There is a particular kind of story that seems to belong to 1970s rock music.
A television leaves a hotel room without using the door. A musician disappears before a concert. Somebody has acquired a swimming pool, several motorcycles and an animal that definitely wasn't mentioned on the tour rider.
Then the manager gets a telephone call.
Again.
Rock stars behaving badly certainly didn't begin in the 1970s, and they didn't stop when the decade ended. But the seventies produced an extraordinary concentration of bands that seemed less like musical acts and more like travelling administrative emergencies.
Led Zeppelin. The Who. The Rolling Stones. Fleetwood Mac. Black Sabbath. Aerosmith. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The list goes on.
So what happened?
Were musicians simply more unhinged then?
Not exactly.
The more interesting answer is that the music business accidentally created almost perfect conditions for chaos.
Rock music became very big, very quickly
By the beginning of the 1970s, rock had escaped the clubs and theatres where much of the previous decade's music had lived.
The audience was enormous.
Albums could sell millions. Tours moved into arenas and stadiums. Successful musicians weren't merely performers anymore. They sat at the centre of businesses involving record companies, promoters, managers, road crews, publishers, lawyers and increasingly elaborate touring operations.
And everybody needed the band to keep functioning.
That last part matters.
When cancelling a concert inconveniences 300 people, somebody can tell the guitarist to go home.
When cancelling means thousands of ticket refunds, a furious promoter and a small convoy of trucks sitting behind an arena, suddenly everyone becomes remarkably interested in finding the guitarist.
The balance of power had changed.
This created one of rock's strangest management problems.
How do you discipline the person everybody else is employed to keep on stage?
Former music manager Simon Napier-Bell described management as veering between enormous success and receiving calls from stars incapacitated by drugs, drink, ego or seemingly ridiculous problems just before performances. His larger point was revealing: despite everything, the manager still had to understand the artist's position because the artist was the one carrying the public risk.
In an ordinary company, repeatedly failing to turn up for work tends to resolve itself.
Rock bands had discovered a different organisational model:
What if the employee who doesn't turn up is also the entire reason the company exists?
Management became part business administration, part diplomacy and part emergency service.
There was an extraordinary amount of money protecting the madness
Bad behaviour becomes much easier to tolerate when good behaviour is less profitable.
Record companies had enormous investments tied up in successful artists. Promoters needed shows to happen. Managers generally earned when their artists earned.
That created an obvious conflict.
Everyone might agree that the drummer's behaviour was becoming impossible.
Unfortunately, the drummer was playing in a band selling several million records.
Even the people running the record companies weren't necessarily models of restraint. Walter Yetnikoff, who became president of CBS Records in 1975, later described an executive culture involving spectacular levels of alcohol, cocaine and excess while presiding over one of the industry's most valuable artist rosters.
The lunatics weren't always fighting the institution.
Sometimes they were having drinks with it.
Drugs weren't hiding at the edge of the industry
It is impossible to discuss the period honestly without talking about drugs.
They weren't unique to musicians, nor was every successful band permanently intoxicated. But alcohol, cocaine, heroin and other drugs became deeply entangled with parts of the rock culture surrounding recording and touring.
David Crosby's addictions eventually progressed through cocaine, freebasing and heroin and seriously affected his productivity. Crosby himself later called CSNY's hugely lucrative 1974 reunion tour the “doom tour”, as relationships and performances deteriorated amid excess.
Chris O'Dell, who worked with artists including the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, later described how touring and substance abuse eventually drove her out of the industry altogether.
The Rolling Stones' mythology was similarly inseparable from highly publicised drug arrests and the turbulent environment surrounding the band.
Drugs didn't create every conflict.
They were, however, remarkably effective at making existing conflicts worse.
Touring created its own sealed world
A major rock tour is already an unusual environment.
You travel constantly. Work happens at night. Thousands of strangers scream when you enter a room. Ordinary routines disappear. People around you are employed partly to remove obstacles.
Then tomorrow you do it again somewhere else.
For months.
The biggest acts could become remarkably insulated from normal life.
The Rolling Stones' notorious 1972 American tour produced enough offstage material for Robert Frank's unreleased documentary Cocksucker Blues. Even one of rock's archetypal hotel stories, Keith Richards and saxophonist Bobby Keys throwing a television from a hotel window, was captured during that tour. Richards later maintained that he and Keys really did engineer the stunt rather than simply being persuaded by the filmmaker.
By modern standards, much of this seems almost designed for instant career destruction.
But there was no Twitter.
No Instagram.
No smartphone in every hotel corridor.
No fan uploading 4K footage before the television reached the pavement.
Stories travelled through journalists, photographers, radio, newspapers, magazines and word of mouth. That created distance between an event and the public response to it.
And distance is very useful when you're behaving like an idiot.
Management itself was still evolving
The modern entertainment industry has armies of specialists: tour accountants, business managers, security consultants, publicists, lawyers, crisis-management teams, sobriety support and people whose apparent profession is preventing celebrities from pressing Send.
The seventies were considerably more improvised.
Some managers were brilliant. Others were ruthless. Some were both.
Contracts could also be brutal. Artists frequently discovered that commercial success did not necessarily mean financial control. Historical accounts of the industry are littered with disputes over recording contracts, publishing rights and management agreements involving everyone from The Who and the Rolling Stones to David Bowie and Elton John.
The relationship wasn't simply:
Responsible manager controls irresponsible musician.
Quite often it was:
Musician, manager and record company attempt to determine which of them is currently exploiting the other.
That is not an ideal foundation for workplace harmony.
And then there was Keith Moon
Every theory requires an extreme test case.
Keith Moon helpfully volunteered.
The Who's drummer became almost as famous for destruction as drumming. Hotel rooms, parties and cars became part of a mythology that Moon himself helped cultivate.
The difficulty is that the mythology eventually became so powerful that fact and folklore started breeding.
One famous version has Moon driving a Lincoln Continental into a Holiday Inn swimming pool during his 21st birthday celebrations in Flint, Michigan. The basic hotel mayhem is well established, but accounts of exactly what happened to the car have varied considerably over the decades.
That's an important warning when looking back at seventies rock.
The crazier the reputation became, the easier it was for another crazy story to stick.
Eventually, audiences expected rock stars to behave like rock stars.
And some rock stars were perfectly happy to oblige.
Chaos became part of the marketing
This may be the most important part.
The music industry didn't merely tolerate rebellion.
It sold it.
Rock was supposed to represent freedom, danger, sex, youth and resistance to ordinary rules. A perfectly behaved rock band returning quietly to its hotel after drinking herbal tea wasn't necessarily helping the mythology.
The outlaw image sold records.
It sold magazines.
It sold concert tickets.
It gave journalists stories.
It gave fans legends.
That doesn't mean record executives deliberately ordered musicians to destroy hotel rooms. But the industry certainly discovered that wild behaviour could enhance the mystique surrounding an artist.
The same behaviour that terrified a tour manager on Tuesday could become excellent publicity by Friday.
Once bad behaviour becomes commercially useful, controlling it gets complicated.
So why were they so hard to control?
Because almost every force around successful 1970s rock bands pushed in the wrong direction at once.
Young musicians acquired extraordinary fame and money.
Touring removed them from ordinary routines.
Drugs and alcohol were readily available.
Managers depended financially on the people they were supposed to control.
Record companies had huge investments to protect.
The media turned excess into mythology.
Fans rewarded rebellion.
And there was no global network of camera-equipped witnesses waiting to document every stupid decision within seconds.
The remarkable thing isn't that some bands became uncontrollable.
The remarkable thing might be that anybody expected them to remain normal.
Today the machinery surrounding major artists is vastly more sophisticated. There are more contracts, more advisers, more security, more corporate oversight and infinitely more cameras.
Rock stars haven't suddenly become sensible.
We've simply become much better at watching them misbehave.