Four “massive lines” and a Nazi outfit: The wild night Deep Purple met Keith Moon
Both onstage and off, Keith Moon was a true force of rock and roll nature, living every day to the fullest and getting himself into some truly bizarre situations as a result. Rock and roll is full of captivatingly unpredictable figures, but there has never been anybody else remotely like Moon.
Right from the beginning of Moon’s journey to rock and roll stardom, the drummer established himself as an endlessly energetic anarchist, and that perfectly suited the ear-drum-bursting playing style of The Who during their era of youthful rebellion.
With mod rock anthems like ‘My Generation, songwriter Pete Townshend captured the zeitgeist of the swinging 1960s in words, but it was Moon’s penchant for blowing up his drum kit at the climax of the song that really reflected the revolutionary attitudes of Britain’s post-war youth at that time.
Nobody else played like Moon, and his amphetamine-fueled performances were utterly essential to the success of The Who. Over the years, the drummer’s one-of-a-kind reputation has been repeatedly cemented, both through those iconic performances with The Who, and the seemingly endless volume of unbelievable anecdotes surrounding Moon.
Everybody from Alice Cooper to the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band have their own, respectively bizarre, Keith Moon stories, and each one seems more outlandish than the last. Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes, for instance, boasts a particularly strange Moon anecdote, involving a Rolling Stone, a Nazi uniform, and, of course, copious amounts of cocaine.
As two titans of British rock back in the 1960s and 1970s, Hughes and Moon crossed paths on a few occasions, going right back to Hughes’ pre-Deep Purple days, performing with Trapeze. However, it was during the recording of Deep Purple’s 1974 record Stormbringer that Hughes really bonded with The Who drummer, albeit in a strange and rather depraved way.
Recalling the tale to Classic Rock in 2007, Hughes looked back to the recording of Stormbinger, which saw the band take residency in California. “We stayed at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in LA. One evening I got a knock on my door, and it was Moony,” he shared. “He was with Ron Wood and Mal Evans. Keith was dressed as a Nazi war officer – the jackboots, the outfit, everything.”
It speaks to the nature of Keith Moon, and the rock and roll lifestyle in general, that Hughes didn’t think to expand upon that last point: why was Keith Moon wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform? Where did he get it from? We will never truly know the answer to those questions, though the rest of Hughes’ story does shed a little bit of light on potential reasons. “I had a bunch of coke with me and I laid out four massive lines,” he recalled.
“We had a competition to see who could snort the fastest – and I won. I did half of Keith’s line as well, which I thought was quite monumental.” One can only imagine the volume of cocaine snorted between the four, bearing in mind their rockstar reputations, and the huge abundance of cocaine in 1970s-era Los Angeles.
As you would expect, therefore, the story only gets stranger from there. “That night we hired a limo and went all across town. For 24 hours we were completely out of our minds,” Hughes said. “And Keith stayed in the character of the Nazi the whole time.”
What exactly went down during that drug-fueled 24 hours remains a mystery, and perhaps it is better that way. But, if you were around in Los Angeles back in the 1970s and swear blind that you once saw a Nazi officer on a cocaine-fueled rampage, do not worry, it was only Keith Moon.
