How Ozzy Osbourne’s Bat-Biting Debacle Became a Rock Legend

“I won’t get in any trouble for admitting this, will I?”

Mark Neal had good purpose to ask that query when he confessed to The Des Moines Register that he had thrown a useless bat onstage at Ozzy Osbourne’s Jan. 20, 1982, present on the Veterans Memorial Auditorium throughout his Diary of a Madman tour. All hell broke unfastened when the rocker sank his tooth into the winged mammal and ripped off its head, giving 5,000-some followers a spectacle they’d always remember.

The then-17-year-old Neal could not have recognized it on the time, however his ill-thought-out stunt would turn out to be one of the vital notorious tales in rock historical past, cementing the Prince of Darkness’ fame as a world-class degenerate and leading to a lot of rabies photographs within the weeks that adopted.

To his credit score, Osbourne thought he was biting into a rubber bat on that fateful evening in Des Moines, although he rapidly found that wasn’t the case. “For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir I Am Ozzy. “I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin.”

Osbourne was no stranger to munching on winged creatures, having bitten the heads off two stay doves throughout a March 1981 assembly with CBS Records. The Diary of a Madman tour additionally featured Osbourne’s “personal dwarf” John Edward Allen, who tossed uncooked meat into the group and was ceremoniously hanged each evening.

This onstage depravity impressed audiences to convey sordid props. “We had dead cats, birds, lizards, all kinds of stuff. With every gig, it just got crazier and crazier,” Osbourne wrote. “Eventually people started to throw things onstage with nails and razor blades embedded in them — joke-shop stuff, mainly, like rubber snakes and plastic spiders.”

It solely made sense for Neal and his pal Carmen Kelly to smuggle a bat into the Veterans Memorial Auditorium. Neal’s youthful brother had discovered the bat two weeks earlier than the live performance, and Kelly satisfied him to retailer it within the freezer till they might ship it to the singer. Despite Osbourne’s claims that the bat wriggled in his mouth, Neal and Kelly each insisted it was useless.

“It landed in front of Rudy Sarzo, the bass player,” Neal instructed the Register. “He looked down at it and motioned to Ozzy and, as they say, the rest is history.”

Neal admitted that the ordeal “really freaked me out,” however he was most likely much less rattled than Osbourne, who was rushed to the hospital for rabies photographs after the present and continued receiving them over the subsequent a number of weeks. “Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get more rabies shots: one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm,” he lamented. “Every one hurt like a bastard.”

The bat incident has turn out to be an inescapable a part of the Prince of Darkness’ mythology, for higher and for worse. While Osbourne has lengthy grown weary of answering journalists’ questions in regards to the stunt, it additionally grew to become an integral a part of his merchandise and iconography, because of his savvy spouse and supervisor Sharon Osbourne. “You know, Ozzy has really lived a charmed journey,” Sarzo instructed Yahoo Music in 2022.

“Ozzy would do something, and Sharon would be right behind him to spin it and save the day. Sharon knew immediately that she had an opportunity here. She contacted Michael Jensen Communications, our publicist, and she spun it. She spun the ‘myth’ that it is today. I saw it happen, right in front of my eyes: her getting on the phone, calling Michael Jensen and saying, ‘Hey, listen, this happened. Let’s make a story out of this.'”