The ‘Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a live bat onstage’ story is true, but requires a little explanation. When I was a teen we all thought he brought the live bat himself as a prop, and bit its head off in a remarkable act of heavy metal depravity. That’s the rumor part.
The actual story is that someone threw a bat onstage, and Ozzy, thinking it was a rubber toy, bit the head off, getting a nasty surprise and needing a round of rabies shots.
For some reason, Mad Magazine always depicted the bat as a chicken.
That one is true.
That was actually Alice Cooper, and the chicken was thrown into the audience.
I think that story sometimes gets conflated with the time he bit the head off a live dove during a meeting with record execs.
It’s often reported that the bat was live, but the kid who (purportedly) threw the bat onstage said it was dead. (I always wondered who on earth would carry and throw a live bat, and why the bat wouldn’t just… fly away. Have you ever tried to catch a bat that snuck into your cabin? Not easy.)
Now Ozzy also says the bat was alive but… hey, it’s Ozzy–he isn’t exactly a reliable source.
Speaking of Walt Disney being frozen..
there is the conspiracy theory that part of the reason The Walt Disney Company made the movie Frozen is so if people search the internet for “Disney” and “frozen” the movie would come up instead rumors about Walt Disney’s corpse.
I thought that one was true. I
For a long time (until I was 19/20) I thought the “frozen Disney” theory was true, because my parents told me about when I was young and I didn’t think they were just repeating rumors.
I am fond of the story of that Judo master Gene LeBell choked Steven Seagal and made him crap his pants
Maybe it is..
Oh yeah, forgot about that story-- also true, and in that case Ozzy did know it was a real (if not still alive) dove. The story I linked below is not clear- apparently the plan was to release 3 ‘symbolic doves of peace’. But one was dead, and having been hitting the booze pretty hard, he bit the head off it to freak out the execs. Then, the article says, he did it again, with a second dove? It’s not clear-- not sure, if there even was a second dove head bite, whether it was also dead, or still alive.
Alcohol is a hell of a drug! At least doves don’t carry rabies.
I grew up in Des Moines, and had graduated from HS the year before. I was not at that concert, but I knew a lot of people who were, and the story is absolutely true.
The newspaper article said that some of the younger ER employees “were explaining Ozzy Osbourne” to older staffers who didn’t believe the story. Nowadays, the generations would probably be reversed.
Alice Cooper seemed to attract a certain type of celebrity rumor, sort of like Yogi Berra and funny malapropisms.
Two that I remember:
Alice Cooper placed a 55-gallon drum at the entrance to the concert venue and asked everyone to spit in it. During the show, the drum was brought to the stage, where he drank it.
Cooper had a standing offer: $50,000 to anyone who could gross him out. A fan jumped up on the stage and took a shit. He thought he’d won the $50,000. But Cooper ate it.
GG Allin doing those things, I could believe. Not Alice Cooper.
LaBell was a badass, and I’ve heard the story repeated as true several times.
Nancy Reagan (nee Davis), in her years as a young actress, was renowned in Hollywood for her fellatio skills.
IIRC, Henderson said they had dinner together at a restaurant once, and while nothing romantic happened, it was widely reported as a “date,” then inflated into a full-fledged affair.
Similar to the rumor that Roger Ebert dated Oprah Winfrey. In fact, the two had a business dinner where they discussed how she could structure a syndication deal for her show that would be more lucrative than the network offers she was getting.
Elvis is still alive.
I’d always heard that one about Frank Zappa. He even addressed it in his book.