Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (32 page)

A meeting was called, a locked doors summit that must have been the most humbling moment of Roger’s life. The sheet-welder from Shepherd’s Bush, the Detours’ founder, leader and organiser, so used to getting his own way by hook, by crook or by sheer force of persuasion, was given an ultimatum. In future, he was to go along with majority decisions or go elsewhere. No more punctuating his directives with punches, no more haranguing the others for their drug habits. Take it or leave it. Daltrey later confessed to the dread realisation that, “If I lost the band I was dead,” thereby admitting that if he left the Who he might as well do so in a hearse for all the life he would have to look forward to. So he capitulated. “I’ll be peaceful Perce from now on,” he reputedly told the others.

The meeting established the Who as a group without leaders, where every individual’s opinion would be considered equally valid. A democracy, in effect. The band would duly go on to function over coming years as do all true democracies – in a state of constant tumult, bickering in public and forging ever-shifting alliances behind the scenes that served to balance individual agendas with a passionate belief in a common goal.

“We all just said, ‘It’s got to change,’ “Moon later explained to Jerry Hopkins. “That was the first time we realised that no one person could tell the others what to do.”

“It was a lesson to all of us, if you like,” said Pete Townshend, “that there is no need to always get your way. That the most important thing is to just stay together.”

“I literally changed,” said Daltrey. “Anything they ever did from then on never bothered me.”

Another serious personnel problem raised itself at exactly the same time. Mike Shaw was critically injured in a traffic accident while driving the van with the group’s equipment just after the Danish tour. At first it was touch and go whether he would make it. And once he did, he would be completely out of action for 18 months. When he finally returned to work with New Action, it was strictly in an office capacity: he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

But the show had to go on. Before his crash Shaw had earmarked a 19-year-old called Richard Cole to work with New Action’s latest signing the Merseybeats (an incongruous choice for Lambert and Stamp given the waning popularity of the sound this band was named after, it was likely evidence of Kit’s Brian Epstein infatuation and other more base infatuations too). But now, with Shaw in hospital and Cy Längsten gone (partially a result of the group’s equipment being stolen from a van outside Battersea Dogs Home while Längsten was inside getting a guard dog to protect it, partially that he’d also had enough of the lack of sleep and low wages, preferring to try his hand as a musician again), Cole became the Who’s driver.

He started work immediately, in the early October of 1965, in time for the Who’s first proper tour of Scotland. On the way north, Keith asked him to stop at a supermarket. He did so and the drummer came back with sugar and weedkiller. Cole didn’t really think to ask why he needed them. Entwistle for his part was more concerned with getting into Edinburgh in time to buy some new bass strings: the Who were
always
short on equipment. At the Caledonian Hotel, one of the best in town and a mark of the group’s continued success, Cole unpacked his bags and ordered some sandwiches and tea, while Entwistle went in search of strings. Then Cole heard an explosion from what sounded like the room next door. He ran into the corridor. Smoke was emerging from Keith’s room, followed closely by a singed drummer. A few minutes later Entwistle returned to the hotel to find “four fire engines outside and our suitcases in the lobby”.

“That was the beginning of learning what it was like to work with Moon,” says Richard Cole with considerable understatement of Keith’s first known experiment with a hotel’s infrastructure. Although the other band members were initially apoplectic at being forced to downgrade from a top hotel, Keith didn’t offer any of them an apology. He didn’t see that he had to. He was just livening up the trip, relieving the boredom, enjoying life to the full.

Pete Townshend had been writing prolifically for months, but one song in particular demanded the group’s attention. Earlier that year, around his twentieth birthday, the guitarist had composed a slow blues number about the social changes he saw going on around him and felt so much a part of. It had the musical feel of Jimmy Reed but the emotion of Mose Allison, and it began with the provocative lines, “People try to put us down, just because we get around.”

The group had already attempted to record the song on three occasions. And each time it failed to ignite a spark. But Stamp and Lambert saw potential – as a controversy they could use for publicity, but also as a genuine statement that would reflect the generation gap and raise the Who’s profile as social commentators – and offered highly constructive criticism that exemplified their effectiveness as hands-on managers. By the time a newly focused group hunkered down at IBC Studios in Portland Place in mid-October, ‘My Generation’ had gone from being a slow-talking blues to a fast, hard rocker with two key changes. In just two takes, the Who delivered a fourth recording of ‘My Generation’ that was destined to be one of rock’s great anthems.

Of the many reasons for ‘My Generation’s prominent position in the pantheon of pop culture, its statement of and about disaffected youth was pre-eminent. Roger Daltrey stuttered his way through the delivery like the pill-headed mod he had spent the last two years trying not to become, and when he announced at the start of the second verse “Why don’t you all f-f-f-f…” there could hardly have been a listener who didn’t expect him to break out swearing. The eventual stammer into “… fade away” failed to alleviate this concern: it still
felt
like he had just told the world to fuck off. ‘My Generation’ was also the first Who recording to truly showcase all four members: Daltrey’s stutters were to become immortal, Townshend’s power chords never sounded more urgent, John Entwistle got to take a bass solo that has been often imitated but rarely bettered, and Keith … well, again the argument might be put forward that Keith spent the entire song performing a solo. And again it would be a false assertion; for three verses, two upward key changes and an instrumental break he kept the beat perfectly intact. At the finale, however, when the lyrics deliberately gave way to musical chaos, he took the opportunity to run riot across the kit in a whirlwind of somewhat belligerent delight.

It was the kind of performance that had never been placed on record before without being laughed at, and it brings back memories of the first time Keith played the drums in front of his pal Gerry Evans: “He was just hitting everything in sight, and making a load of noise…. There was no way that this guy was going to be a professional drummer.” Except that Keith
was
now a professional drummer and he was making more than just noise. Nor was there anything humorous about his intent, or that of the others; in fact they were all deadly serious about this musical anarchy. With the group summit, the Who had successfully agreed to focus their anger inward, on the music, rather than outward, upon each other. The result was a recording of barely contained violence.

‘My Generation’ was more than just the Who’s own statement of rebellion. It served as a mirror to an increasingly self-empowered youth which bought it in such numbers that it quickly rose to number two on the British pop charts in December 1965, at which moment the Who’s debut album of the same name was released. One of the most revolutionary years in pop music history – although in the Sixties, every year was more remarkable than that which it followed – ended with the Who, if not quite top of the charts, an honour that went to the Beatles for the third year running, then certainly the most talked about new British rock band.

By the halfway point of the Sixties, the view that pop music albums were merely something to fill the Christmas stocking (and that the music they contained was exactly that, filler) was just beginning to be challenged by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and, to some degree, the Rolling Stones. So when time ran out on the Who’s recording schedule with only nine original songs in the can, three of the cover versions from the March sessions were included to push the record towards the acceptable 30-minute mark and the ‘My Generation’ album was hustled into the record stores just in time for the peak of the Christmas shopping season. Yet the haste didn’t show. If anything, the simplicity and rawness, both of the songs themselves and the recordings thereof, were to the lasting benefit of the finished work.
My Generation
has stood the test of time as one of rock music’s great debut albums.

It was an inspired mixture of volume, vitriol and vitality, and not a fair amount of classic pop melody as well. But two factors truly distinguished the album from its contemporaries: Pete Townshend’s lyrics and Keith Moon’s drumming, and in particular the way they coalesced to create a new expressiveness in rock music. There were some ongoing precedents for the first of these. In 1965, the Beatles had begun veering away from traditional love lyrics towards oblique messages of sexual experimentation (‘Norwegian Wood’) and inner turmoil (‘Help!’). The Rolling Stones were carving out their own niche as angry young men, 1965 being the year that ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ went to number one both in Britain
and
the USA. (The American industry did its best to ignore the Who in 1965, ‘I Can’t Explain’ becoming a hit in Detroit and some other urban areas but merely scraping the national Top 100, Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’ disappearing without trace.) Ray Davies of the Kinks, meanwhile, was beginning to establish himself as England’s pop poet laureate, documenting the minutiae of suburban life with rare humour and delicacy.

The Who were not unique then in abandoning the typical lyrical topics of love for lust, or romance for angst, but
My Generation
was nonetheless remarkable for being an album almost entirely anit-love. It was as if Townshend, who was going steady at the time (as were Keith and John), set out to detail not his own satisfactory relationship but the sexual mores of the ace face mod that he aspired to represent, he whose speed intake lowered his sexual drive and whose obsession with dancing and clothes then relegated women yet lower down his list of desires. The ace face never had a problem pulling women and no qualms about screwing them, he just didn’t crave their constant attention or care for their conniving ways.

Certainly the female sex got a raw deal from Townshend. The songs ‘La La La Lies’, ‘It’s Not True’ and A Legal Matter’, though as blatantly commercial in their melodies as anything Townshend would ever compose, accused the female object of deceit and deception. (Perhaps because the wedding references in A Legal Matter’ reflected too closely on Daltrey’s short-lived marriage, it was the first recorded Who song on which Townshend took lead vocals.) In ‘Much Too Much’ what love that existed was “too heavy” to survive, ‘The Good’s Gone’ was ominous from its title on down, while ‘The Kids Are Alright’, the most upbeat and optimistic of all Who songs to date, promoted romance only in the homo-erotic mod confines of trusting one’s girl with one’s male mates. ‘Out In The Street’ (the new title for ‘You’re Going To Know Me’, recorded back in March as a prototype for Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’) offered love under the strict terms of male domination, echoing the masculinity of Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m A Man’, the blues staple the Who chose to cover, as did almost all the R&B bands of the era. Finally, the two James Brown numbers, ‘Please Please Please’ and ‘I Don’t Mind’, were essentially break-up songs.
²¹
‘My Generation’ the song, the only one of the three Who singles to be included (singles and albums were generally considered mutually exclusive products in Britain during the Sixties) was already notable for avoiding the concept of romance entirely.

To these harshly pronounced statements of dissatisfaction and alienation Keith Moon brought an understanding as yet unheard in rock drumming. Each tune was driven as much by the force or restraint of his performance as by Daltrey’s attempted snarl, Townshend’s churning chords, Entwistle’s sadly undermixed bass, or indeed, Nicky Hopkins’ superb piano enhancements. Moon’s ability to ‘play riffs on drums’ was pronounced immediately, with ‘Out In The Street’, where he eschewed a steady beat to instead match the Bo Diddley-esque rhythm of the guitar and bass, in the process kicking proceedings off with a tension missing through most other group’s entire albums. Similarly, on ‘La La La Lies’, he doubled the complex beat of the piano part on the tom-toms, leaving his usually favoured cymbals alone until the bridge, where their sudden addition added extra emphasis. On the few songs where he contributed a more conventional backbeat – ‘It’s Not True’ and ‘A Legal Matter’ being the most obvious examples – he could not help but add clusters of rapid-fire, precision drum rolls across the kit where most other musicians would be contemplating a mere tinker on the snare.