Did Ozzy Osbourne Really Bite The Head Off A Live Bat?

Did Ozzy Osbourne really bite the head off a live bat? The short answer is NO but it is somewhat true.

What happened was Ozzy was touring his second solo ‘Diary of a Madman’. The tour was playing in Des Moines, Iowa on 20 January 1982.

The Des Moines Register tracked down the guy who brought a dead bat to the show and threw it on stage. Mark Neal told the local newspaper that by the time he took the bat to the concert, it had been dead for days.

The legend is somewhat true in that Neal threw bat on stage and Ozzy, thinking it was a rubber bat, picked it up and put the head in his mouth but Sharon standing side of stage stopped him from biting it.

However, he did have to get a rabies shot.

What about biting the head of a live dove story? Ozzy was attending a meeting with his CBS record company executives.

In Mick Wall’s 1986 Ozzy biography ‘Diary Of A Madman – The Official Biography of Ozzy Osbourne’ Ozzy told Wall, “I just remember this PR woman going on and on at me. I pulled out one of these doves and bit its fucking head off. Just to shut her up. Then I did it again… that’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again.”

Again, kind of true, but the dove was dead, not alive.

Did any of this really happen? The man was larger than life on stage or when he was “playing” Ozzy. It was a time when the truth never got in the way of a good story and Ozzy had a reputation as a “Madman” to uphold.

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