Did Ozzy Osbourne actually chew the pinnacle off a reside bat?

When it involves the unruly world of rock, stunning behaviour isn’t frowned upon. Just the other. Most of the time it is virtually obligatory.

If there are limits, few performers have pushed these beneficiant boundaries greater than John Michael Osbourne, aka Ozzy Osbourne, or the Prince of Darkness, who has died aged 76.

You do not get a nickname like that accidentally. Black Sabbath followers initially dubbed him with it due to his jet black onstage persona, decadent aura and lyrics that appeared obsessed by the occult.

Still, his actions on the evening of 20 January 1982, when the physique of an unlucky creature ended up separated from its head, have been bat-split loopy, even by Ozzy’s extreme requirements.

Decades later, the occasion continues to be mentioned as probably the most infamous moments in heavy metallic historical past. But, over time, recollections have differed on the exact flip of occasions.

Sometimes that was as a result of folks’s recollections clashed. But principally it trusted which model of the story Ozzy was within the temper to inform.

Some info concerning the incident, nonetheless, are unambiguous.

In January 1982, Ozzy was two months right into a gruelling tour selling his second solo album, Diary of a Madman. A convention had developed the place the singer would catapult items of uncooked meat and animal components – together with intestines and liver – into the viewers.

So far, so revolting. And maybe, not completely inexplicable behaviour for a person who’d as soon as served an apprenticeship at an abattoir.

Throughout the tour, phrase rapidly unfold concerning the follow, and Ozzy’s followers have been nothing if not resourceful. At each venue, they knew precisely what was coming, they usually turned up armed and able to retaliate.

So when one thing small and black landed on stage throughout a rowdy Wednesday evening present at Des Moines’ Veterans Memorial Auditorium, the singer thought it was a rubber toy.

This is the place recollections begin to veer off in several instructions.

In his 2010 autobiography I Am Ozzy the singer says he picked it up, stuffed it in his mouth, and chomped down.

“Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid,” he recalled. “Then the head in my mouth twitched.”

“Somebody threw a bat. I just thought it was a rubber bat. And I picked it up and put it in my mouth. I bit into it,” he stated.

Then he realised: “Oh no, it’s real. It was a real live bat.”

But Ozzy hadn’t at all times insisted the bat was alive when it was thrown in the direction of him.

In 2006, he gave the BBC a tackle the story that was subtly, however crucially completely different.

“This bat comes on. I thought it was one of them Hallowe’en joke bats ‘cos it had some string around its neck,” he stated.

“I bite into it, and I look to my left and Sharon [Osbourne, his wife and then manager] was going [gesturing no].

“And I’m like, what you speaking about? She [says], ‘it is a useless actual bat’. And I’m… I do know now!”

So was the bat useless or alive? The man who claims to have introduced it to the live performance, in accordance with the Des Moines Register, was Mark Neal.

He was 17 at the time of the concert. And his account of the events leading up to the gory night was this: His younger brother had brought the bat home a fortnight before but, sadly, it hadn’t survived.

Neal said that, by the time he took it to the concert, it had been dead for days.

So it seems that the available evidence about this legendary piece of heavy metal excess, placed at number two in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of Rock’s Wildest Myths, does point to it being largely true.

Everyone agrees that the bat did find its way into Ozzy’s mouth, although it seems likely it was no longer alive by that point – something Ozzy himself concurred with. Sometimes.

But what of an eerily similar incident some nine months before in Los Angeles?

Again the details vary, usually depending on who Ozzy was talking to.

The basic facts have never been in dispute. Ozzy was due to meet a group of CBS record label executives in Los Angeles, and Sharon had the idea of him bringing three live doves with him.

After giving a short speech of thanks, the plan was for Ozzy to throw them into the air, so everyone could watch them flutter away, in a symbolic gesture of peace.

That’s not what ended up happening.

Ozzy had been drinking brandy all morning, and he later told rock biographer Mick Wall that a PR woman at the meeting had been seriously annoying him.

According to Wall’s book, Black Sabbath: Symptoms of the Universe, Ozzy “pulled out one in every of these doves and bit its [expletive] head off simply to close her up”.

“Then I did it once more with the following dove,” he added, “spitting the pinnacle out on the desk”.

“That’s once they threw me out. They stated I’d by no means work for CBS once more.”

In version two, recounted some months later, he told Sounds’ magazine’s Garry Bushell a slightly different story.

“The rip-off is the hen was useless. We have been planning to launch it there, nevertheless it died beforehand. So fairly than waste it, I bit its head off.

“You should have seen their faces. They all went white. They were speechless.”

Ozzy, in fact, had a fame to uphold. After all, this was the person who’d been thrown out of Black Sabbath as a result of, even by rock’s astronomically lax requirements, his drink and drug consumption was thought-about an excessive amount of.

And whereas his encounters with bat and dove might not have appeared cricket to many, they – with useful dollops of exaggeration – added considerably to Ozzy’s outrageous picture.

They undoubtedly gave him even larger publicity and notoriety, serving to his solo profession to skyrocket like a bat out of hell.

And although he won’t be responsible of each misdemeanour that was attributed to him over time, there’s little doubt that he reached heights (or depths) that different rock stars by no means dared to ponder.

He was seen because the undoubted ringmaster of rock extra – a profession defining fame that stayed with him proper to the top.