Watch Ozzy Osbourne Tour the Alamo 33 Years After Urination Arrest
It’s one of the most notorious moments in rock history: Ozzy Osbourne, arrested in San Antonio, Texas in February 1982 for urinating at a monument near the Alamo dedicated to the lives of soldiers killed in the 1836 Texas Revolution. Following the incident, Osbourne was banned from the Texas city for a decade. And while he’s since performed live in San Antonio, he returned to that landmark Thursday for the first time in 33 years when he, his son Jack and a History Channel documentary team took a tour of the shrine.
“This is my first time here, not his,” Jack Osbourne joked to Stephen L. Hardin, the Osbournes’ tour guide for the Alamo visit, the San Antonio Express-News reports. The Alamo tour was set up in secret as part of Jack Osbourne’s upcoming History Channel travelogue series. However, word soon spread that the Black Sabbath singer was heading back to the Texas shrine that he accidentally urinated on three decades prior, an incident that resulted in him seeking treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. Dozens gathered to watch the rocker return to the scene of the infamous crime.
“I think [Ozzy] was a little overwhelmed,” Hardin told the newspaper. “The plan was for them to just fly in under the radar … for Jack and Ozzy to be like regular tourists. … And the producers swore me to secrecy because we didn’t want a mob scene. And I checked Facebook this morning and I thought, ‘God, it’s going to be a …’ and it was. … I’m friends with Phil Collins, too. His fan base is very much different. I can tell you that.” (Collins is an avid Alamo artifact collector, having written a book about the siege as well as donating his Alamo collection to the museum there.)
Osbourne’s visit to San Antonio also featured a stop at City Hall to visit District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño, who had a meeting with the Osbournes after Jack filed an open-records request for his father’s 1982 arrest report. After Osbourne urinated on the Alamo Cenotaph, the rocker was arrested and briefly jailed, but he was bonded out on $40 and made it to his concert at the HemisFair Arena on time.
Ten years after his arrest for public intoxication and urination in San Antonio, Osbourne was pardoned after he donated $10,000 to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the group that maintains and manages the Alamo, Ultimate Classic Rock reports. Osbourne performed at the city’s Freeman Coliseum in 1992 and then at the Alamodome in 1996.