ByTobias Wartime|Aug 26, 2022, 6:00 PM EDT
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Life on the road as a rock star can get weird, especially when you throw large amounts of money and partying into the mix. Many famous rock stars—including Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, and others—could even be considered lucky to come away relatively unscathed, given the amount of on- and offstage brawls (and assorted hijinks) they got up to along the way. Below are eight of the wildest and most bizarre tour stories in the history of rock music.
1. Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a live bat while onstage.
While onstage during a performance in Des Moines, Iowa on January 20, 1982, Ozzy Osbourne reportedly bit the head off a bat that someone in the audience threw on stage. Osbourne believed it was made of rubber, so he picked it up and sank his teeth in—but as it turned out, the bat was indeed the real deal.
“Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong,” Osbourne wrote in his memoir, I Am Ozzy. “For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin. Then the head in my mouth twitched. Oh f**k me, I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a f**king bat, did I?”
Osbourne was later rushed to the emergency room where a doctor confirmed that the bat had been real after all and the rockstar had potentially been exposed to rabies. For the rest of the tour, Osbourne had to get a series of injections from doctors as a precautionary treatment against virus.
2. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who got into a fight with a plainclothes police officer.
During The Who’s U.S. tour at Fillmore East in New York City in May 1969, a plainclothes police officer reportedly jumped onstage. He rushed the British rock band and tried to wrestle the microphone away from singer Roger Daltrey to warn them about heavy smoke wafting through from a fire next door.
But Daltrey didn’t see the smoke—nor did he realize the man was actually part of law enforcement. He started to fight him, and then guitarist Pete Townshend joined in the melee.
“There was a warrant out for Pete’s and my arrest because we kicked a cop off the stage,” Daltrey, told AOL (via Yahoo!) in 2018. “He was in plain clothes. He ran on the stage while we were in the middle of ‘Tommy’ and took my microphone away. Pete came and kicked him up the ass.”
Luckily for both, the charges were eventually dropped.
3. Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle through hotel hallways.
Circa 1968, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham reportedly rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle—a gift he received from the band for his 25th birthday—through the halls and lobby of Los Angeles’s legendary Chateau Marmont, which ruined the hotel’s carpet with tire marks. He repeated the stunt again at the Continental Hyatt House Hotel and the Andaz West Hollywood. Meanwhile, Robert Plant is believed to have shouted out his infamous, “I am a golden god!” line (later recreated in Almost Famous) from one of those hotel balconies while Bonham went full hog inside.
4. Ozzy Osbourne took Mötley Crüe “under his wing.”
The bat incident wasn’t Ozzy’s first brush with controversy while on the road; in 1984, he found himself in a peculiar competition with Mötley Crüe’s bassist Nikki Sixx, while both acts were on tour together.
According to the hair metal band’s 2001 autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, Osbourne snorted a line of ants from the pavement, urinated on the ground, and started to lap it up. He then challenged Sixx to do the same, but the bassist soon learned that it’s not easy going toe-to-toe with the Prince of Darkness.
“We were a wild young band and he kind of took us under his wing,” Sixx told Page Six in 2019. “We thought we could compete with that, but you can’t with Ozzy. He won.”
While Sixx claims it’s all true, former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee has maintained that some of the antics described weren’t exactly accurate—namely, that Osbourne never snorted a line of ants. “I was there, and I never saw ants,” Jake E. Lee told Tone-Talk. “I was right there … Ozzy snorted a little tiny stupid spider that was crawling across. There was no ants.”
5. Keith Richards almost burnt down the Playboy Mansion.
In 1972, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and saxophonist Bobby Keys reportedly set fire to the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago while the pair were up to some party-related hijinks.
“We managed to set a bathroom on fire in the Playboy Mansion. We didn’t notice the curtains had caught fire while we were sitting around on the john smoking,” Richards told NPR in 2015. Fortunately, the structure remained intact and was even put up for sale in 2018 for a cool $3.7 million.
6. Liam Gallagher of Oasis lost teeth during a huge brawl in Germany.
In 2002, Oasis was on tour in Germany when three of the band’s members, including lead singer Liam Gallagher, got into a serious brawl at the Bayerischer Hof nightclub in Munich.
According to reports, 80 police officers were called in to keep the peace and break up the melee, and Gallagher lost several of his teeth during the altercation, which resulted in the arrests of five people (including Gallagher and two other members of Oasis), a €50,000 fine, and the cancellation of two tour dates in Germany.
In 2018, Liam Gallagher told The Guardian, “I remember we were sitting at a table under a balcony, and our security guard just grabs us by the neck, drags us over the f**king table, and the next minute, there’s a geezer on the balcony drops a f**king glass table on our heads, but the security’s got us out of the way, or it could have f**king killed us. And then it went off, man.”
7. Van Halen’s infamous brown M&M clause in their tour rider.
During Van Halen’s 1982 tour, the rock band added a small (yet soon to be notorious) detail to their tour rider contract—the band wanted M&M’s but with a disclaimer: “WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES.”
While the seemingly random rider has definitely elicited some chuckles over the years, it actually was less bizarre than it seems. For the band, it served as a test to make sure each concert venue thoroughly read through the document and followed each technical specification included.
“There was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function,” lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy From the Heat. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … Well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.”
If the band saw brown M&M’s backstage, they’d get upset because they knew the concert promoters likely hadn’t read the entire contract and therefore couldn’t guarantee their show would go safely and smoothly. In one instance, Roth trashed his dressing room because he found brown M&M candies backstage.
8. Coheed and Cambria’s Michael Todd was arrested for armed robbery at a concert venue.
While on tour in 2011, Coheed and Cambria’s then bassist Michael Todd reportedly walked into a Walgreens and showed a pharmacist a text on his phone, which claimed that he had a bomb and would blow up the drugstore unless he was given OxyContin. Todd then left the store with six bottles of painkillers, hailed a taxi, and went back to the Comcast Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts to play the show.
However, police tracked him down and arrested him for armed robbery and possession of a class B controlled substance.
“Todd was arrested today on what we consider very serious charges and therefore he will not be finishing up the current tour,” the band later wrote on their website, following the incident. “We are surprised, to say the least, and will address the situation with Michael after the tour.”
Todd was later sentenced to one year of home confinement and three years probation after pleading guilty to charges. Meanwhile, touring keyboardist Wes Styles took over on bass for the rest of the tour.
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20 Outdated Things Millennials Still Love
From flip phones to emo anthems, these nostalgic favorites never go out of style, even if millennials are busy adulting now.
ByPaul Anthony Jones|Nov 5, 2026, 8:00 PM EST
In 2026, it was quietly reported that longstanding fast-food favorite Pizza Hut had, for several years, been gradually bringing back its old-school restaurants, in an attempt to revitalize the business after the brand was sold to new owners. The retro-styled refits—complete with padded booths, stained glass lamps, and classic chunky red glassware—proved pure nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s when Pizza Hut restaurants were at their heyday. (And it proved to make good business sense too, with the rolling out of the retro design costing a fraction of a standard renovation.)
Needless to say, the refit restaurants quickly proved popular among Millennials—and nor were they the only outmoded things that Millennials still cling to.
OLD-SCHOOL EMOJIS
While it’s Gen Alpha who seemingly use the most emojis overall, recent studies have shown that emoji use differs greatly across the generations, with Millennials—who grew up on a diet of Buzzfeed quizzes and MSN Messenger—sticking to tried and tested emojis that the generations after largely ignore. The Face With Tears of Joy Emoji is still the go-to laughter response among Millennials, for instance, but is dismissed as cringe and outdated by Gen Z and younger (who prefer a rather less wholesome skull to show extreme hilarity). And while Millennials so no problem at all with a simple thumbs up, Gen Z finds it passive-aggressive and noncommittal.
GIFS
It’s not just old-fashioned emojis that Millennials are holding on to, either. More than a third of Millennials regularly use GIFS as a means of expressing their opinions, with two-thirds claiming doing so allows them to convey their feelings more accurately than words alone. The generations behind, however, are increasingly turning their backs on gifs, which are apparently being seen as ever more cringey among Gen Zs and Gen Alpha.
FLIP PHONES
Millennials might like sending emojis and gifs, there was something about using a simpler screen or a far more complicated handset back in the day. Early 2000s flip phones might have had grayscale screens, shrill ringtones, and next to no battery life, but there was something about flipping a phone open to answer it that a swipe of a touchscreen just can’t match. No wonder the tech world now seems to be nostalgically re-embracing the style more than 20 years later.
CLASSIC KIDS TV
Speaking comforting classics that you grew up with, one thing Millennials and Gen Z can seemingly agree on is that kids TV was far better back in the day than it is today. These two cohorts watch more repeats of classic childhood movies and TV favorites than any other generation.
THE BIG SCREEN EXPERIENCE
When it comes to finding something entertaining to watch, Millennials are also near single-handedly keeping the big summer blockbuster alive. With a worrisome one in ten cinemagoers claiming that the summer movie experience has all but died out, Millennials are bucking that trend, with almost two-fifths proudly claiming the opposite and that the summer blockbuster is alive and well. (Perhaps growing up with The Matrix, The Mummy, The Sixth Sense and the first Star Wars prequel all released in the same summer might have something to do with it.)
STAND-ALONE BLOCKBUSTERS
On the subject of blockbusters, the big-budget movie experience at the moment is dominated by remakes and spinoffs, or else stories set in some pre-existing universe. Sequels and IP-mining are by no means new, of course, but with almost 40 films in the endless expanded MCU and Disney currently slating more remakes and sequels than original stories, it seems the standalone blockbusters of the 80s and 90s are a thing of the Millennial past.
Case in point, 16 of the Top 20 highest-grossing movies of the 1990s were either stand-alone or entirely original movies, with only four spinoffs and sequels (Star Wars: Episode 1, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and Toy Story 2) listed alongside the likes of Armageddon, Ghost, Twister, and Independence Day.
So far in the 2020s, the exact opposite is true, with only four of the current Top 20 (The Odyssey, Barbie, Michael and Oppenheimer) not belonging to an existing movie universe.
DISNEY ORIGINALS
The live-action remakes of Disney classics might be proving big business, but for Millennials—who grew up on hand-drawn and painted classics like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast—there’s really no comparison.
PRACTICAL EFFECTS
Is it fair to say Millennials grew up at the best time for movie effects? Millennials had the best of both worlds in the 90s and early 2000s, with movies like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 seamlessly blending practical effects with cutting-edge CGI, while others, like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies, built stunning practical sets and used real-world locations to bring their universes to light. Modern big-budget extravaganzas that increasingly rely on green screen and LED backlots just don’t seem to match up, and don’t have quite the same immersive quality.
EMO MUSIC
If you’re a Millennial who fell deeply into the emo subculture of the early 2000s, then you might have heard your parents say that it was just a phase. Not so, it seems, as Millennials are still proudly holding on to the bands, artists, and music that defined them more than two decades ago and supporting their music still today.
VINYL RECORDS
On the subject of music, though, Millennials have long been the driving force behind the recent resurgence in popularity of vinyl records, too, all but single-handedly steering the decades-old format through the choppy waters of the streaming era. Having brought LPs and record players back from the brink, however, more recent research is showing that Gen Z are catching up too and are jumping on the Millennial bandwagon as the biggest buyers of vinyl records in the mid 2020s.
MIXTAPES
Curating a Spotify playlist just isn’t the same as burning a bespoke CD or recording a uniquely compiled cassette tape, is it?
PHYSICAL MEDIA
It’s not just vinyl and mixtapes, either. Millennials and Gen Z alike are increasingly expressing a preference for physical media of all types—from CDs and DVDs to old-school gaming consoles and cartridge games. Turns out paying for streaming platforms that don’t stream the movie you want to watch when you want to watch it (and can delete it even once you’ve bought it) isn’t the best business model.
BOARD GAMES
The pandemic made board games fashionable again, leading to a resurgence of interest among Gen Z, but for Millennials they never went out of favor. Two-thirds of Millennials admit to being board game fanatics, with almost 40% claiming that they enjoy regular board games as a hobby.
ARCADES
Not that Millennials only played dice-rolling games back in the day, of course. A pocketful of loose change was all you needed to have a good time when video game arcades were everywhere—although these too, it seems, are starting to enjoy a renaissance as the edge continues to wear off in the digital age.
PEN AND PAPER
In an era when you can make a note of absolutely anything on your phone, there’s a growing trend among Millennials and Gen Zs for re-embracing pen and paper. As well as giving the opportunity for some much-needed time away from a screen, there’s something satisfyingly tactile in making a to-do list by hand and scratching each job off as you do it.
ONE-TIME PURCHASES
Speaking of things that used to be simpler back in the day, it used to be the case that if you needed, say, a new program for your computer, you would buy it, install it, and it would be yours in perpetuity. Nowadays, everything is a subscription service—so that one-off fee has been switched to a steady and increasingly infuriating drip-feed of monthly payments and constant downloadable upgrades.
WORKPLACE PROFESSIONALISM
From the “Gen Z stare” to the rumbling debate over whether or not you can take an iced coffee into a job interview, much has been said in recent years of the different social mores of Millennials versus Gen Z and beyond. With Boomers now retired, and Gen X not far behind them, Millennials are becoming the elder statesmen and women of the workplace—and in that capacity are steadfastly defending the professional etiquette of the past against an ever more relaxed and less demanding style of professionalism that’s emerging among the generations behind.
AN AI-LESS INTERNET
Use a search engine today, and chances are you’ll be shown an AI-curated overview of the search results, rather than the results themselves. Scroll a social media feed, and you’ll likely end up wading through a morass of AI slop. Try to order something online, and you might get an AI chatbot asking you what you’re looking for and if there’s anything they can do to help (if it hasn’t already made things worse). Things really were better, easier, and more human back in the day.
ONLINE ANONYMITY
On the topic of the early internet, it’s easy to forget that influencer culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, and there was a time in the not-too-distant past when people did not live their every moment online, and we were all largely anonymous. Sure, there were Facebook pages and MySpace profiles, but people typically kept themselves to themselves and used them to expand on real-life, in-person friendships and relationships, rather than build new parasocial ones with strangers.
DOWNTIME
There was a time when your downtime was genuine downtime—not time spent still scrolling feeds, watching shorts, and digesting headlines. And what’s more, Millennials seem to be figuring that out, with studies showing more and more Millennials are switching off when they really don’t need to be online.
Read More:
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100 Amazing Facts About Millennials
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20 Things Millennials Grew Up With That Are Already Obsolete
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The Two Types of Millennials, and the Differences Between Them