Today in Rock History: Ozzy Osbourne Updates His Diet Plan

Thirty years ago today—January 20, 1982—the shambling, incomprehensible wreck once known as Ozzy Osbourne inexplicably bit the head off of a bat that was (also inexplicably) thrown onstage during his concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

No, it wasn't this kind of bat. We just like
having fun with Photoshop.

Depending on the version of the story you hear, the bat was 100% alive, totally dead, or presumed to be fake. It’s likely that we’ll never be sure of the full story, since the odds are good that at this point even Ozzy—or perhaps especially Ozzy—is a bit hazy on the details.


Other questions that likely never will be answered include:

1. What kind of nut throws a fake bat onto a rock-concert stage?
2. What kind of nut throws a real bat—live or dead—onto a rock-concert stage?
3. What kind of maniac five-star über-nut sees a bat fly through the air (which is, in fact, how live bats generally travel) and land on his stage, assumes it’s fake, and figures the best way to test his theory is to bite its head off?

Exhibit A: maniac five-star über-nut.

. . . actually, now that we think about it, those questions aren’t actually unanswerable at all:

1. A nut.
2. at least two kinds of people would do this: (a) an only moderately-nutty Ozzy Osbourne fan, or, if we didn’t know for sure that he was onstage at the time of the incident, (b) Ozzy himself.
3. The very same kind of nut that, only a few months earlier, bit the head off an unmistakably live dove in front of a room of CBS record executives. 

Completely coincidentally, it was right around 1982 that some folks started to suspect that there was something slightly unusual about Ozzy Osbourne.