Read Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon Online
Authors: Tony Fletcher
Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (65 page)
(Top © Mirror Syndication International, bottom © LFI)
Domestic bliss at Highgate with wife Kim and daughter Mandy (and pet fox), but the champagne bottle in the wall – thrown at Kim – betrays the underside of the Moon’s personal life. “Every time I left, then the Keith I originally knew and loved and got on with and could rationalise with and could talk to would come to me and then I’d go back. And then all these other Keiths would come out – the violent one, the thoughtless one, the aggressive one.”
(Top © Mirror Syndication International, bottom © LFI)
“He was a star.” said Keith’s wife Kim. “And he illuminated so many other lives.”
(© Elliott Landy, Star Tile)
Left: Keith adored Who fans and was always willing to sign autographs. “Keith was the greatest, the most flamboyant and extrovert of rock stars… but he was also the most committed of fans.”
(© Pictorial Press)
Right: Keith with chauffeur Neil Boland, at the War Is Over Concert with John and Yoko, London Lyceum, December 15, 1969. Boland died two weeks later under the wheels of Keith’s Bentley.
(© Barry Plummer)
So, at least, the story goes. Any of the three anecdotes are equally plausible when one takes into account Keith’s potential for self-inflicted calamities. Though Keith could hardly shrug off this latest injury, he appeared typically nonchalant about it, showing up for a
Top Of The Pops
special on December 30 that would be broadcast over New Year’s Eve. Performing on a transparent drum kit he had acquired in Kansas (never as good to the ear as it was to the eye, it was only ever used on television), he employed Viv Stanshall to stand behind him and pull on a rope attached to his right wrist whenever they thought the camera was on him. It looked preposterous, but then what else in Keith’s life was new?
43
This concert was issued as both a double CD (by Castle/Legacy) and a home video (Warner Music Vision) in 1997, entitled
Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970.
44
Keith also brought an American comedian called Murray Roman to the Track label. Roman was in his thirties, specialising in a bold, sexual New York Jewish dope humour, and he was Keith’s vanity project at the label. And Keith and John had been trying to produce or manage groups for years – they worked with car dealer John Mason on a band called the Brood in ’67 and, inexplicably, on a pretentious progressive act heavy on the Indian mantras called Quintessence in ’69 – but it really wasn’t their forte. Keith was better off in the field of comedy. Murray Roman made two albums for Track, and he came over to England to tour and compere some of the festivals in the early Seventies, Moon usually alongside him. The festival audiences found Roman funny, but they usually found Keith Moon funnier.
45
Chester was one of four people recounting memories in this chapter alone to have likened the daily world of Keith Moon to that which the rest of us would witness only on a movie or television programme. It seems no surprise then that Keith ultimately became confused about his personality when his reality was for most observers a fiction.
21T
he opening line of scripted dialogue for Frank Zappa’s movie
200 Motels
, subtitled
Life On The Road
, was this: “Touring can make you crazy.” There were few rock’n’rollers on the planet who knew it better than Keith Moon. So when the American iconoclast Zappa, having moved over to the UK in December 1970 to set up the shoot for the movie, observed Moon looning about at the Speakeasy one night, he realised he was watching a perfect member for his cast. “How d’you like to be in a film?” he asked the Who’s drummer.
How could Keith
not
like to? He had spent the best part of the last year dressing up on a whim and acting out improv. parts around the streets and highways of Great Britain for his own amusement. The opportunity to do so on screen, especially for someone as similarly unorthodox as Zappa, was a dream come true. Furthermore, the film that Zappa had raised a budget of $630,000 from United Artists for, while meticulously scripted and scored, required participants who understood what it meant to find oneself in ‘Centerville, USA’ night after night, where rednecks and nuclear families often tried to drive the long-haired freaks out of town, where groupies inexplicably threw themselves at travelling Englishmen’s smelly feet, where serious musicians worried that they were denigrating themselves, and life was frequently reduced to getting paid, getting laid, getting stoned and getting the hell out of Dodge. People like Keith.
200 Motels
was a film about madness made in an atmosphere
of
madness.
46
Frank Zappa, for example, was too busy directing the movie to star in it; he was played by Ringo Starr. Fronting the Mothers of Invention as vocalists were Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, the two former singers for the Turtles who Keith had met in New York in ’67 (and then welcomed to London later that year); they were going through contractual difficulties over using their real names at the time, and were alternately known as the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie, after two of the Turtles’ roadies. Indeed, it was Kaylan’s experiences with a groupie at the height of his pop stardom that provided a vital part of the storyline to
200 Motels;
unfortunately the allotted seven days of filming concluded before this, or other important parts of the script, could be elucidated.
Performing complex avant-garde orchestral arrangements behind the Mothers was the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – although two of its trumpet players resigned from the project after the first rehearsal, offended at the script’s obsession with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, as if they thought there was anything else involved in a touring musician’s life.
The only mainstream actor involved, Theodore Bikel, his role a bizarre cross between a security guard, a TV compere and a narrator, was equally put out by the script, in particular his required use of the word ‘penis’, which he only agreed to utter off-camera. But at least he stayed involved in the project throughout. The Mothers’ bass player Jeff Simmons quit halfway through script readings, when he came upon a scene in which the Mothers castigated Zappa for recording their conversations – and, seeing lines he had recently spoken in real life (about Zappa being too old, and about himself not being taken seriously as a musician anymore in this ‘comedy group’), realised that Zappa had already done so. He there and then quit the group and flew home to America. Noel Redding was suggested as his replacement, but Zappa instead hired Wilfred Bramble, the ageing British comedy actor who had played Paul McCartney’s grandfather in
A Hard Day’s Night.
Bramble then quit amidst total confusion on the final day of rehearsals. With just hours to go before the cameras started rolling, Zappa announced to his perturbed gathered cast that the next person to walk through the dressing room door would have the part; Ringo’s young driver Martin Lickert came in at that moment and found himself starring in a movie the next morning.
Playing the part of groupies were Miss Lucy (Offerall) of the all-girl group the GTOs that Zappa had previously assembled from the coterie of real Los Angeles groupies, and Janet Ferguson, another Zappa protégé. Playing the part of a feckless journalist and niece to Bikel, kitted out in fetish leather, was another GTO, the winsome blonde Miss Pamela (Miller).