The drummer Alice Cooper crowned the greatest ever: “Nobody better”
Countless rock and roll stars have come and gone over the years, and Alice Cooper has had a first-row seat to encounter most of them.
From his early days as a rebellious rock teenager during the mid-1960s, Cooper has been a godfather of hard rock for decades.
As you can imagine, therefore, it takes a lot to shock the musician; he has certainly seen more than most over the course of his illustrious career. However, even he could not help but stand in awe when encountering the raucous force of nature that was The Who’s Keith Moon.
Within the sphere of rock and roll, drummers are rarely afforded the same artistic reputation as, for instance, guitarists or lead singers. A big contributing factor to this is the wild reputation that is invariably attached to drummers. While guitarists are viewed as deep, profound artists, drummers are often viewed as raucous harbingers of anarchy and destruction. This reputation is, almost single-handedly, down to Keith Moon, who seemed to be fueled by an endless supply of energy and lots of amphetamines.
All of those stories about rock stars trashing hotel rooms, driving cars into swimming pools, and generally living a life of chaotic excess are originally derived from Keith Moon. However, the drummer managed to balance that anarchic lifestyle with a truly groundbreaking performance style. The Who helped to create the defining sound of London’s swinging sixties period, blazing a trail for angry, adolescent rock that countless future artists would follow. Although it is the songwriting of Pete Townshend that is often placed in the spotlight, Moon’s drumming was utterly essential to their sound.
Moon’s artistic genius was often viewed as being second to his raucous antics, and it is easy to see why. When you blow up a drum kit on American television, you are never again going to be viewed as a profound musical artist. However, the rock legend Alice Cooper was all too aware of both Moon’s incredible drumming abilities and his rebellious offstage persona.
“I always tell people, 30 per cent of what you’ve heard about me is true, okay? Or Marilyn Manson or Ozzy Osbourne. Everything you’ve ever heard about Keith Moon, and you’ve only heard a tenth of it,” Cooper once told Fretlight Guitar, neatly encapsulating the wide-reaching depravity of Moon’s personality both off and on stage.
Seemingly, Cooper witnessed this behaviour first-hand. “He used to come over to the house,” the musician shared, “And my wife and I were just married; she had no idea who he was. He’d stay for a week. We left one time, came back, and he was dressed in a full French maid’s outfit, and he was like [imitates French accent] ‘Oh, hello, how are you doing? I have done all the dusting in the house. My wife is going, ‘Who is he?’ and I said, ‘he’s the best drummer in the world. Just go with it.’”
When he wasn’t dusting Alice Cooper’s house as a French maid, the shock rock pioneer also remembered seeing Moon demolish a hotel room wall in order to retrieve a tape player from next door. “This was daily,” he said of Moon’s antics. “So, the fact that he got to 32 years old is absolutely astounding. I mean, he should have been dead 50 times, you know?”
For all the chaos that surrounded Moon, musicians like Cooper understood that the madness was inseparable from the brilliance. His drumming never sounded mechanical or restrained; instead, it felt like a constant explosion happening behind the rest of the band. Songs like ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Baba O’Riley’ only worked because Moon approached the kit less like a timekeeper and more like a lead instrumentalist battling against Townshend’s guitar windmills.
That combination of danger and genius is ultimately why Moon became such a mythical figure in rock history. Plenty of drummers have copied his wild behaviour over the years, but very few could match the sheer creativity he brought to The Who’s music. Cooper had seen enough rock stars to separate empty excess from genuine artistry, and in Moon’s case, he recognised both in equal measure.
Alice Cooper on why “nobody played better than” Keith Moon
