After 25-plus years in and around the music business — first as the assistant to Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, then as a touring drummer, and now producing the world's top session players from a yurt — I've heard a lot of drum stories. Some are tragic, some are hilarious, and a select few make you stop, blink, and ask, “wait, that REALLY happened?”
Drummers are a special breed. We sit in the back, hit things for a living, and occasionally do something so spectacularly insane that the whole rock and roll world has to sit up and take notice. Below are three of the craziest, most entertaining, and most improbably true drum stories of all time.
Pour yourself a cup of coffee. This is going to be fun.
1. Keith Moon Almost Killed Pete Townshend on Live TV
Photo: Keith Moon at the Marquee Club, London. Source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
September 17, 1967. The Who is booked on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Keith Moon — already an unhinged genius behind the kit — has a habit of stuffing a small explosive charge into one of his bass drums for dramatic effect. It's his thing. The crowd loves it. The producers tolerate it.
For this show, however, Moon decides bigger is better. He bribes a stagehand to load his bass drum with what one Who documentarian later estimated at “ten times the legal amount of gunpowder you're allowed to use on a soundstage.” Ten. Times.
Cue “My Generation.” The band rips through the song, and at the climax Moon kicks the kit and detonates the charge. Except this isn't a charge. This is essentially a small bomb. The blast knocks the cymbals across the studio. Pete Townshend's hair catches fire. Roger Daltrey is engulfed in white smoke. A piece of cymbal embeds itself in Moon's arm. Townshend, who would later credit the show with permanently damaging his hearing, stumbles around the stage looking like he just walked off the set of Apocalypse Now.
And then — because this is The Who — they keep going.
You can find the footage on YouTube. Watch it twice. Once for the absurdity, and once because you simply will not believe a network let it happen.
2. Phil Collins Got Into Genesis by Eavesdropping From a Swimming Pool
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Photo: Phil Collins, 1977. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Summer of 1970. Genesis — a young, ambitious art-rock band with a singer named Peter Gabriel — needs a new drummer. They place a “Drummer Wanted” ad in Melody Maker asking for someone “sensitive to acoustic music.” The audition is held at Peter Gabriel's parents' house, which happens to have a swimming pool in the backyard.
Phil Collins, all of 19 years old, shows up early with his friend (and fellow auditioner) Ronnie Caryl. Someone — possibly Gabriel himself, possibly his mom — looks at the lineup of nervous drummers and tells Phil, “We've got ten guys ahead of you. Why don't you go have a swim?”
Phil, being Phil, says yes. He climbs into the pool. He floats around. And the entire time, he's listening to every drummer ahead of him auditioning in the open air, learning the tunes, hearing exactly what the band wants and exactly what the band doesn't want, all while doing the backstroke.
By the time it's his turn, he's basically rehearsed the audition pieces from a chaise lounge. He sits down at the kit, plays the parts cleanly, and walks out with the gig.
Gabriel later said, “The way he sat down at the kit, I knew he was a good drummer before he even played a note.” What Gabriel didn't realize was that he'd just been hustled by a teenager with goggles. Phil Collins didn't audition for Genesis. He cheated his way in. And we are all, fifty-five years later, much better for it.
3. Tommy Lee Played His Drum Solo Stuck Upside Down on a Rollercoaster
Photo: Tommy Lee. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Mötley Crüe never did anything quietly. So when Tommy Lee decided to up the ante on the rock and roll drum solo, he didn't just spin the kit. He didn't just lift it in the air. He built something he called The Crüecifly — an actual rollercoaster track suspended above the arena, with his drum kit bolted to a platform that does full 360-degree loops while he plays.
Picture it: 20,000 fans. Pyrotechnics. A drum kit going inverted at 30 feet in the air. A grown man pounding out paradiddles while the blood is rushing into his skull. Tommy figured out, through sheer force of will, how to play the kick drum upside down. He even sold a passenger seat for one lucky fan to ride alongside him.
It went mostly fine for years. Until New Year's Eve 2015, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles — Mötley Crüe's literal final show ever.
Mid-solo, mid-loop, the rollercoaster mechanism gets stuck. Tommy is left dangling upside down, suspended over a packed arena, blood slowly pooling in his face. So what does he do? He finishes the solo. Upside. Down. Then he starts joking with the crowd while a crew climbs up to free him, calmly, like it's just another Tuesday.
That's not just rock and roll. That's a man who has fully made peace with gravity.
The Common Thread
Three different drummers, three different decades, three different definitions of “wait, what?” But they share something — a willingness to take the back-of-the-stage gig and make it the most memorable thing in the room. Drummers don't get the most ink. We don't get the magazine covers (sorry, fellow members of the rhythm section, you know it's true). But every now and then, one of us does something so colossally weird, so beautifully dumb, so on-brand for the species, that the story outlives the band, the album, and even the eardrums of the guitarist.
If you've got your own crazy drum story, send it our way. We're collecting them.
— Ryan