Keith Moon’s 10 Wildest Pranks

The Who's powerful early live shows were generally climaxed with Pete Townshend smashing his guitars, Moon upending his drum kit and plenty of smoke bombs going off. But when the band made its American TV debut on the September 17th, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Moon decided to ratchet things up even further. While the band's performance of "My Generation" was mostly mimed, the smash-up finale was unforgettably real, thanks to Moon loading his drums with considerably more flash powder than he'd ever used before. The resulting explosion nearly blew the Who themselves off the stage, briefly blinded the TV cameras, and caused actress Bette Davis – who was booked as a guest on the same program – to faint dead away in the wings.

During the Who’s U.K. tour in late 1967, Moon relished tormenting the Herd, their opening band. Though Herd guitarist Peter Frampton somehow managed to avoid becoming a target of Moon’s japery, keyboardist Andy Bown once found his instrument wired with firecrackers, which Moon detonated electronically from backstage during the band’s set. Moon and Who bassist John Entwistle also rigged up a wire-and-pulley system to the gong used by Herd drummer Andrew Steele; each time the hapless drummer would attempt to bang the going during the show, it would mysteriously move just out of his reach.

One of Moon’s favorite recurring pranks was to disrupt small British villages by blaring bogus public service announcements from a passing car. Though he occasionally used a police bullhorn for these occasions, he also had his own cars rigged up with hidden amplifiers and speakers, which allowed him to keep his windows rolled up while scaring the locals with bulletins about such nonexistent dangers as impending tidal waves or advancing throngs of poisonous snakes, or ruffling their feathers by informing them that the British government would soon be relocating the country’s entire immigrant population to their neck of the woods.

In the fall of 1969, Moon teamed up with “Legs” Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band to pull a twisted practical joke on the venerable British retailer Marks and Spencer. First, Smith entered the store’s trouser department and asked to be shown their most durable work trousers; then, having examined the pair, Smith expressed concern that they might not be strong enough for his purposes – whereupon Moon entered the shop and cheerily offered to help him test them. Each taking a leg, the two men proceeded to completely tear the trousers in half, causing the freaked-out staff to call for the store detective. Then, right as Smith and Moon were about to be led away by the authorities, their limo driver appeared on the scene. “Are those one-legged trousers?” he asked. “They’re just what I’ve been looking for!” (“He paid for the trousers, and everyone calmed down,” Smith later told Moon biographer Tony Fletcher. “And we asked for each leg to be wrapped separately!”)

Unlike the rest of his bandmates, Moon had no “off” switch – so when the Who were not on tour or in the studio, their drummer had to find other ways to perform. He loved to go out in public dressed in costume, especially if it meant getting a rise out of unsuspecting passersby. One of his favorite getups was that of a bald vicar, who would frighten old ladies by suddenly screaming torrents of obscenities at them. Once while Moon’s “vicar” was strolling down London’s crowded Oxford Street in the middle of the day, two “gangsters” set upon him and dragged him kicking and screaming into a waiting Rolls-Royce; the kidnapping was completely staged – members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band were reportedly involved – but it looked convincing enough to cause a police car to immediately intercept the Rolls (which actually belonged to Moon) before its occupants could even make their getaway.

Moon’s sense of humor had a tendency to push the boundaries of taste – and there was no more cringe-inducing example of this than the time in 1970 that he and former Bonzos frontman Viv Stanshall dressed up as Nazi officers for a record company photo shoot, and then went out drinking while still wearing the uniforms. The two men found the reaction to their public goose-stepping so satisfyingly negative – Moon and Stanshall were even physically evicted from one German Bierkeller – that they decided to remain in uniform (and in character) for the better part of the week, even hiring an open-top Mercedes for an ill-advised trip to the heavily Jewish London neighborhood of Golders Green.