People love music. People love crazy stuff. With thousands of years of history in the files, therefore, it is no surprise that many artists have done wacky things for the sake of music. Whether these stunts were executed for practical purposes, to prove a point, enforce an image, or promote sales, or whether they were simply products of unbridled insanity is up to you to decide. Without further ado, here are some of the craziest musical stunts musicians have pulled off.
- The Ozzy Osbourne Bat Incident
On Jan. 20, 1982 Ozzy Osbourne was playing a show to an audience of about 5,000 in Des Moines, Iowa. Ozzy was in the nascence of the peak of his success with Randy Rhoads, the respected guitar player who would die two months later in a plane crash. After seeing a pie fight in a movie, Osbourne adopted and adapted the idea and began throwing bits of meat and dead animal parts at the audience during performances. The audience, in turn, would throw chicken parts, frogs, and other dead / alive creatures back. At this particular performance in Des Moines one concert-goer threw a bat (some say alive, many say dead) on stage. Ozzy, believing that the bat was fake, picked up the bat, put it in his mouth, and bit its head off. When blood began to ooze from his mouth, however, he was likely even more shocked than the audience. Ozzy was rushed to a hospital where he had to receive a slew of rabies shots. For the next decade the incident came up in nearly every interview Ozzy gave, which would have been many at the height of his career. While Ozzy became tired of having to answer as to the unexpected decapitation, he did eventually accept it as part of his legacy and decapitated bat plushies can now be purchased from his official website.
- The Castrati
You’ve trained a group of boys since birth to sing the finest classical music of the time, but suddenly they become teenagers, their voices change, and all that hard work has been ruined. But what can you do? Apparently you can cut off their genitals. From the 1600s all the way into the 1900s thousands of young boys were castrated to prevent their natural growth and preserve their high voices. These were the Castrati and they were many of the most famous singers of their day. The “need” for Castrati was actually spurred by the Roman Catholic Church. In Italy (and almost everywhere else) for a long time women were excluded from music – and therefore prohibited from singing in church choirs. To fill out the beautiful sound the church sought out male sopranos, but more readily available were boys they could make into Castrati. At the time the sound of an altered male was considered far superior to any sound a woman could produce. Italy was not only the center of religious music at the time, however. Italy was also the home of Opera. The popularity of the Castrati quickly expanded into public music and they became a norm in the Opera house. Many of the superstars at the top of European music were Castrati. Many famous composers such as Handel and Mozart wrote music intended to be sung by Castrati. As music, society, and medical technology changed the Castrati became much less popular, dwindling to few by the mid 1800s. The Catholic Church, however, continued to castrate boys, with the last known Castrati, Allessandro Moreschi, serving on the choir of the Sistine Chapel until 1913.
- Zappa’s Giraffe
Frank Zappa was a very strange guy. He released 62 albums in his lifetime ranging from Psychedelic Rock to Doo-wop. He was praised and loved by many in the hippie community while simultaneously maintaining a rigid anti-drug policy and viewing hippiedom as a form of orthodoxy. In 1967, in the early days of his career, Zappa’s first major band, The Mothers of Invention, would often play gigs at the Garrick Theater in Greenwich Village where they loved to pull wacky stuff on their audiences. One of the best of these antics was a large stuffed giraffe which the band had rigged up with a hose that stuck out of its hind quarters. During performances the band would bring the giraffe out and shoot whipped cream at their audience out of the giraffe. This delicious feat not only made the audiences’ day, but also resulted in one of the greatest quotes in Rock-N-Roll history: “You can’t write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.” – Frank Zappa.
