Crazy Train - Ozzy Ate a Bat!

Dear Gen Xer,

It was the stuff of legend. A tale so monstrous, so crazy and baffling, it captivated the kids at school.

Ozzy ate a bat! Ozzy ate a bat!

This was in the winter of 1982. Before the cesspool of social media. When hearsay traveled from city to city. When rumors turned men into myths.

We’d heard all kinds of stories before. How Ozzy drank blood. How he worshipped the devil. How he’d bitten off the heads of two live doves at the annual sales convention for Epic Records.

“I just remember this PR woman going on and on at me. In the end, I said, ‘Do you like animals?’ Then I pulled out one of these doves and bit its fucking head off. Just to shut her up. Then I did it again with the next dove, spitting the head out on the table, and [the woman] fell on the floor screaming. That’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again." – Ozzy Osbourne, From Symptom of the Universe by Mick Wall

The spontaneous snack could have ruined Ozzy’s career. But his manager at the time, Sharon Arden (later to become Sharon Osbourne), spun the fiasco into gold. She shared the gory details with every news outlet in America. Ozzy’s album, Blizzard of Ozz, went on to sell over five million copies.

The incident with the doves thrust Ozzy in the spotlight. It also gave some kids in Des Moines a tantalizing idea.

Handbill for ‘the bat show’ suggesting not to eat beforehand

Mark Neal was 17 in 1982. He liked Black Sabbath and Judas Priest and anything else that pissed off his parents. Two weeks before Ozzy rolled into town, Mark’s younger brother brought home a bat. He’d found it near a school and meant to keep it as a pet. The bat did not last long.

“I said, ‘Mark, I think we should take it to the Ozzy concert and see what happens.’ We had heard so many stories.” - Carmen Martin-Kelly

Carmen was a close friend of Mark’s. She’d heard about Ozzy and the incident with the doves and convinced him to keep the bat.

“We were telling everybody before the concert that we were bringing a bat. Hell or high water, we were gonna get it in and throw the bat up onstage. We brought a whole bunch of friends who used to sit together in Section 22, so when Mark was headed up towards the stage, I told him to wait a few minutes so I could get up there and tell everybody that Mark’s getting ready to throw the bat up onstage.” - Carmen Martin-Kelly

Mark had certainly done his part. He’d preserved the bat in his freezer. Tucked it into a bag and shoved it in his pocket. Security at Veterans Memorial Auditorium didn’t have a clue.

“We got right down in front, right in front of Rudy Sarzo, the bass player. I tossed [the bat] up onstage and it landed in front of him. He kinda looked at it a couple of times and motioned Ozzy over. Ozzy came over, picked it up, and the rest is history.” – Mark Neal

Or, as Ozzy told the Des Moines Register: “... 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.”

Bat thrower Mark (middle) and friend Carmen (right) at an Ozzy show in 2001 in the same arena

Five thousand people saw Ozzy bite the head off a bat on January 20, 1982. The way the news spread, you’d think there’d been a million. They say a thousand fans can net you a living. Apparently five thousand can make you immortal.

Ozzy sat down with the Des Moines Register twenty years after the fact. “The name of the town of Des Moines is embossed in my head!" he said. "I've had some mileage from Des Moines.” That mileage included rabies shots for the next three weeks on the road.

“Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get more rabies shots: One in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm. Every one hurt like a bastard.” – Ozzy Osbourne

I didn’t know any of this in 1982. I was just a bewildered kid talking to other bewildered kids in a snowy schoolyard. We had no idea who’d thrown the bat, or why it hadn’t flown away the moment it hit the stage. All we knew was what we’d heard from friends and siblings and the clerks at the record store.

Ozzy ate a bat! Ozzy ate a bat!

We gorged on the story. Sang Crazy Train at recess. And tried to guess what madcap shit Ozzy would pull off next.

Less than a month later, drunk and clad in Sharon’s dress, Ozzy whizzed on the Cenotaph in Alamo Plaza.