Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon

by Tony Fletcher

  Barsalona immediately got dressed again, and ran over to 55th Street. A phalanx of police were outside the Gorham, looking decidedly uneasy. Barsalona wondered initially if it had anything to do with reactions to Martin Luther King’s death but then figured it couldn’t do, not at a midtown hotel. He went into the lobby to find three of the Who looking abject and annoyed. That one member was not with them – Keith Moon – made it all too clear what, or rather who, the trouble was about.

  “Roger takes me outside,” recalls Barsalona, “and I’m looking at the policemen looking up, they’re looking up at this ledge, and on this ledge is this crazy fucking Moon, and he’s doing this crazy laugh, and he’s throwing cherry bombs down on the police! I said, ‘Oh my god!’ and this police captain says, ‘Do you know that fucking nut up there?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you want me to speak to him?’ And he said, ‘You’d better, ‘cos his ass is going to jail.’”

  That was one problem they could all do without. Any serious breach of the peace and it would be difficult to get Moon back into the country again – in which case you could forget about the Who making enough money to invest in a new kitchen, let alone in Australia.

  Barsalona quickly found the hotel manager, who was every bit as agitated as the police captain. With good reason. Prior to throwing cherry bombs from his ninth-floor window onto the street – and police – below, Keith had blown up his toilet, and with it the entire floor’s plumbing.

  The hotel manager, the police captain and the agent got to Moon’s room. Keith was still out on the ledge; in his state, it was remarkable he hadn’t fallen to his death. Barsalona leaned out of the window to talk to him. “I said, ‘Come on, you’ve ruined a real lovely night. Why?’ He started swearing: ‘Fucking everything.’ He’d gone back to the hotel and got drunk. Eventually I got him back in, and once he came in he was all right. It was only while he was outside he was crazy. I said, ‘You’ve got to tell them you had a bad reaction to a drug or something.’ So when the captain starts asking him, he comes up with this amazing excuse that I would never have thought of about what was wrong with him and what he had been taking. I talked to the captain as well and surprisingly they didn’t arrest him. They let him off.”

  Keith’s quick thinking, even in his inebriated, aggravated, half-crazed state, had once again got him out of trouble lesser people would have been imprisoned for, but it didn’t alter the fact that there were damages to be paid, and that the Gorham, the hotel at which most rock bands were welcomed, demanded the Who leave immediately and never come back. In a move befitting the group’s logic, they promptly checked into the Waldorf Astoria, arguably the most prestigious hotel in the city.

  The following morning, the Who had a photo session. It had been arranged by Nancy Lewis (who was now working for publicity firm Rogers and Cowan, representing the Who and other acts), and it was to form part of a spread for Life magazine about ‘The New Rock’, featuring seven groups who represented the most promising talent in the world (including the Doors, Cream and Jefferson Airplane). In other words, it was arguably the Who’s most important American photo shoot to date.

  But when Lewis finally tracked the band down, they weren’t speaking to each other. Or rather, they weren’t speaking to Keith. Pete, citing his lack of sleep, made it quite clear that he “wasn’t going to go for any fucking picture for any fucking Life magazine”. That Townshend had his fiancée Karen Astley with him, and that she too had suffered because of this extreme example of Moon’s behavioural swings only added to the guitarist’s aggravation. John Entwistle too would call it the most frustrating and unamusing episode he ever experienced of Keith’s character changes and potential for devastation. Finally, sharing their frustration but with the additional burden of her own responsibilities, Nancy Lewis burst into tears. Only then did Townshend agree to the photo shoot.31

  The photographs, by Art Kane, were taken at the foot of Grant’s Tomb, with the group draped in a giant Union Jack flag, apparently feigning sleep. Except that they weren’t: all of them exhausted from Keith’s activities the previous night and the changing of hotels in the middle of it, they had to be woken at the end of the shoot.

  In the meantime, although New York City did not follow Washington DC, Detroit or Chicago by rioting and looting in the aftermath of Dr King’s assassination, many of the city’s nightclubs shuttered their doors, and the Fillmore compressed the Who’s two shows into one. The band performed a stellar set that further enhanced their live reputation, but still their troubles with Keith and hotels were not over. The Waldorf Astoria, clearly unnerved at the prospect of letting the Who stay in their esteemed premises, had demanded cash up front, which proved to be less than immediately forthcoming. Now the hotel refused the group admission to their rooms – where stood their luggage – until the issue was resolved. Though it was through Keith’s own doing that they found themselves in this predicament, he cared only about extricating himself from it. As always, he had some cherry bombs in his possession. As he later, proudly and succinctly, recalled, “I blew the door off the hinges and got my luggage,” following which, the Who were promptly kicked out of, and banned from, New York’s illustrious Waldorf Astoria.

  The next night at the Fillmore, Pete Townshend apologised to the audience for being down, explaining that the band had been kicked out of three hotels in one day. With word rapidly spreading on the hotel grapevine that there was a group in town with a drummer called Keith Moon who should not be allowed to check in under any circumstances, the Who were suddenly unwelcome at all the best hotels in one of their most frequently visited cities. Townshend found sleeping space with friends in the city that night, and the others ended up staying on their tour bus. The next time they came to town, in August, they would be reduced to staying at, of all ironies, the Holiday Inn.

  While in Melbourne, Australia, Keith had sent Kim a letter with the following poignant line: ‘Although I can laugh on the outside, it’s much harder to laugh when you’re not with me, inside.’ It’s tempting to assert this as being one of the rare occasions on which he confessed to the insecurities that festered so painfully on the internal side of his clown’s face, and there will always exist the possibility that this was his intention. But it’s unlikely. The odds are that it was another attempt by Keith to cover up his misdemeanours by pretending to his loneliness. He returned from one of the tours around this period with a hefty dose of VD.

  Up until just about this moment, Kim believed Keith to have been faithful. She was under no illusions as to his popularity with women. And she knew how promiscuous the musician’s world could be; she wasn’t stupid. But for all their marital problems, she had never really expected it of Keith. When he was with her, he never so much as looked at another girl. At the few shows that she went to, mainly in London, he generally acted the part of the loyal loving husband with his beautiful model wife. And she was so taken by the passion of his letters from abroad that she simultaneously believed his tales of loneliness and restraint therein.

  But then Kim had never been on tour with the Who: she wasn’t remotely interested in the circus it entailed and the more difficult that Keith became at home, the more she relished the time she and Mandy could be left on their own. As such, she had never seen how readily available the girls made themselves on the road – particularly abroad, especially in America.

  Alison Entwistle had, and she came back from an eye-opening trip to the States feeling a greater loyalty to her own friend Kim – who was more like a sister-in-law given the family status of the group – than to her husband’s friend Keith. She sat Kim down and said, as gently as she could, “There’s something you ought to know …”

  So Kim was not completely shocked when she finally had proof. But to say she was “extremely upset” at the circumstances, as she puts it, is to touch at the merest brink of her feelings. It’s one thing finding out your rock star husband has been unfaithful; it’s another entirely for him to give you a dose of the clap.

  Yet fo
r all that Keith had been cheating on his wife, he was never disloyal for the sake of it. Certainly not yet, at any rate. There were plenty of pop stars about at the time who kept score cards, who considered no show complete without a ‘pull’ afterwards. Keith Moon was too much of a ‘lad’ for that. The after-show for him was all about going back to the hotel bar or on to a club, getting drunk, having a laugh, playing a few practical jokes, hanging out with the boys, telling stories, being stupid … but if, at the end of it all, an attractive young girl who had lasted the distance was eager to make it with him, then sometimes he found it hard to resist. It was unfortunate, but most musicians, even the married ones, agreed that the occasional one-night stand was part of the trade-off for being away from home months at a time. And in Keith’s case, you could hardly blame the girls: it wasn’t as if there was a wedding ring on his hand to prod their consciences.

  The admission of adultery could have killed Kim and Keith’s marriage off for good – it had certainly been an uphill struggle so far – but it appears to have had the opposite effect, at least in the short term.

  In May 1968 the Moons went public with the marriage, in a story ‘broken’ by Penny Valentine of the Moon-obsessed Disc and Music Echo. By this late point in the Sixties, the idea of an already successful musician’s career being helped or hindered by his marital status was ludicrous, and Keith admitted as much. “It’s stupid really keeping it a secret any longer,” he explained. “We once thought that if it leaked out it would spoil the group’s image. Now I think our fans are grown-up enough to accept that things like this happen. It was hard on Kim coming out with me and not being introduced as my wife. People in the business knew about the situation but I managed to evade the issue by pretending I was an idiot every time I was asked about it.” Keith and Kim were pictured in their Highgate flat with Mandy on Kim’s lap, the impish grin on the girl’s face bearing an unmistakable resemblance to her father.

  They then took a holiday to Mombasa, where Kim used to go with her parents when living in East Africa, and it went like a dream. That Mandy stayed behind helped enormously. It wasn’t that Keith didn’t love his daughter, for he undoubtedly adored her. But he had no idea how to be a father. As Kim says, “He was too much of a child himself.”

  They were both children, and there were times when Kim could be as game for juvenile behaviour as her husband. One day they noticed an advert in the window of a bookshop on Highgate High Street for foxes and wild hedgehogs ‘rescued from the country’, and couldn’t resist acquiring a pet fox. “It was a disaster,” says Kim. “It shouldn’t have been in town in the first place, let alone in a flat. It was hiding the whole time – a very sensible fox. Eventually we gave it back to the shop, but we had it long enough for him to get some good publicity pictures.”

  Keith and his publicity pictures … One of the most enduring and famous of all from this period shows him proudly seated next to a gilt picture frame which surrounds a champagne bottle embedded in the wall of the Highgate flat. Keith clearly seems to be suggesting that his destruction is an art form. Often it was. But what went unsaid in this instance was that the bottle was only in the wall in the first place because Keith had thrown it at Kim during a fight. Extreme violence and high comedy continued to be uneasy marital bedfellows.

  Habitually, Keith would spend his evenings out on the town, and frequently his daytimes too, making the most of the social life that passed for work in the music business. Though the Who were experiencing commercial setbacks in the UK, they were at the core of a growing independent empire as Track Records went from strength to strength: in the summer of 1968 it even had its first number one single with ‘Fire’, by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and a correspondingly successful album to match. Track expanded commensurately with its success, Stamp and Lambert appointing new staff from all walks of life. Peter Rudge came straight out of Cambridge University, having made himself known to the management after the band cancelled a May Ball show a year earlier, asserting Keith’s ill health when they were in fact making a promo film; Rudge got straight on a train to London to remonstrate and made a forceful enough impression to win himself a job when he graduated. (It’s worth noting that Keith’s reputation for health and punctuality was already so tarnished that it was considered the easiest way to get out of commitments.] John Field was an accountant who left the suit and tie behind to become the companies’ moneyman. Jack and Jim McCulloch, the Glaswegian brothers who had befriended the Who in their High Numbers days and who had recently come to London to make it as musicians, joined as menial staff after bumping into Pete Townshend on Denmark Street one day.

  With their businesses booming, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp moved operations for both the label and the management from Chesterfield Gardens in Mayfair to 70 Old Compton Street, a four-storey sliver of a building in Soho opposite the old 21s coffee bar. It made sense to locate themselves there in the pulsating heart of central London – and to nobody more so than Keith Moon. Shaftesbury Avenue, where he had wandered the music stores as a child, Denmark Street, where he had hung around the coffee bars hoping to spot famous faces, the Flamingo, where he had played with the Beachcombers opening for the great Geòrgie Fame, the Scene, where the Who had cemented their mod following, and then the Marquee, which they had helped turn into a world-famous rock venue, De Hems and the Ship, where the musicians still hung out, the nightclubs where Swinging London had celebrated itself, and now La Chasse and the Speakeasy, musicians’ members clubs of the moment, all were a mere drumstick’s throw from the new offices, and it became almost a daily routine for Keith, when there were no other commitments, to make a mid-afternoon appearance at the office, frequently just after the banks had closed so as to ‘borrow’ some cash, then whittle away the early evening hours in the Ship or La Chasse, meet up with other musicians and ravers there, and move on after closing time to the Speak, until they were all kicked out in the early hours.

  Keith so loved his nights out he didn’t want them to end: frequently he would invite half a club back to the flat at Highgate to ensure as much. Convoys would pull up outside Pearl Garages and Kim would be raised from her sleep to reluctantly put on the kettle and start making sandwiches because it was easier to do that and keep the noise down than have a fight for refusing and wake Mandy in the process.

  It could come as no surprise then – to anyone but Keith Moon – that there were times when Kim wouldn’t be there at all, but back with her own parents in Bournemouth, Mandy in tow. On those occasions, Keith would be morose, and he didn’t care if it showed. Chris Welch, a Melody Maker journalist who had been writing favourably about the Who since 1965, found himself with Keith one night “talking in the bar at the Speak and he was quite miserable and sad, I thought, and he genuinely wanted some company”. It was unusual for Keith to let anyone see him in less than exuberant form, and Welch correctly assumed something was seriously wrong.

  “He had just split with his wife and he couldn’t face going back to the place on his own. So I came back with him to his flat. We arrived there in the early hours of the morning when it was dark. It was like the average musician’s digs. Clothes lying about. There was no family around. He seemed very down and unhappy. He just wanted to keep drinking.

  “We sat down and talked about classical music – because there was a big thing for classical music at the time, mostly instigated by Kit Lambert. We were all listening to Debussy a lot, La Traviata was the big thing. But he was still stomping and pacing round the flat, he couldn’t relax at all. In the end I had to go to sleep. I went to sleep and woke up hours later and he was still awake – he hadn’t been to bed at all.”

  With Keith’s marriage now public, John Entwistle wedded to Alison and Pete Townshend about to tie the knot with Karen Astley, only Roger Daltrey remained single, and even he would be married (again) within a couple of years. The notion that the Who were all growing up gained further credence when Pete Townshend was turned on to the Indian guru Meher Baba (by Ronnie Lane
of the Small Faces during the tour of Australia, among others) and became a passionate devotee of an Avatar believed to be the living reincarnation of Buddha, Christ and Mohammed among other great religious leaders. In many ways the renowned cynic Townshend seemed the least likely of rock’s figureheads to choose such spiritual enlightenment, especially given the negative experiences of the Beatles and the Stones in their well-publicised dalliance with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. But then Meher Baba was not a cult of personality, as were many of the other ‘gurus’ who had been adopted, almost like fashion accessories, by various members of the musical élite during 1966 and ’67. Baba made no demands for property or money, and insisted on no wholesale change in lifestyle other than the abandonment of hallucinatory drugs – a call which necessitated Townshend giving up pot, reluctantly so until he found he was more creative without it. Though he had not spoken a word since 1925, Baba’s simple message of compassion, love and introspection found a willing convert in a Pete Townshend who wanted to correct the less pleasant aspects of his capricious personality without having to abandon the on-stage aggression which provided him and his band-mates with so much emotional release. As his love for Meher Baba grew, Townshend even took to wearing a button badge with the guru’s face on it.

  “Who’s that?” Keith Moon inquired of Pete when he first saw the Indian’s smiling visage emblazoned on his band-mate’s chest.

  “Meher Baba,” replied Pete.

  “Is it?” He peered closer. “Well, you won’t see me walking round with a picture of Vidal Sassoon!”

  Pete Townshend’s new-found spirituality was certainly not evident on the single the Who released in the UK in June ’68. In fact, ‘Dogs’ was the weakest and most juvenile record of their career.32 A cockney ode to the greyhound track, and an apparent attempt to emulate the exuberance of the Small Faces’ recent hit ‘Lazy Sunday’, ‘Dogs’ fell short of its target by several laps. It instead sniffed around the lower twenties of the British charts before limping off into obscurity, by far and away the worst ever showing for a self-penned official Who release.