King of the Road: The five wildest Ozzy Osbourne touring moments
Ozzy Osbourne’s days wreaking untold havoc on the tour bus are over. It’s a sad day for all of us, and even his beleaguered tour manager has been spotted wandering the streets muttering, ‘What am I going to do with myself’. On the other hand, The Holiday Inn’s insurance premium has just taken a favourable turn. During his hellraising heyday, Ozzy really was king of the road—a true rock ‘n’ roll tour de force who blazed through towns like a musical maelstrom of mania, mystique, and vitally, heavy metal mastery.
It mustn’t be forgotten that as part of Black Sabbath, Ozzy truly was a pioneer of a new musical advancement. However, it also must be noted that this is often undermined for the best possible reason—he didn’t take himself so seriously that his mission was to amass reverence, all he wanted to leave in his wake was a good time, everything else was secondary. And that day-brightening endeavour will never not be commendable.
As he once said himself: “You’ve got to try and take things to the next level, or you’ll just get stuck in a rut.” For Ozzy, breaking the shackles was not just a studio pursuit, he was always pushing things well past 11 when he was out on the road. In some ways, this singles him out as the ultimate touring artist. Everything he did musically seemed to be geared towards performance—geared towards offering up a cheap thrill for the weary masses.
For this, we say thank you, Ozzy Osbourne. His days on the road will not be forgotten. He made perfectly sure of that himself by decapitating bats, snorting ants and even being presumed dead. These are the incidents we are taking a look at below, as we explore the touring life of a man who never once laughed at This Is Spinal Tap believing them to be a real band capable of rather modest antics.
The five wildest Ozzy Osbourne touring moments:
Madman missing, presumed dead, following cocaine duel
In November 1978, Black Sabbath and Van Halen were two of the biggest rock bands on the planet. Thus, naturally, given the era, they were also two of the biggest consumers of illicit substances in human history. So danger was afoot one night when Van Halen were opening for Black Sabbath in Alabama. The duel that David Lee Roth and Ozzy engaged in seemed to have the simple and utterly stupid premise of, ‘Let’s see who can snort the most coke without dying’.
So, the story goes that the duel commences with a macho handshake and the snorting gets underway. Roth is declared the loser at 9 am the next morning when he passes out. The tour bus rolls on to Nashville, but when they arrive, they discover that Ozzy is missing. The police are called to look for him. At certain points during the unsuccessful search, Ozzy was simply presumed dead. Panic sets in among the band, but this is tempered by a certain sense of inevitability.
However, a few hours later a groggy figure staggered into the lobby of the hotel. Guests avoided this ghostly beast—stinking and covered in foulness. The hunched figure finally revealed his face, and he was greeted with chants of “Ozzy’s alive.”
The life and times of John Edward Allen, Ozzy’s “personal dwarf”
When John Edward Allen took off from Southampton to visit his sister in America, he could never have envisaged what life had in store for him. His dreams of being an actor were realised almost instantly as he scored gigs on Broadway. And soon after Hollywood beckoned where he starred in Blade Runner, performed for President Carter at the White House and featured in Under the Rainbow which came with the problematic synopsis: “Somewhere, Under the Rainbow, way down low – Chevy Chase, Carrie Fisher, and 150 midgets are fighting valiantly to save our country against all Oz!”
Naturally, this title brought Allen to the attention of Ozzy, and sadly, at the time, they were both linked by an unfortunate dependence on alcohol. So, he figured that Allen was the perfect kindred spirit to help him fulfil his dream of taking a dwarf on tour. In the end, Osbourne hired Allen for the duration of both his ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘Speak of the Devil’ tours.
The paradigm of this nettlesome dynamic came one night deep into their eight-month run of shows. “He showed up late, he drank…it got to me after a while,” Ozzy once said of ‘Ronnie’ which was the nickname he gave Allen. “So, one night, when he wanted to get on the tour bus, I threw him in the luggage compartment. Somebody grabbed me and said: ‘What you’re doing is not only illegal but it’s inhumane.’ I lost it. I yelled: ‘He’s my fucking midget and I’ll fucking do what I want with him.’” It is at this point that the voice of ‘Ronnie the Dwarf’ muffled its way through the stuffy luggage compartment. “He’s right: I’m his midget,” he uttered, “and he can do what he wants with me.”
Poisoning a drummer’s penis
Bill Ward lived a perilous life on the road with the Black Sabbath hoodlums, so perilous, in fact, that it almost cost him his spam javelin. Osbourne revealed a coke-fuelled prank he attempted to pull on Ward while they were urinating next to one other, saying to Rolling Stone some years later: “I see this aerosol can and squirt his dick with it. He starts screaming and falls down. I look at the can and it says, WARNING: DO NOT SPRAY ON SKIN – HIGHLY TOXIC. I poisoned Bill through his dick!”
However, in his autobiography, he would remember the incident a little differently and tried to rewrite history by painting himself in a more innocent light. He wrote: “One day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks around the other side of the railing, and when Bill starts pissing over the railing, he sprays his dick with it. You should have heard the scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing and starts rolling down the hillside.”
He then added in a comic tongue: “Ah, he’ll be all right,’ I said. And he was, eventually. Although he did have a blue dick for a while.” Regardless of which account holds the truth, I’m sure there are many former bandmates who can testify that life on the road with Ozzy and his cohorts was never a comfortable affair.
Snorting a line of ants
In 1984, when famous yachtsman and musician Tommy Lee found himself on tour with Ozzy, things were never going to be smooth sailing. Ozzy recalls, if that’s the right word, that it is “one continuous alcohol and drug-induced tour. I don’t remember the shows to be honest with you.”
Naturally, high jinks, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were bountiful amid the heady mix of the tour bus, but this escalated a little further than usual on one occasion. As it happens, Lee and Ozzy embarked on what would become known as a gross-out competition. Such a battle was, of course, unadvisable and this tale comes with a ‘don’t try this at home warning’. “It was simply a tour of who could out-gross the next man you know,” Ozzy states.
“One night we’re all drinking, doing a tonne of cocaine,” Lee recalls, “the sun is coming up. We pull into some resort-style hotel in Florida. Ozzy sees a popsicle stick on the ground and there is a long trail of ants going towards it.” See his chance to seal the coveted title of the grossest man on the tour, Ozzy dropped down to his knees in an instant and snorted a line of ants.
Interestingly, this is one story from the tour that Mr Osbourne actually remembers well. Perhaps it was the sobering effect of the sunrise, but he happily says, “I was snorting ants on this tour,” almost bewildered by his own actions, “crazy stuff,” he adds. All the while, Lee and the rest of the crew watched on in disbelief, unable to summon any other words aside from “Dear God, this man is actually crazy.”
The many animal beheadings of Ozzy Osbourne
One animal beheading can perhaps be put down to an accident, but once you re-offend, well, frankly you’re a downright beheading fiend. This is the tale of the many beheadings of Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness who Satan’s winged minions have ensured is barred from the gates of hell. Everyone knows the tale of his famed Des Moines bat beheading, but it is one riddled with incredulities so let’s start by sifting through the myths and try to snatch some semblance of fact amid the mayhem. On January 20th, 1982, at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium a 5000 strong crowd witnessed the former Black Sabbath frontman scoop up a not only dead but decating bat and chow down on its noggin.
He then proceeded to finish the performance like the consummate hungry pro. Then when the curtain fell, he was rushed off to the hospital to receive rabies shots at the Broadlands Medical Centre. The stunned audience spread the story like wildfire and the rest is history.
However, you dig a little further into the history books and you find that there was perhaps an even more disturbing portent that occurred long before. A year earlier in March 1981, his decapitating ways began, with not one dove, but two! The incident was not technically a tour related escapade, but in promotion of a new album whereby he was set to release three doves to clean up his animal rights image. “I just remember this PR woman going on and on at me. In the end, I said, ‘Do you like animals?’ Then I pulled out one of these doves and bit its f—ing head off. Just to shut her up,” I’m sure it worked!
