Songfacts®:

• Bark at the Moon was the first studio album Ozzy released without lead guitarist Randy Rhoads, who died in a plane crash the year before while the band was touring in Florida. Jake E. Lee took over on guitar.
  
  Lee and bass player Bob Daisley wrote the song with Ozzy, but weren't credited as part of an agreement they made with Osbourne's record company. The album lists Ozzy as the solo composer of all the songs, which is far from true.
• This song is about a werewolf who comes back from the dead and seeks revenge. Horror archetypes were a consistent source of lyrical inspiration for Ozzy - his band Black Sabbath was named after a horror movie.
• In the liner notes for The Ozzman Cometh, Ozzy wrote: "The title for this song actually came from a joke I used to tell where the punch line was 'eat s--t and bark at the moon.' I'd had the vocal line for this and Jake came up with the riff. It was the first song we wrote together."
• In 1983, a 20-year-old Canadian man named James Jollimore claimed that this song compelled him to stab a woman and her two sons to death. The next year, parents of a 19-year-old American man would sue Ozzy and blame his death on "Suicide Solution," a song from Osbourne's first solo album in 1980.
• In the video, Ozzy plays a mad scientist who concocts a potion that turns him into a werewolf - his werewolf transformation pre-dated Michael Jackson's in "Thriller" by about a month, but the effect had been done in the 1981 film An American Werewolf In London. Directed by Mike Mansfield, it was Ozzy's first concept video.
  
  According to Ozzy, it took eight hours in makeup to turn him into the beast. He says the video was filmed in an old mental hospital, and in one room they found a pickled fetus in a jar.
• Ozzy was attempting rehab at this time. His wife, Sharon, made him go to the Betty Ford Clinic, which didn't work. Ozzy finally went sober in 1991.
• A cover version appears on the 1999 compilation Land of the Wizard: A Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne. It is performed by Sanctorum.
• Speaking with Ultimate Classic Rock in a December 2013 interview, Jake E. Lee recalled the writing process for the Bark At The Moon album. "Most of that was really me and [bassist] Bob Daisley. Because Ozzy would show up and kind of play around with songs," he said.
  
  "I remember that I had the riff for 'Bark At The Moon' and I played that, and he said, 'Oh, I love it - we'll call that one 'Bark At The Moon',' because he already had the album title in mind," Lee continued. "So he said, 'That's the one that's going to be 'Bark At The Moon.'' He'd come in with things like that and then he'd drink, and he'd either pass out or leave, which left just me and Bob. We'd stay in the studio and flesh out the songs. It was fun working with Bob. He wrote all of the lyrics, and he's a great lyricist. So yeah, me and Bob, we had a good working relationship. It was fun doing that record."
• Ozzy sang "Bark at the Moon" during a solar eclipse on August 21, 2017 at a show in Carterville, Illinois, which was in the path of totality. The sun vanished as Ozzy howled.
• The US and UK albums have slightly different covers and a few different tracks.
• Tommy Aldridge played drums on this track, but Carmine Appice, who had recently joined Ozzy's band, hits the skins in the video.