Moon the Loon: Keith Moon’s 25 Craziest Antics

Keith Moon took rock ’n’ roll excess and made it into something approaching performance art, as you'll see in the above look at Moon the Loon: Keith Moon’s 25 Craziest Antics.

When it came to debauchery, the late Who drummer had few peers. Rockers’ tales of the ’60s and ’70s are rife with stories of sex, drugs, booze and destruction. But what set Moon the Loon apart from the busted and bleary-eyed rabble is that he seemed to view all of his bad behavior as a performance – a circus of street pranks, car crashes, hotel vandalism and death-defying stunts. Whether he was onstage blowing up his drums or backstage pranking the opening act, whether he was leaving a prize for the Holiday Inn maids or trying to horrify buttoned-down Londoners, Moon seemed to take unbridled glee in getting a reaction. Even when he went too far, he seemed so consistently eager to entertain.

And he certainly did that, which is why everyone who knew Moon or enjoyed the Who seems to have a favorite story about something unbelievably crazy, funny or awful that he did. There are so many of these legends that some of them have mutated or combined into even taller tales – some of them helped into myth-hood by the exaggeration-prone Moon, before his fatal overdose in 1978.

In the above gallery, we’ve attempted to separate the fables from the truth (at least the truth as according to his friends, bandmates and the police). That’s why you won’t find made-up stories of Moon rolling a toy hand grenade down an airplane aisle, showing a hotel manager the difference between pure noise and the Who with the help of dynamite or sinking a Rolls-Royce into a hotel swimming pool. Those things probably never happened, but that doesn’t mean the stuff that did isn’t even crazier.