Keith Moon
In the summer of 1993, I worked with a man who had lived for a while in Austin, Texas, and we were all talking about concerts we had attended. He sheepishly said, “I saw GG Allin” and I replied, “Before you say anything more, all I know about GG Allin is that every time he performs, he always ends up getting arrested. What does he do onstage, or do I want to know?”
"Oh, he shits onstage - "
Other co-workers: “You are lying!”
" - he sticks his microphone up his butt - "
“You are making this up!”
When asked why he went to something like this, he replied, “I just wanted to find out if the guy was for real.”
He got another job (the co-worker, not GG Allin - just thought I’d clarify that) and the day after he quit, I read in Rolling Stone that Allin was dead. Too bad; I would have loved to have been the one to tell him.
Guess he didn’t get to blow himself up onstage after all; instead, he quietly OD’d at an aftershow party. Findagrave.com said that his headstone had to be removed because relatives and friends of other people buried at that cemetery complained about all the vandalism, mostly people taking a dump on Allin’s grave. :smack:
I was going to come in here and nominate them, I’m not even talking about the depraved level of heroin use but an anecdote they shared about a competition to see how nasty they could make themselves before groupies would refuse to sleep with them, it involved months of not bathing or changing clothes and other nastiness. It honestly sounded like they both had serious mental health issues.
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were right up there, weren’t they?
No votes yet for Ozzy Osbourne? Who can forget the bat incident?
I was just thinking of that. Didn’t he also bite the head off of a dove, too?
I grew up in Des Moines and about half the people I knew were at that concert.
Really.
I’m inclined to vote for someone who didn’t kick off at an early age. I’m a little more impressed if you raise all kinds of hell AND manage to give the Grim Reaper the slip over and over again. Give me Nikki Sixx or Keith Richards … maybe even Steven Tyler.
Unfair standard. As a cocaine mummy, Keith Richards cannot die (and in fact cannot be harmed by conventional weapons).
Anyway, Iggy Pop’s gotta be in the running somewhere. Dude literally crawled onstage puking his guts out and begging his public for heroin, would roll around naked on broken glass and play bleeding everywhere… The last show he did with The Stooges ended up in a brawl between them and a bunch of bikers in the crowd !
He cleaned up his act but he still looks like something ancient that was found in an iceblock somewhere up Siberia.
I was about to mention him. I read his autobiography, the man is a lab experiment. Between him and Keith Richards blood is the ultimate antiserum.
Joe Walsh used to bring a chainsaw with him on tour to use on hotel rooms.
Elvis was just batshit crazy. His life from about 1960 on is one awful, hedonistic train wreck. For consistency he has to be up there.
Rory Gallagher for literally drinking himself to death.
Pete Townshend’s autobiography covers a bit of this, Moon’s self-destructive behavior. As I recall, for a long stretch when he was severely in his alcoholic extremes, Moon would call Townshend daily at some awful hour in the middle of the night to talk, because of how lonely he was, how much pain he was in. Pete always indulged it because he wanted to be a good friend. And the calls would end with Keith saying, “I love you, Pete,” with Townshend answering, “I love you, too.” It was sad.
I always had a soft spot in my heart for that time Courtney Love hijacked a Madonna interview by throwing trash at her and then drunkenly stumbling up.
It may not be pretty, but it is exactly the kind of rock-and-roll this thread is all about.
Yeah, but my understanding is that he mostly did so pretty quietly without as much of the typical explosions of hedonistic rock and roll excess.
He didn’t come off as a terribly happy man. Apparently his two limited pleasures in life were playing guitar and watching movies and he was never fully satisfied with the first and quickly tired of the second.
But it’s actually just an optical illusion. Later at night his head is normal-sized again.
Lemmy is unkillable.
None of these people could probably match Bob Stinson of the Replacements. He made some of the others look like choirboys.
And by all accounts, the Go-Go’s were awfully wild, and Belinda Carlisle has admitted to relapsing on heroin in recent years. :eek: I can’t believe all of them are still alive.
Indeed - these days when he sings The Ace of Spades, he replaces the line “But that’s the way I like it baby I don’t wanna live forever, and don’t forget the Joker !” with “I don’t want to live forever… but apparently I am” 