Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (123 page)

“I was shocked even though I knew he was in trouble,” says Bill Curbishley. “I didn’t think someone in his early thirties was going to die on us.”

I could repeat such comments almost ad infinitum. I heard them from far and wide while talking to people about Keith. The most succinct example, perhaps, is that from Alice Cooper, who knew Keith for the last ten years of his life. “I wasn’t surprised when Jim Morrison died. I wasn’t surprised when Janis Joplin died. I
was
surprised when Keith Moon died. Because he had no death wish. He was having too much fun living.”

K
eith Moon’s death gave the Who life. That, at least, appeared to be the initial gloss put on the tragic loss by his friends and partners.

“In a way, it was like a sacrifice,” Roger Daltrey told
Rolling Stone’s
Dave Marsh, who flew to London and was granted access to the grieving group a few days after Keith’s death. “We can do anything we want to do now. I have very odd feelings. I feel incredibly strong, and at the same time, I feel incredibly fragile.”

The underlying sentiment appeared to be that Keith had somehow tethered the group to a sound, an image and a lifestyle that the other band members had left behind. That without him, they would be free from those restraints, inspired to make something different of the legend that they often felt had become a burden. Pete was saying as much, quite bluntly, within a few short months. “Ironically, Keith’s passing was a positive thing,” he told
Melody Maker’s
Chris Welch the following January. “It meant that it was impossible to continue to be bound by Who traditions … I feel very excited about the fact that the Who is a well-established band with a tremendous history, but suddenly we’re in the middle of nowhere – a new band. I’m really excited about it.”

In November, the Who officially hired Kenny Jones – who from now on elected to spell his name Kenney – to fill Keith’s shoes. “There was nobody else, in my opinion,” said Townshend adamantly. In as much as the Small Faces had been contemporaries of the Who, the two groups had toured together and got on with each other, and Jones was now unattached, it all made sense. Plus, he had played successfully with the Who
sans
Keith on the
Tommy
soundtrack.

Jones did not play
like
Moon, however. Where Keith threw technique out the window, Kenney treated the rules with reverence; he was a solid, tight, no-nonsense kind of player. The Who appeared relieved by this, believing that in Jones’ orthodoxy they could point the backbeat in any direction they wanted.

The Who immediately made Jones a full member of the band, guaranteeing him an equal share of the profits from his future work with them. It was the kind of solid job offer Keith himself claimed never to have received upon his own admission to the group (though of course, he was an equal partner throughout), it went against the group’s publicity statements issued immediately after Keith’s death and it was made largely upon the insistence of Townshend, who had the security of continuing to receive the extra publishing income.

“Roger really resisted Kenney being brought in as a quarter member,” Townshend admitted to Charles Young of
Musician
a decade later.
¹⁰⁷
“He wanted Kenney on salary. I said, ‘No, I’m not ready for that. It means we’re still running the Who. It’s like we’re on a pilgrimage to find Keith. To be really unpleasant about it, I’m kind of glad Keith is gone. He was a pain in the ass. The band wasn’t functioning. This is a chance to do something new.’”

If Keith might have turned in his grave to hear how readily he was described publicly as a ‘sacrifice’ and privately as ‘a pain in the ass’, by his band-mates no less, he would probably have risen from the dead to prevent Townshend following his instincts any further. In the band’s attempt to free itself – to which Jones’ installation as a permanent member was a blatant contradiction – they decided to hire a keyboard player. And seriously considered Ian McLagan. “I wanted him,” said Townshend in January ’79. “He’s a good guitar player too. I was very keen to get him.”

Wiser heads prevailed, and the offer was never officially made. (The job eventually went to John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick.) McLagan was already being used by the Rolling Stones on tour. And he and Kim had made the decision to move to California. Indeed, to ease immigration problems, they got married.

It was not something they had planned on before the American move came up and it was not something they
could
have planned upon. “If we’d wanted to get married before Keith died, it would have been completely out of the question,” says Kim, referring to Keith’s continual refusal, even after all these years, to accept that she could be in love with another man. But now, somehow it all made sense. They were officially wed at Wandsworth register office on October 9, 1978.

For her first wedding, Kim had worn white but been forced to secrecy. This time, she was allowed to go public – the couple’s picture made the national press – but in respect to Keith’s passing, she wore black. And Kathleen Moon, in tribute to the daughter-in-law she had always loved as one of her own, attended, giving the couple her blessing. Mac reminded her of Keith at his sunniest. She would say to Kim of her new relationship, “It’s a shame it couldn’t have been like this with my son.”

The two Mrs Moons (though Kim now became a McLagan) were appointed as joint executors of Keith’s estate. The absence of a will – the one he had torn up when Annette temporarily left had not been witnessed anyway – meant that Keith had died intestate. Not surprisingly for one of the rock world’s great spenders, he initially left behind considerably more bills than he did cash on hand.

The Who’s management handled some of the debts. Among those settled was the account with Asprey. “It was a seven grand bill and there was no way they were going to see the money while he was alive,” says John Wolff “But once he was dead there was no way we were going to leave a stain on his good name.” The jewellers were so ecstatic to finally be paid they gave Wolff a gold watch in appreciation.

The debts were considerable in California, too, where Keith had still not paid bills ranging from psychiatric treatment to interior decorating. It was Ian and Kim’s intention to sell the Trancas house to clear these debts and put money in trust for Mandy, who as Keith’s only surviving descendant, was the heir apparent to whatever funds would eventually be forthcoming. But the newly married couple were recommended to hold on to the property by their Californian lawyer. In a move that made perverse sense for a life and death as contradictory as Keith Moon’s, Ian and Kim moved to Los Angeles, and promptly settled into Keith’s vacant house in Victoria Point Road. They lived there for 18 months while Kim helped establish the Keith Moon Estate, and Mandy discovered a new habitat on the Pacific coast. The house was sold in 1980 for exactly $1,000,000; what had seemed his grandest folly turned out to be Keith’s one wise investment.
¹⁰⁸

Annette Walter-Lax was mistakenly informed that she could lay claim on the Trancas property from being Keith Moon’s common-law wife during the period they lived there. But Annette decided not to pursue any such claim. “I was in sorrow,” she said. “I had pain. I just wasn’t there to fight for material things there and then.”

In the short term, the Who treated her as though she was Keith’s widow anyway. After she had spent several weeks staying with her friend Sally Arnold, they put her up for a month in the bridal suite of the ultra-posh Kensington hotel Blake’s. When she was ready to move on, they bought her a car (she chose a Honda Civic), and paid rent on a flat (she chose a small one-bedroom apartment – in Knightsbridge).

She tried not to ask for too much, and in the end she didn’t take what she might have. She went to Shepperton to sort through Keith’s private belongings, and the sight of them, “tossed into a room at the top in there, just like a container full of rubble”, was too much for her to bear. “I just walked away. I didn’t have the strength.”

Finally Annette got back on the social circuit. She met Gareth Hunt, an actor who made his name in the Seventies television series
The New Avengers
. She became pregnant, moved to Surrey with Hunt, married him and had a son, Oliver. Somewhere in the early stages of that relationship, the Who organisation recognised that she was back on her own two feet and took her off the pay-roll. It was the end of her relationship with the band.

But not with the memory of its drummer. In early 1981, she sold the story of her love life with Keith to the top-selling British tabloid the
Sunday Mirror.

She needed the money, she says – although having just married a relatively successful actor, one might not have thought that to be the case. It would be more accurate to say that she felt she
deserved
the money, that although she had been well looked after by management immediately following Keith’s death, she was hurt that other people had become the beneficiaries of his income; she who had stood by Keith’s side through four traumatic years, who he had announced his intention to marry, who she says he wrote a will leaving much of his wealth to, was given no permanent recompense. She had, not surprisingly, been hounded by the press to tell her story ever since Keith’s death, and had consistently refused. In the end, however, “They made me an offer I
couldn’t
refuse.”

The resulting series was published in typically scandalous ‘kiss and tell’ fashion – though the actual contents were no more revealing than anything she volunteered for this book – thereby propagating the ‘Moon the Loon’ image and angering Keith’s immediate family.

Kathleen Moon was particularly appalled. You’ve got a son of your own now, she told Annette. Just think what it feels like when people write that about your son. And you said you loved him. It was the end of Annette’s relationship with the Moons.

Dougal Butler went one better than Annette. Financially hard-up, in no small part from his unpaid year in America, he sold the story of his exploits with Keith for a book, published in 1981 as
Moon The Loon
in the UK and
Full Moon
in the USA. Though the graphic descriptions of Keith’s sexual activity and drink and drug habits served to estrange him from both the group
and
the family, and though many of the anecdotes were either relocated in time and place, elaborated on or combined with others, the book (written with the help of two ghostwriters) found its way into the hearts of many Moon fans who appreciated the way the garrulous and outrageous narrative style seemed to reflect the chaos of Keith’s own life.