January 20, 1982...........Des Moines, Iowa
Ozzy Osborne bites the head off a bat during a concert on his
Diary of a Madman tour.
He thought a fan had thrown a fake rubber bat onstage, and it wasn’t until he chomped into the flying mammal that he realized it was real. Ozzy even claims he 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.”
“The taste of bats is very salty,” Ozzy explained. “It tastes of salt.” After 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?”
The bat thrower revealed himself in 1982 -- the same year the concert took place. The man’s name? Mark Neal.
Neal was 17 years old when he tossed the bat onstage that night. It was something he’d planned to do, and even told his close friends about before embarking to the Ozzy Osbourne 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. 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.”
Mark Neal himself 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.”
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