Did Ozzy Osbourne Really Bite the Head off a Live Bat? Here’s the True Story.
· Vice
A lot of crazy stories have been told about Ozzy Osbourne over the years, but none is more ingrained in the public consciousness than him biting the head off of a bat.
Visit betsport.cv for more information.
The incident in question took place at a concert in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 20, 1982. While Osbourne has shared conflicting memories of what happened that night, one thing seemed consistent: someone threw what Osbourne believed to be a toy bat onto the stage during his performance. Osbourne also never denied that he bit the bat’s head off as a goof.
“Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong,” the Black Sabbath singer wrote in his 2010 autobiography I Am Ozzy. “For a start my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid,” he continued. “Then the head in my mouth twitched.” Osbourne went on to say that he’d realized in that moment that he’d killed a real live bat.
44 Years Ago, Ozzy Osbourne Mistook a Real Bat for a Toy—and Made Rock History
However, he’d previously claimed that the bat was dead when he chomped down on it. According to Mark Neal, who brought the animal to the concert, that’s the real version of events. Neal says his younger brother caught the bat days earlier, but it died before the show. By the time Neal threw it on stage that infamous evening at the Des Moines Veterans Memorial Auditorium, it’d been dead for quite a while.
As for the story you might’ve heard about Osbourne biting the head off a dove or two in a meeting with record executives, Osbourne’s account differed slightly there, too. In one version, he said that he bit two doves’ heads off because a PR woman had gotten on his nerves. Osbourne later backtracked, insisting it was just one bird and that it had accidentally died before the stunt.
But from his wife Sharon’s recollection of that whole debacle, we’re sad to report that he did, in fact, kill a dove that day:
The post Did Ozzy Osbourne Really Bite the Head off a Live Bat? Here’s the True Story. appeared first on VICE.