Gigs were understandably thin on the ground for the group of 16-year-olds, but as with the Escorts, Keith soon fell into a tight friendship with his new band members, especially once Peter Tree secured Moon a job in the printing department of his employers, the National Council for Social Services, in Bedford Square. Evans worked just round the corner, and Foskett was with a big advertising firm down the road on St Martin’s Lane. This latter company had its own lunch canteen, and Keith soon showed the others how easy it was to eat for free: “Just act like in the army,” recalls Tree of Moon’s instructions. “Just keep walking and join the queue!”
Out on the perpetually packed pavements of Oxford Street, Keith had a fondness for a typically effective public prank: he would feign a fainting attack, his friends in the Strangers would fake their own concern, and only when a crowd of worried passers-by had built up and someone called an ambulance would Keith jump up and dust himself off.
It was always about rejecting the staid ways of an inherently conservative society that, by the early Sixties, was finally under attack from a new generation – of which Keith would prove such a prominent member. The Strangers played a show in Tree’s family home town of Burgess Hill, Sussex (where Tree’s father took the photo used in Maximum R&B, in his back garden), and found themselves catching an early morning commuter train back to London. “It was all ‘City Gents’ reading The Times,” recalls Evans of a scene that smacks of the morning equivalent of the 5.15 train in Quadrophenia. “It was an automatic cue for Keith. Because he was quite small, he leapt up into the luggage rack and started squawking like a parrot! He did this to get a reaction, but of course there was no reaction – they all just kept reading The Times. Except for me and Peter who were falling about on the floor.”
The NCSS, where Moon and Tree both worked, had its own stiff-upper-lip traditions, most notably a daily “tea” at four o’clock with what Tree recalls as “all these old dears and retired colonels”. Unable to suffer their sedate ways, Keith arrived for one such session wearing his khaki smock from the print room on which he’d painted, with a felt tip, the name Lance Bombardier Tripe. For those who’d fought in World War II, making a mockery of the Armed Forces was … well, good enough reason to bring back National Service. Keith was called in by a superior and told, recalls Tree, that, “If he didn’t go and apologise to Brigadier so-and-so he’d have to leave. So of course, he said, ‘Well, I’ll leave.’ It was his thing at the establishment.”
If Keith treated his day job with disdain, his dedication to the drums was nonetheless devout. “He knew even then that he was good,” recalls Tree. Lunchtimes were drawn out by extended visits to Drum City, where his friend Gerry Evans (no relation to Michael) worked, and where Keith would confidently hit up the star drummers of the day for playing tips. And if the Strangers stopped in to see other bands at night, Keith would often ask to get up and play a couple of songs. On one such occasion, they came across a band whose powerful singer, Reg King, would later front The Action, the venerable R&B band for which Michael Evans would play bass. Keith volunteered his services that night, stepped up to the drums “and smashes them to bits”, recalls Evans in what sounds like a mirror image of Moon’s fabled audition with the Who.
On the few occasions that the Strangers had a public audience of their own, it was always Moon who received the most accolades. “It is what he was,” says Evans of Keith’s drumming. “It was always there. Later I tried to analyse it because the drummer in The Action, Roger Powell, was a fantastic drummer too. And I’d say Roger’s style was more Buddy Rich and Keith’s was more Gene Krupa.”
The Strangers were certainly ambitious. They followed Keith’s lead and acquired gold lamé suits from Cecil Gee’s. They recorded a demo tape -probably Moon’s first recording session, which makes it all the more disappointing that it has subsequently disappeared. And they auditioned for the BBC’s Light Programme in the Beeb’s Piccadilly Studio in September 1962. (The Dave Clark Five got the nod instead.) They then secured a lengthy overseas tour of US Army bases in Germany, but what should have been the Strangers’ introduction to the big time instead inspired its demise. Keith was barely 16 and his parents refused him permission to tour. Peter Tree also had problems confirming his availability. Foskett and Evans found replacements and went ahead with the tour, but the group split up soon after.
Evans then went on to join Reg King’s group the Boys (later The Action), opening for the Who – now featuring Keith Moon – during the legendary Marquee residency of late 1964/early 1965. Peter Tree went into concert promotion and, through his friendship with Moon, booked the Who for a gig around Burgess Hill in Sussex after they’d struck it big.
Keith must have spent a few months in the performing wilderness after his time with the Strangers. It turns out his audition with the Beachcombers was not, as that band originally claimed, December 1962, but April 1963.113 This reduces Keith’s time with the Beachcombers from seventeen months to one year. It does nothing to alter his band-mates’ glorious memories of that time.
First Recording Sessions
There is some confusion about Keith’s first recording sessions with the Who/the High Numbers. In Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, published in 2002, a tape case for ‘I’m The Face’ (dated May 11, 1964) and the Townshend composition ‘It Was You’ (dated June 4, 1964) is displayed, credited to engineer Alan Florence at IBC Studios. It’s uncertain whether Moon played on either of these recordings, as it’s known that Brian Redman was brought down from Liverpool for a couple of auditions around this time. It is accepted that Moon was the drummer – though not without some disagreement – on the High Numbers’ single ‘I’m The Face’/‘Zoot Suit’, recorded in June 1964 at the Philips’ studio on Stanhope Place. The keyboard player on that session was Allen Ellett, who was hired by Pete Meaden and who sat in with the band at a couple of London shows leading up to the recording date. In a letter to the Dear Boy publishers dated April 2000, he noted that, “Somebody wanted to use another drummer on the session but this went down like a lead weight.” One can only surmise that this “somebody” was Philips’ A&R man Chris Parmeinter, who had previously rejected Doug Sandom and was perhaps not aware that the young firebrand Moon had been instantly accepted by the band.
Ellett notes that, onstage, Keith “was in a league of his own on those drums and was ever ready to show his skills to their best effect, which went down well with the audience but detracted from Roger’s singing.” He also details all manner of frictions between three members of the band, consistent with their long-term image, and confirms John Entwistle’s role as peacemaker. “John was a mediator within the group and helped defuse matters that became very tense, purely by being there and remaining cool and calm.”
As well as playing piano, Ellett says he was “given the job of cracking a thick leather belt which was bent in two … great fun.”
Ellett recalls “running through a couple of standard rock numbers that day to get sound levels,” and history suggests that these were ‘Leaving Here’ and ‘Here ‘Tis’. In due time, these recordings showed up: ‘Leaving Here’ initially on the 1985 compilation Who’s Missing, joined by ‘Here ‘Tis’ on the four-CD box set 30 Years Of Maximum R&B, where they were both credited to that June 1964 High Numbers session. Given that this box set was compiled with the close involvement of the Who themselves (Townshend even wrote the introduction for the booklet), Who fans had every reason to believe this information, and I duly spent much of pages 91 and 92 waxing lyrical about Keith’s performance on ‘Leaving Here’, expressing some astonishment that his drumming was so fully formed at his first serious session.
Now we know why ‘Leaving Here’ stood out. The recording was in fact part of a session with Shel Talmy, in April 1965 – a full ten months later – for the prospective debut Who album. This recording and many other cover versions were scrapped in favour of Townshend compositions and the eventual My Generation LP. The covers were finally reassembled for the long-overdue 2002 dou
ble-CD reissue of My Generation: an ‘alternate take’ of ‘Leaving Here’ opens the bonus CD and Keith’s drumming is, almost snare roll-for-cymbal crash, identical to the previously released version. Certain aspects of what is noted on pages 90 and 91 now have to be read taking into account this new information.114
Keith’s 21st Birthday Party
More than any other legend surrounding Keith Moon, it’s the events of August 23, 1967 – his 21st birthday party at the Flint, Michigan Holiday Inn -that have been most frequently discussed and disputed. It almost broke my heart to report, in the earlier editions of this book, that Keith had not driven a car into the hotel swimming pool that night, and that the Who had not been subsequently banned from Holiday Inns as a result. But perhaps I need not have worried. The power of myth appears stronger than that of the written word, and many people still believe one or both of those legends to be true.
Other media investigations have mostly, in essence if not detail (the latter being beyond precise confirmation by this point!), confirmed the version reported in Dear Boy. In the VH1 Behind The Music profile on Keith, researched in 1998 just before Dear Boy was published, the Who’s tour manager Tom Wright stuck to his account, as originally printed in Richard Barnes’ book Maximum R&B, that Keith only threw his body into the swimming pool, that the pool was empty at the time, and that Keith lost his front tooth as a result. And for the Channel 4 documentary The Real Keith Moon, Herman’s Hermits bass player Karl Green stayed with his version of events as summarised on page 197.
Then, in 2003, Channel 4 commissioned a series entitled Rock’n’Roll Myths, one episode of which focused purely on this question: did or did not Keith Moon drive a car into a Holiday Inn swimming pool the night of his 21st birthday? Three members of Herman’s Hermits (Karl Green, drummer Barry Whitwam, and singer Peter Noone) were interviewed on camera; despite predictable variations on the details, all agreed on the same key fact: at no point did a car end up in a swimming pool.
“I love all the stories, that he went on and he drove cars into pools, but that never really happened,” said Noone. “He’s getting his stories mixed up there, because it was never on the bill we paid,” said Whitwam, while Green concluded, a little cryptically, “It was my recollection that it wasn’t at the Holiday Inn in Michigan.”
That, you might think, is that. But then, for the 25th Anniversary of Keith’s death, in September 2003, the highly regarded American National Public Radio show Weekend Edition ran a story on Moon’s life, for which I was interviewed. Asked to cite “a story that has survived as one of the myths surrounding Keith Moon, and what the truth is behind it”, I opted for Keith’s 21st birthday party. When the show was broadcast, my opinion was followed on air by that of Roger Daltrey; asked the same question, he turned it on its head.115
“I read these biographies where they say that ‘this never happened’ and ‘that never happened’,” he said, “but I was there and I know it happened, so I think, ‘Well what bloody group was I in then?’ I read that the car in the swimming pool on his 21st birthday party wasn’t actually there. And yet I saw it. We paid the bill. It was $50,000. I just remember the car in the pool, and the chaos, and people going crazy and Keith being rushed off to the dentist – after being arrested. And us having to find $50,000 to pay for the damage to the hotel. But then I read in a biography that that never happened – so maybe I’ve been living someone else’s life, I don’t know. Then again, they were interviewing ex-alcoholics and drug addicts, so I suppose they’re bound to get a very blurred view of what actually happened.”116
Daltrey’s memory, though it appeared to jar with everyone else I had tracked down from the party, was soon joined, in print, by Pete Townshend. Responding to a question about the incident in an e-mail exchange for a special Who edition of Q magazine, he stated, “I was asleep by the time the Lincoln (Convertible) thing happened. I have seen photos, which never lie.”
On the Rock’n’Roll Myths TV Show, I had suggested that the photo of Keith’s Rolls Royce in the pond at Tara around 1973 (see page 335) has led many people to convince themselves that they’ve in fact seen a picture of a Lincoln or Cadillac in a Holiday Inn swimming pool; I can now only surmise that Pete is among them!
Yet, in mid-2004, I received an excerpt from the book Local DJ, the self-published memoir by that era’s influential Detroit radio DJ Peter Cavanaugh, who attended the party and wrote the following account all these years later.117
Food was also flying. Whoops. Someone just hit somebody else in the mouth with a whiskey bottle. Accidentally. He was aiming a friendly toss over a third party’s head.
“Who gave Keith the car keys?”
“He’s pretending he’s going to drive it in the pool.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Watch, he’ll stop at the last minute!”
“No!!”
“He’s in the deep end, too!”
“Oh, there he is.”
“Good swimmer!”
“He’s O.K.!”
“But, he drowned the Cadillac!!”
“Anybody know CPR? Cadillac Pool Rescue?”
“What cops???”
I contacted Cavanaugh, who had not seen my own book. When I sent him the relevant text, he replied by e-mail, “I would suggest my own testimony be reviewed as additive to, not contradictory of, your own exceptional observations.” (Reading Cavanaugh’s copy again, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a contradiction. But still …) Cavanaugh then suggested I contact Bruce Wensch, proprietor of the Flint Guitar Company, who not only attended the concert at the Atwood Stadium, but was at the Holiday Inn three times in less than 24 hours that day: in the afternoon preceding the show, at Keith’s post-show party, and again the following morning.
Wensch’s memory of what took place is almost photographic, partly because he was just 15 at the time, wide-eyed and completely sober, and therefore unlikely to forget the night – and also because he took photos throughout. A self-confessed “science oriented nerd who was really interested in photography” but also a rock’n’roll fan who understood that the Who would be part of the “Holy Trinity of Rock” with The Beatles and the Stones, he was given free tickets and near enough all-access by a local DJ who hooked him up with the Herman’s Hermits National Fan Club. (The President of the Club was flying in for the show from Madison, Wisconsin; recall again just how popular Peter Noone and co. had been over the past few years across mid-America and this is not so trivial as it may now sound.)
The afternoon of August 23, Wensch visited the Holiday Inn, camera in hand, where he met Moon, John Entwistle and Karl Green when they came out to lounge by the pool. Consistent with so many other people’s memories of Moon, Wensch found the drummer extremely friendly, eager to learn about the boy’s own life – all the more so once he found out that the 15-year-old was a potential musician – and excited to know about Flint and what they could expect from the audience. (Detroit had been one of the Who’s first break-out cities, and the Flint show, in the automobile-producing town 60 miles away, offered a genuine opportunity to steal the limelight from the Hermits.) Kit Lambert then showed up “with his latest ‘boy toy’”, says Wensch, and also with a birthday present for Moon: an attaché case that opened to reveal tumblers and mixers, essentially a ‘portable pub’. Lambert and co-manager Chris Stamp had also visited the nearby packaged goods store, Boaker’s, on Fenton Road, to purchase drinks for the post-show party; the store later claimed to have been virtually cleaned out to the tune of $400.
A grateful Moon took immediate advantage of his birthday gift and the alcohol; it’s already written that he was drunk by the time he took the stage. At the Atwood Stadium, in and on high birthday spirits, Moon preceded the Who’s performance by racing round the field in a bright orange shirt and then drop-kicking a plastic container over the goalposts. This shameless piece of crowd-pleasing served to get the audience on the Who’s side for what was reputedly a ragged performance.
Moon had earl
ier invited Wensch to his post-show birthday party, but the 15-year-old had to wait until after Herman’s Hermits played to catch a ride with a friend to the Holiday Inn. By the time he got there, he recalls, choosing his words carefully so as not to incriminate the guilty completely, “There was a big commotion going on on the second floor. There was a scuffle with a fan in a room, and I think it was in Keith’s room, and I think they made an arrest. There was a local ‘yahoo’ by the name of Dennis Williams who pretended he was the brother of Keith Relf (of The Yardbirds). He dressed extremely Carnaby Street, very very mod, and called himself Jim Relf. This guy got on Keith’s nerves, and I believe that Keith probably got a little hostile. And Dennis Williams ended up with a scar. The Sheriff was called -his name was Sheriff Bell – and I believe Keith actually had to go to the County Jail.”
Members of the Who entourage immediately set “chase” to bail Keith out, but because the tour was leaving town the next morning anyway, the Sheriff may have been inclined to let Keith go with no more than a warning; charges do not appear to have been pressed. “They allowed Keith to finish out his party as long as he behaved himself,” recalls Wensch.
Of course, Keith had no intention of behaving himself, not on such a major occasion as this. Back at the Holiday Inn, meantime, the $400 of spirits – not to mention various hallucinogenics – were having the predictable effect on the many party-goers, whose behaviour was becoming increasingly rowdy even without the ringleading assistance of Moon. Wensch recalls that it was the Blues Magoos, loaded on psychedelics, who began throwing Keith’s Premier drum kit birthday cake around the room; that Keith’s clothes were indeed torn off, which “didn’t seem to be that big a thing in British culture, but in American culture was extremely risqué”; and that the party soon gravitated from the conference room to the pool area alongside, which had a fence around it. “Assorted different people in the entourage and females actually ended up in the pool. And I don’t believe everybody was clothed -which I thought was pretty unusual at 151”
Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon Page 88
