South Park FAQ by Dave Thompson

Author:Dave Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: television, film
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
Published: 2014-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

Death by Rock Star

Pity poor Ozzy. One day, he’s just another hard-rock idol, touring the world and blasting out his music to a legion of devoted followers. And the next, he’s the bat-biter supreme, the maniacal metal monster who devours flying rodents for fun, and who knows what else for an encore? Happily married as the Ozmeister is, you may not need to lock up your daughters when his circus rolls into town. But you should certainly count their heads when they get home from the show.

In January 1982 in Des Moines, Iowa, Ozzy found himself holding a rubber bat that someone had thrown onto the stage. At least, he thought it was a rubber bat. It looked like rubber, it felt like rubber . . . quite understandably, Ozzy wondered whether it tasted like rubber.

Out in the auditorium, meanwhile, the kid who threw it onstage thought it was a dead bat. It looked like a dead bat, it felt like a dead bat . . . and, oh look! Ozzy’s going to find out whether or not it tastes like a dead bat.

He bit off its head.

At which point, Rolling Stone magazine revealed that it was neither rubber nor dead. The bat was very much alive, if not quite kicking, and Ozzy later revealed that he had to go get a rabies jab immediately after.

End of story?

Not quite.

“It’s amazing people remember all the crap,” the once-and-future Black Sabbath front man remarked a few years later. “But it’s not anyone’s fault but mine, and the amount of mileage I’ve had out of it has been amazing. It just gets a bit tedious when someone goes, ‘So Ozzy, tell me, what do bats taste like?’ The amount of times I’ve been asked that question in America—‘Now we have the infamous bat-biting rock ’n’ roll freak, Ozzy Osbourne!’ Sideshow, sideshow . . . I tell ’em it tastes like a good McDonald’s.”

Besides, it’s not as though he’d not done something similar in the past.

The previous year at a record company convention, he got it into his head that he should release a dove into the auditorium during his performance. But of course, things didn’t quite go according to plan.

“I was at a CBS Convention, right? You don’t realize what these business things are like. All the old codgers are there and they don’t give a fuck about you, it’s just a sham. They play your album while you’re there then forget you. Well, I wanted to make a real impression.

“The scam is, the bird was dead. We were planning to release it there, but it died beforehand. So rather than waste it, I bit its head off. You should have seen their faces. They all went white. They were speechless. That girl in the pictures was screaming. Eventually a bloke came up and said ‘You better go.’

“The dove’s head landed on the PR chick’s lap in a splatter of blood. To be honest with you, I was so pissed it just tasted of Cointreau.

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