When Ozzy Osbourne Bit the Head Off a Bat — Planned or Staged?
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On this day in 1982, more than 40 years after one of the most shocking moments in metal history, people still wonder, “Why did Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a bat?” There’s a side to this story that many haven’t heard, shedding light on why a bat was thrown onstage during that infamous Ozzy Osbourne concert.
The notorious bat-biting event occurred at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa (now Community Choice Credit Union Convention Center) on January 20, 1982. It was during Ozzy’s “Diary of a Madman” tour, just weeks before guitarist Randy Rhoads tragically died in a plane crash.
Ozzy Osbourne’s Infamous Bat Incident
Ozzy Osbourne has shared his side of the event numerous times. He believed a fan had thrown a fake rubber bat onstage. It wasn’t until he bit into the flying creature that he realized it was real. Ozzy says he even felt the bat twitch in his mouth as he bit down on its neck.
“I get a lot of weird people at my concerts, it’s rock ’n’ roll,” Ozzy told David Letterman in 1982. “Somebody threw a bat onstage and I thought it was one of these toy bats, so I picked it up, bite the thing’s head off and suddenly everybody is freaking out … I can assure you the rabies shots I went through afterwards aren’t fun.”
Ozzy was rushed to Broadlawns Medical Center after the concert. According to the Des Moines Register, he had to undergo three weeks of rabies shots while on tour. “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,” Ozzy said. “Every one hurt like a bastard.”
Pam Culver, the nurse supervisor on duty that night in Des Moines, didn’t treat Ozzy herself. She claims that as news of the bat-biting spread across the country, she received calls from England, Canada, and the United States about the incident.
“For a week that was probably 50 percent of my job,” Culver recalled. “People wanted to know how much did it cost to do that, and did it hurt, and how many shots did he have to have, what part of his body did we have to attack.”
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The Aftermath and Legacy of the Bat Incident
By October 1982, the auditorium directors changed their rules to ban concert performers from using live animals without management’s consent. When Ozzy returned to Iowa in 2007, he wrote, “No more bats. Love, Ozzy Osbourne,” on a poster at the venue.
About six months after he talked about the incident on Letterman, Ozzy appeared on the USA Network show Night Flight. He repeated his story about thinking the bat was rubber and gave more details of his experience that January night.
“The taste of bats is very salty,” Ozzy explained. “It tastes of salt.” When the host asked if it tasted like anything else, Ozzy replied, “Well, yes, but I can’t really say that on the air, can I?”
These days, Ozzy gets tired of being asked about the incident. In a recent interview with Billboard, Ozzy named “What do bats taste like?” as his least favorite interview question.
For fans of Ozzy Osbourne and metalheads in general, the basic details of the bat-biting story are well known. However, some questions remained unanswered for years:
“Who actually threw the bat onstage?”
“Why didn’t the bat just fly away once it had been thrown?”
“How did an Ozzy Osbourne fan sneak a live bat past security and into the venue?”
The Revelation of the Bat Incident
It wasn’t until decades later that the truth came out. According to the Des Moines Register, the person who threw the bat came forward in 1982—the same year the concert took place. His name was Mark Neal.
Neal was 17 when he threw the bat onstage that night. He had planned it and even told his friends about it before heading to the concert. “We were telling everybody before the concert that we were bringing a bat,” Carmen Martin-Kelly, a friend of Neal’s, revealed. “Hell or high water, we were gonna get it in and throw the bat up onstage.”
Neal added, “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.”
Why didn’t the bat fly away once it was thrown? The answer is simple—it was dead. Although Ozzy believed he felt the bat twitch in his mouth, the creature was already dead when Neal smuggled it into the show. Neal’s younger brother had found the bat two weeks before the concert. Planning to keep it as a pet, the bat didn’t survive long. Neal’s friends convinced him to save the dead bat and throw it at the concert.
“If the bat was alive, it surely wouldn’t have just laid there on the stage,” Martin-Kelly said. “The next day, everybody’s asking about the live bat at the Ozzy concert. I assure you, we didn’t harm any animals. It was definitely dead when we brought it.”
Neal snuck the bat into the venue by sealing it in a baggy and hiding it inside his coat. Security was apparently lax enough at the time to allow it.
“It really freaked me out,” Neal said in a 1982 interview. “I won’t get in any trouble for admitting this, will I?”
Ozzy went on to appear in the film Little Nicky, saving the day by biting the head off the main villain, who had turned into a bat. Over the years, anything involving Ozzy and bats has made headlines, like when bats living on Ozzy’s land delayed a renovation to his home.
