When Keith Moon’s name comes up in conversation most times, it will typically start from “yeah he was an incredible drummer,” then quickly graduate to: “He was wild!”. One only needs to watch Moon perform on the drums to see the image unfold reasonably rapidly. Famously, the rest of the band would have to strap his drum toms down so they would not shift because of the sheer ferocity in which he played. His style of drumming was chaotic seeming; Moon the Loon’s sense of rhythm was impeccable, but deceivingly so, it seemed like his timing, just like his sanity, was going to burst at the seams any minute.

When he was introduced to cherry bombs, all hell broke loose. On The Who’s first tour, the band would repeatedly get thrown out of hotel rooms. This started in America’s deep south, and word would travel quickly. Terry Fletcher wrote in his biography of the drummer, Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend: “From that moment on, no hotel room or changing was safe until the tour moved away. Keith Moon developed a taste for blowing up toilets.”

On one extreme occasion in New York in 1968, a drunk Keith blew up a toilet on the ninth floor of the Gorsham Hotel, then proceeded to climb out onto the window ledge and throw more cherry bombs onto the incoming police. From then on, The Who were eventually relegated to staying at cheap Holiday Inns across the States. As Pete Townsend recalls in his book, An Amazing Journey: The Life of Pete Townshend: “One day I was in Keith’s room and I said, ‘could I use your bog?’ and he smiled and said ‘sure.’ I went in there and there was no toilet, just sort of an S bend, and I thought, ‘Christ, what happened?’.”

Townshend continued: “He said, ‘well this cherry bomb was about to go off in me hand and I threw it down the toilet to stop it going off.’ So I said, ‘Are they that powerful?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s incredible!’ So I said, ‘How many of ‘em have you got?’ with fear in me eyes. He laughed and said, ‘Five hundred,’ and opened up a case full to the top with cherry bombs. And of course from that moment on we got thrown out of every hotel we ever stayed in.” Hence, Moon the Loon would forever be known as a brilliant drummer, a wild man, and the quintessential bathroom bomber.