LEWISTON – If you’re a diehard Ozzy fan and your heart is broken, where do you go to mourn?

The cancellation of Thursday night’s Ozzy Osbourne/Rob Zombie concert in Portland no doubt left some local fans feeling the anguish. But they were a hard lot to find Thursday night.

They weren’t in the friendly downtown tavern.

“I haven’t heard a lot about it,” said Barry Fraser, who was working at the Blue Goose in Lewiston, where no Ozzy fans were seen crying in their beers. “They’re probably at home, where they can play their music louder than they can in any bar.”

Osbourne, who rose to fame as the singer of the iconic heavy metal band Black Sabbath and whose solo hits include “Crazy Train,” “Flying High Again,” “No More Tears” and “Over The Mountain,” was reportedly too under the weather to perform.

The Ozzy fans weren’t at the record store either, although there had been murmurs.

“We’ve had some phone calls about it,” said Maxwell Hansen, at Bull Moose Music on Lisbon Street. “He’s a popular guy.”

They weren’t at Warden’s Bar & Grill across town, either, though plenty of Ozzy fans are known to hang out there.

“I expected to have a slow night because so many of our customers were headed to the show,” said Jen Gagne, owner of the bar. “There are probably a lot of them on their way down to Portland who haven’t heard about it yet. That’s a bummer.”

A local man who works on the event staff at the Cumberland County Civic Center said he was informed that Ozzy had bailed out while he was on his way to the arena. He estimated that of the nearly 7,000 fans who had planned to attend, probably only a few dozen would have come from Lewiston and Auburn.

The announcement, made late in the afternoon, was short and without drama. Yet a few simple lines were surely enough to crush the spirits of ticket holders who had planned to spend the night under the spell of dark rock ‘n roll.

“The Ozzy Osbourne concert scheduled for tonight at the Cumberland County Civic Center has been rescheduled,” the bleak announcement stated. “It was postponed because Osbourne has the flu.”

The good news: Those who suffered the sounds of silence Thursday night will have another shot if they can hold out to the end of the month. Ozzy is expected to make the trip back to Portland on Jan. 31. Those fans are also being offered discount rates on Ozzy tickets for a show slated for Jan. 8 in Worcester, Mass.

By late Thursday night, only a handful had offered up thoughts on the cancellation on a Sun Journal online board. One, using the name Steve T., questioned the validity of the Ozzy’s excuse.

“Yeah, I’ll just bet Ozzie has the ‘flu,” Steve T. wrote.

Rob Zombie was the frontman for White Zombie before embarking on a solo career. In addition to performing heavy metal, he makes horror movies.