Getty Image / Bettmann
This month marked the 46th anniversary of drummer Keith Moon‘s passing and an interview of him from 1977 where he tells a legendary rock star story about destroying three hotel rooms at once has been making the rounds as people remember his legacy.
As drummer for The Who, Keith Moon is still widely regarded by the music industry as one of the greatest drummers the industry has ever seen. In fact, Rolling Stone ranked Keith Moon at #2 on their definitive list of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time, only behind Led Zeppelin’s Jon Bonham on the list.
Like most of you, I wasn’t alive when Keith Moon passed but have been familiar with his work for pretty much my entire life as I grew up in a household that was big on Music and being exposed to as much of it as possible. And while I know the music I’ve never known much about he man himself which is why I thoroughly enjoyed this video of him telling the others on stage about how he destroyed three hotel rooms at once with a water bed.
Someone DM’d me this video earlier today after they saw it on DIGG, a website I used to frequent and actually be quite prominent on back when DIGG was Reddit before Reddit had really taken off, and DIGG used to be one of the most trafficked websites on the Internet. It’s wild to see it these days as a curated blog and not at all the user-submitted site it once was where all of the levers were pulled by power users capable of crashing web servers across the globe.
But I digress… Why don’t more hotels have waterbeds these days? Why doesn’t anyone anywhere have waterbeds these days? I had a waterbed in high school like a decade after waterbeds were completely out of fashion and it was glorious. The thing was so heavy my parents basically had to keep it until well after college because it was impossible to get out of the room. It had a built-in heater where I could crank up the warmth of the water on cold nights.
Keith Moon recognized how awesome waterbeds were. I recognize how awesome waterbeds were. Why can’t we bring them back? Google says in 2013, waterbeds accounted for less than 5% of all bed sales but that figure seems high even then…