The legend is commonly well-known for outselling the reality. There are different instances when the legend is the reality, however obscures one other story – and Keith Moon belongs in that class.
Many, if not most, of the stuff you’ve heard about The Who drummer’s eccentricity (different descriptions can be found) are in all probability correct – however they often get in the way in which of the overriding musical reality concerning the man: that he was a drummer like no different. And to assume he was initially going to play the bugle.
Beginning out with The Who
When Moon was recruited by the fledgling Who in 1964 after passing an audition in a pub, nobody would fake that they knew how the damaging, important chemistry would develop between 4 of essentially the most cohesive forces rock music would ever see. He was by no means prone to make previous bones, but when rock stars dwell canine years, then the 14 during which Keith Moon was in all of our lives are like one other individual’s lifetime. Perhaps he’s dwelling out a quiet retirement someplace up there, or down there…as if. Staying lifeless disgracefully, extra seemingly.
Extra significantly, it’s very uncommon to return throughout a file by The Who on which Moon is just not an important half. He was there by way of eight albums and round 35 singles, unforgettable to the final beat. For all of the abiding glory of Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey’s sensible twelfth album below the band’s identify, WHO, even they’d admit that the soul of the group was wounded past measure that unhappy evening of September 7, 1978. It’s nonetheless unimaginable to assume that Moony was simply 32 years previous.
Completely fitted to The Who
Daltrey affectionately put the world to rights about Moon’s significance to The Who in a dialog with this author in 2016. “The general perception of Keith Moon as a drummer is that he was chaotic, sloppy, but it was anything but,” stated the frontman. “It’s simply that his algorithms [he laughed as he said the word] have been just a little bit totally different, that’s all it was.
“He played with every instrument playing on stage, and he managed to make it work,” Daltrey continued. “I understand how it wasn’t four-to-the-floor rock’n’roll drumming, but for The Who, it was perfect. The entertainment from that man…the humor. I mean, looking at the audience is what the singer does, he never sees the band. But I can imagine he must have taken the piss out of me something terrible! The mind boggles.”
Considered one of Moon’s remaining appearances on digital camera was in The Who’s video for the title hit from his final album with them, Who Are You. Filmed at their Ramport Studios in Battersea, London, for the film The Youngsters Are Alright, it’s a beautiful final glimpse, capturing his playful spirit and a few heart-warming horseplay with Pete, Rog, and John Entwistle, as Moon thunders by way of his magnificent drum components together with his wayward headphones clamped to his head with duct tape.
Versatility as a drummer
No different rock drummer has ever handled their package as a lead instrument, and from 1965 the media have been saying that The Who “slaughtered their amplifiers.” However that by no means meant that Moon bludgeoned or bashed his solution to the entrance of the combination, both on stage or on file. Particularly because the group matured, and as Townshend’s writing grew ever extra nuanced and episodic (notably from the Tommy period onwards), that will quickly have caught him out. Moony may do mild and shade simply as simply as he could possibly be essentially the most exhilarating powerhouse any band ever had.
Entwistle as soon as remarked that Moon performed not back and forth, however forwards. “Keith Moon – now there’s a drummer who doesn’t believe in my policy of taking a back seat!” joked his eventual successor Kenney Jones, throughout Small Faces’ heyday of 1966. You knew what he meant, however Moon may play with detailed restraint, as on so many Who tracks, reminiscent of “I’m Free”; with full theatricality, as on “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; or, typically, with a mix of the 2 on the identical monitor – out of his mind, and again in it, on “5:15,” for instance.
“Keith was innovative, always playing the unexpected,” wrote Blondie’s Clem Burke within the foreword to 2016’s approved A Tribute To Keith Moon: There Is No Substitute. “There are such a lot of nice riffs and fills which are inspiring – simply take a look at one thing like ‘Young Man Blues’ from Reside At Leeds.
“I’ll never forget the scene in the film The Kids Are Alright – Keith’s headphones gaffered to his head playing along to the synthesizer sequence. Talk about being ahead of his time, that’s what most drummers are doing today in concert!”
One other large admirer amongst his friends was Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, who would all the time watch Moon as carefully and as typically as he may. “Bonzo” sat in on all the “Won’t Get Fooled Again” recording session. Townshend later revealed that A-list jazz drummers reminiscent of Buddy Wealthy and Tony Williams have been additionally followers.
‘I’d prefer to play Hamlet, however he wasn’t a drummer’
Moon’s apprenticeship in his native north London, with the Escorts, Mark Twain and the Strangers and the Beachcombers, meant that he hit the bottom working in his new make use of. He was the so-called mod who cherished surf music and daft humor. And has anybody ever owned their sound from the get-go the way in which that Moon does on The Who’s first single below that identify, “I Can’t Explain,” or the debut album that adopted late in that very same 12 months of 1965, My Era?
“There are many sides to Keith Moon’s strange personality,” wrote Rave journal in 1966. “One minute he’s insulting, exaggerating, joking – the next minute he’s a wide-eyed, innocent-looking drummer boy.” Three years later, author Keith Altham tried to interview him for a similar publication. It was suitably chaotic. “I’d like to play Hamlet, but he wasn’t a drummer, was he?” stated Moon.
“I suppose it could be written in that he was a drummer in his spare time – a bit of a dab hand with the sticks. Let’s face it, he must have been ’cos he had a sense of rhythm. It was a bit of a fluke that I can play drums really or that I can’t play ’em really. I’m not a great drummer. I don’t have any drumming idols – I know a few idle drummers.”
The Moon legacy
Moon did make one solo album, 1975’s Two Sides Of The Moon, however different ambitions remained unfulfilled. “I’ve no real aspirations to be a great drummer,” he stated. “I don’t want to channel all my energy into drumming, or to be a Buddy Rich. I just want to play drums for The Who, and that’s it,” he informed Chris Charlesworth in 1972. “I think a lot of my lunacy is because I want to do some film work. Pete has got his writing, John has got his writing and producing, and Roger has got his farm. My interest is into filming and videoing.”
For the entire TV units out of home windows, the blowing up of the Smothers Brothers’ set on tv and driving the hovercraft on the garden (as his daughter describes to us right here), it’s reassuring to keep in mind that, above all else, Keith Moon simply needed to play drums for The Who. For the entire sense of a life reduce brief, he did that as nobody else ever may.
“I think the word I would use to describe Keith’s drumming is ‘free’ rather than ‘anarchic’,” wrote Townshend within the introduction to There Is No Substitute. “He knew no boundaries.”
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