Riders on the Storm

A guide to the (fortunately) lost world of rock stardom

Photo by Alejandro Ortiz on Unsplash

I hope you kind subscribers won’t mind acting as a sounding-board for my next book — a survey of the misbehaviour and monstrous egotism of old-school rock stars, epitomised by the ludicrous demands, or ‘riders’ in their performance contracts. And even some of the newer ones in the school are carrying on the tradition. Let me know what you think in the comments!

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Rock stars today had best keep their noses clean of more than just cocaine. The #Me Too movement, Cancel Culture, public order acts and health-and-safety regulations all seem expressly designed to unnerve them. Many of the oldest also live in fear of their ‘historic’ sexual offences being dredged up, so nixing any chance of their appearance in the King’s Birthday Honours.

But until a few years ago, it was so different. The rock star – then still almost exclusively male – enjoyed a licence to behave badly unknown since the nastier Roman emperors.

The rampagings of the breed peaked in the 60s and early 70s when America opened up to dozens of British bands in the Beatles’ wake. Long periods of boredom on the road, the monotony and sterility of chain hotels and motels and ingestion of alcohol and drugs in epic quantities found an outlet in trashing their accommodation or throwing TV sets or large pieces of furniture out of high-rise windows without a thought of who might be passing beneath.

This was raised almost to an art by The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, aka ‘Moon the Loon’, whose antics went far beyond the band’s ritual destruction of their equipment as the finale of each show.

Debate still rages over whether Moon or Cream’s Ginger Baker was the greatest rock drummer of all. But while Baker away from his skins was as wild as when belabouring them (think Animal in The Muppet Show) Moon offstage had a shy, almost apologetic air and a surreal touch of Noel Coward: he addressed his bandmates impartially as ‘dear boy’ however little he might be endearing himself to them. Only the manic stare and wolfish smile hinted at the demon within.

For Moon was a pyromaniac, dedicated to the incineration of every toilet which, so to speak, crossed his path. To begin with, he used fireworks called cherry bombs which were the size and shape of cherries with a length of fuse like a stalk. These he would put down the toilet in his hotel-suite, timed to explode sequentially in the toilets on the three floors below – ideally while one of them was in use.

However, Moon didn’t limit himself to mere fireworks any more than to porcelain receptacles. When The Who appeared live on CBS-TV’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, he bribed a roadie to fill one of his two bass drums with gunpowder and set it off at the end of ‘My Generation’. The explosion buried a razor-sharp shard of cymbal in his arm, set Pete Townshend’s hair on fire and permanently damaged Townshend’s hearing.

Water-damage was as satisfying to him as fire. In Copenhagen, finding his seventh-floor room contained an outsize waterbed, he ordered his guys to put it in the lift and take it up to the ninth floor so that when the doors opened it would engulf the people waiting there like the Blob in his favourite horror film.

But when the guys tried to bend it double to fit the narrow space, it split down the middle and some two tons of loose water poured through the ceilings of rooms on three floors below.

Moon was such a reliably destructive guest that some hotels would deliberately give him their shabbiest room, allow him to take it apart unhindered, then use the compensation-money from The Who’s long-suffering management to pay for a complete refurb.

One overnight stay at the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan, happened to coincide with Moon’s 21^st birthday. He celebrated by starting a food fight – that familiar expression of rock-star second childhood – and topping off several bottles of champagne and brandy with a new and untried stimulant called a Monkey Tranquilliser.

Still far from tranquillised and looking for fresh mischief, he noticed that the hotel car-park lay only a few yards from the swimming-pool and sloped downward to the water’s edge. Picking out the most expensive car, a Lincoln, Continental, he got behind the wheel and steered it through a flimsy boundary-fence and straight into the – fortunately empty – pool, only by the greatest good fortune getting out alive.

The result was a bill for $50,000 and a lifetime ban from Holiday Inns for the whole band. In some tellings, the location is Moon’s own home near London and the drowned limo a Rolls-Royce Corniche, but both versions may well be true.

After another show as their driver raced to catch an onward flight, he suddenly shouted there was something he’d forgotten at the hotel and they had to go back even though it meant missing the plane and possibly the next concert on their schedule.

Returning to the room he’d just vacated, he threw the TV set out of the window.

Riders to rock-star performance contracts once dealt with basic things like backstage refreshments, transportation and security. But they soon evolved into demonstrations of celebrity caprice, the more pointless and infantile the better. Hence Val Halen’s demand for bowls of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out.

Many top-echelon entertainers wanted private entertainment of their own in their dressing-rooms before consenting to go onstage. For Iggy Pop it was a whole programme consisting of a Bob Hope impersonator endlessly recycling the ancient stand-up’s corniest gags, living replicas of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs singing ‘Hi-ho hi-ho, it’s off to work we go’ and a belly dancer (though probably not all simultaneously.)

Such things were long mistaken for goodwill gestures on the promoters’ part. It took the astute Sting when fronting The Police to realise that every specially-curated bowl of M&Ms was charged to the artists at a hugely inflated price. The Police thereafter massively reduced their overheads by providing their own limos, booze and food. Many other bands since have done likewise.

Twenty-first century riders tend to be less concerned with performers’ backstage partying than their phobias and aversions.

The strict vegetarian Sir Paul McCartney not only bans leather sofas and limo-seats but any fabric with the slightest resemblance to it. Germophobe Justin Timberlake requires any door-handle he’s likely to touch be disinfected every two hours.

The rise of female megastars over the past three decades has given the rider a new lease of life, whether securing a temperature-controlled room just for Cher’s wigs or guaranteeing Madonna a 200-person entourage and a dressing-room containing furnishings from her own home. Nothing, however, competes with Beyoncé’s insistence on titanium drinking-straws and ‘hand-carved ice balls.’

Even hip-hop stars, while rebelling against other forms of white pop, are by no means riderless. Jay Z’s demands seven dressing-rooms for himself and his entourage. Kanye West’s prohibits flowers in vases of any shape but cylindrical.

On Rolling Stones tours, each Stone’s individual rider was a promoter’s nightmare except that of their drummer, Charlie Watts. The modest but fastidious Charlie only ever had one requirement – a coat-hanger made of wood not plastic.

To be continued…