The life lesson Joe Walsh learned from touring with The Who’s Keith Moon
The Who drummer Keith Moon earned a reputation as one of the wildest figures in the music industry, and on the road, he was more mischievous than ever. Moon happily played up to the rock ‘n’ roll cliché, and according to those who knew him best, the stories in public from his adventures sit on the more sanitised side of the spectrum.
One benefit, or curse, of being a touring musician is the nomadic lifestyle. Artists can often go to sleep while in one country and wake up in a different region. Every night, a new set of people await entertainment, and it truly is like no other walk of life. Even the most conservatively-minded musicians still struggle to come down from the seismic endorphin rush that comes with performing.
For most artists, the post-show ritual may involve unwinding with a bottle of red wine and slowly allowing themselves to crash back down to earth. However, Moon was immediately looking for the next high and didn’t rely upon illicit substances alone in search of a buzz. Instead, his preferred tonic was trashing hotel rooms.
On his 21st birthday, Moon celebrated at a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan, and infamously drove a Lincoln Continental into the hotel pool, landing The Who with a $50,000 bill. While this incident was a source of humour at the time, it had serious consequences for the band, as they were banned from every Holiday Inn in America.
Moon was every hotel’s worst nightmare, but Joe Walsh enjoyed every second of their tour together. At the time, Walsh had yet to join the Eagles and was a member of the James Gang, who spent a month on the road together in 1970 throughout the United Kingdom.
During an interview with David Gans in 1981, Walsh explained why he started trashing hotel rooms as a coping mechanism, noting, “You’re buzzed, mentally high, and nothing to do with drugs or anything — you’re just buzzed because the energy of getting that many people on their feet yellin’ and screamin’, you get feedback from it and it wakes you up. So I’ll be sitting in a hotel room wide awake just buzzin’ from the energy of the concert, thinking, ‘Hey, where’d everybody go?’ So I would break things and smash things, have a great time.”
Walsh said this allowed him to “blow off steam” and then revealed that Moon was the reason why he developed the expensive habit, stating, “Keith Moon really taught me how to do that—he was a master at it. The James Gang did a tour with the Who, and Keith gave me lessons about breaking things.”
The Eagles guitarist then shared his proudest moment, when he used his hotel trashing skills to get his own back on an executive at his record label, recalling, “The best one was in Chicago. It was the end of the tour and I was mad at the record company. A vice president had come out, so I trashed his whole suite.”
Walsh then proceeded to take all the pictures down from the walls, tear the wallpaper off the entire room, and re-hang the paintings. Fortunately, as it wasn’t his room, Walsh escaped punishment from the hotel, but unsurprisingly, the record label executive departed the company shortly afterwards.
Thankfully, for the sake of the innocent hotel staff, musicians trashing hotel rooms is becoming a lost art. However, it served as an unconventional solution for Walsh as he coped with the chaotic post-show energy, and there was nobody better placed to learn the craft from than Moon, the man banned from every Holiday Inn.
