Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (108 page)

He ended up at Hollywood (Florida) Memorial Hospital for eight days. Alan Jay remembers Keith being very keen to go there (“He knew he was sick, he knew what it was”) but also that Moon seemed to believe he was going to some kind of a health farm rather than a psychiatric ward. “He wanted me to go get him tennis rackets and some shorts and some shoes and his video … He thought it was a vacation. Twenty-four hours later I went up to see him and it was just like
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
I got to this big old iron gate, inside the hospital, I rang the bell and a guy walked towards the gate like a gorilla, with this half-inch chain round his neck, stainless steel with this one solitary key six inches long. He said to me, ‘Would you like to come in?’ They’re all walking round in night shirts and I said, ‘No, thank you, you bring him to me.’”

In the meantime, the rest of the touring party went home, and after a few days sitting around, so did Alan Jay – though that proved problematic as, having signed Keith in, his signature was needed to release him. And once he realised what he had let himself in for, Keith wanted out immediately.’ Annette, moved by management from the Fontainebleau into a cheap Holiday Inn, waited, miserable, for days on end, her visits kept to a minimum while over at the Memorial Keith Moon, at the height of his professional success, was as low and as lonely as he had ever been.

Still, he tried to sound his best when, on August 16, he conducted an interview from his bed with a local DJ who was eager to hear why the rock world’s legendary drummer and madman had been hospitalised. “I don’t really remember much about it,” Keith explained, as vaguely as possible. “I felt dizzy … and I just blacked out and woke up here. The doctors said it was a breakdown … from overwork, pressure, just getting wound up over the shows. I’ve been working quite steadily over the past two years and eventually it just catches up with you.” There was nothing untrue about any of this (although Keith could hardly be accused of ‘overwork’ in regards to the Who these past two years), but what was most frightening about the whole episode was that Keith had barely lasted a four-day tour in summer sunshine before this latest relapse/collapse. There was one final three-week tour of America coming up in October and, more than ever, the Who organisation was terrified as to whether Keith would get through it.

Eventually, on August 19, Keith was checked out of the Memorial Hospital, from where he and Annette flew back to Los Angeles. Four days later Keith Moon turned 30.

Dougal Butler was not totally shocked to get the phone call. If anything, he was surprised it had taken so long. He had spent the last few months outside the music business, watching the Who’s concert successes jealously from afar, wishing he was still part of it. And he had heard all about Doug Clarke’s short tenure and the hospitalisation in Miami. So when Keith did get back in touch, full of apologies, it was hard to bear him a grudge. Their relationship, like the romantic ones Keith had with Kim and Annette, or the close professional and family one with the group, had genuine love at the root of it all.

Keith told Dougal all about the house that was near completion in Malibu. It was going to be magnificent. And unlike Sherman Oaks, Keith promised, there was enough room for another couple to live there without getting in the way.

Keith and Dougal agreed to resume working together on the last leg of the American tour. The drummer seemed genuinely relieved. “You’re the only person who knows me,” he kept telling his friend. Dougal travelled to America at the beginning of October on the same jumbo jet as the other members of the band. The Who were surprised to see him back in the fold, but quite relieved also. You’re the only person who can deal with him, they said.

The proof of that statement is evident in the fact that this last tour – for it was, sadly, his last – was in many ways Moon’s greatest. It was only nine shows spread over 15 days but, “He was fucking amazing,” says John Entwistle. “In fact the whole band was fucking amazing. Usually someone would like it and someone would hate it, but we could have gone on playing forever. That to me was the peak of the Who’s career.”

Further to the on-stage success, for the first time in the whole twelve months of sporadic touring, Keith did not get into serious trouble off it. This did not mean he cleaned up his act. Far from it. Unlike Doug Clarke and Alan Jay, Dougal Butler joined in on many of Keith’s extra-curricular activities, but that was what made the relationship work where the others hadn’t. ‘Co-conspirator’ that he was, Dougal allowed Keith to be the playboy rock star to his heart’s content, but all the time watched for the moment when he might cross the line into dangerous self-abuse. Those last few weeks, it didn’t happen.

But they had fun. In Edmonton, Canada, frustrated by the lack of nightlife, Keith hired six hookers and, his irrepressible childishness at its most apparent, had a pillow fight with them rather than screw them. Then he stuck feathers over the girls and called Bill Curbishley to come see his personal
Swan Lake.
Several days later Annette unwrapped Keith’s luggage and found feathers throughout it. When she saw pictures of the pillow fight, she couldn’t help but laugh.

In Toronto on October 21, the last night of the tour, the Who played to 20,000 people at Maple Leaf Gardens. At the end of the show Pete Townshend smashed one of his Gibson Les Pauls for old time’s sake, and Keith attempted to kick over his drums – except that they were bound together like scaffolding these days, and wouldn’t budge. After the show, Keith and Dougal stayed over and held their own end-of-tour party at a local restaurant. Moon talked one of the Maple Leaf hockey stars into giving him his shirt, scored a large bag of cocaine at the cost of several hundred dollars and then scored two local girls, with whom he continued his party in private. So soon after the horrors of Miami, the world was perfect once more. Even in a year in which the Rolling Stones also came back out to play, there seemed little dispute that the Who were indeed The Greatest Rock’n’roll Band In The World, equally little argument that Keith Moon was its most distinctive drummer, and almost no debate that he was the rock world’s most engaging character.

He would happily have stayed out on the road forever.

In time for the Christmas market, Polydor Records in the UK issued a double album compilation,
The Story Of The Who.
It was a shrewd move: not only was there no hope of a new studio album for at least another year, but the football stadium shows had introduced the group to a new audience, a younger one that was still in short trousers when the Who first hit the charts.
The Story Of The Who
soared almost to the very top of the British charts, and a re-issue of ‘Substitute’ nearly bested its original performance, peaking at number seven.

Keith had another record in the charts that Christmas. Los Angeles producer Russ Regan had come up with the idea of setting Beatles songs to a visual documentary of World War II, and recognising the commercial potential should those songs be re-recorded by new artists, brought Lou Reizner in to handle the proceedings. Reizner gathered the usual suspects like Rod Stewart, Elton John, David Essex and Leo Sayer, and alongside some less obvious ones (Franki Valli and Frankie Laine), allowed Keith Moon to offer a rendition of ‘When I’m Sixty Four’.

Backed by an almost self-mocking string arrangement, Keith delivered his finest non-Who vocal performance. His aristocratic, somewhat Python-esque delivery was perfectly suited for a song that was equal parts saccharine and sincerity, the words of an insecure young man in the prime of life wanting reassurance that he would still be loved towards the end of it, an alarmingly appropriate choice for Keith, it would seem. Though the subsequent movie,
All This And World War II
, was slammed by critics and ignored by the public, the double album soundtrack sold well. In America, there was widespread criticism of the advertising campaign, which showed Adolf Hitler wearing headphones; one could be sure that Keith was not among those offended.

As if all this activity were not enough to keep Keith in the news, upon the conclusion of the Who tour he announced his intentions to marry Annette, in California on December 15. Keith’s customary extravagance typically to the fore, there was talk of a $15,000 diamond wedding ring and a chartered jet by which he would bring over the rest of the Who, various ex-Beatles and all his other show-biz friends from the UK.

There was only one catch: he hadn’t mentioned it to Annette. She heard about it only from friends she spoke to back in England. Given that he didn’t even raise the issue directly with her, let alone propose to her, she subsequently put it down to Keith’s penchant for self-publicity.

Any disappointment Annette experienced at having her emotions played with in public was considerably alleviated when the couple finally moved, along with Dougal and his girlfriend Jill, to the beach house in Trancas. It was, truly, the lap of luxury, a split-level home with several balconies overlooking the Pacific Ocean, three bedrooms, two kitchens, a study, a lavish lounge with fireplace, an expansive dining room, a sauna, and ‘his’ and ‘hers’ bathrooms (the window to Keith’s fitted with a tribute to opulent vanity, a stained glass representation of his star sign, Leo). The extent to which Keith indulged himself can be ascertained by his acquisition of a chair specially moulded to fit his contours, which made even the wealthiest and most spoiled of his friends laugh. There were just three other houses on Victoria Point Road, the entrance to which was protected by electronic gates: the top one belonged to the owner of the Century 21 real estate empire, the second to rag-trade millionaire and recording studio proprietor Howard Grinel; and that next to Keith, at the bottom of the hill, was lived in by Hollywood’s hottest couple, Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw.

It was the pot of gold at the end of his rainbow, the personal dream fulfilled, the Californian lifestyle realised. And it was an awful long way from Wembley, London, and the crumbling British Empire.

On December 1, 1976, the
Today
programme on the Thames region of Britain’s ITV network introduced its viewers to a ‘punk rock’ group called the Sex Pistols whose debut single, Anarchy In The UK’, had just been released by venerable British arms-and-entertainment conglomerate EMI. The Sex Pistols represented the vanguard of a new musical movement that had been germinating throughout the year, primarily in London (though impetus also came from New York, where a band of pretend ‘bruwers’ called the Ramones had just released their first album of breakneck-speed anthems like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’), as the younger generation finally recognised that rock’s elder statesmen no longer held any relevance. The Sex Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten had even taken to wearing a T-shirt announcing ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’, though the mods of the Sixties were among the few acknowledged influences: both the Who’s ‘Substitute’ and the Small Faces’ ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It?’ featured in early Pistols’ sets.

That night on live TV, goaded by a visibly drunken middle-aged presenter, Bill Grundy, to live up to their controversial reputation, the Sex Pistols, at first reluctantly and then with all the cocky petulance of provoked schoolyard scruffs, swore bluntly, and repetitively, calling Grundy a ‘dirty fucker’ and a ‘fucking rotter’. Across the London region, choking over their TV dinners, thousands of families divided almost instantaneously down the generation barrier, the elders outraged by this treasonable breach of the British moral code, their bored teenagers ecstatic that someone, somewhere, had finally dared challenge the status quo.