Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (36 page)

“I asked him what the reason was. He said, ‘Well, you used another drummer on ‘Substitute’. That’s not me playing the drums.’ I was like ‘What are you doing? Are you still on the pills?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘It’s the fucking pills getting you paranoid. We’re not getting a new drummer. I was there when you played ‘Substitute’ and you were there, you’re the only drummer I know who screams when he does a difficult drum break and that’s you screaming.’ He couldn’t remember, he was so out of it, he couldn’t remember playing ‘Substitute’.”

Aside from screaming as he played, there was probably also no other drummer who would have doubled up on John’s bass throughout the chorus as Keith did, playing a constant eighth-beat kick drum that served to emphasise the repetitive nature of the lyrics, all adolescent insecurity hiding behind pill-popping bravado. (A fitting description for Keith himself, too.) Towards the end of the song, during a double chorus, these kick drums lurch forward in an ever building crescendo, bypassing invited opportunities for drum rolls that lesser players might have opted for, instead speeding up the tempo slightly to drive home the urgency of the matter, so that the young listener, already revelling in a lyric that emotes teenage turmoil, feels almost as though the band is banging its head against the wall in shared teenage frustration. As the song finally concludes, Keith leans into a flourish of cymbals and the briefest of tom-tom rolls as though noting his own exhaustion but ultimate survival.

In the search for a cleaner, more defined sound, however, the drums were moved further back in the mix than Talmy would likely have favoured, and for the first time a distinct Townshend riff was played on acoustic rather than electric guitar. But if ‘Substitute’ was less of a raw rock sound than had been exhibited on the
My Generation
album then it was still a superb example of Townshend’s continued growth as a songwriter and, despite the legal injunctions by Talmy and attempted sabotage by A Legal Matter’ (which stalled outside the top 30), ‘Substitute’ made number five on the British pop charts. In America it was duly released on Ateo as part of Polydor’s new deal with Atlantic, the experienced rhythm & blues label from which the Who expected great things. It flopped ignominiously.

From the beginning of 1966 the Who directed the anger that had provoked Pete and Keith to wreck their equipment on (very) rare occasions since back in 1964 into an integral part of the live performance. At the conclusion of ‘My Generation’ every night, Pete Townshend would start poking his (usually hollowed-out) speaker cabinet with the neck of his guitar or bounce the entire instrument on the floor, and as the instrument screamed in apparent pain, Keith would wrestle his drums ever more energetically, until in the final moments of mayhem, Townshend would lift his guitar by the neck and smash it into pieces on the floor or against his amplifiers, and Keith would kick over his drums in a flurry of apparent fury, usually leaving just a snare or a cymbal on which to create some final noise before retiring from the stage in a haze of smoke and a caterwaul of feedback.

For teenagers with more pent-up aggression than they knew what to do with, it was glorious stuff, just the kind of anarchic behaviour with which to rile their parents. For the more staid members of the Who’s audience, the effect was horrifying. Playing Liverpool in February, Keith was reunited with his former best friend Gerry Evans, who had been sent by his employers to work in the home town of British beat music. “It was packed out with 2,000 students, and it was unbelievable,” Evans recalled of the show at the university. “‘Cos when they destroyed the equipment at the end, he threw his drums right out into the audience. The audience was completely packed, there were all these people crushed up against the stage, and the bass drum has got spurs on it, that are sharp, and he couldn’t have cared less. He could have killed someone or at least poked somebody in the eye. I was horrified, but that was their act.” It certainly was, and although it disturbed a considerable number of other straight-edged people along the way who had never seen anything quite so nihilistic in their lives, in those negative responses it achieved exactly the same as it did among those who adored it: a reaction to ensure that, in a world of here-today gone-tomorrow pop groups, the Who would never be forgotten.

The introduction of the Beach Boys’ current hit ‘Barbara Ann’ into the Who’s set, on their first substantial theatre package tour in April, with Keith taking the lead vocals (the others having to harmonise over almost all of them to cover up his complete lack of pitch), only served to greater concentrate the spotlight on the drummer’s stool. For Keith, as well as a chance to sing, the song’s inclusion represented a major victory in his determination to turn the group on to surf sounds. For the others, the inclusion of the Beach Boys’ ongoing hit single seemed less like a reversion to the Who’s days as a covers act than a simple case of tossing a bone to an eager puppy who bounced up and down on his drum kit in gratitude.

Among the support groups on that April tour were the Merseys (a truncated Merseybeats both by name and line-up), the Spencer Davis Group and a couple of Keith’s Wembley contemporaries: singer Paul Dean and, as drummer for the Jimmy Cliff Sound, Phil Wainman. “Phil Wainman was the famous drummer in the area,” Gerry Evans recalled of growing up around Wembley. “He was the first drummer we ever saw with two bass drums. But he was a rich boy.” Keith eventually met Phil while hanging out at Jim Marshall’s store in Hanwell, where most west London professional musicians spent their spare time, and they formed a friendship, occasionally playing together on the display kits at Marshall’s while the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page jammed on guitars in the satellite store across the street.

But if Keith was not jealous of Phil Wainman back when they met, he certainly was when they came to tour together. For Phil Wainman did indeed have two bass drums. The support band had a bigger drum kit than he did. And if there was one thing Keith Moon hated, it was being upstaged.

Fortunately for Moon, he was already tight with Wainman. “He was ever such a regular bloke,” recalls the fellow drummer. “He couldn’t believe his luck. It was like, ‘Bloody hell, look what I’ve done.’ He never came across as ‘I’m better than you’ or Aren’t I great?’ He was like a puppy, always his tail wagging…. He’d chase you around, and he’d follow you and he’d bite your leg and he’d grab you round the neck. He was fabulous.” After a couple of shows together, Keith asked to borrow part of Phil’s kit.

But Wainman had seen what it was Moon did with his drums at the end of the set, and being among the vast majority of musicians who treated his equipment with loving reverence, he refused.

“Look, I’ll make you a bargain,” said Keith. “Just lend me the left-hand side of your kit, and I promise you I won’t harm it.”

Keith could be so persuasive that it was easier to agree with him and hope for the best. Wainman reluctantly lent his friend half his treasured kit. To his subsequent astonishment, at the end of the show, while Townshend destroyed his guitar, Keith Moon knocked over every one of the drums on his right-hand side, while on his left-hand side, “There was my part of the kit, still on stage, absolutely pristine.”

As Roy Carr had discovered a year earlier in a similar situation, Keith’s on-stage aggression was largely an act. The boy got the greatest thrill on earth kicking his drums across the stage, twirling and throwing his sticks, even launching part of his kit into the audience, but he was almost always in control of the situation. Just like the great jazz drummers who had instigated the showmanship that Keith had long ago incorporated into his stage act, it was all for effect, at least on his part. “This ‘being angry at the adult world’ bit is not all of us,” Keith admitted at the time. “It’s not me and it’s not John. It’s only half Roger, but it
is
Pete.” Still, the effect worked. In a pop world where drummers had traditionally been little heard and rarely seen, Keith Moon was impossible to avoid.

At the end of the tour Keith put his notoriety to immediate use, demanding, and with the aid of a first sponsorship deal from Premier Drums getting, a new custom-made kit in a sparkle red. It was twice the size of his old one, consisting of two floor toms, two hang toms, and no fewer than four crash cymbals. Astute observers and fellow musicians quickly noted that Keith, alone perhaps of all the drummers of his generation, opted to go without a hi-hat cymbal on his new kit. There was a reason for this: the left foot that normally operated the hi-hat pedal was now playing a second bass drum. From this moment on, audiences seeing the band for the first time would stare in disbelief at a kit that seemed to stretch halfway across the stage, the two bass drums set at a slight angle from each other, the word ‘the’ painted on one outer skin, ‘Who’ painted on the other, each in 18-inch high lettering. Keith Moon would never be up-staged by a bigger drum kit again.

Not that he treated his new kit with any more respect than he did his old one. Night after night it went into the audience. A defining moment in the development of the on-stage destruction occurred on May 1 during the
NME
Poll Winners concert at Wembley Empire Pool. Keith had first appeared at this pinnacle of home-town venues – indeed, the biggest in the country – six months back, as part of a student ‘Glad Rag Ball’ during which Roger Daltrey had thrown a fit at the quality of the PA and refused to continue playing until the Who’s own equipment was installed. The Who, the singer had clearly been signifying to the other groups as much as the audience, were not your common or garden beat band that could suffice with any old equipment.

The stakes were even higher at the
NME
concert. It was a definitive moment for British music, a temporary coming together of every notable act in the country before they diverged, some progressing into rock bands that would give the music the depth required to take it into another decade, others to tread water as pop groups, garnering sporadic hits over the next couple of years until they eventually faded into the oldies circuit or broke up completely. The line-up at Wembley that day was staggering in its depth and quality and as a celebration of the swinging Sixties at the very axis of the decade, it was never to be rivalled. Performing brief 15 minute sets were the Yardbirds, the Small Faces, Herman’s Hermits, the Walker Brothers, Cliff Richard, the Shadows and Roy Orbison to name just
some
of those actually remembered by future generations. And they were only the warm-up bands.

“The last three acts were the Who, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles,” recalls Chris Stamp. (Though no one knew it on the day, this was to be the Beatles’ last ever UK concert.) “The Who by this time were very into their Union Jack period and looking incredible. Pete did his feedback thing and we had smoke bombs going off. And we did this destructive ending with Pete’s guitar. And Keith, who had knocked over a few drums here and there, really went for it. It came from his head. He did a huge thing with the drums, I think they even fell off the stage, he made a huge mess. He did it to be with Pete, to top Pete, and to also make the Who’s presence felt, make sure the Stones and the Beatles had to follow
this.”

The occasion, subsequently broadcast on regional television, meant that the Who also had to follow their self-created reputation as an incendiary live act, had to now meet on a nightly basis the expectations of an audience that came to see them destroy their equipment for the same nefarious thrill that draws people to car crashes and executions. Keith Moon, more than anyone, was happy to live up to these expectations. He was all for the Who’s show to be bigger and bolder than anyone else. He loved the attention it brought. “I don’t know why we do it,” he said towards the end of the year. “I suppose it’s just animal instinct.”

It was also expensive. “We had some fairly heavy repair bills,” says Neville Chester, the group’s road manager at the time. “I heard lots of murmuring back at the office about Keith: ‘It’s cost £200 to repair this stuff Pete was always the head of the band so it was justified if he destroyed something, he wasn’t answerable. Whereas Keith was considered the madman.” The outcome, according to Chester, was that Moon was frequently told, ‘You’re just going to have to stop breaking stuff up.’

It wasn’t in his nature. It was too much fun. The Who appeared to have finally found the perfect outlet for all their anger and aggravation, their dislike and even distrust of each other, and if the fact that it was manifested at the end of every show in clouds of smoke and flying equipment put them in debt, so be it. The publicity more than made up for it.