In the world of rock and roll, a single notorious story can trail an artist for years, becoming inseparable from their legacy.
For Ozzy Osbourne, no story loomed larger, or more curiously, than the one behind the question: “What do bats taste like?”
The rock legend, who passed away in 2025, released several chart-topping hits, both as a solo artist and with Black Sabbath. “Crazy Train,” “War Pigs,” “No More Tears,” “Paranoid,” the list goes on. He toured the globe, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice (as a member of Black Sabbath in 1984 and as a solo artist in 2024), and even starred in a popular television series, The Osbournes, with his family in the early 2000s.
Yet, perhaps what he’s most remembered for is one show, and one show and one infamous incident, which, for Ozzy, was more of a painful accident.
In 1982, the Prince of Darkness, as he was memorably known, bit the head off a bat, instantly creating one of rock’s most wild anecdotes. The mishap became so prominent that it almost completely overshadowed the time he bit the heads off two doves (which were allegedly already dead) during a CBS sales convention in 1981 while promoting his Blizzard of Oz album in the U.S. But that’s another story for another time.
We know Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat, but why did he do it? And who threw it on stage? And, while we’re at it, what happened after?
THE STORY
During a performance in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 1982, someone threw a bat on stage. Ozzy was used to fans tossing strange objects during his shows, so this was hardly unusual…until it was.
Assuming the bat was a rubber toy, Ozzy picked it up and bit its head. Sharon, his wife and then manager, signaled that the bat was real. Ozzy was stunned, unable to comprehend that he had just bitten the head of a real bat; a moment that, little did he know at the time, would haunt him for the rest of his career.
“Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid. Then the head in my mouth twitched,” he recalled in his 2010 autobiography, I Am Ozzy. Accounts differ on whether the bat was actually alive.
Sometime after the incident, Mark Neal, the man who threw the bat onto the stage, revealed that he had planned all along to throw the animal, which he assured was “dead for days,” up to the band. It landed in front of bass player Rudy Sarzo, who motioned for Ozzy to pick it up. Neal, nor anyone packed inside the venue, could have predicted what would happen next.
THE TASTE
The icon was asked about the incident in several interviews, sometimes offering added context, other times sharing his distaste for the question, and on rare occasions revealing what it tasted like.
“The taste of bats is very salty. They taste of salt.”
THE AFTERMATH
After the incident, Ozzy couldn’t go anywhere without being asked about the bat or having people assume that he bit the heads off of other animals, for that matter. He joked around about the situation, but the truth was, he didn’t like recalling it; in fact, he “hated” being asked about it again and again.
Once it was discovered the bat was, in fact, a real animal, Ozzy was rushed to the hospital and given a series of “painful” rabies shots, since bats are known to carry the disease.
As headlines fade and curtains fall, Ozzy’s unforgettable “bite” out of rock history remains impossible to swallow, or forget.
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