So...Where Did The Bat Really Come From?

Let's get to the bottom of the bat that Ozzy chomped….exactly where did the winged rabies cocktail come from?

Like most chapters of bands, myths and legends, the bat-biting was born of a rare mix of calculation and coincidence.

Ozzy was no stranger to decapitations of winged creatures: He bit the head off a live dove in 1981, during a sit down with horrified record-company executive

The bat in Des Moines, however, was most certainly dead, closer to rancid, according to Mark Neal. He was 17 at the time he tossed the bat corpse on stage.

Neal got more of a reaction than he bargained for.

"It really freaked me out," he told a Register reporter in 1982. "I won't get in any trouble for admitting this, will I?"

It’s on the “Diary of a Madman” tour that Osbourne staged the hanging of a dwarf and used a catapult that tossed raw meat into the audience....audience members started smuggling in meat and, eventually, toy reptiles to throw back at the band.

“We had dead cats, birds, lizards, all kinds of stuff,” Osbourne recalled. “With every gig, it just got crazier and crazier. Eventually people started to throw things on stage with nails and razor blades embedded in them — joke shop stuff, mainly, like rubber snakes and plastic spiders.”

Word of the Ozzy's antics reached Des Moines teenagers Mark Neal and Carmen Kelly.

Two weeks before the show, Neal’s younger brother found a dead bat (Kelly and Neal defend the bat was dead; Osbourne argues he felt the head twitch in his mouth, leading him to believe it alive when bitten) outside an elementary school on the city’s southside.

Kelly suggested keeping it for the upcoming Osbourne show, so Neal stored it in a freezer. “I said, ‘Mark, I think we should take it to the Ozzy concert and … see what happens,’” Kelly said. “We had heard so many stories.”

On show night, he tucked the bat into his pocket, found a close spot to the stage, and threw it toward the band.

“It landed in front of Rudy Sarzo, the bass player,” Neal said. “He looked down at it and motioned to Ozzy and, as they say, the rest is history”

Or, as Osbourne described: “... 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.”

Osbourne took the bite, but the media ate up the story.

“The name of the town of Des Moines is embossed in my head!" Osbourne told the Register in November 2001, ahead of his return to the auditorium for the first time since the beheading. "I've had some mileage from Des Moines.”

And Osbourne paid for that mileage. He earned roughly $39,000 for performing that night, Register archives say, but faced three weeks of rabies shots on the road ahead.

“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,” he wrote. “Every one hurt like a bastard.”