Ozzy Osbourne, performing at Mandalay Bay, reveals why fans love him

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Time to shed some light on the Prince of Darkness.

Who’s Ozzy?

"I Am Ozzy," declares the title of the recently published memoir of one John Michael Osbourne.

You know him better as the dude who once bit the head off a live bat and dove, who relieved himself on the Alamo in a woman’s dress, who allegedly snorted up a line of fire ants and who set the unofficial F-bomb record on his reality TV show with his family, where the dialogue was as blue as a Smurf turd.

Ozzy Osbourne is less a heavy metal forebear than a cartoon character come to life, a lovable, loony English gent far more into the Beatles than Beelzebub, despite what his well-traveled nickname suggests.

His aforementioned autobiography is a punchy, profane read, just as fun and out-of-hand as the man at the center of it all.

With Osbourne hitting Vegas this week, we thought we’d delve into the sharp-tongued tome and take a closer look at just who Ozzy really is:

A Bad Criminal

Some of Ozzy’s early occupations included testing car horns and cleaning the vomit out of sheep stomachs, the latter of which at least prepared him for a career in the music industry.

And so it’s probably not too much of a surprise that Osbourne briefly tried his hand at a life of crime — in embarrassing fashion.

He attempted to be a burglar, robbing the same clothing/department store three times.

The first go-round, he didn’t take a flashlight with him, and as a result, blindly grabbed the first few hangers he came across, ending up with a bunch of baby clothes that he couldn’t do anything with.

Next time, he swiped a TV, but it was too heavy for him to carry, and as he made his getaway, he fell over a fence and lay trapped beneath the thing for an hour.

"I was like Mr. Magoo on drugs, I was," Ozzy writes. "Eventually I got the telly off of me but I had to leave it behind."

Finally, Osbourne broke into the place with one of the thumbs missing from the gloves he was wearing.

Whoops.

The police identified his fingerprints, and he was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

Osbourne would get out in six weeks for good behavior, perhaps the only time his behavior would ever be labeled as such.

A Good Practical Joker

During the time he worked at a slaughterhouse in his 20s in the English factory town of Aston, where he grew up, Ozzy was fond of swiping cows’ eyeballs from work, going to the local pub and then dropping them in people’s drinks when they weren’t looking.

"The best thing was to find a young sensitive-looking chick," Osbourne recalls in his book, "and when she went to the bog, put an eyeball on top of her can of Coke. They would go crazy when they saw that."

And that’s just for starters.

Houseguests at Ozzy’s pad over the years would frequently wake up to find that Osbourne had shave their eyebrows off, a favorite prank of his, and his road crew got similar treatment.

During Osbourne’s "Diary of a Madman" tour in the ’80s, the stage show involved a mock hanging of a little person.

The guy who played the role of the victim in the production just happened to be almost as big a drinker as Ozzy himself and would frequently pass out on the band’s tour bus.

And that’s when the fun would start.

"We’d put him in the highest bunk bed," Osbourne remembers, "so when he woke up, he’d roll over and go ‘Aarrgh!’ Splat."

We feel kind of bad for laughing at that one — just not as bad as the Lilliputian fellow with the dented forehead.

Not Really The Prince of Darkness

As Ozzy himself tells it, the only evil spirits he was ever into were whiskey, vodka and gin.

When he and his Black Sabbath bandmates saw "The Exorcist" for the first time back in the day, they all had to stay in the same hotel room that night because they were too spooked to be alone.

None of this stopped occultists from diligently following Sabbath early in the band’s career, largely because of their name and dark imagery.

Osbourne grew increasingly tired of being hounded by devil worshipping types, though.

One day, a group of Satanists camped outside his hotel room, chanting, surrounded by black candles.

"Instead of brushing past them as I usually did," Ozzy writes, "I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles and sang ‘Happy Birthday.’ "

They were not amused.

We are.

A Survivor

As a kid, Osbourne grew up so poor, he remembers raiding local vegetable gardens for food and his family’s using newspaper instead of toilet paper in the john.

Despite these humble origins, Osbourne’s made himself into a millionaire rock star almost in spite of himself.

This is a dude who once awoke in the middle of a 12-lane freeway after a night of boozing, who dipped his testicles into a German record label CEO’s drink during a dinner party and then peed in his cocktail, and who has defecated in public more times than your average Rottweiler.

And yet, the man is more famous and celebrated than you.

There’s a lesson to be learned here.

So, why are your pants still on?

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.