Keith Moon and a Swimming Pool

The Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan was the site of one of the most notorious examples of extreme rock ’n’ roll behavior in history...

The drummer had already left a trail of chaos on the road, diving into swimming pools from hotel rooftops and blowing up toilets with cherry bombs, but it was in Flint where his behavior reached its peak.

Following a large-scale food fight, the evening’s entertainment reached its climax when Moon steered a Lincoln Continental into the hotel’s swimming pool.

This is what Keith said about the events:

Keith Moon: Half-a-dozen cars were parked around this swimming pool. I ran out, jumped into the first car I came to, which was a brand new Lincoln Continental. It was parked on a slight hill, and when I took the handbrake off it started to roll, and it smashed straight through this pool-surround fence, and the whole Lincoln Continental went into the swimming pool – with me in it.

So there I was, sitting in the driver’s seat of a Lincoln Continental, underwater. And the water was pouring in – coming in through the bloody pedal holes in the floorboard, squirting in through the windows. In a startling moment of logic, I said: “Well, I can’t open the doors until the pressure is the same”. It’s amazing how I remembered those things from my physics class. So I’m sitting there, thinking about me situation, as the water creeps up to me nose. When there’s just enough air in the top of the car to take a gulp, I fill up me lungs, throw open the door and go rising to the top of the pool. So I went back to the party, streaming water.

Listen to Daltrey talk about it on Conan: