One of the most infamous stories in rock and metal history is that of Ozzy Osbourne‘s March 1981 meeting with CBS Records. As the story goes, Sharon asked Ozzy to arrive sober and ready to present, and gave him a couple of doves to throw out when he arrived, for dramatic effect and as an offering of peace. Instead, Ozzy showed up wasted, sat on a female staffer’s lap, tossed one dove into the air, and then bit the head off of the other one. The rest, as they say, is history — but we can’t help but wonder, what happened to the other dove?
Now, in a new interview, Ozzy’s former bassist Rudy Sarzo explains what happened to the remaining dove from Ozzy’s CBS meeting. And spoiler: it didn’t survive long.
“When I joined the band, I went from sleeping on a floor to staying with them,” Rudy told Yahoo! Entertainment. “And ‘them’ is the Arden family, Sharon’s family, who owned the manage management company and all that.
“They had a beautiful estate that was built by Howard Hughes for Jane Russell up in the Beverly Hills area. It was a compound. They gave me a bungalow to stay there. So, I was hanging out and waiting to do the rehearsals, and I bump into Ozzy and he tell 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.”
So there you have it: Ozzy wasn’t just performing for the CBS staff. The dude was biting the heads off of doves left and right in the ’80s. As it should be.
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Words by Chris Krovatin
