Saturday, July 06, 2013

The Who Started It All


An attention getter was to destroy everything after playing, a trend that culminated in Jimmy Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire while it was still resonating with feed back on stage.

It’s hard to smash a drum kit like you would a guitar, so Keith Moon would opt to blow his set up at the end of The Who’s shows. Just a little explosion. No big deal. He also had a penchant for doing the same to toilets. Lots of toilets.
But when the band appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Moon bribed a stagehand, allegedly with whiskey, to pack the drums with 10 times the amount of explosives as normal. (When introduced in the video above, Moon tells the host that he's "got sloppy stagehands around here." Cheeky.)
When the whole mess went off, it left Pete Townshend with singed hair and permanent hearing loss in one ear. Shrapnel from a cymbal tore into Moon’s arm.

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