The N1 seemed to adhere to the rule of "what goes up, most come down" more than any other in Newtonian physics, and shortly after lifting off from the launch pad it came right back down, crashing to earth and combusting.
It turns out a bolt had come loose and was sucked straight into an oxygen pump fueling one of the thirty little engines, which then promptly exploded, setting off a chain reaction.
The rocket exploded with the force of seven kilotons of TNT, equivalent to a small nuclear bomb. It remains one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history. The destruction was so vast, in fact, that it let the Americans know what the Soviet Union was up to when satellites photographed the wrecked launch pad. It took 18 months for the USSR to rebuild it. This time, they installed fuel filters.
Oh, and the entire thing was fueled by kerosene. It's not quite a lamp, this thing.
Pogo Pogo Pogo
The fourth and final unsuccessful N1 launch, in 1972, also resulted in a massive explosion, this time from a phenomenon known as pogo oscillation. Pogo oscillation is exactly what it sounds like – a violent up-and-down motion that could make anybody sick, but makes rockets really really sick. It results from a variation in thrust from different engines, and with thirty unreliable ones, you can get a lot of variation. Once it starts, it's very hard to correct, as the variable acceleration leads to variable fuel pump pressures, which leads to more variables acceleration, and so on and so on until eventually you match the vehicle's resonance frequency and vibrate the whole thing to death.
Protip: Name your next band "Pogo Of Death," the kids will love you.
This time, the N1 managed to get up to 40 kilometers in altitude before it encountered the dreaded pogo oscillation. An orderly shutdown of the engines was begun, which sounds easy enough. Of course, because this was the Soviet Union and the N1, it didn't exactly go according to plan. Instead of shutting down, one of the liquid oxygen pumps of course exploded.
Another enormous boom resulted.
With that, the Soviet Union decided to pack it in on its plans to put a person on the moon.
Although the US found out about the whole program due to satellite overflights, it was officially denied by the USSR until 1989 as it was thought to be such a huge embarrassment. By then, it would only be two years until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would disintegrate itself.
This Insane Rocket Is Why The Soviet Union Never Made It To The Moon