Quiet Riot bassist Rudy Sarzo has recalled the time he saw Godfather of Metal, Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a dove. Speaking in a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Sarzo claimed the ordeal occurred on the same day he joined the former Black Sabbath singer’s band.
According to Sarzo, Ozzy had bitten the heads off two doves during a business meeting that day, with Sharon exploiting the incidents to develop his media profile. Initially attending the event with three doves, the rocker had forgotten the third bird.
“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.”
Unsure how to react to the Hellraiser’s shocking ways, Sarzo said his only reference of 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 behaviour.’ No, no – it just happens to be Ozzy.”
Reflecting on the time Ozzy bit the head off a bat onstage, Sarzo noted that Ozzy has really lived a “charmed journey”. He explains that whatever sinister act the metal maniac produced, his manager – and future wife, Sharon would “be right behind him to spin it and save the day. Sharon knew immediately that she had an opportunity here. She contacted Michael Jensen Communications, our publicist, and she spun it. She spun the ‘myth’ that it is today. I saw it happen, right in front of my eyes: her getting on the phone, calling Michael Jensen, and saying, ‘Hey, listen, this happened. Let’s make a story out of this.’”
Meanwhile Ozzy recently rescheduled dates for his UK and European Tour due to COVID-19 restrictions. The gigs which were first announced in 2018, were also postponed several times due to a combination of Osbourne’s ill health and the pandemic.
