Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (20 page)

But if Keith had finally found kindred rebellious spirits, similar in range of age, location and musical ambition, he couldn’t find a way to tell them, just as they couldn’t bring themselves to formally say, “Hey, you’re one of us.” Years later, in a wonderfully revealing interview with Jerry Hopkins of
Rolling Stone
, Keith admitted that as in many a great marriage, instant attraction also made for immediate tension. “I always loved the boys,” he said. “But in the early days it was a bit difficult to get across, because we were all wary of each other.”

Keith’s greatest problems were with Roger Daltrey. They were like chalk and cheese. Even their one shared endowment – height, each of them topping off at five-foot-eight – they handled differently. While Moon always treated his limited size as an excuse to act childish and play the jester’s role, Roger reacted to his own shortness by proving he was physically tough enough to combat it. While Keith happily laughed his way in and out of trouble, Roger preferred to fight his way through it. While Keith was still just discovering the opposite sex, Roger, who had turned 20 that March 1 and was therefore the oldest in the group, had a reputation as an experienced womaniser. (Still, it looked as if those days might be over: his girlfriend Jackie was pregnant and pregnancy meant marriage. Keith couldn’t contemplate getting hitched so young.) Roger was solid working class, with a job welding sheet metal by day, but he was intelligent, too. He’d passed his 11 -plus and been sent straight to the top stream of his grammar school, which made Keith the only member of the Who to have suffered the ignominy of attending secondary modern. A skiffle and rock’n’roll fanatic since he’d been in short trousers, Roger had put the Detours together at Acton Grammar School, recruiting John and then Pete from other groups in the year beneath him. He’d chosen their clothes and set list, he’d bought the van and done the driving. He was the Detours’ boss.

But the Detours didn’t exist any longer. And now that it was the Who, Daltrey had growing competition for leadership. Pete Townshend had been a student at the famously progressive Ealing Art School for almost three years by the time he turned 19 on May 19, 1964, and the Who were clearly the long-term project to which he was devoting his creativity. Sometimes his endeavours failed – like the leather capes that the others were refusing to wear (though word got back to the Who that Keith Moon was seen wearing
his
while still playing with the Beachcombers, which pissed them off no end). More often the ideas worked, like the on-stage guitar feedback he was experimenting with, or the choice of material he was pushing, both of which helped distinguish the Who from other R&B acts. Townshend had the additional advantage of being able to clearly articulate his creativity while Daltrey could only punctuate his own with punches, and Moon’s allegiance was evident from the outset: in Pete, Keith saw a leader of the kind the Beachcombers had lacked, someone who could take a band forward. No one knew where or quite how – the future of rock’n’roll wasn’t self-evident and Pete wasn’t a songwriter – but Keith had faith. Yet he was also wary of the guitarist. Townshend smoked too much illegal marijuana, which Keith tried and didn’t like: it made him drowsy and lose concentration. And Pete could be a surly bastard who showed no remorse as to the effects of his particularly harsh tongue. Although Keith’s insolence was renowned throughout Wembley, he tried never to use it on those he respected or cared for, and yet here was Pete constantly lashing out verbally at the very people he accepted as his creative family. Not used to being bad-mouthed, Keith burrowed away at finding a weak spot in Townshend, until eventually people began noting that Pete could occasionally be seen laughing when Keith was with him – a distinct improvement on his demeanour around anyone else.

As for John Entwistle, who would be turning 20 that coming October, the bass player was something of an enigma. He stood stock still on stage, and rarely spoke unless spoken to, but his musicianship was clearly the most proficient in the band. And although he appeared to many to be the shy and retiring type, Keith discovered that the man who worked quietly at a tax office by day was by night a born ‘raver’ with a penchant for the practical joke. In John, then, Keith immediately found his foil, the straight guy he was going to need to partner with if life was to be remotely as much fun as it had been in the Beachcombers.

Keith’s insecurities about being the new boy were of course compounded by his status as the youngest member: he joined the Who when he was 17 and the others all 19 and 20. But the gap was not quite as large as it needed to seem: Townshend and Entwistle were only one school year above Moon and given that they had stayed on at Acton Grammar through a fifth year, that meant all three had gone into the adult world at the same time, Easter 1961. Factor in that Townshend had assiduously avoided employment, heading straight for art school, and you could argue that Keith knew more about the real world than even the guitarist: certainly he had greater job experience and he had had every bit as thorough a gigging background. Nevertheless, Keith felt intimidated by his new partners: Pete obviously had intelligence over him (and a steady girlfriend from art school, Karen Astley), John had common sense (and a steady girlfriend, Alison Wise), and both had the cultural advantage of a middle-class education. Roger had age, a wife and a kid on the way, a working-class chip on his shoulder, a middle-class education,
and
a violent streak to cap it off with. Who could blame Keith if he felt inwardly insecure – and therefore, acted so outwardly confident – in such company?

His three new band members weren’t the only people with whom Keith needed to become acquainted. There was the manager, Helmut Görden, who called the boys “my little diamonds” and knew as much about rock’n’roll as Keith’s dad. Having Görden around was like being back at school with a form teacher who had no idea of your real identity or what you wanted to do with your life but patronised you all the same: the archetypal authority figure that Keith hated. Keith would have complained about it publicly, but it was obvious the others felt the same way too. Görden evidently wasn’t long for the Who’s world. His newly hired publicist, Pete Meaden, who came into the picture almost the exact moment the line-up settled with Keith’s arrival, seemed to be the one in control.

Pete Meaden is a fabled figure in rock’n’roll history, and deservedly so, less for his fleeting involvement with the fledgling Who than for coining the most succinct and oft-quoted definition of mod, the culture which ruled his short life. He called it “an euphemism for clean living under difficult circumstances”.

Mods became a national phenomenon overnight in late March ’64, when several hundred of them travelled from London to the seaside resort of Clacton for the Easter weekend, became exasperated with the cold weather, the shuttered shops, and the rundown sea front (they were mods after all, reared on European style and American culture, each as common in Clacton as Martians) and in their attempts to create some entertainment for themselves, provoked the police into a confrontation. It was kids’ stuff really, but a sensation-hungry British media latched on to it as the British media is so adept at doing, and come the next Bank Holiday, Whitsun Monday on May 18 (almost the exact time Keith auditioned for the Who), riots broke out in Brighton, Margate and Bournemouth. These were seriously violent affrays involving easily identifiable opponents for the mods (the leather-clad rockers who were a hangover from the Fifties) and they were preserved forever on newsreel and tabloid front pages, the media ready and waiting on the beaches with their cameras, as sure an incentive to riot as any testosterone-riddled teenager ever requires. For the first time since the Teddy boys of nearly a decade earlier, a genuine British youth cult had emerged, seemingly from out of nowhere, to strike terror into the hearts of the Establishment.

The Bank Holiday riots were the end of mod as any kind of closely kept secret, but as rapidly as its trend-setting leaders – the ‘faces’ – dropped off the scene in disgust at seeing it co-opted by the uncultured and violent masses, so less-disciplined wanna-be mods filled the newly vacant positions at the bottom of the hierarchy ten times over. Mod went from being an underground collective of regional cliques to a national (or at least southern) mass movement in a matter of weeks, and for those in the business of selling dreams to a well-financed generation of youth, that mass market reeked of money.

Whether Pete Meaden, an obsessive mod in every respect, was driven by the prospect of wealth or some higher goal has never been fully clarified. Certainly he was an entrepreneur. As a publicist for the Rolling Stones, he had seen that group initially accepted by London mods for their purity of rhythm & blues, and then dropped for being too shabby, too damn dirty. In the months since parting company with the Stones, Meaden, who had also been a publicist for Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and Geòrgie Fame, had searched for a band he could cultívate to his own designs. Mods listened to all kinds of music, he noted, from American soul to R&B to modern jazz, effectively anything with black roots that expressed genuine emotion and carried a beat, but with the possible exception of Geòrgie Fame and the Blue Flames, there was no British group they cared to follow. Neither the white-bread mop-tops of the Mersey Beat generation nor the unkempt purveyors of the new British blues appealed sufficiently to the mod
esprit de corps.
Meaden figured that if he could find a band that had the core ingredients so cherished by the mods – style, flair, attitude, that obsession to detail and a love of black American music – he could mould them as icons for a generation. The sky would be the limit. So when Meaden was asked by Görden, through the least likely of middle-men -their barber – to come and check out the Who, he took one look at the raw ingredients on stage and figured that God had dealt him the ace card.

Meaden made an immediate impression on the Who. Though he was a Londoner like them, he spoke with the slick accent and self-assurance of an American DJ, calling everyone ‘baby’ as he rattled off manifestos at the rate of a couple of hundred words a minute. He walked the talk too, looking ace face perfect at all times despite living in his barely furnished office on minimal income, and he stayed up all night attending the hip clubs of Soho as if his life depended on it (which to any self-respecting mod, was indeed the case). It was clear his energy and motivation and confidence were all fed by an amphetamine habit, but once the band members joined in on the pill-popping – with the notable exception of Daltrey, wary of the effect the drugs had on his throat – they too began to share his enthusiasm and excitement. It was difficult not to be confident on uppers. Given that the Who were already popular among west London mods for their electric renditions of R&B classics, it didn’t seem such a leap into the unknown to place their wholehearted allegiance with the biggest youth movement in ten years.

Meaden was duly given money by Görden to dress the boys according to his mod vision. That meant making Daltrey the ‘face’, and the rest of the band ‘tickets’ (regular mods). Though Daltrey was inherently resistant to having his personality interfered with, he looked quite the handsome devil in his tailored white jacket and neatly pressed black trousers, with his hair in a blond French cut, and can be seen happier with this look in some of his early press shots than he would for many a year. Of the others, Entwistle was the closest to being a rocker at heart, and initially struggled to look comfortable in his new clothes. Townshend, however, his art school education making him fully conversant with the importance of image and his interest already piqued from the clubs he attended and music he listened to, threw himself into the mod make-over heart and soul. Within weeks, he was not just wearing Ivy League jackets and button down shirts but perfecting the new dances on stage the same week they were invented in the audience.

Keith Moon, too, willingly seized Meaden’s mod handle. Although many people have stressed how little affinity Keith had for mods before joining the Who (Moon himself among them), he indisputably possessed plenty of the raw ingredients: a dedication to individual flair and style (the brown Italian box suit he’d worn back in ’61–62 was a precursor of the current mod fashions], an affinity for pills and all-night ‘raving’, naturally youthful good looks, and a fondness for the surfer’s straightforward uniform of Levi’s jeans and the new fashion of T-shirts that doubled as casual mod wear. With him it was merely a matter of tailoring these ingredients into a palatable finished product: substitute an occasional Fred Perry or striped cycling shirt for the T-shirt, throw a decent jacket on top, let his fringe fall naturally rather than lacquering it sideways as when he had first appeared to the Who, to their great dislike, and it was as if he’d been a mod for life. In many ways he had, and in many ways he always would be. There are thousands of people to this day who associate Keith Moon with the mod image more readily than they do with any other member of the Who.

As part of the group’s education, Meaden took his new charges down to Soho and introduced them to the mod ‘in’ clubs. Again Keith was not out of place – he had played the Flamingo on Wardour Street with the Beachcombers several times, sharing the stage with the great Geòrgie Fame – but he was new to the Scene, on Ham Yard, which was a veritable hive of speeding hard-core faces, and to La Discotheque, a few doors down from the Flamingo, a venue that dispensed with live music entirely, relying instead purely on records. Meaden always ensured that his boys were ‘blocked’ – speeding – when he took them out, the better to appreciate the intensity of the occasion. The other members of the Who seem to have been unaware that Keith was already highly conversant with the effect.