Did Ozzy Osbourne tear his head to a bat of a bite in one of his concerts?

In the turbulent world of rock, it is rarely frowned to be shocking.

On the contrary. Most of the time it is practically mandatory.

If there are the limits, few artists have transferred them as much as John Michael Osbourne, also known as Ozzy Osbourne, or the Prince of Tinieblas, who died on Tuesday at age 76.

Such nickname is not achieved by chance.

Black Sabbath fans initially nicknamed him because of his dark personality on stage, his decadent aura and his lyrics obsessed with the hidden.

Even so, his actions on the night of January 20, 1982, in which the head of an unfortunate creature ended up separated from his body, were a huge madness, even for excessive Ozzy standards.

It is an event that, decades later, is still considered one of the most notorious moments in the history of heavy metal.

Although apparently, this was not even the first time that the singer was involved in the decapitation of an innocent animal.

But more about that later.

With regard to Ozzy and the bat, it is not surprising that, over the years, the memories have changed about the precise turn that the events gave.

Sometimes it was because people's memories contradicted each other. But above all, it depended on the version of the story that Ozzy would like to tell.

But some data on the incident are unequivocal.

In January 1982, Ozzy had had been promoting his second solo album for two months, Diary of a Madman.

A tradition had been developed: the singer launched pieces of raw meat and parts of animals, including intestines and liver.

At that time it was a scandal and, perhaps, a behavior not entirely inexplicable for a man who had been apprentice in a slaughterhouse.

Throughout the tour, the news of the practice spread rapidly, and Ozzy fans began to show their ingenuity. In each scenario, they knew exactly what was coming and armed and ready for the show.

So, when something small and black landed on stage during a bustling concert on Wednesday night at the De Moines Memorial Auditorium, in Iowa, the singer thought it was a rubber toy.

And this is where memories begin to deviate in different directions. In his autobiography of 2010, I Am Ozzythe singer says he picked it up, put it in his mouth and devoured it.

“However, I immediately felt that something was wrong. Very bad. At first, my mouth was instantly filled with a warm and sticky liquid,” he recalled. “Then, my head in my mouth moved nervously.”

“Someone threw a bat. I thought it was rubber. I picked it up, I put it in my mouth and gave him a bite.”

Then he says he realized: “Oh, no, it's real! He was a really living bat.”

Is this the definitive version of the story? A living bat that launched on stage and that Ozzy bites? Nothing is further from reality.

Ozzy did not always say that the animal was alive when they threw it.

In 2006, he offered BBC a version of subtle, but crucially different history.

“This bat appears. I thought it was one of those Halloween joke bats because it had a rope around the neck,” he said.

“I bit it, I looked to my left and Sharon (Osbourne, his wife and then representative) said (making a gesture of no).

“And I said: What are you talking about? She (says):” It's a really dead bat. “And I … now I know!”

So, was the unfortunate winged mammal alive or dead?

Who better to confirm if I was devoid of life and had ceased to exist that the person who claims to have taken the bat to the concert?

According to the newspaper Register monksthat man was Mark Neal.

He was 17 years old at the time of the concert. And his story of the events that preceded the bloody night was the following: his younger brother had brought the animal home two weeks before, but unfortunately, he had not survived.

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

So it seems that the evidence available on this legendary piece of excess heavy metal, located at number two on the list of the wildest rock myths of the magazine Rolling Stoneit indicates that it is largely true.

Everyone agrees that the bat did arrive in Ozzy's mouth, although it seems likely to be no longer alive, something with which Ozzy himself coincided. Sometimes.

But what about a disturbingly similar incident occurred about nine months before in Los Angeles?

Once again, the details vary, generally depending on who Ozzy spoke with.

The basic facts have never been discussed. Ozzy planned to meet with a group of executives from the CBS record label in Los Angeles, Sharon occurred to him to wear three living pigeons.

After a brief speech of thanks, the plan was for Ozzy to throw them into the air so that everyone could see them flutter, in a symbolic gesture of peace.

Spoiler Alert: That was not what finally happened.

Ozzy had been drinking brandy all morning, and later told the rock biographer Mick Wall than a public relationship at the meeting had been bothering him a lot.

According to Wall's book, Black Sabbath: Universe symptomsOzzy “he took one of those pigeons and ripped his head from a bite just to silence it.”

“Then he did it again with the next dove,” he added, “spitting his head on the table.”

“That's when they threw me. They said I would never work for CBS.”

In the second version, reported a few months later, he told Garry Bushell, from the magazine Soundsa slightly different story.

“The deception is that the bird was dead. We planned to free him there, but he died before. So, instead of wasting him, I arranged his head of a bite.

“You should have seen their faces. Everyone paled. They were speechless.”

Ozzy, of course, had a reputation to maintain. After all, this was the man who had been expelled from Black Sabbath because, even for astronomically lax rock standards, his alcohol and drug use was considered excessive.

And although their encounters with the bat and the pigeons might not seem to many madness, these, with useful doses of exaggeration, contributed significantly to Ozzy's scandalous image.

Without a doubt, they gave him even more advertising and notoriety, helping his solo career to shoot like lightning.

And although it may not be guilty of all crimes attributed over the years, there is no doubt that it reached heights (or depths) that other rock stars never dared to contemplate.

That meant that he was seen as the undisputed master of ceremonies of rock excess, a reputation that defined his career and that accompanied him to the end.