Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (126 page)

For no one ever
has
replaced Keith Moon, in or out of the Who, on stage or in the studio. In the increasingly regimented world that pop, rock (and of course dance) music has become, where the click track is master and the drum machine always waits in the wings, it’s unlikely – make that unimaginable – that there will ever be another quite like him. Certainly, no drummer has pushed the limits of the instrument as far as Keith pushed, nor has any group of musicians relied so heavily on the skill of its drummer to achieve their unique sound as the Who relied upon Keith.

Likewise, neither will Moon’s standing as an icon of rock’n’roll excess ever be surpassed. Unfortunately, that has not and will not stop people trying. Because Keith’s contribution to the world remains as noted for turning indulgence and destruction into an art form as it does for turning the drums into an innovative, front-line instrument, his behaviour is imitated and emulated to this day. To an extent that’s fully understandable: rock’n’roll in its most base cultural definition remains a world of misfits and outsiders, for whom impulsive actions and compulsive experimentation provide both a release and a reward. And fame brings with it opportunities on both those fronts that are difficult to refuse. Of course, most who sample the vices on offer (both material and chemical) find they can handle them, or at least manage to outgrow them. And those who don’t … end up like Keith.

It is then perhaps a final irony in a tale too full of them to note that if Keith
had
succeeded in sobering up for good, he would have found himself -eventually – in illustrious and familiar company. For almost all those whom he partied hardest with that aren’t dead wholly or largely due to their excesses (a depressing roll-call of premature demises that includes John Bonham, Harry Nilsson, Viv Stanshall, Kit Lambert, Pete Meaden, Gary Kellgren, Mal Evans, Jesse Ed Davis and many, many others) are sober. Pete Townshend, Ringo Starr, Larry Smith, Alice Cooper, Joe Walsh, Karl Green, Keith Allison, Steve Ellis, Richard Cole, Larry Hagman, Ginger Baker and Chris Stamp are just some of his many friends who now live teetotal existences.

“Keith’s death was when I stopped drinking,” says Steve Ellis. “I thought, ‘If Keith can die then we all can.” ’ It took Ellis two years to achieve abstention.

But even then, had he prevailed and were he alive today, there is nothing to suggest that Keith would have been any happier for it. Because inevitably the music would have to have stopped – although superstar bands of the Sixties and Seventies often undertake lucrative tours, there are none who can be said to be constantly active – at which Keith would have been totally flummoxed. He lived for the Who and the stage, and deprived of both, it’s hard to imagine him contentedly embracing middle age as most of rock’s other elder statesmen proved secure enough in themselves to do.

“He was like a brother,” Roger Daltrey, whose love for Moon was never more evident than after the drummer’s death, has observed. “But I could never imagine him getting old. That would have been cruel in itself.”

“I firmly believe that Keith lived the rock’n’roll life and decided to go out swinging,” says Joe Walsh. “He decided to live it all the way, as far as he could take it and as long as he could go. Towards the end, there were obvious signs of collapse. And I think he knew it. I think he knew all along that death was not that far away. But I think he really chose to take it as far as he could and go down in history as a rock’n’roll drummer. That’s the way he wanted to be remembered. That’s what he wanted to do with his life.”

“If you were to ask me who had the most fun in rock’n’roll I would say Keith Moon,” concurs Alice Cooper. “Who really actually understood what rock’n’roll was about, it would be Keith Moon. It’s not to say it’s right, because he died way prematurely. But I don’t think he had another gear to go down to. I think everyone sits around afterwards and says, ‘I wish I could have spent more time with him, I wish I could have said, “slow down”,’ but nobody would ever say that while he was going, because he would just have looked at you and said, ‘Are you crazy? I’m Keith Moon.’”

“Moon could not have grown old gracefully,” says Bill Curbishley. “And he could not have led a normal life. So rather than fade away into normality, Moon had to die.”

Put like that, it could be said that he martyred himself to an out-dated image of rock’n’roll – that had no right to demand such a sacrifice.

But it could not be said that he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. “I know I’ve had about 78 lives already,” Keith once said, “but I never think about my own mortality. Immortality I consider.”

If he was making it clear he would like to have lived longer, his greater determination was evidently to live forever. The Faustian bargain rarely allows you to have it both ways.

O
n August 1, 1978, an exhibition of Who memorabilia curated by the group’s fans opened at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace in London. It was perhaps inevitable that members of the band would turn up to the opening. Their presence brought the process full circle: if the Who meant so much to their fans that the audience should mount an exhibition, then it followed that the fans meant so much to the Who that the band would want to see it.

So it came about that both Pete Townshend and Keith Moon immersed themselves among the hundreds of diehard Who worshippers that first day of ‘Who’s Who’ to make their way around the exhibition, pausing to talk with the audience along the way.

To a 14-year-old fanzine writer, who had identified with the Who since first discovering pop music, and had attended the group’s last London stadium show as an excited 12-year-old, being in the same room as Pete and Keith was a significant moment. Like many others throwing nervous glances his heroes’ way, he respected them enough to grant them their privacy, but still he wanted an autograph, a chance to talk. While studying a bizarre life-size hologram of Keith Moon at the drums, the boy turned to find the real thing standing next to him. Keith looked shorter in real life, and somewhat chubbier. But it was unmistakably him: the hologram had obviously been based on a recent picture or film. The boy made a comment about the surreal situation, looking at an illusion while standing next to the real thing, and the rock star, quietly, in contrast to his larger-than-life reputation, said something in agreement. The boy then seized his moment. He pulled from his sports bag a lone copy of the fanzine he produced and asked Keith Moon to autograph a basic biography on the Who he had written for it.

The drummer looked at the cheaply produced fanzine, checked the cover to register the name –
Jamming! –
examined the boy’s face, and said, “I don’t think I’ve seen this one.”

‘You wouldn’t have,’ thought the boy, given that there were only 100 copies in existence, and those mainly sold at his school. “It’s my own magazine,” he said aloud.

“I’d like to read this article some time,” said the rock star with evident sincerity.

“You can keep it if you want,” replied the boy, eager to please.

“No, you want it autographed,” said Moon, signing his name across the page with a flourish. “Tell you what, though.” He produced a slip of paper from an inside pocket and scribbled an address in Mayfair on it. “Here’s where I live,” he said as he handed it to the incredulous 14-year-old. “Come and see me. Bring a copy of your magazine with you. Any time’s fine by me.”

A week or so after meeting his hero, the 14-year-old boy made his way nervously to a plush apartment building in London’s Mayfair. He carried the star’s address in his pocket: Flat 9, 12 Curzon Place, London W1. He did not know if he possessed the courage. It didn’t make sense his being invited around like that; it was hardly as if someone so popular could be lonely for company. With no security to stop him, he made his way to the fourth floor. His heart in his mouth, he approached Flat 9 with his magazine under his arm and knocked quietly. He thought he could hear music, yet from which apartment he was not sure. He knocked again, a little louder this time. But there was no reply. He slipped the magazine under the door along with an appreciative note bearing his own phone number and address. He didn’t really expect to hear back from his hero.

And he never did. Just a couple of weeks later, Keith Moon died in that same Mayfair apartment.

I cried when I learned of Keith Moon’s death: on Capital Radio at 9pm, at the start of Nicky Horne’s show, as I vividly recall, late that Thursday evening of September 7. (At 10pm every night, I would turn religiously to John Peel on Radio 1.) It was the first time anybody’s death had ever hit me personally, and it affected me in much deeper ways than I believe my family could understand at the time. To them he was just another alcoholic rock star, pissing away his limited talent and excess wealth, and indeed there was an ugly scene at a cousin’s communion shortly thereafter, when an aunt dared to insult the dead drummer for the general debauchery and lack of morals she had read about in a middle-class tabloid and I jumped passionately to my dead hero’s defence. For me, Keith Moon had been more than just a world-famous rock star, more than simply a brilliant drummer, more even than the most irrepressible and carefree character of rock’n’roll’s last (and British rock’s first) 15 years. He had been a human being, an approachable, affable man who had never forgotten what it was like to be a fan or a dreamer. More than that, for those few minutes that August on the Mall, he had been as a friend.

T
he first edition of
Dear Boy
was published precisely twenty years after Keith Moon’s death. This was less a matter of cold calculation than cool circumstance: I worked on the book for years, and when I finally finished writing it, my UK editor saw that the likely publication date would fall so close to the unfortunate anniversary of Keith’s death that it may as well be rendered exact.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one looking to mark Keith’s death by honouring his life. The same week that
Dear Boy
was published, in early September 1998, a Who fans’ convention – only the second of its kind – was held in central London; and
Mojo
magazine made Keith its cover star while running a lengthy story on him inside. With
Dear Boy
receiving substantial coverage in the national press, then for a while that September, Keith Moon seemed to be everywhere in the media, just as when he was alive. And at the very moment it appeared that he would slide from public view … interest in Keith Moon kept growing.

In America, Keith “starred” in a regularly repeated episode of the memorable VH1 series
Behind The Music.
In the UK, Channel 4 commissioned a similar, though more sensationalist, documentary called
The Real Keith Moon.
Radio 2 (yes, Radio 2) led off its Real Wild Child series with a profile on Keith. And then BBC2 decided that Keith was worthy of profile in a series called
Real Lives
, though his episode was abruptly pulled when Pete Townshend was arrested over the matter of illegal Internet downloads.
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