It’s a nearly mythical in the annals of rock and roll history…but is it real? Did Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a bat onstage during a concert? The answer is yes, he did. But there are still some questions which remain unanswered 38 years to the day later.
The date was January 20th, 1982. A 17-year-old fellow named Mark Neal was preparing to go to see Ozzy at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. Neal had seen a reported rumor (later confirmed) that a drunk and bored Ozzy had bitten the heads off two live doves during a meeting with CBS record executives. So he brought a bat to the show and threw it onstage where it landed in front of bassist Rudy Sarzo. Sarzo motioned to Ozzy and, well, it’s now one of rock’s iconic moments.
Ozzy picked up the bat, thinking it was a fake, and immediately chomped down.
“Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine,” Ozzy said. “I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin. Then the head in my mouth twitched . I didn’t just go and eat a f______g bat, did I?”
He did but there is some question about whether it was alive. Neal claims the bat was dead but Ozzy maintains it wasn’t. The singer did undergo a series of rabies shots as a precaution immediately after the concert. Later, auditorium directors decided to make performers ask permission to use live animals as props unless they had prior permission.
Ozzy has said he regrets the bat biting incident because he is asked about it all the time, even 38 years later. He told reporters that one of the most common questions is, “How did it taste?” But legends live on in rock and roll, and this one was named number two on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 2004 list of “Rock’s Wildest Myths.”
