Somewhere backstage at the Buffalo Chip on Sunday night, a grown man is going to stand in a corner and yell at Sharon Osbourne. She won’t be there. That’s the point.

Patrick Stone does that before the Ozzy songs. He’s heard enough reality TV to know the cadence, so he stands back there and gets the accent loaded before he walks out. Then he’ll come off stage, pull the wig, wipe the face, and turn into somebody else entirely.

Stone sings for Hairball, the Minnesota tribute act that plays the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally pretty much every year. This time they’re at the Buffalo Chip on Sunday, Aug. 9, opening for Yungblud, and again Monday, Aug. 10, on a bill with P.O.D. and Skillet.

Twenty-six years of wigs

Hairball started as a bit.

Mike Findling, who most people know as Chainsaw from the Minneapolis band Slave Raider, was in a club one night watching a Rat Pack show. One guy came out as Sammy Davis. Another as Sinatra. Then Dean Martin. Same band, rotating frontmen.

“I should do this for rock and roll,” Stone says Findling thought.

The early version was pure parody. A prosthetic nose on the Steve Perry character. Prince songs with the lyrics rewritten to something you couldn’t print here. Stone has met people in Duluth who saw those first club shows, and he’s a little jealous of them.

Then the musicians got better. Guitarist Michael “Happy” Schneider came aboard and started building drum risers and lighting rigs, and the rooms kept getting bigger. Clubs to convention halls to arenas.

“They’ve been doing it for twenty-six freaking years,” Stone said. “That’s especially crazy for a cover band.”

He’s been in the group about a year and eight months. He calls himself the baby of the band.

Sounding exactly like them

Stone has spent his life as a singer-songwriter. He never planned on this.

Here’s the funny part. A guy from his high school recently dug up cassettes of their fifteen-year-old selves playing “Seek and Destroy” and “Miracle Man,” some of the same songs he does now. Back then, sounding like somebody else came easy.

Then came three decades of building a voice of his own, and now he has to work back around it.

“It’s like getting into a different car every three or four songs,” he said. “You have to know how to drive each one, how they’re going to corner, how far you can push them.”

Axl. Vince Neil. Diamond Dave. Steve Perry. Sebastian Bach is his favorite, and he’ll tell you why.

“I don’t think I have that kind of confidence as Patrick Stone,” he said. “But I can act like I have it.”

There’s some history behind that. Stone got sober twenty years ago and went into acting because it was the only way he could see to make money without going back to school. He learned method. He did TV and commercials. All of it feeds the wig.

Fourteen minutes

The singing might be the easy part.

Every changeover means wardrobe, wig, and a full face of makeup, done by the guys themselves, in the dark, while two other singers stall for time. Dave Moody’s Gene Simmons takes about ninety minutes if he’s doing it right. The band once challenged him to squeeze it into the end of a set and he came out in twenty-two.

Stone’s Vince Neil runs forty-five minutes to an hour unhurried. He’s crunched it to fourteen.

“All of a sudden I’m a makeup artist, a wardrobe person, an actor, and a singer, on top of everything else,” he said.

Mistakes happen. Kris Vox once got ready for Bon Jovi while the band started playing Def Leppard, walked into the “Rock of Ages” intro, and instead of the big “Oh yeah,” the crowd got, “Oh no, wrong costume.”

Stone loves that story. Everything on that stage is live, and when the wheels come off, the audience gets something real out of it.

What he wants from Sturgis

Hairball usually headlines the Iron Horse Saloon during rally week. Opening for somebody is new territory, and Stone is fired up about walking into a crowd that’s already vibrating for Yungblud.

He’s met him three times. Once at a Bring Me the Horizon show at the Whisky a Go Go, where the pit got so tight that Yungblud landed in his arms mid-song. He plans to beg him to come out for the Ozzy bit.

As for the rally crowd itself, Stone wants lawlessness. Bikes peeling out, people losing their minds, the whole danger-zone experience he found the year he played Sturgis with L.A. Guns.

“I go to church every Sunday,” he said. “I want to have to go three times the Sunday after service to ask for forgiveness.”