Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon

by Tony Fletcher

  Cause and effect continued to entangle themselves as Pete found out in the spring of 1981 that, despite having written five best-selling albums in the last thirty months, he was a staggering half a million pounds in debt. Away from the Who, Pete had followed his idealism in what he saw as a logical direction, setting up his own book publishing company, recording studios, a book shop, a Meher Baba centre and even a barge fleet. Like the Beatles with Apple, however (yet unlike The Who Group of Companies under Bill Curbishley), there was no business structure in place to encourage profits and with Pete permanently out to lunch, it was not long before, as he later admitted, “People were spending my money faster than I could earn it.”

  His immediate response was simply to throw himself yet further into the abyss. As word spread that Townshend had blown it, was dancing with death, tossing it all away in one endless binge, it seemed truly that the whole rock crusade had been a pointless battle. The likes of Keith Moon were born to be decadent reprobates, so popular opinion went. But if the hallowed Pete Townshend could not lead by example, no one could. (Though of course it was partly the pressures of that responsibility that caused him to jump overboard in the first place.)

  Townshend eventually came around after a near-fatal overdose at a London nightclub three years and a day after Keith’s death. He went into a clinic to dry out in November 1981, and in the New Year of 1982, went to San Diego, where Meg and George Patterson had moved their practice, for a four-week drug withdrawal programme. The irony of seeking help from the same people to whom he had sent his friends Eric Clapton and Keith Moon was not lost on him.

  His depression was captured in the experimental solo album All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, released in early summer of ’82; his near-bankruptcy revealed itself on the Who’s next (and final) studio album, It’s Hard, released just a few weeks later. The other three members of the Who had accused Pete of stealing his best material for his own album, to which he challenged them to tell him what kind of songs they wanted, declaring he would write to order. Such a process went against every grain of his once-idealistic fibre, and the result was an album of slack arena rock devoid of soul or meaning or even content, the one true embarrassment of the group’s career, a pitiful way to bow out.110

  But in his new sobriety Pete, whilst fully aware of the Who’s decay, determined to make himself rich again. Selling off his loss-making businesses for immediate cash, he committed himself to one final jaunt around America. For three months leading up to Christmas 1982, the group criss-crossed America, playing the country’s biggest outdoor stadiums in often appalling weather to crowds nearing 100,000 a night, for only one real reason: money. Recordings from that tour, released as a double live album and video, were almost uniformly dull and uninspired. Who’s Last was the Who’s worst.

  The bulk of the blame for the group’s transparent artistic decline fell on Kenney Jones’ shoulders. His disciplined drumming technique was so far removed from Moon’s that it tied the Who to rigid formality far more than their apparently constrictive legend had ever done. It was so orthodox it could neither energise nor encourage experimentation. The public’s increasing scepticism as to Jones’ suitability was compounded by his own internal fight for approval. “I just never thought he was the right drummer for the Who,” Roger Daltrey told Musician magazine in 1989. “Kenney was simplicity itself … Kenney was not capable of doing any more than he did.”

  That Jones deprived the Who of their customary fire cannot be denied. But on that final tour the whole band was lacklustre. It was rock as commerce, not rock as rebellion. And it was touring as work, not play. Townshend was newly sober. Daltrey didn’t drink on tour anyway. Kenney Jones also went on the wagon, partly to avert Daltrey’s antagonism towards him. Only John Entwistle was there to party, and he no longer had Moon to join him. One wonders what Keith would have thought of it all, and how he too might have sounded had he dissociated drumming from drink and drugs for any length of time in his thirties.

  The three surviving members finally accepted that Keith’s death had been the end of a dream. Any aspects of that dream which had not been fulfilled were now abandoned. Townshend paid for himself and Kenney Jones to be bought out of the record contract the band had only recently signed. The Who’s various companies were sold off or closed down. Though they shied short of publicly declaring it, the Who had split up. It had taken a spirited attempt at rejuvenation to discover that without Keith Moon, “our great comedian, the supreme melodramatist … the most spontaneous and unpredictable drummer in rock”, as Pete had called him just after his death, they were not a shadow of the band they thought they were. Just as Keith’s addition back in 1964 had made for an exponential improvement, his loss made for an exponential regression.

  But they had tried. “When Tommy the film came out, the Who as a company probably earned six million pounds a year,” Pete Townshend told Jamming! Magazine in 1985, summarising the latter years. “With that money, we bought a load of PA gear, we bought a load of trucks, we bought a chunk of Shepperton studios, and we started to invest in films. It was great while it lasted, until Keith died. It was a shame, because Keith was having such a great time. At one time it looked like we were all set to become film moguls, and then he went and dropped dead. Most inconvenient; his timing was a bit off at the end.”

  The Who reformed once for Live Aid in 1985, and again for a televised awards show in the UK in 1987, and each time they were under-rehearsed and underwhelming. Daltrey and Entwistle never gave up on the idea of reuniting properly, but they never much expected it either. Yet at the beginning of 1989, for a variety of reasons, financial remuneration not the least among them, it happened. The Twenty-fifth Anniversary Tour took in the obligatory football stadiums of America that summer, and a few British cities in the autumn, becoming one of the great money-spinners of the decade.

  Finally recognising the futility of trying to relive their youth, the Who performed instead as a 15-piece unit including a brass section, backing singers, and a second guitarist, Townshend’s hearing having deteriorated to the point that he was forced to perform mostly just acoustic guitar on the ‘quiet’ side of the stage. On drums was not Kenney Jones, with whom Daltrey refused to play, but session musician Simon Phillips. (There was also an additional percussionist.) Though Phillips had not grown up on the Who’s music, his jazz training enabled him to successfully uphold the Keith Moon legacy. In other words, Moon’s talents were so unique that it took a highly accomplished artisan of Phillips’ calibre to accurately imitate them.

  On January 17, 1990, the Who were inducted into the ‘Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame’, which meant permanent placement in a new museum built in Cleveland, and temporary attendance at a black-tie ceremony at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The same year that the Who were inducted, so were the Kinks, and Keith’s contemporary and friend Bob Henrit, who now played for that north London band which had influenced the Who all those years ago, felt almost relieved that Keith was not alive to attend.

  “We got into music because rock’n’roll was the antithesis of everything else,” he said, echoing the sentiments of so many from that first generation of British youth inspired by the thrilling sounds of distant American pioneers in the Fifties. “We never expected it to be a museum. It waters it down and makes it acceptable. The reason we got into it was because it was unacceptable.”

  Amanda Jane Moon, who was invited to attend as Keith’s representative, seemed to understand this. The 23-year-old knew enough about his experiences on the premises back in 1968 to sum up the inherent contradictions of the occasion while simultaneously recognising Keith’s infamous legacy. She was, she said, proud to accept on his behalf – “even though I know my father was banned from this hotel”.

  In 1988, Kim McLagan had resigned as Administrator of Keith’s estate; the following year Amanda, now 22, had assumed that role. In the process, Mandy had become sole recipient of Keith’s royalties, which were to prove quite considerable once a
quality CD reissue campaign got under way in the mid-1990s. But she turned out to have inherited more than just wealth. Much of her youth was spent repeating the tendencies of a father towards whom she understandably felt conflicting emotions; as well as taking to the drums in a series of bands, she battled with her own drink problem and passed through a succession of failed relationships. By the age of 30, she appeared to have finally come to terms with being the child of such a complex and famous man, had settled into her third marriage, was expecting a child of her own and running a boutique in Los Angeles, where she had remained living since her mother and step-father moved her there in 1978.

  Ian and Kim McLagan themselves left LA after riots, earthquakes and other natural disasters removed the last vestiges of glamour from the city of angels in the early Nineties. Not wanting to return to England or to live in a megatropolis anymore, they relocated to Austin, Texas, which appeared to offer a healthy music scene for Ian to base himself in along with a pleasant small-city mentality. There was also the considerable advantage of being close to Ian’s fellow former Small Faces and Faces partner Ronnie Lane, who was seriously afflicted with multiple sclerosis. Yet almost immediately after the McLagans arrived in town, Lane’s new wife moved Ronnie and herself from Austin to Colorado, where Ronnie Lane died in 1997. Ian and Kim McLagan continue to live happily, without children of their own, in Austin.

  Dougal Butler can also be found happily married, with a teenage daughter to whom he occasionally regales some of his and Keith’s less salacious exploits, in his original home town of Uxbridge, Middlesex, where he runs a financial services company. In 2001, Dougal published a second book on his former charge. Keith Moon: A Personal Portrait was a privately published, limited edition hardcover, full of rare photographs, unseen mementos and written memories.

  Annette Walter-Lax is back in Stockholm, right where she started out. Divorced from Gareth Hunt, she lives with only her son Oliver. The modelling career, the years with Keith Moon, those crazy days in London and Los Angeles with the cream of entertainment society, now belong to another time, another place, another world entirely. She occasionally relives them by rummaging through a box of mementoes she keeps in her flat, one that includes love letters from Keith and holiday snaps from their trips to Tahiti and Mauritius, times when Keith was lovable just for being himself, not the famous drummer or the wild character. Still, it hurts Annette to open that box. She tends to keep it out of sight and almost, but never fully, out of mind.

  Roger Daltrey released a few more solo albums in the Eighties while vigorously pursuing an acting career. Throughout the Nineties, he attempted to launch a biopic on Keith Moon’s life, for which scripts were drafted, production deals discussed (Mel Gibson was purported to be a backer), and Chris Stamp, against whom Daltrey had instigated legal proceedings all those years earlier, brought in as partner. The movie never got off the ground. In 1995, Tribeca Movies in conjunction with Viacom/Paramount bought up Dougal Butler’s Full Moon instead with the intention of making what would appear to be a ‘buddy’ movie that would further mythologise the most outrageous aspects of Moon the Loon’s life.

  Daltrey, though he temporarily climbed on board this alternate project (which also appears to have stalled), was among those who understood the subject to be more complex than that. So often derided for his hard man image, Roger’s level-headedness and sobriety enabled him to confront and deal with the loss of Keith more quickly than his band mates; similarly, as the most practical and least philosophical of the band, and the only member not to have engaged in substance abuse, he developed an arguably purer perspective than his partners. “Keith had the comedian’s disease of trying to make people laugh all the time, but inside he was incredibly unhappy,” he said many years after the man’s death. “The alcoholism was a result of the unhappiness. I never met anyone like Keith Moon. He had so much energy, so much drive. And if he wasn’t channelling it through his drums he had no place to put it. And he had this desperation to be loved, really loved by the people he cared about.”

  John Entwistle holed up in the Gloucestershire mansion, with its 16 bedrooms, recording studio and his collections ranging from armour to guitars. Keith never saw the premises during his year back in England. Entwistle, who came to realise that he too had hidden his emotions when Moon died, was ultimately glad Keith had been away in California for three years; that way, he had already become used to living without him.

  Entwistle remained bitter about the Who’s lack of activity, a malaise he sees as dating back to the early Seventies and a contributory factor to Keith’s premature demise. “Playing drums is very strenuous so I don’t know how long he could have lasted, but I know he would have lasted a lot longer if he hadn’t had so much fucking time off. That’s what destroyed him – he lost his fucking identity. He was trying to hold on to his identity by being Keith Moon all the time. Because there was nothing for him to do.”

  Pete Townshend went on to make further solo albums doubling as narratives, to a steadily decreasing audience. But his reputation as a composer of rock musicals was firmly established with the phenomenally successful early Nineties theatrical run of Tommy. After that, anything seemed possible. He continued to have occasional battles with the bottle, but by the late Nineties appeared to have finally conquered them for good. He took great pleasure in telling Keith Moon stories to anyone who would listen, usually exaggerated if not totally fabricated – and yet he gained little satisfaction in attempting to justify them.

  “There was something going on with Keith that none of us, to this day, entirely understand,” he said in 1996. “You get a sense that he was doomed from another angle entirely.”

  Of Keith’s direct family, Keith’s sisters Linda and Lesley are both married and living just to the west of London; following in her brother’s footsteps but with none of his excesses, Linda is landlady of a pub in Twyford, along with her second husband.

  And Kathleen Moon, who has survived both her husband and her son by more than 25 years, still lives at Chaplin Road and still works part-time at the hospital around the corner despite being in her late seventies. Never one to complain or quit, she keeps the job more to stay fit, healthy and active than out of pure financial necessity. With Keith’s daughter, ex-wife and former fiancée all living overseas, Kitty Moon is the person most frequently invited to British Who-related events to serve both as a reminder of and tribute to Keith. Much though she swears each occasion will be her last, someone always manages to convince her to attend one more.

  Such was the situation on June 19, 1996, when the three surviving members of the Who (though not specifically billed as such) reunited with an extensive line-up to play Quadrophenia in its entirety for a Prince’s Trust concert in London’s Hyde Park to a crowd of around 100,000. Again there was an extensive backing band, this time including Pete’s younger brother Simon on second guitar. On the drums, perhaps the youngest member of all and yet almost the exact same age as Keith when he died, was Zak Starkey.

  Zak had strongly considered turning down the opportunity to play with the Who. Having toured with Daltrey and Entwistle on a short-lived ‘Daltrey Sings Townshend’ tour of America in 1994, and also with his father Ringo in 1995, he felt he had already done his share of backing the older generation. And given that his new band Face – mod connotations to the fore – had almost secured a major British record deal, he felt a certain duty to stick with his contemporaries in the London pub and club scene he knew and loved.

  But the offer made too much sense, he finally accepted. Though the Who were old enough to be his parents (indeed Zak himself has long been a father, living in a modest town house in Keith’s desired final locale, Ascot), still they had influenced him more than any group his own age. During a difficult childhood, the Who’s musical manifestations of adolescent confusion, their humility with the fans that conflicted so boldly with their on-stage bravado, had brought comfort and release. In that sense he was like so many others of his generation, even pi
nning cuttings about ‘Moon the Loon’ on his wall -except that unlike all the other fans his age, he also knew the adorable, witty and generous Keith Moon behind that tabloid image. Thankful to have been encouraged to play the drums by what he considered the instrument’s premier practitioner, Zak took the gig. It brought, he felt, a sense of closure.

  For Pete Townshend, he who had for seven years put off playing with his former partners, the one-off Quadrophenia concert proved so enjoyable he volunteered to take to the road with it. Through the rest of 1996 and 1997, across Europe and America, the Quadrophenia show toured under the name of the Who, although by deliberately avoiding the fanfare that accompanied the 1989 reunion ticket sales suffered considerably. This didn’t seem to matter to Pete; for once it was about the music, finally making something work on stage that had proved so problematic at the time of its conception.

  At the end of every show Pete Townshend would introduce the band members, along with special guests like Billy Idol or Gary Glitter who performed cameos much like those Keith had enacted on screen. Zak Starkey, widely praised for a playing style which echoed Keith’s vitality without simply imitating it, was purposefully the last to be mentioned. The drums were always the hardest job in the Who, Pete would usually say, adding something along the lines of how “We’ve never really been able to replace Keith.” (Though God knows Pete had once thought they could.) At mention of Moon’s name the audience would automatically roar its approval – a purely Pavlovian response perhaps, but for most a truly heartfelt one too: even those who had not seen the band with Keith in the flesh knew all too well the truth behind Pete’s words.