Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (124 page)

The new Who, with Kenney Jones on drums and ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick on keyboards, ‘came out’ at the Rainbow in London on May 2, 1979, eight months after Keith’s death. The next week they went to the Cannes Film Festival to perform live and promote
The Kids Are Alright
and
Quadrophenia
, which were now ready for release.
The Kids Are Alright
, gloriously anarchic in both the group’s performances and in its lack of script or narration, cemented the Who legend and further immortalised Keith, who was already set to be its star even before his death made the film something of a public memorial.
Quadrophenia
, which had gone into production only days after Keith’s death, coincided with a full-scale mod revival among UK teenagers, for which the Who was a pre-dominant influence and a prime benefactor. When that revival played itself out,
Quadrophenia
was still a stunningly emotional and realistic movie about teenage identity crisis, and has gone on to be recognised as one of the UK’s great cult classics.

Both films were accompanied by double album soundtracks,
Quadrophenia
featuring the first product of the new Who line-up’s recordings (three extremely average songs that sounded like nothing so much as filler). In the year after Keith’s death, the considerable success of the various albums and movies ensured that, given he was no longer around to spend the profits overnight, Keith Moon became in death the very wealthy man he always thought he was in life.

Finally it was time to look to the future. The new Who played Wembley Stadium in August, a local venue Keith would certainly love to have conquered, and then did a week in New York and New Jersey. The ecstatic reaction suggested that even without Keith, the dynamics were still there to make them one of rock’s great spectacles. Such was the response and the sense of rejuvenation that Pete Townshend, so stubbornly opposed while Keith was alive, was persuaded to go back out on tour.

To that end the Who returned to the States in December 1979. On December 3, at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, 11 fans were killed in what was referred to as a ‘stampede’ to gain first access to the arena’s ‘festival seating’ (which was actually an oxymoron for unreserved standing). The ‘stampede’ was more a desperate crush born of thousands of fans queuing outside a venue in freezing temperatures in a dangerous funnel design, their excitement fuelled by the general admission format of the arena floor, the sound of the group taking a late soundcheck and the limited number of opened doors. As such, it can be argued that the tragedy could have struck any band of similar intensity and legend in America – particularly at the Riverfront, which had had a series of disregarded close calls. Nonetheless, fate dictated that it happen to the Who. At least Keith Moon, who contributed so much to their legend, did not have to live with those deaths on his conscience. The memory of Neil Boland had been quite enough to chase him to an early grave.
¹⁰⁹

Pete Townshend finally made a real solo album:
Empty Glass
, released in the spring of 1980, used most of the songs he had written in the last two years and was a substantial commercial and critical success, particularly in America. The solo Townshend seemed able to present himself as a fragile, introspective and mature superstar revealing his strengths and weaknesses with lyrical integrity and sublime arrangements. The post-Moon Who, meanwhile, appeared to be a great live band that struggled to transfer that excitement back onto tape. The album
Face Dances
, released in early 1981, had some passable pop songs, including the hit ‘You Better You Bet’ which helped it to sell as rapidly as any other Who album in history, but the group were not proud of it and indeed, quickly disowned it.

When, on September 25, 1980, Keith’s fellow inebriate drummer John Bonham asphyxiated after one shot of vodka too many in a drinking binge at the age of 33, Led Zeppelin did not delay their decision or cast around for replacements. The most consistently successful rock group of the Seventies immediately disbanded.

Now more than ever, Pete’s apparent newfound optimism seemed to many like cold-hearted betrayal. His immediate comments of excitement about the future in the wake of Keith’s death, his insistence on making Kenney Jones a full member, his sudden willingness to go back out on tour – and his apparent disregard for the tragedy of Cincinnati as displayed in a heartless
Rolling Stone
interview in June 1980 – all seemed to insult the memory of the man who had been, to the fans, the heart and soul of the group.

Only over a considerable period of time did it become apparent that Pete’s apparent positivity was in fact pure denial. In Keith’s passing, he had lost not only a best friend, but his most passionate believer, his most vociferous champion. And more than that, he lost his foil. While Moon was alive, if Townshend ever wanted to get up to mischief or adventure – as frequently he did – he only needed to track down Keith. Chances were he could walk away again at the end of whatever chaos the pair would inspire and leave Moon to take the blame. (To which Keith didn’t care; it all just added to his legend.)

But when Keith died, there was no one for Pete to bounce off like that. Absent his soul-mate, he lost his self-control. The recapitulation into the touring lifestyle, the deaths in Cincinnati, and the almost insane decision to record solo albums and Who albums concurrently combined for Pete with the loss of Keith to send him over the edge. No one quite realised what was happening until it was almost too late, but step by step, Townshend was absorbing Moon’s persona in addition to his own. It was as if, after years of publicly disowning and denouncing Keith’s excesses and weaknesses, he felt compelled in his friend’s death to repeat them.

Soon, his and Moon’s personalities were not even co-existing: Keith’s worst aspects appeared to have taken him over completely. Townshend became the fool instead of the teacher, the gadabout in place of the spiritualist, the destroyer rather than the seeker, and the adulterer where once he was the family man. He adopted the jet-set nightclub lifestyle more flagrantly than Keith ever had, was photographed falling out of trendy nightclubs on the arms of young blondes, to the horror of his loyal wife and kids, and in so doing he hardened his drinking habits until he was every bit the fully confirmed alcoholic Keith had ever been. At which point he began taking cocaine with a ferocity that would have shocked even Moon – and which he appeared to be doing in clear imitation of him.

“It’s all right for Keith,” he slurred through grinding teeth to his art school comrade Richard Barnes when confronted backstage during the Who’s 1980 tour of America. “Why should he have all the glory?” On the return flight to the UK at the end of that tour, Pete behaved as embarrassingly as Keith ever had in transit. During the Who’s longest-ever British tour, on stage at the Rainbow in February 1981, he went through four bottles of brandy in a near-successful attempt to provoke Roger to fight him.

The squalid death of Kit Lambert on April 27, 1981, from a brain haemorrhage almost certainly brought on when he was beaten up at a London gay bar two nights earlier, did nothing to bring Pete to his senses. Instead, he went a step further in his self-abuse, crossing Keith’s strict demarcation line (but, notably, not Kit’s): he became a heroin addict.

It’s easy to pass judgement and pontificate at his stupidity. But Pete must have felt truly deserted. The three biggest influences in his professional and creative life – Pete Meaden, Keith Moon and Kit Lambert – had died within 20 months of each other, all of them from “fucking around with drugs and alcohol”, as he later described Keith’s cause of death. He seemed to have little desire for anything but to follow them in the same downward spiral towards oblivion.

Cause and effect continued to entangle themselves as Pete found out in the spring of 1981 that, despite having written five best-selling albums in the last thirty months, he was a staggering half a million pounds in debt. Away from the Who, Pete had followed his idealism in what he saw as a logical direction, setting up his own book publishing company, recording studios, a book shop, a Meher Baba centre and even a barge fleet. Like the Beatles with Apple, however (yet unlike The Who Group of Companies under Bill Curbishley), there was no business structure in place to encourage profits and with Pete permanently out to lunch, it was not long before, as he later admitted, “People were spending my money faster than I could earn it.”

His immediate response was simply to throw himself yet further into the abyss. As word spread that Townshend had blown it, was dancing with death, tossing it all away in one endless binge, it seemed truly that the whole rock crusade had been a pointless battle. The likes of Keith Moon were born to be decadent reprobates, so popular opinion went. But if the hallowed Pete Townshend could not lead by example, no one could. (Though of course it was partly the pressures of that responsibility that caused him to jump overboard in the first place.)

Townshend eventually came around after a near-fatal overdose at a London nightclub three years and a day after Keith’s death. He went into a clinic to dry out in November 1981, and in the New Year of 1982, went to San Diego, where Meg and George Patterson had moved their practice, for a four-week drug withdrawal programme. The irony of seeking help from the same people to whom he had sent his friends Eric Clapton and Keith Moon was not lost on him.

His depression was captured in the experimental solo album
All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes
, released in early summer of ’82; his near-bankruptcy revealed itself on the Who’s next (and final) studio album,
It’s Hard
, released just a few weeks later. The other three members of the Who had accused Pete of stealing his best material for his own album, to which he challenged them to tell him what kind of songs they wanted, declaring he would write to order. Such a process went against every grain of his once-idealistic fibre, and the result was an album of slack arena rock devoid of soul or meaning or even content, the one true embarrassment of the group’s career, a pitiful way to bow out.
¹¹⁰

But in his new sobriety Pete, whilst fully aware of the Who’s decay, determined to make himself rich again. Selling off his loss-making businesses for immediate cash, he committed himself to one final jaunt around America. For three months leading up to Christmas 1982, the group criss-crossed America, playing the country’s biggest outdoor stadiums in often appalling weather to crowds nearing 100,000 a night, for only one real reason: money. Recordings from that tour, released as a double live album and video, were almost uniformly dull and uninspired.
Who’s Last
was the Who’s worst.

The bulk of the blame for the group’s transparent artistic decline fell on Kenney Jones’ shoulders. His disciplined drumming technique was so far removed from Moon’s that it tied the Who to rigid formality far more than their apparently constrictive legend had ever done. It was so orthodox it could neither energise
nor
encourage experimentation. The public’s increasing scepticism as to Jones’ suitability was compounded by his own internal fight for approval. “I just never thought he was the right drummer for the Who,” Roger Daltrey told
Musician
magazine in 1989. “Kenney was simplicity itself … Kenney was not capable of doing any more than he did.”

That Jones deprived the Who of their customary fire cannot be denied. But on that final tour the whole band was lacklustre. It was rock as commerce, not rock as rebellion. And it was touring as work, not play. Townshend was newly sober. Daltrey didn’t drink on tour anyway. Kenney Jones also went on the wagon, partly to avert Daltrey’s antagonism towards him. Only John Entwistle was there to party, and he no longer had Moon to join him. One wonders what Keith would have thought of it all, and how he too might have sounded had he dissociated drumming from drink and drugs for any length of time in his thirties.

The three surviving members finally accepted that Keith’s death had been the end of a dream. Any aspects of that dream which had not been fulfilled were now abandoned. Townshend paid for himself and Kenney Jones to be bought out of the record contract the band had only recently signed. The Who’s various companies were sold off or closed down. Though they shied short of publicly declaring it, the Who had split up. It had taken a spirited attempt at rejuvenation to discover that without Keith Moon, “our great comedian, the supreme melodramatist … the most spontaneous and unpredictable drummer in rock”, as Pete had called him just after his death, they were not a shadow of the band they thought they were. Just as Keith’s addition back in 1964 had made for an exponential improvement, his loss made for an exponential regression.

But they had tried. “When
Tommy
the film came out, the Who as a company probably earned six million pounds a year,” Pete Townshend told
Jamming!
Magazine in 1985, summarising the latter years. “With that money, we bought a load of PA gear, we bought a load of trucks, we bought a chunk of Shepperton studios, and we started to invest in films. It was great while it lasted, until Keith died. It was a shame, because Keith was having such a great time. At one time it looked like we were all set to become film moguls, and then he went and dropped dead. Most inconvenient; his timing was a bit off at the end.”