Sam Andrew and I finish our coffee and get ready to leave the posh hotel lounge when he takes hold of my arm. “Janis had more fun than people thought,” he says intently, “but then there was that other side—the insecurity was there all the time, too. She’d say, ‘Was I good? Do you love me? Did I go flat on that ending? Was it okay?’ She knew it was okay, but she needed to hear it. At the same time she had more fun than anyone.” Sam looks around the stuffy, elegant room. “Janis Joplin had more fun than anyone in this room will ever have.”
KEITH MOON “THE LOON”
Hope I Die Before I Get Old
“I think I must be a victim of circumstance, really. Most of it’s my own doing. I’m a victim of my own practical jokes. I suppose that reflects a rather selfish attitude. I like to be the recipient of my own doings. Nine times out of ten, I am. I set traps and fall into them.”
I had much firsthand experience with the Who’s deranged, severely damaged, and very dear-hearted drummer, Keith Moon. I met him in 1971, on the set of Frank Zappa’s breakthrough video film, 200 Motels, the avant-madcap story of “life on the road” with the Mothers of Invention. I was playing a ga-ga groupie-girl news hen and Mr. Moon was hired to conjure up a maniac nun, which he pulled off quite nicely. His excessive amounts of savage energy and scathing wit frightened me at first, but after observing from a safe distance, I soon realized that his court-jester desire to be loved kept impish-faced Mr. Moon pretty much harmless (to everyone but himself and hotel rooms!). Keith was always on the lookout for mischief, and his huge, wide-open, cocoa-brown eyes never missed an opportunity to shred an otherwise sane or boring moment. “It was another ’oliday Inn. When I get bored, I rebel,” he told Rolling Stone. “I said, ‘Fuck it!! Fuck the lot of ya!’ And I took out me ’atchet and chopped the ’otel room to bits. The television, the chairs, the dresser. The cupboard doors. The bed. It happens all the time.”
Notes written on Keith Moon’s report card in 1959 suggest that his tendency toward lunacy started early: “Retarded artistically,” wrote his art teacher, adding, “Idiotic in other respects.” His physical education teacher had this to say: “Keen at times, but goonery seems to come before anything.” How right he was. The music instructor’s comments were more telling: “Great ability, but must guard against tendency to ‘show off.’” No such luck. It seemed that Keith was born with an unfinished nature that made him impossible to embarrass, and this quirk left him free to do and say things that most thinking people wouldn’t dare.
Keith started playing drums in 1960 at the age of fourteen, left his Wembley school a year later, and joined a series of bands with names like the Mighty Avengers and the Adequates, playing weddings and parties on weekends. By 1964 Keith had lost twenty-three jobs and was fond of telling friends the many, many fascinating ways he had found to get fired. Because he was wildly into California surf music, his next band, the Beachcombers, were heavily influenced by Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys—breezy sun-and-fun, sand-and-surf music far removed from the London chill. One warm California night, many years later, I introduced Keith to Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean, and in the back of a limo the two of them sang, “Goin’ to Surf City, gonna have some fun / Goin’ to Surf City, where it’s two to once … .” It was glorious.
Keith Moon and me—all dolled up with a whole lot of places to go. (RICHARD CREAMER)
Keith had been following a local Mod band called the Detours, headed by a stalk-slim guitarist with an imposing hooter, Pete Townshend. Keith harbored a secret desire to audition for the band and one night, in April 1964, a pie-eyed pal approached the stage, announcing that his friend with the dyed bright orange hair, Keith Moon, could play better than the guy they had on drums. With his mum watching, not only did Keith pass the test, he played with such reckless ferocity that he busted up the session drummer’s bass pedal and high-hat—a sure sign of things to come. Singer Roger Daltrey asked Keith what he was doing the following Monday. “We’ll pick you up in the van,” he said, and Keith was an instant member of the Detours.
The Detours were already locked in constant combat, Peter and Roger vying for power, and, with the addition of seventeen-year-old Keith Moon, they became an even more volatile entity. Instead of disagreements being bottled up and shoved aside, they were heatedly tackled and thrown into the music. Bass player John Entwistle had difficulty with Moon’s lunatic soloist tendencies. He was all over the place full force, hammering every drum at once with no real backbeat, playing more like a guitarist than a drummer—taking his own leads, thrashing and bashing, twirling his sticks, standing up behind the kit, cocky and insistent, demanding attention. Pete and John already had massive amplification, so in order to keep up, Keith added a second bass drum and loads of cymbals and tom-toms. Soon other rock drummers followed suit until oversize kits became commonplace.
The Detours became the High Numbers and got their chance in the studio, recording two R&B covers for Fontana Records. Despite a mini-rave in Disc magazine—“They’re up to date with a difference—they’re even ahead of themselves”—the single wasn’t a hit. Due to the glut of cool records out, including the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and the Stones’ “It’s All Over Now,” the High Numbers’ single just wasn’t good enough. Still, the band was gathering more and more fans at gigs.
On the outlook for a local group on which to base a pop film, Kit Lambert turned up to see the High Numbers at the Railway Tavern on a tip from a friend. Impressed, the following week he brought his partner, Chris Stamp (brother of actor Terence Stamp), who said, “All we could hear was a great dirty noise. Still, we sensed this amazing excitement all around us, and we knew that it had to be wild.” The pop film was out the window. “Instead, the pair became the band’s managers, converting their name back to an earlier idea of Townshend’s—the Who.
Stamp and Lambert took the boys to Max Factor on Bond Street for theatrical makeup lessons and to Carnaby Street for stage clothes, which they wore on a daily basis to maintain their Mod image. Despite their recording flop, the Who could fill venues and started modifying the stage to accommodate their ever-growing theatrical pranks. Pete had crazed episodes of arm windmilling, mowing down the audience with his machine-gun guitar; Roger leered, whipping his mike cord round and round in a vast circle; and Keith Moon loomed behind his gargantuan kit, sweating maniacally, tossing his sticks in the air, while John gazed menacingly. By this time John, Keith, and Pete were heavily into “leapers,” potent amphetamines that brought out a lot of innate aggression. Personally, they couldn’t stand each other, and it all came out onstage. But the legendary Who instrument-bashing came about by accident. Trying to control feedback at a club with a very low ceiling, Pete got pissed off, accidentally smashing the neck of the guitar against the ceiling, which created a quirky sound. He repeated the action, and the audience wanted more. During the second set, after a challenge from some art-school friends, Pete banged his axe so hard that the neck broke. “I had no recourse but to completely look as though I meant to do it,” Pete recalled, “so I smashed the guitar and jumped all over the bits. It gave me a fantastic buzz.” The following night the joint was jammed. The destruction may have thrilled the punters, but the band couldn’t afford to replace ravaged instruments. After a disappointed crowd left the club, Keith got so frustrated he kicked his drum kit to smithereens and word soon got around. The next gig was packed, and both Pete and Keith destroyed their instruments to such a huge response that, despite the cost, destruction became a semiregular event. The demolition symbolized the fury of rock and roll and the audience demanded it.
When Lambert booked the Who into London’s R&B Marquee Club, he came up with the slogan “Maximum R&B,” which is exactly what the Who played—spiked, hard-core, rocked-out versions of Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and Bo Diddley. “The Who should be billed as not only ‘Maximum R&B,’ but as ‘far-out R&B,’” announced London’s hip rock paper Melody Maker, adding that the Who were one of the trend-setting groups of 1965. The r
eview was timely. A week later the Who released their first single, “I Can’t Explain,” one of Pete’s earliest attempts at songwriting, inspired by the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.”
An amazing slab of pop history, the song is highlighted by the suspenseful, fearless slam-bam flair of Keith’s cut-loose drumming. He had the uncanny ability to climb inside a song, fill it to the bursting brim, and bang his way out with his drumsticks. In the process Keith Moon elevated and reinvented rock drumming, setting a formidable standard that few have been able to follow. And he was rock’s first superstar drummer.
As the record climbed the charts, the Who became regular faces on “Top of the Pops” and “Ready, Steady, Go!” “It wasn’t until Townshend started smashing up guitars and I started smashing up the drums that producers of the shows began to realize that there was more than the singer in a band,” Keith said. “They’d actually line up a camera for the drums, which was a first. People started to actually notice the drummer.” It’s not surprising. Mr. Moon made it his life’s work to be noticed.
“I Can’t Explain” hit the British Top Ten, but all the money went to replace smashed-up instruments. Despite impending success, animosity within the band raged. “Roger is not a very good singer at all,” Pete told Disc magazine. “The pretty one,” Keith Moon, did an article for the teen magazine Fabulous, entering the room with an axe, which he slammed down on the table. “What’s that for?” inquired the stunned interviewer. “That’s for Roger,” said Keith with manic glee. “You ’aven’t seem ’im, ’ave you?”
As Modism faded with the fashion craze, Pete turned more to pop art for his inspiration. “We stand for pop art clothes, pop art music, pop art behavior,” said Pete. “We live pop art.” For Keith it was “just a way of dressing up the music and putting it across.”
The sales of the second single, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” were fueled by controversy. Pete had started telling the press that he advocated drugs and was a drug user himself. In a New Musical Express survey, Keith listed his favorite food as “French Blues,” certain happy pills that he enjoyed enormously. Though the Rolling Stones actually got arrested for pissing against the wall of a gas station in the English countryside, at the end of a show in Paris the Who peed in an alley and it was filmed live for French and British cameras!
The drug taking got so ferocious that singer Roger Daltrey (who was already cleaning up his act) threatened to quit the band during a tour of Sweden. At a show in Denmark Roger emptied Keith’s profound pill supply down the toilet, and when Keith got pissed off, Roger knocked him out. Weary of the constant aggro, the band then threatened to fire Roger. After a humiliating meeting, Roger agreed to keep his temper in check. The massive drug and alcohol consumption continued to escalate.
The band’s first album, The Who Sings My Generation, put them over the top. Every kid in the universe hoped they would die before they got old. Keith Moon’s drumming continued to lambaste any preexisting limits and challenge any and all ground rules. His personality and his musicianship were completely intertwined. Keith was so bombed at the “Substitute” session that he had no recall of playing on the track, insisting that it had been someone else, expressing fear and outrage that he was being replaced. He relished his pop stardom, the rampant, doped-up endless nights, so proud of being the very baddest bad boy in rock. He married his longtime sweetheart, Kim Kerrigan, in March 1966, but the wedding vows did nothing to tame his unfinished nature.
War within the band never ceased. When Keith turned up late at a gig, Pete beat him over the head with his guitar, and for a few days Keith tried to persuade John Entwistle to leave the Who with him and form a new band. Keith also wanted to sing, despite his lack of vocal talent, and spiteful rows always ensued.
Keith soon became was the father of a new baby girl, Mandy, but this sobering fact did nothing to sober him up. The parties at his home in Chelsea went on for days with gargantuan amounts of drugs and alcohol consumed, gallantly provided by everyone’s ever-ready host. Kim and the baby would disappear upstairs into an entirely different (and much saner) world.
When the Who finally got to New York City in March 1967, manager Stamp arranged for regular shots of amphetamines, adding doses of penicillin just in case. Free-spirited females were around in abundance, and the Who took full advantage. Though the gigs proved to be stunningly received, the band was tossed out of the first two hotels due to Keith’s nearly perfect destruction of his room. He eventually made hotel-room trashing into a fine art and, like his drumming, the annihilation was often imitated but rarely duplicated.
In May the Who were invited to play the Monterey Pop Festival, where ruthless, respectful competition with the Jimi Hendrix Experience elevated both bands into the stratosphere. This high-profile exposure got the Who booked on a ten-week American jaunt with Herman’s Hermits, one of Britain’s squeakiest-clean exports, and the Who got their first taste of the long and winding endless road. Keith coped in his inimitable way by securing five hundred cherry-bomb explosives and gleefully blowing up dozens of hotel-room toilets—until word got around and a five-thousand-dollar security deposit was demanded before the Who could check in to any hotel in America. Keith’s twentieth-birthday party was held at the end of a ragged gig in Flint, Michigan (Keith announced vociferously he was turning twenty-one because in most states that was the legal drinking age), and when the Holiday Inn manager had the unforeseen gall to tell the partygoers to turn down the music, the birthday boy took hearty offense. The first to go was the five-tiered cake from Decca Records (by some accounts, right into the manager’s face). Legend has it that Keith raced through the hotel hallway, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and sprayed every car in the lot, ruining many paint jobs, before wrecking his hotel room, stripping naked, and jumping into the pool—which was empty! In an interview with Rolling Stone a month before his death, Keith said he drove a new Lincoln Continental into a full swimming pool that night. “Today I can think of less outrageous ways of going than drowning in a Lincoln Continental in a ‘oliday Inn swimming pool, but at that time I ’ad no thoughts of death whatsoever,” he told Jerry Hopkins. “There was none of that all-me-life-passing-before-me-eyes-in-a-flash. I was busy planning. I knew if I panicked I’d ’ave ’ad it.” Keith made a Houdini escape from the Lincoln, arrived back at the room dripping wet in his underwear, tripped through the doorway, slipped on some marzipan, and knocked out his front tooth. He was rushed to the dentist and then spent the day in jail. Happy birthday, Mr. Moon, happy birthday to you.
The Who’s appearance on the Smothers Brothers’ TV show was rebel rock at its finest: Between rehearsal and tape time, Keith hurtled around, giving stagehands a bit of cash and a swig out of his brandy flask, charming them into putting ten times the usual dose of gunpowder into his drum kit. As Pete went into the final windmill whip at the end of “My Generation,” Keith set off his drums and the blast sent him flying off the riser, a razor chunk of cymbal slicing into his arm. Pete’s hair caught on fire and his left ear took the brunt of the blast, which probably contributed immensely to his future hearing problems. When Tommy Smothers walked onstage wearing an acoustic guitar around his neck, despite being half-dazed Pete seized the moment, yanked away Tommy’s guitar, smashed it to the ground, and put his foot through it. Backstage, Bette Davis fainted into Mickey Rooney’s arms.
Rolling Stone named the Who as rock-and-roll group of 1967. “I Can See for Miles” was a Top Ten hit in England and the United States, but Pete Townshend was restless. After reading books on Indian avatar Meher Baba, Pete became an outspoken, devoted disciple. He stopped taking drugs and began to write for the Indian master the music that became his masterwork, the rock opera Tommy.
The road always beckoned and Keith got bored easily, but blessed with an ingenious, devilish imagination, he battled to keep the boredom at bay. And of course he had his image to uphold! Sleep never came easy for Mr. Moon: Once he spent hours nailing hotel-room furniture to the ceiling exactly as it had been
on the floor. He would take the screws out of cabinets and put them back together so they seemed untouched; drag furniture outside, piece by piece, leaving his room all but empty; dump catsup in the tub along with plastic arms and legs to shock the maids; toss priceless antiques into the fireplace with a lit cigarette; hurl endless TV sets out of plate-glass windows; literally swing on sparkling chandeliers until they crashed down all around him. What else was a poor boy to do with all that pumping adrenaline? After being cheered by thousands? After ruling the world for two hours? After popping half a dozen multicolored pills and downing a full bottle of Courvoisier? The after-gig anticlimax must have hurt like dull arrows, and Keith dealt with it the best way he knew how. “Things get broken,” he said. “If you’re sitting around after a show and there’s something you don’t like, you just switch it off by throwing a bottle through the screen.”
Thrashing and bashing—altering rock drumming forever. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)
The Tommy album came out in May 1969 and everything changed for the Who. They went from being a solid kick-ass rock band to a theatrical pop event that was not to be missed. Touring with Tommy all through 1969 and 1970 (including a blistering set at Woodstock), the Who brought the deaf, dumb, and blind boy to a huge international audience, turning the world on to bright possibilities. By the end of 1970 the Who were finally millionaires.
Except for Mr. Moon. He spent his money quicker than it came in. Along with a new pyramid-shaped home, Keith bought himself his very own pub, as well as many, many cars that he was fond of totaling. He lived his life as if he was always on the road, becoming British tabloid fodder as “Moon the Loon,” stalling his hovercraft on the train tracks, which delayed British Rail for a day, dressing up in full Nazi regalia, or stepping out stark, raving nude. He was proud of how many chemicals and vats of liquor he could get down, and more than once he was rushed to the hospital for a stomach pumping. He would bring strange women home with him, so of course his marriage was always in deep trouble. Despite his obvious love for Kim and Mandy, he was out of control and couldn’t seem to help himself. His wit was matchless, and though he could make everyone around him double up with laughing fits, he was a sad, sad fellow.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 27