On July 5, a couple of days after I saw Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Black Sabbath played its final show, at Villa Park, in Birmingham, England. Not only are these two phenomena related; they seem to have been impishly synchronized: Just when the troupe behind Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that satirically exploded the genre of heavy metal, reunited after four decades for a sequel, the band that invented heavy metal called it quits.

And then, two weeks later, Ozzy died: Ozzy Osbourne, Sabbath’s front man, who at Villa Park had sung sitting down, enthroned on what looked like a satanic office chair, heroically managing a host of ailments (including Parkinson’s disease). No one was more metal than Ozzy. At the same time, no one in metal was funnier, more in touch wi

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