That time Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat

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On a cold January night in 1982, thousands of heavy metal fans streamed into a Des Moines auditorium for what radio DJs promised would be the concert of the year. Ozzy Osbourne, the former lead singer of British band Black Sabbath, was about to rock.

The mood was festively macabre. Posters for the “Diary of a Madman Tour” showed Osbourne in his “Prince of Darkness” alter ego – complete with devil horns – and warned attendees that eating before the concert was “not recommended.”

But no one knew just how stomach churning the performance would prove, or how it would become synonymous with the oddball musician, who died July 22 at the age of 76.

In the 1980s, Ozzy concerts were often raucous events, with crowds tossing rubber snakes or cockroaches onstage and the then-33-year-old singer firing stuff back, including raw meat from a catapult.

So when a teenage boy in the Des Moines crowd that evening tossed something small and dark toward the tenor, it wasn’t surprising that Osbourne picked it up.

It was a bat.

“Obviously a toy,” Osbourne recalled thinking in his memoir. The singer held it up to the lights, bared his teeth to the crowd’s delight and did what he usually did with rubber toys thrown onstage: He bit it.

“Immediately though, something felt wrong,” he wrote. “Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin. Then the head in my mouth twitched.”

The animal was not, in fact, a toy, but rather a real bat that local 17-year-old Mark Neal had smuggled into the concert in a baggy inside his coat.

“It really freaked me out,” Neal told the Des Moines Register at the time. “I won’t get in any trouble for admitting this, will I?”

In his memoir, Osbourne says he spat out the head and looked over to his future wife, Sharon, who screamed that the bat was real.

“Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, a doctor was saying to Sharon, ‘Yes, Miss Arden, the bat was alive. It was probably stunned from being at a rock concert, but it was definitely alive. There’s a good chance Mr. Osbourne now has rabies.”

The incident made national headlines, with some skepticism over whether it was real or just another one of Osbourne’s antics.

“You have to understand this is what’s called ‘shock rock’ and the kids love it,” Rick Freiberg, in charge of bookings at the Milwaukee Exposition and Convention Center and Arena, told the Des Moines Tribune, which later merged with the Register. “It’s all illusion.”

Then again, Freiberg had reason to play down the controversy: Osbourne was due to play at his arena a few days later.

“Everyone thought I’d bitten the head of a bat on purpose, instead of it being a simple misunderstanding,” Osbourne wrote. “For a while, I was worried we might be closed down, and a couple of venues did go ahead and ban us. The fans didn’t help, either. After they heard about the bat, they started bringing even crazier stuff to the gigs. Going onstage was like being at a butchers’ convention.”

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Osbourne had previous experience decapitating animals, however. Just a year earlier, the singer – who was using drugs and alcohol heavily at the time – had bitten the head off a dove during a meeting with CBS Records in what he said was a response to the label’s tepid attitude toward his album.

That incident – which, unlike the Des Moines controversy, appears to have been captured on camera – helped spur Neal to toss the bat onstage in the first place, he told the Register.

Whether intentional or not, the bat bite became emblematic of Osbourne’s growing brand. Decades later, it remains one of the most memorable things about his long and odd career.

Osbourne once complained that he would be getting questions about the bat until he died – and beyond, according to the Register.

“And then they’ll dig me up and ask me again,” he said.

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