DID OZZY OSBORNE ACTUALLY PEE ON THE ALAMO?

By Brian Burrough, Jason Stanford, and Chris Tomlinson

Vanity Fair

The story of the Alamo is simple, right? 

Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, William Barret Travis, and a bunch of their friends come to Texas to start new lives, suddenly realize they are being oppressed by the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, and rush off to do battle with him at an old Spanish mission in San Antonio. 

They are outnumbered but fight valiantly and die, to a man, buying Sam Houston enough time to defeat Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. As almost any Texan will tell you, their sacrifice turned the Alamo into the cradle of Texas liberty.

The problem is that much of what you think you know about the Alamo is wrong. What you just read? That’s the Alamo myth. The actual story, well, it’s a lot more complicated.

These days there are essentially two schools of thought about the Alamo and what it means. A playful way to contrast them is through the stories of the two British rock stars most closely associated with all this. The first would be Phil Collins, who began his career drumming for the band Genesis and, as a solo singer, has sold millions of albums. 

Collins happens to be the world’s greatest collector of Alamo artifacts. He owns Sam Houston’s Bowie knife, a belt said to have been worn by Travis, and a shot pouch Crockett is said to have turned over to a Mexican soldier before dying. Not to mention Alamo-sourced cannonballs, maps, letters, muskets, powder flasks, bullets, swords, and even human teeth.

Like many aficionados of a certain age, Collins caught the Alamo bug as a boy watching Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett on the small screen and John Wayne’s on the big. He named his Jack Russell terrier Travis. 

He was once told that in a previous life, he’d been a courier dashing in and out of the old mission in the days before Santa Anna’s soldiers stormed it. Collins wants to believe. He has hundreds of old Alamo photos, many flecked with small balls of white light. He believes these are “orbs,” globs of paranormal energy.

In Texas, though, where he has donated his collection as the core of a grand new museum planned for San Antonio, Collins is a giant among men. He represents the apotheosis of Alamo “traditionalism,” which is to say, he is deeply invested in the sanctity of the shrine and its tales of heroism. He is the ultimate believer—although he’s taken a bit of fire lately. Collins and other collectors have recently been ensnared in a feud with archivists and activists who say that some of their accumulated memorabilia is of suspect origin or it is downright bogus.

On the other end of the Alamo spectrum is none other than Ozzy Osbourne. The former Black Sabbath frontman and reality TV star passed into Alamo lore on a Friday afternoon, February 19, 1982. At approximately 2:50 p.m., as San Antonio children were heading home from school, a 33-year-old old man wobbled unsteadily into Alamo Plaza. He was wearing a torn green evening gown and sneakers. In his hand he carried a bottle of Courvoisier.

Osbourne was having a rough day. He and his bandmates, scheduled to perform a set at the San Antonio Convention Center that night, were squabbling. His partner, Sharon, was carping again about his drinking, which typically began when he rose in the morning, as it had on this day. In an effort to confine his drunken idylls to their hotel suite, Sharon had taken to hiding his clothes, hence the gown, which was hers.

Later, Ozzy would be hazy as to where he was heading that day. What he remembered clearly, though, was an overwhelming need to relieve himself. Frustrated by his inability to locate a suitable loo, he decided to do as inebriated rock stars have done since the dawn of time. He sidled up to what appeared to be a little-used section of wall, parted his dress, and proceeded, with a great sigh, to do his business. Suddenly he heard a voice behind him:

“You disgust me.”

Ozzy turned, as one would, and said, “What?”

An older gent in a cowboy hat was staring at him. “You’re a disgrace, d’ya know that?” he said.

Ozzy attempted to explain about the gown.

“It ain’t the dress, you limey faggot piece of dirt,” the man said. “That wall you’re relieving yourself on is the Alamo.”

“The Aalawot?”

That Ozzy Osbourne peed on the Alamo became part of the Texas canon. It has inspired everything from exchanges in mainstream movies (see: the Steve Buscemi character in Airheads) to journalistic investigations (see: “A Brief History of Peeing on the Alamo,” Texas Monthly, 2014) to an art installation in which a life-sized wax statue of Osbourne urinates on a wall once onlookers trigger an adjacent motion sensor. 

Alas, as with so much about the Alamo, the story is not exactly true. Ozzy didn’t actually pee on the Alamo. He actually peed on the Cenotaph, a 60-foot-high monument beside it, on which the names of all those killed are listed. City fathers banned him from performing in San Antonio for years, until Ozzy apologized and donated $10,000 to charity.


Osbourne represents the flip side of Collins’s traditionalism, what people in Texas call Alamo “revisionism,” an intellectual school that, metaphorically, amounts to peeing on the Alamo legend. 

Revisionists tend to think the entire Texas Revolt was a bit more about protecting slavery from Mexico’s abolitionist government than it was about opposing Santa Anna’s supposed tyranny. In the oral traditions of the Mexican American community, in fact, mothers and fathers, for decades, have passed down their view that the Alamo was a symbol of Anglo oppression. 

Indeed, to scores of Tejanos interviewed by the authors, white racism toward the Latino “other” was hard-wired into to Alamo narrative. As San Antonio art historian Ruben Cordova puts it, “Davy Crockett’s [death], it’s sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.”

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