Ozzy Osbourne, often referred to as rock’s Prince of Darkness by humans and succubi alike, has left this realm for the next one. The 76-year-old musician and showman, who pretty much invented heavy metal, died just weeks after his final concert, where he sang hits from both his Black Sabbath days and his solo career in Birmingham, England, while seated on a throne.
The legendary artist, whose first band’s name was taken from a Mario Bava horror film starring Boris Karloff, will forever have a career shrouded in myth. And the most famous piece of lore has to do with his alleged taste for chiropteran snacks. So now is as good a time as any to ask: did Ozzy Osbourne really eat a bat onstage?
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Ozzy Osbourne onstage in 2022
The answer is: yes, kinda, a little bit, but there’s some contours to the tale.
Part of Osbourne’s schtick (apart from recording songs in drop tuning to make them sound extra badass) was a vaudevillian alignment with the occult. One of the songs on his first solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, was “Mr. Crowley,” an ode to the British mystic Aleister Crowley. When he signed the deal to release this album back in 1981, he prepped a stunt for the executives in which he would release some doves. Things went a little haywire, though, and the intoxicated Osbourne ended up biting off the heads of two of the birds before getting escorted out of the building. (These were… unusual times.)
From these stories, legends grew.
The following year, on the Diary of a Madman tour, Osbourne hit the Des Moines Veterans Memorial Auditorium. A fan in the crowd chucked what the singer thought was a dead bat up onstage. (It is believed he stole it from a high school science lab.) It remains unclear if it was alive or dead, but the key thing is that Osbourne thought it was a toy, so he bit its head off. Talk about going off the rails on a crazy train.
In interviews, Osbourne said he heard his future wife Sharon shouting, “Dummy! It’s real!!!” (He also claimed at other times that the bat also bit him.) He threw the creature back in the crowd and, after the show, was sent to the hospital for rabies shots.
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Ozzy Osbourne with… something… in his mouth
Over time, Osbourne leaned into the story, clowning around with fake bats onstage, and eventually releasing a plush bat toy. Many a fan has worn an Ozzy-with-a-bat T-shirt or patch on the back of their acid-washed denim jacket.
Bats weren’t the only members of the animal kingdom that got swept up by Osbourne during his more hardcore days. As discussed in the book and Netflix film The Dirt, there was a time when he was hanging around the guys from Mötley Crüe and he decided to snort a line of ants. There is a lot of debate if this tale is actually true — the man himself said it happened as recently as 2023.
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Ozzy Osbourne cooking breakfast. No bats in the recipe
For what it’s worth, Mr. Osbourne didn’t act this way all the time. Even before he hit the mainstream with his reality show The Osbournes, there was the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years, in which big bad Ozzy is seen… cooking himself a nice breakfast of eggs and orange juice. And no bats.
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