While on tour with Mötley Crüe in 1984, Ozzy Osbourne reportedly snorted a line of live ants after being unable to find any cocaine. Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx witnessed the inhaling of innocent insects while Osbourne has gone on record as stating that he has zero recollection of the incident.
The story starts on a sunny afternoon at a Florida resort/hotel where Ozzy and the Crüe had stopped on tour. Ozzy is wearing a dress that he’d stolen from the purse of an elderly woman (due to some other antics in the bar). The Ozzy/Crüe entourage is hanging by the pool when they run out of cocaine. When Nikki Sixx tells Ozzy there’s “no blow” left, Ozzy insists to be handed a straw. In Nikki’s words:
I handed him the straw, and he walked over to a crack in the sidewalk and bent over it. I saw a long column of ants, marching to a little dugout built where the pavement met the dirt. And as I thought, “No, he wouldn’t,” he did. He put the straw to his nose and, with his bare white ass peeking out from under the dress like a sliced honeydew, sent the entire line of ants tickling up his nose with a single, monstrous snort.
He stood up, reared back his head, and concluded with a powerful right nostril sniff that probably sent a stray ant or two dripping down his throat. Then he hiked up the sundress, grabbed his dick, and pissed on the pavement. Without even looking at his growing audience–everyone on the tour was watching him while the old women and families on the pool deck were pretending not to–he knelt down and, getting the dress soggy in the puddle, lapped it up. He didn’t just flick it with his tongue, he took a half-dozen long, lingering, and thorough strokes, like a cat. Then he stood up and, eyes blazing and mouth wet with urine, looked straight at me. “Do that, Sixx!”.
If ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ are the main ingredients of a great rock story, then Mötley Crüe’s oral history The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band has it all. This jaw-dropping, debaucherous Ozzy Osbourne tale is one of the many reasons that this book landed my list of the best rock and roll books of all time. This scene also appears in vivid detail in Netflix’s film adaptation of The Dirt.