Keith was propped up in bed looking very sorry for himself. The walls of the suite were decorated with what appeared to be large strokes of black paint. This was the aftermath of Keith’s accident. He’d sliced through an artery in his leg and sprayed the walls with deep arterial blood. He’d been lucky to survive. Cool Hand Bill Curbishley had found him and managed to get a tourniquet on the wound before Keith bled out. Judging by the abstract art arching across the walls of the room, the ambulance had arrived in the nick of time.
“Sorry, Rog,” was all Keith could say now.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “But you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. Why the self-destruct button? Is it Kim?”
Of course it was Kim. It was obvious. Every girl he was with, he dressed up like Kim. He even used to hire hookers and make them dress up like her, too. He always carried a blond wig around with him to complete the effect. When I asked the question to which I already knew the answer, he started to nod and then he burst into tears.
“I’ll never get her back,” he said. For a long while, there was silence, broken only by the sound of Keith sobbing. I didn’t know what to say. I just stayed there at the bottom of the bed.
“Yeah,” I said eventually, “she might not come back but if you love her and if you showed her that, then she’d always be there. That’s how it is with your one true love. It might not be how it was but you don’t have to lose everything.”
He just looked blankly back at me and we returned to silence. So I asked him, “Is it Neil as well?”
And he burst into tears again. “I’m a murderer,” he said. “I’m a murderer.”
“No you’re not, Keith. It was circumstances. It could have happened to anyone.”
I told him he did what he thought was the best he could at the time. I told him he had to let this stuff go. He had to get help. A few moments later he sat up and, as was always his way, he gave me a hug. I should have been hugging him.
When I left his suite some time later, he seemed a little more chipper. He was happy, or he was making a pretense of being happy. And we never talked about any of that stuff again. For the next eighteen months, the rest of Keith’s life, he would call me up. I don’t think anyone else was answering the phone to him. He’d call at four in the morning when I was at home and the kids were in bed, and we always knew it was Keith. Heather was particularly good with him in that dark period and we did what we could. Of course, for the last four decades, I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I’d done more.
He did come back to London, though. He abandoned his tarnished dream in California, left Steve McQueen in peace, and, borrowing more cash from Pete, rented a suitably grand pad on Curzon Street, Mayfair.
That was stage one. Stage two was getting him fit. He couldn’t get through our grueling set if he wasn’t fit. I nagged him and nagged him and then one day he turned up at the studio in jodhpurs and a riding jacket.
He’d signed up for riding classes along Rotten Row in Hyde Park. For the exercise. His bum must have been pretty sore that night but it was a good sign. At least he was trying. Unfortunately, when we started work on our eighth studio album, Who Are You, in the autumn of 1977, it was obvious that his physicality and his prowess on the drums had suffered badly from the last five years of abuse. He just had it or he didn’t. And in those last months of his life, his natural talent was deserting him. And without that he was stuck in a downward spiral.
In my time off, I was going the other way. Where Keith had hookers and drugs, I was obsessing with more mundane things. The house absorbed all my excess energy. I started with the lake below the house. When we arrived, you wouldn’t call it a lake. Through years of neglect, it was not much more than a muddy puddle. I enlisted the help of Herbert, the son of the publican who ran our local, the Kicking Donkey. His favorite pastime was playing with giant bulldozers. He had the toys and I had the playground, and together we spent weeks and happy weeks digging out the silt and raising the dam until, finally, I had a proper lake. There is very little that’s more satisfying than digging a bloody great hole and then watching it fill with water, watching the contours of the land shape a new lake, covering up the muddy mess we’d made and replacing it with something beautiful. And it’s incredible how quickly they become inhabited with all kinds of wildlife. That’s probably why I ended up with four interconnected lakes on the far side of the farm. Once you start …
Given that I had all these lakes, I could invite all my old mates from the factory to come fishing almost every weekend I wasn’t touring. They would sit there by the water, shooting the breeze, and they’d tell me it was criminal, Rog, to keep all this to yourself. What about the likes of us living in tower blocks, eh, Rog? The likes of us would love to come to a place like this and fish. And, of course, they were right. So I opened it up to the public. In the early eighties, fly-fishing for trout was the up-and-coming sport for the workingman, and it gave me the chance to meet lots of people who were more interested in fish than in rock star Roger. And I’m proud of what I’ve done to that land. If it had been left to fall fallow, the whole valley would have been lost. It takes a huge amount of work to keep the countryside looking and working the way it should. It means a great deal to me that I’ve looked after my bit of it. It’s a cliché but I’m just the tenant. I’m keeping it in trust for future generations. Hopefully, I’ve left it in good shape.
It took me ten years to decorate Holmshurst. With the help of another very good, very loyal, very long-suffering friend, we scrubbed every inch of the wood with paint stripper. At some point in the Victorian period, its owners had decided to stain all the beams black and it took seven summers to get them back to their original honey color. We were there in rubber gloves and boiler suits, sweating our bollocks off. I loved almost every minute of it. It was a straightforward, repetitive job, the opposite of anything to do with The Who. When I wasn’t scrubbing, I was digging, and when I wasn’t digging, I was making things.
Or restoring things. For several years, for example, I collected old Gypsy caravans and Victorian hand-driven roundabouts. I’d become great friends with John Carter, formerly of the Slade School of Fine Art, latterly a towering, bearded hulk of a man who liked to accumulate vintage cars, bikes, slot machines, and fairground rides. He even managed to get hold of a set of steam-driven gallopers (you could never call them carousels in front of John … too American).
John was a bit strapped for cash back then. It was the midseventies. Most people were. So I’d buy some of the kit and have the joy of restoring them myself. Trouble was, as soon as they were finished, they just became objects to look at (and fill up the sheds). In the end, I sold two to a museum and the rest to John … for a fair price, of course. And in 1977, he and his wife, Anna, set off with their wonderful Carters Steam Fair. It’s still in the family and still chugging and belching around Britain today.
At some point in the 1970s, between the lakes and the caravans and the music, I built the kids a dolls’ house. It took three months—one side is Rosie’s, all clean and well kept, the other side is Willow’s, the scuzzy neighbor. It’s still in Rosie’s bedroom today. And I look at it with the same affection with which I look at one of our albums. I made it out of plywood with a saw, no plan, and a bit of brainpower. It’s pure satisfaction. And I think that’s the key. I need to work. And I honestly believe that’s part of the reason why I’m still here today. Pete, who has an incredible work ethic, survived by creating things in his head and on tape. I survived by doing things with my hands. If I didn’t have a project during our downtimes, what else would I have done with my time?
Chance bad luck also kept me on the straight and narrow. In 1975, round about the time I was fielding calls from Hollywood, welcoming our second daughter into the world, launching my second solo album, and wrapping Lisztomania, I dropped a large stone ball on my toe. It’s one of the hazards of buying a rather grand home. There are lots of plinths and columns and some of them have large stone balls
on top. I was trying to move one and I lost my grip. Two years later, I started to get gout in the toe the stone ball had flattened. The cure was twofold. I gave up booze and I gave up wheat. By my midthirties, I was the exact opposite of the hedonistic rocker. It wasn’t because I had an obsession with longevity. It was because if I didn’t stay healthy I couldn’t sing.
My vocal cords defined my lifestyle and that’s why I’m still kicking around today. I’m kicking carefully, mind you. That toe still plays up.
chapter sixteen
The End, a Beginning, and Another End
On Thursday, September 7, 1978, Jackie Curbishley, Bill’s wife, called Pete, and Pete called me. “He’s gone and done it,” said Pete.
“Who’s done what?”
“Moon.”
Keith Moon died in his sleep sometime after breakfast, the morning after he and Annette briefly attended a party in Covent Garden hosted by Paul McCartney to mark the start of Buddy Holly Week. We hadn’t toured all year because he had been in no fit state to keep up. It had been hard enough recording Who Are You at Ramport. “Music Must Change,” the fifth track on the album, almost didn’t make it because Keith struggled with the six-eight time. He was never a musical conformist anyway, but this was different. After four takes and countless apologies, he leapt up from behind his drums and shouted, “I’m the best Keith Moon–type drummer in the world!”
And he was, right until the end. He died after overdosing on thirty-two chlormethiazole tablets, sedatives prescribed to help with alcohol withdrawal. He had been talking about sorting himself out. He’d moved back to London. He’d gone horse riding. He still wanted to be in the band. But it was a losing battle.
His death was something we’d been expecting for five years, maybe longer. It could have happened on any day during that time. But when the inevitable news came through, it was still a big hit. It’s weird, when you’ve been expecting something for that long, it’s actually more shocking than if he’d just gone unexpectedly. We’d got used to expecting it to the point where it was never going to happen. It left me, and I’m sure it left Pete, totally traumatized.
The next day, we put out a statement saying that we were more determined than ever to carry on, and that we wanted the spirit of the group to which Keith contributed so much to go on. We were in a daze, of course, but those weren’t just platitudes. We meant it. I was determined that the band should survive because of the music. And, of course, there was self-interest as well. It was my profession and my life.
Later, Pete would say that Keith’s death stopped The Who from petering out. That it gave us another few years. To look at it very objectively, it did give us freedom. We could never replace Keith but now that he was gone, we had an opportunity. We had always been a foursome. A square. A four-walled room. Now, one of the walls was gone and the room was open to infinity. We had infinite options. We were open to a world of infinite possibilities. And then, somehow and suddenly, we closed up the room again.
In January 1979, Pete invited Kenney Jones to become our drummer. We all liked Kenney very much. He’d been a friend for years and he’s a great bloke. During the tours we did with him, I got on with him better than the rest of the band. He was also a great drummer. But he was completely the wrong drummer for us. He was right for the Faces.
That’s not meant to sound disparaging. At the time, people thought I was saying Kenney was a crap drummer. I have never ever said Kenney was a crap drummer. He was a crap drummer for The Who, just as Keith would have been for the Faces. He was wrong, very wrong, for us. They had their style and we had ours. They were a tight band, Chas and Dave with Rod Stewart, a jolly old singsong down the pub, and they needed a metronomic drummer like Kenney. The Who was completely different. We were nose-to-the-grindstone, workhorse rock. If you’d put Keith in the Faces, he would have clattered over everything else.
Still, the decision was made and Kenney was brought in. We signed him in for a quarter share of the band, which was just stupid. Pete wanted it that way so Pete had it that way and I gave in for the quiet life. On May 2, 1979, after a lot of rehearsal at Shepperton, we arrived at the Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park, to open our first tour with Kenney, not Keith.
At first, it wasn’t bad. In fact, it was good to be playing again. It was a huge relief. A therapy. None of us found it easy to move on. Keith’s absence was palpable. All those wild years together, night after night, were lost and so it was emotional. It felt like we were doing ten miles of a marathon each night, but we put our heads down and we dug into the music. We were silent between songs, but the music was as solid as anything. And Kenney, to his immense credit, was brilliant. He played to the energy level demanded by The Who. A lot of the stuff we were playing on that tour was from the new album, and that made it easier. It worked and we were jelling. It was only when we went back to the old stuff that it felt hollow.
We toured across Britain, France, and Germany, and the gigs got bigger and bigger. We did Wembley Stadium, we did the sixty-five-thousand-capacity Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg, we did five sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden. Everywhere we went, the demand far outstripped capacity. Promoters were allocating tickets by lottery and all the venues were bursting at the seams. And then, in December, we arrived at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati.
It was a good show—a fabulous show—which made it even more painful to hear what had happened when we came offstage. It was an ice-cold night and it was festival seating—first come, first served. The promoter decided to open three of the eleven doors to the venue so everyone made a dash for it, desperate to get out of the cold and into the front rows. It must have been like pouring a quart into a half-pint pot. Eleven fans died in the crush at the entrance. Thanks to Bill, the organizers made the sensible decision to let the show go on to prevent further panic, which stopped people from clambering over the dead and injured. That meant we did the whole gig without any knowledge of the tragedy. Imagine how it feels to walk off stage, euphoric, buzzing, full of the joys of life, only to discover that people have died in their attempt to see you play.
I don’t even remember if I had a reaction. It was immediately so public with people poking microphones at you asking, “How d’you feel?” What stupid questions journalists ask before anyone has had time to process anything. How do you think I felt? Wonderful? It was horrible and I was just shocked. Numb. Sleep was entirely elusive that night and then, the very next day, we had to travel to Buffalo, New York, for the next show. It was a hard night. There was no communication with each other or the audience. But we played with pure venom arising from the grief we were all feeling.
We could have stopped, I suppose, but that was never even discussed. With Keith’s death and now this, this worse thing, this meaningless thing, we could have just packed up the kit for good and gone home. But I honestly think stopping would not have done anything for the situation at all. And it would almost certainly have made the suffering worse, for me at any rate. So maybe it was a selfish thing, I don’t know. Or maybe to put your head into music, to immerse yourself in performance, was the only therapy to get out of it. Certainly, it helped. We got the tour done and we did play well. Those ten remaining shows after Cincinnati were among the most intense of my life. Musically, it was a great tour. Emotionally, it was a nightmare.
We stay in touch with the friends of the people who died, but I can’t bring them back. I wish I could, I just wish I could. Have I ever felt responsible? Can I be responsible for what happened in Cincinnati? Of course I can’t. I don’t feel guilty. I feel sad, incredibly sad for the people who lost family. It was extremely hard to get through.
The hardest bit was coming home just before Christmas and seeing all my friends and family. To be reintroduced to normality after what had happened. It was like being hit by a cricket bat. It had made the headlines back in the UK but no one knew what it was like to be there. There was no one to talk to, to share the load. I went for long walks around my farm and I talked to my
self. I’m agnostic, bordering on atheist. The whole God thing seems to me to have caused most of humanity’s problems. But in that bleak winter, it would have been nice to have had someone else to have talked to, to pretend there was some divine plan and that what happened in Cincinnati was a part of it.
* * *
When we set off again in 1980, it was more obvious that things weren’t right. Kenney watered down the energy of the band. He was pulling The Who back into a straight-paced, Small Faces pub-style performance, and I was finding it impossible to phrase the lyrics. We were playing all the songs, but we were doing them like a pub band playing covers. Nothing knitted together. The Who had gone and our songs, Pete’s magical songs, were now just songs. I seriously considered buying Kenney a pair of brushes for “My Generation”—it was lacking so much energy. And it’s hard enough getting through a three-hour set night after night when things are working. You rely on the adrenaline and the energy of the music to get you through. When it’s gone, it’s debilitating.
So I sat Kenney down and said, sorry, chum, I can’t go on with you playing drums. He didn’t say much. Who can blame him? It must have been hard not to take it personally. But it really wasn’t personal. You can’t be anything but ruthless to get a band to succeed. You can’t be mediocre. A band can be either terrible or brilliant. There is no middle ground. So you have to make tough decisions. I’d done it with Harry Wilson, my best friend, when we’d replaced him with Doug Sandom. I wanted to do it with Kenney.
So we had a meeting, a summit, a reckoning in Bill Curbishley’s house in Chigwell. Pete and Kenney were sitting on one sofa; John and I were facing them; Bill was in the middle, mediating. There wasn’t any aggression on my part. I loved Kenney, but he was wrong for us. I knew it. I know Pete knew it. I knew Pete was kicking himself, but he couldn’t do the bad guy bit. So I just said what I needed to say. If you’ve got the wrong wheel on a car and you’re weaving all over the place, you have to change it. So an ultimatum. It’s me or Kenney.
Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite Page 19