Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (100 page)

A
midst the public bickering that seemed such a betrayal of the rock’n’roll band as united gang, it was something of a relief for Who fans beholden to the rebel myth to open up the pages of the music press and discover that Moon the Loon, at least, was not going to let them down.

In July 1975,
Melody Maker
reported Keith’s shenanigans aboard a transatlantic flight. Then in August, Roy Carr in
NME
wrote up a particularly infamous example of Moon’s behaviour. Keith had supposedly taken mixes of the new Who album back to Los Angeles with him after the initial sessions. There, he had apparently stayed in a swank hotel where the manager confronted Keith about playing the songs on his portable tape recorder at full volume in the lobby, with the words, “Will you turn off that noise?!”

Keith’s response had been to bring the manager to his room and have him wait outside while methodically, and loudly, destroying the contents of the interior, ‘reaching a climax’, so the story ran, ‘when Moon detonated the door off its hinges with a cherry bomb firework.

‘Squaring up to the shocked manager, Moon explained, “That was noise,” and shoving the cassette under the man’s nose concluded, “This is The ‘Oo.’”

One of
the
Keith Moon classics, Roy Carr heard it directly from Keith, and having witnessed enough of Moon’s wild escapades over the years first hand, took him at his word. But it’s another falsehood. Keith was not living in hotels in LA at the time, and no witness or confirming detail has ever been unearthed. If there was any truth to the story, it was as an amalgam of all Keith’s hotel contretemps of recent years exaggerated into one single ludicrous apocryphal yarn.

What the tale really revealed about Keith’s character was the double-edged sword on which he had chosen to balance himself. On the one hand, he garnered the Who substantial publicity beyond even what the group’s music could expect to account for and which justified his role as so much more than ‘merely’ the drummer. (“He was the best PR man the Who could have,” Bill Curbishley readily agrees.)

Yet in doing so he felt ever more burdened with having to live up to this self-created reputation. “He became a monkey. It was ‘Perform, Keith, perform,’ “says Karl Howman. “People didn’t want him to be normal. They were like, ‘What’s he going to do next?’ And he had to think of something, like getting naked and chasing you round the restaurant. It was almost like putting your Batman costume on.”

There was no one moment when his good-natured tomfoolery turned into self-parody, just a steady transition. Maybe Kim’s departure brought it on. Perhaps it was the narcissism of Los Angeles, or the internal confusion of increasing alcoholism. Certainly, Keith’s continual search for something ‘more’ in life meant always pushing at his emotional envelope, always going a step further. To sometimes hilarious, often worrying, effect, such behaviour would become his trademark during the coming months on tour.

Keith and Annette, with Dougal, flew back to London on September 20 for pre-tour rehearsals, moving into a rented house on Gordon Place just off Kensington Church Street. Karl Howman came around one evening and stayed over. He was having tea with Keith in the morning when the doorbell rang. Karl went to see who it was.

“Just the postman,” he reported back.

“Serves him right,” said Keith.

“Serves him right? What do you mean?”

“He could have been a rock star like me.”

There was little you could say to that. The comment came from so far out of left field that it defied any follow-up. But that was Keith: unpredictable, illogical, witty, cruel – often in the same sentence.

Keith and Karl been out drinking the night before. Keith was more or less living in the pub that was conveniently situated almost outside the front door. Hearing these reports, and seeing him show up late and inebriated at rehearsals, the others became genuinely concerned about his health with regard to the upcoming tour. Under duress, Keith agreed to talk to a representative from Alcoholics Anonymous. Karl Howman was there when the phone call came through to set up the meeting.

“One o’clock at the Dog and Duck,” he heard Keith say down the phone line, and to the obvious protestation that a pub was maybe not the best place to meet, “Well, it’s the Dog and Duck or nothing!”

He was later convinced to change his mind and meet at the house instead, where Dougal showed the man from AA in. Keith wanted to show willing by not drinking. He took amphetamines instead.

“What are your problems?” the AA man asked as he made himself comfortable. “Why do you drink?”

Keith began to explain. To his visitor’s initial delight, he seemed very keen to talk about it.