“I’m stoned. Did that just happen?” she said. “She” being Melinda, a large breasted hanger-on backstage at Ozzfest 2007 in San Bernardino County Califoria. I told her that indeed “that” had just happened. “That” being that someone had tripped over some bottles behind the stage and made a big noise. Melinda was trying to get close to D. Randall (Randy) Blythe, lead throat shredder of heavy metal megastars Lamb of God, while simultaneously running away from someone she called “Leatherface.” I was unable to determine whether or not this was actually the guy who played Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In any case Melinda seemed to think he was the real Leatherface and told us, “He runs with a chainsaw and he thinks I’m going to fuck him?”

I assumed the question was rhetorical. In any case I had no answer.

Randy came off stage and apologized for being so stinky, saying we should hang here for a minute while he changed out of his stage clothes. Melinda made sure he knew that we had saved her life from Leatherface. He didn’t seem much concerned. Melinda didn’t seem to notice and sorta wandered off.

Me and my friends Bret and Ronny -- he’s Danish, so it’s OK for him to be called “Ronny” -- just stood there taking it all in. The backstage area was a large open space where the bands on the festival had parked all their tour busses. There were some tents back there where people sat around drinking beers and waiting for things to happen. I don’t know the metal scene well enough to know whether we were in the company of famous people or not. But I think not.

Randy had invited me backstage because he’s a fan of my books. We’ve been e-mailing each other for a few months now. Watching Lamb of God from backstage was a trip. You really can’t differentiate any of the sounds except the drums when you’re standing where we were. So it all came across like one gigantic roar. Though I did hear Randy dedicate their song Red Neck to me. I was honored. But was he just calling me a red neck? The security dudes kept getting more and more nervous and pushing us further and further back from where Randy told us to stay. I used to hate concert security guys. Now they just kind of amuse me. All pent-up frustration and petty power issues.

The crowd was tossing a beach ball around and it landed on stage. One enormously fat security guy snagged it and proceeded to stab it repeatedly with a sharp object until it died. Poor beach ball. I would have named it Wilson. Every couple minutes a different security dude would come around with a flash light and make sure everyone behind the stage had the proper passes and then push us back so we could see and hear even less of the show.

A crowd of teenagers wandered in from somewhere. Were they relatives of someone in the organization? Were they jail bait fun for later in the evening? Were they a school trip gone horribly wrong? I’ll never know. The security dudes booted them out and tried to send us with them till we showed them our all-access stickers. Again.

When they scooted us all the way to the very rear of the stage I was finally able to confirm something I’d always suspected. Those big walls of amps metal bands use? Fake. Not only were they not wired up, they weren’t even designed to be wired up. But this is fine. It would look crappy to have the whole band playing through a bunch of Line 6 pedals.

I never expected teaching Zen to get me backstage at Ozzfest. Randy’s a veteran of the hardcore scene and, truth be told, there’s really very little difference between hardcore punk and metal anymore. He’s been interested in Buddhism for some time now and has even practiced Zazen. So a book titled Hardcore Zen appealed to him on many levels.

He said there’d be a big ass backstage barbeque so we should come hungry, which we did. Randy snagged a Boca burger for me but the rest of the people there ate nothing but meat. These guys didn’t even have buns for their bratwurst or chips to go with their buffalo wings. Just piles and piles of meaty meat. The barbeque was out by the second stage, which, by that point in the evening had been mostly torn down. Since the barriers that kept audience members at bay were now gone, people kept wandering in. Nearly everyone stepped into the gigantic mud puddle on the way over. It's Southern California. There is no mud here because it never rains. I didn't want to know.

Jägermeister is one of the sponsors of this year’s Ozzfest so free Jägermeister flowed like free Jägermeister. Metal guys like any drink with an umlat in its name. I soon found myself in the midst of a huge gang of hairy guys in biker clothes and women whose only common feature was the giganticness of their breasts all getting more and more plowed on Jägermeister by the minute. Yet it didn’t really feel as dangerous as I’m sure it looked. I mean I wouldn’t have gone within ten feet of that crowd if I’d been passing by. But here among them I felt pretty safe. Besides, as tough as they looked most of them were musicians. Metal musicians are essentially nerds in black leather. Punk musicians are too, by the way. My leather jacket is fake leather anyhow. Plus it’s always too hot to wear it in Los Angeles.

So everyone’s looking tough, getting drunk and eating meat, meat and more meat while I’m standing there talking Buddhism to one of modern metal’s leading lights. It made me really happy to do this because for way too long Buddhism has been the exclusive province of a) whiny intellectuals who try and make it as complicated as possible so no one but their friends can possibly discuss it and b) spaced out new age waste cases who haven’t got a single clue what Buddha was on about, but they like that little Om symbol. I’m glad to see it reclaimed by normal people. And by “normal people” I mean, of course, booze soaked heavy metal musicians in leather and studs. Not that Randy himself was booze soaked. From what I could tell his glass was full of O’Doul’s.

Melinda eventually made her way to the barbeque, still very stoned. But she’d stopped paying much attention to us by then. Me, though, I mainly stood there wondering, “I’m not stoned. Is this really happening?”

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.