Keith Moon

Keith Moon: The Drummer Who Refused to Keep Time

His art teacher at Alperton Secondary Modern filed a verdict that has outlived most published criticism: "Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects." The music teacher spotted the talent, and warned him against showing off. Both men were right, and Moon spent the next twenty years ignoring the second half of the advice. *Rolling Stone* would eventually rank him the second-greatest drummer in the history of rock.

Alperton, and Ten Shillings a Lesson

Keith John Moon was born on 23 August 1946 at Central Middlesex Hospital and grew up on Chaplin Road, Wembley, a hyperactive child. He failed the eleven-plus. He joined the Sea Cadet Corps band at twelve, on bugle before switching to drums, practised at Macari's Musical Exchange on Ealing Road and took lessons from Carlo Little at ten shillings a time. What he listened to explains much of it: Gene Krupa, rhythm and blues, and above all surf music and the Beach Boys, whose session drummer Hal Blaine shaped his phrasing. He said later he would have left the Who for the Beach Boys even at the height of the band's fame.

The Audition

The Beachcombers, a semi-professional London covers band he joined in December 1962, he immediately turned theatrical, at one point "shooting" the singer with a starter pistol. In April 1964 he turned up at a Who show dressed in ginger with his hair dyed to match, had several drinks, sat in on "Road Runner," and broke the bass drum pedal and the skins. Pete Townshend told him to come to Monday's gig. Moon maintained no one ever formally asked him to join; he told Ringo Starr he had been "just filling in for the last fifteen years."

The Method

He built a kit no one had used before: two sets of tom-toms, double bass drums — a configuration he and Ginger Baker pioneered independently — an ever-expanding Premier setup endorsed from late 1965, and, early on, no hi-hat at all. What he did with it was stranger than the hardware. Instead of moving linearly around the kit he zig-zagged across it, treating toms and crashes as the primary voice and letting the pulse look after itself. His fills never repeated; *DRUM!* magazine notes that on "Who Are You" he changes them measure to measure. Underneath the apparent chaos ran eighth notes of varying volume on the bass drum and ghost notes on the snare — felt rather than heard. Critics said he could not keep time. The producer Jon Astley put it best: "You didn't think he was keeping time, but he was." He refused to play drum solos, calling them boring.

Auto-Destruction

It started at the Railway Tavern in Harrow: Townshend accidentally broke a guitar, deliberately finished the job, and Moon kicked over his kit. It became the act. He got through some $300 of drum skins a show. Premier's Eddie Haynes noted that he wrecked things carefully: the kit rarely needed repair, though stands and pedals went "like a knife through butter." On *The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour* in 1967 he bribed a stagehand to load roughly ten times the usual charge of gunpowder into his bass drum. The explosion singed Townshend's hair and put cymbal fragments in Moon's arm, and the footage later opened *The Kids Are Alright*. Entwistle estimated the band lost around £150,000 in the 1960s to breakage. On his twenty-first birthday, in Flint, Michigan, a Holiday Inn party degenerated into a food fight that cost him a tooth — extracted without anaesthetic, because he was too drunk to be given any — fire extinguishers, bodies in the pool and police arriving with guns drawn. The bill came to $24,000.

What He Actually Contributed

He played on every Who album from *My Generation* (1965) to *Who Are You* (1978), and wrote or co-wrote "I Need You," "Cobwebs and Strange," "In the City" with John Entwistle, "Girl's Eyes" and "Waspman." It was Moon who suggested that Dave Arbus play the violin solo on "Baba O'Riley." He played timpani on Jeff Beck's "Beck's Bolero," credited as "You Know Who," and sang backing vocals on the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love." He acted — *That'll Be the Day*, *Stardust*, Uncle Ernie in Ken Russell's *Tommy* — and made one solo album, *Two Sides of the Moon* (1975), on which other people did the drumming. Dave Marsh in *Rolling Stone*: "There isn't any legitimate reason for this album's existence."

Neil Boland, and the Long Decline

On 4 January 1970, outside the Red Lion in Hatfield, Moon was drunk and trying to escape pub patrons attacking his Bentley when he ran over and killed Neil Boland, his driver and friend. The coroner ruled it accidental and Moon was given an absolute discharge. He never got over it; he told people he had no right to be alive. His marriage to Kim Kerrigan, whom he wed in 1966 and with whom he had a daughter, Amanda, collapsed in 1973 — he could be violent toward her — and Dave Marsh believed he never recovered from losing them. The drinking, which David Puttnam watched go "from being a joke to being a problem," took the playing with it. At the Cow Palace in 1973 he passed out twice on stage and a member of the audience, Scot Halpin, finished the show. In Boston in 1976 he passed out after two numbers, then destroyed his hotel room and cut himself so badly that doctors told his manager he would have bled to death. By September 1978 a roadie watched him at an overdub session get "more and more sluggish" until "he could barely hold a drum stick."

Why Keith Is Called a Genius

Moon's claim rests on a single structural idea, and it is a real one. Rock drumming keeps time; Moon decided the kit was a lead instrument. He played a continuous melodic commentary underneath the song — toms and cymbals foregrounded, fills that never repeat, phrases zig-zagging across the kit instead of travelling round it — while the pulse ran almost subliminally in bass-drum eighth notes of shifting volume and snare ghost notes you feel rather than hear. That is composition, not incompetence, and Astley's remark is the proof: "You didn't think he was keeping time, but he was." Ray Davies's tribute at the Kinks' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction was exact — "Keith Moon changed the sound of drumming."

The honest counter-case starts with the fact that this was instinct and nerve rather than intellect: no system, nothing teachable, which is why nobody has copied him. His tempo genuinely moved with his mood, so the band had to follow the drummer rather than the reverse. His peak lasted little more than a decade before alcohol destroyed the playing outright. And a great deal of the legend is behaviour, not music: the gunpowder, the hotel plumbing, "Moon the Loon" — a persona that sold records, obscured the drumming, and killed him at thirty-two. The music is the argument. The rest is the wreckage.

Legacy

He died on 7 September 1978 in a Mayfair flat rented from Harry Nilsson, in which Cass Elliot had died four years earlier — Townshend had assured Nilsson that lightning would not strike twice. Prescribed clomethiazole for alcohol withdrawal by a doctor unaware of how he lived, Moon took thirty-two tablets; twenty-six were still undigested. English Heritage refused him a blue plaque in 2008, ruling that "bad behaviour and overdosing on various substances wasn't a sufficient qualification"; the UK Heritage Foundation put one up anyway in March 2009, with Daltrey, Townshend and his mother present. The Muppets' Animal is widely thought to be modelled on him. The Who's drummer for nearly three decades was Zak Starkey, who as a small boy had been given a drum kit by Keith Moon.

Achievements

• Instruments: drum kit and voice
• Genres: rock music, art rock and hard rock