Less than a week ago we celebrated the 40th anniversary of one of the most popular anecdotes in rock, the one starring Ozzy Osbourne and an unfortunate bat that lost its head from a bite during the concert that the Madman offered in Des Moines, Iowa.
As pointed out then, the story was directly associated with the episode in which Ozzy had bitten two pigeons during a meeting with representatives of the CBS label in Los Angeles, what is not so well known is that there was a third pigeon in the story. Quiet Riot bassist Rudy Sarzo recalled:
“I went from sleeping on a floor to staying with them,” he recalled. “And ‘them’ is the Arden family, Sharon’s family, who owned the management company and all that. They had a beautiful estate … up in the Beverly Hills area. It was a compound. They gave me a bungalow to stay there. … I was hanging out and waiting to do the rehearsals, and I bump into Ozzy and he tells me the whole dove story that had just happened. And as we were talking, I see that his jacket is flapping. I go, ‘What’s that?” And he puts his hand in his pocket, pulls out another bird, looks at it and he just goes and bites the head off again – right in front of me! I gross-out, and he just laughs and keeps walking.”
Not sure how to react: “My only reference, right before I joined Ozzy, was I used to play with Randy Rhoads in Quiet Riot on the Sunset Strip. … Randy had been there for about a year and a half, so he mentored me and said, ‘Listen, don’t take it personal. This is the way they do things.’ And so I rolled with it because I had never experienced anything like it before. I thought, ‘OK, all the bands at this level must have this, um, unusual behavior.’ No, no – it just happens to be Ozzy.”