Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (102 page)

Still, for all that the lack of new or even recent material marked the death knell for the Who’s onstage ambition, the absence of complex pre-recorded tapes (other than on ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Baba O‘Riley’) and a general excitement at being back on stage quickly raised the performance level to that of a
pre-Quadrophenia
peak. Seemingly satisfied with their new modest requirements to merely entertain and not explain, they played with uniform energy and enthusiasm. John Wolf’s introduction of hi-tech lasers that lit up the halls at pre-ordained moments raised the emotional stakes yet higher. The Who, like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, had become living legends, a spectacle that every fan in rock music wanted to see whether or not they bought the new records. (And
The Who By Numbers
, while it sold well, did not match ticket sales.) The Who met all expectations. For the next year, they were as consistently excellent as they were constantly treated to adoration.

Throughout Europe, the Who’s support act was the Steve Gibbons Band, a Birmingham act that had been found by Pete Meaden, who himself had been discovered languishing in a mental hospital by
NME
journalist Steve Turner. Upon rehabilitation, Meaden took to the music scene with a vengeance, his contagious excitement untempered by the years. After selling Pete Townshend on Gibbons’ talent, he was encouraged into a co-management deal for his newest discoveries with Bill Curbishley. Boasting that Townshend sent him £1,000 every Christmas as thanks for his initial grooming of the Who, he also formed a record label, suitably entitled Goldhawk, with Roger Daltrey. It must have felt like sweet revenge for Meaden to be in the heart of the action again as Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp slipped into the sunset of the Who’s existence.

Keith’s own delight to be back with the boys, particularly on the road where he felt most at home, could best be measured by his enthusiasm to party. It was for that reason that he sent Annette back to Los Angeles. Although 15 months into their relationship, she had yet to see the Who perform. This suited her fine; like Kim before her, she found that Keith being on the road “gave me a breather. I could relax and retain some kind of normal life in between.” Keith immediately signalled his intentions for the forthcoming year just four dates and two cities in, while staying at an Airport Hotel outside Manchester. No place in the city itself would take them, and with good reason: Keith blew the door off the hotel bar in the middle of the night, quickly raising fellow guests with exhortations to resume drinking.

As a warning of the stop-start motion that would be the Who’s touring schedule for the next 12 months, there was a week’s break after Manchester before the next show in Glasgow. Keith booked into the Londonderry Hotel on Park Lane and hosted an ongoing party for himself, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers. Annette called from Los Angeles one day to be told by “this cantankerous old man” on the switchboard that ‘Mr Moon is at home in the country with his wife.’ “I heard later on that he had gone down to the breakfast room naked, walking around shamelessly while all these old ladies were having their bacon and eggs.”

John Walters came to meet with Keith Moon during this week, seeing for himself the ravages of the Bacchic celebration. “There was a very lightly dressed girl of German or Austrian background who had been there all night. She said, ‘Good morning’ and went off into the shower. Keith said, ‘See if you can find out her name, will you mate, I can’t remember what she’s called.’ “Walters fulfilled Keith’s request and soon the girl disappeared into the London streets with only her taxi fare and memories. The producer’s attention then turned to a hole in the alcove, which looked “as if a giant had bent down and bitten a chunk out of the wall”.

“Jesus, what happened here?” he asked Moon.

“That? Oh, I was trying to show Peter Sellers how to open a bottle of champagne without touching the cork. It involves banging it against the wall.”

If the earlier Spike Milligan association had proved false, the Sellers one was very real. And Keith, the eternal celebrity groupie, was particularly proud of fraternising with one of his all-time comic heroes. “To be an ex-Goon was to be looked up to like a rock musician,” says Walters of that period. “Keith wanted the respect of people like Peter Sellers.”

What better way to achieve it than to make a comedy album? More than two years since first discussing the idea, Moon went into the BBC Studios at Maida Vale with Walters on October 11, in the middle of his Londonderry party, in an attempt to finally get some fresh recordings down. It was the only occasion on which he did. Although the proposed album got much press coverage over the next year as Keith pre-hyped it the same way he did all his plans, hopes and fantasies, he never made himself readily available to Walters again, and the producer, something of a self-confessed dilettante himself, did not conspire to chase Moon back into the studio. The tapes of that one day’s work, recorded on the then-popular eight-track system, remain in Walters’ sole possession.

Moon returned instead to partying. At the end of the week off, the Londonderry charged him £2,000 for accommodation and an extra £1,000 to redecorate the suite – and banned him from ever staying there again. “I wrecked it totally,” Keith confessed to the press like a proud child. “Mind you, it was an incredible party.”

On October 15 and 16, the Who played the Apollo in Glasgow. On the 17th, they intended flying back to London, by regular British Airways jet, then making their own way by car up to their concerts in Leicester for the 18th and 19th. True to form, the Who did not opt for a tour bus; relations were too strained to live in that close a proximity.

But Glasgow Airport was fog-bound on the 17th, necessitating the Who join the general public on a special coach to the larger Prestwick International Airport just outside Ayr. Keith, who had earlier in the day stocked up on toy guns and itching powder, spent the long coach journey south winding up the other passengers and swigging from his bottle of brandy.

Prestwick, it transpired, was also completely fog bound – for the first time in three years. No one knew when, if at all, the plane to London would depart. Keith got more drunk and rambunctious with it. As with hotels, airports provided a perfect stage for him to perform on. “Anywhere where there were normal people he could shock,” says Peter Rudge, “we used to think to break the boredom, we’d let Keith have some fun.” Instantly recognisable in his rabbitskin fur coat as Moon the Loon in the immediate proximity of the general public, Keith did his best to keep the airport crowd entertained. Which mostly meant amusing himself.

“It was the funniest thing in the world,” says John Wolff, who laughs about it still, though he had to handle the aftermath. “It built up more and more and more. Keith pulled or pushed over a terminal to the floor, because the girl was saying, ‘There are no flights anywhere,’ so he went, ‘Well, fuck you,’ and over it went. After that, the police came from their station at the airport, and said to me and Dougal, ‘Will you please take care of this man or we’ll have to take him away to jail.’

“So he quietened down, was very contrite, because he could put on this very contrite face. You’d have to have seen it to believe it, how innocent looking he was, the wide brown eyes, the downcast look of ‘I’m sorry’, a little bit hangdoggy – but a man with growth on, debauched from the night before. He was quiet for a while, but he spotted a paraplegic’s chair, and he got into the wheelchair. He wanted to go down this flight of stairs on the wheelchair, a little bit like a Marx Brothers movie. I couldn’t believe he was going to do it. He came down the stairs, and of course it doesn’t work like it does in the movies, because in the movies they have big wheels at the front that can take a step. But this paraplegic’s chair only had two small wheels, so as soon as he went over the first step, the little wheels caught so he went straight over the top. It went like a Catherine wheel, this chair and him going over and over, with him still in the seat. As it was going down the centre there’s these old people looking up, like Aaaagh!’ People were pinning themselves up against the side to let him go by.

“So there he was lying there at the bottom, and the same police came up. ‘We warned you, you’ve got to look after this man,’ and we apologised and said it was all an accident and they swallowed it. It’s a wonder he wasn’t dead. We thought he would have to go to the hospital, but Keith got up miraculously.

“Then it went quiet again, and we waited. There were these announcements, the flight was always delayed half an hour, they’ll keep you there for three days in half hour increments. We’ve been there all day and he’s been drinking all day. Finally he went and held up this old woman at the kiosk with his toy gun, and she thought it was real, and almost died of a heart attack. He pulled the trigger and she went, ‘Oooooh’ and dropped away as this little flag came out with the word ‘Bang!’ on the end of it!

“At this point you have to pan across to the same two coppers coming out of the same cubbyhole. They marched straight over, and I’m going, ‘But…’ and they said, ‘No, not this time,’ and they each lifted an arm, and Keith’s legs were going because he couldn’t touch the ground, in this great big fur coat. It was hilarious. I think we laughed even as it was happening.

“They took him away. ‘He’s staying here, overnight.’ I said, ‘We’ve got a gig tomorrow and thousands will die because there will be a riot if the Who don’t go on …’ ‘That doesn’t matter, he’s staying here.’”

Keith was held overnight without bail on charges of breach of the peace and maliciously damaging a computer.
⁹⁵
While the band finally flew to London, Wolff and Butler stayed behind trying to arrange Moon’s release in time for the next night’s concert. True to form, Keith ordered in lobster in jail and later thanked the police for “the best night’s sleep I’ve had in many years. Everyone was terrific.”

The following morning he came up before the Ayr Sheriff’s Court in the same clothes he had worn the previous day, ‘a white silk scarf and high-heeled boots with gold stars studded all over them’. And the fur coat. Keith’s locally appointed lawyer successfully understated Keith’s behaviour the night before. “Owing to the strain of his profession he is perhaps a little less patient than other people would be.” Keith apologised for his actions and was fined £30 on each count. He was whisked from court by John Wolff, who had chartered a private plane to take him, Butler and Moon down to that night’s show in Leicester.

The publicity generated by the incident made the cost of hiring the aircraft appear almost incidental. Keith’s picture was plastered all over the Scottish papers that morning of Saturday October 18. The next day the
Sunday Mirror
ran a story under the banner headline ‘Wanted: A Jet For Mr. Moon’, Keith having spiced the press interest by insisting he would buy his own plane to travel on. “I won’t fly British Airways again,” he announced after leaving the court.

But he cheekily added that he might purchase one of their disused jets. “I don’t hold a grudge against the airline,” he said. “Maybe they were jealous because I am making a profit and they are not. I don’t mind helping them out.”

Keith insisted on his own private transport to take him back to London after the two shows in Leicester: a white Rolls Royce. Nothing else would suffice. The Who management, reminding Keith that it would come out of his own pocket, tracked one down through Sinclair Carriages, a company that regularly chauffeured the music élite. A driver called Alan Jay, six years older than Keith, came to pick Moon up from the hotel in the requested white Roller. The two men got on splendidly.

The short British tour wound up with three nights at the Wembley Empire Pool. Having spent so much of the last year abroad, away from friends and family, it was a chance to play lord of the manor again, the local boy made good. The Who’s concerts had all sold out weeks in advance; playing the bigger venues, shifting large quantities of merchandise (with the legend ‘The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World’ now cockily inscribed across the shirts), they were guaranteed a hefty profit from this, their first UK tour in two years.

But while the other Who members each banked four to five-figure sums from the two weeks’ work, Keith was presented with a cheque for £47.35. By the time his stay at the Londonderry had been paid for, the chartered airplane from Prestwick, the lawyer’s fees, the hired Rolls Royce, the various room service bills, well, he was lucky to be getting anything at all. Still, the figure was so risible that it got Keith straight back into the national newspapers, laughing off his habits and his destructive tendencies. “I’m not really bothered about the money,” he said generously, if not with complete honesty.

From England it was off to Holland for one show and then a string of dates in Germany. This time they travelled by private plane. “We went to Gatwick,” recalls Bill Curbishley, “and the pilot comes in, and he looked like the character from a JP Dunleavy book, he had a big red beard, a bundle of maps under his arm, a topcoat buttoned down to the bottom, and he said, ‘Right, where are we going?’ And Moon’s eyes
just lit up.”

For the next week, Keith alternately terrorised and entertained his fellow band members and crew as they flew from German city to German city. “You forget what an arsehole he could be,” says John Entwistle, recalling Keith’s insistence on sitting naked on his lap for one of the flights. “A lot of it is really funny when it comes back as a legend, but when you were there it was a pain the arse.”

Curbishley remembers the tour instead as being among Keith’s finest moments. “The plane was like a cigar tube, a cargo plane with some seats in. The toilet was in the back of the plane. And on the way back Pete Townshend went in there and Moon locked him in, so Townshend kicked the door off. Moon carried the door down to the cockpit and said, ‘I believe this is yours old chap,’ gave it to the pilot and put it on his shoulders. So the pilot’s trying to fly this plane with a fucking door on him!

“I fell asleep and Moon put all these matches between my toes and lit them. This madness was going on
ail the time.
When we got to Gatwick, they took all Bob Pridden’s clothes off, and he had to go through customs with no clothes. Everything he did was funny. And once Townshend started with him as well, and they started mimicking each other, it was hilarious. Because Townshend was as funny as him, they were
fantastic.”