47 years ago this month, I was 18 years old, dipping a disinterested toe into college, and utterly devastated that Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, had died on September 7 at age 32.
Moon’s death came just two weeks after the American release of Who Are You, the band’s eighth studio album, which most observers regarded as among the its weakest. While I grasped this assessment in my head, my heart was impervious, and I listened to the album over and over, almost as if repetition would somehow reincarnate my favorite drummer.
(A friend recorded it on one side of a 90-minute cassette. On the other, he put another new release: Willie Nelson’s Stardust. A mild contrast, those.)
Moon remained one of my idols for a long time. Occasionally I sought to emulate him by drinking entire bottles of brandy at a sitting (this didn’t last long), playing index finger drums on tabletops to the escalating annoyance of my friends, and hunting down a red-striped tank top just like he wore in clips of the documentary film The Kids Are Alright, which I acquired on laserdisc and bribed a buddy to copy on VHS. I watched it (sound familiar?) over and over again; see the preceding reference to failed reincarnation.
47 years later, the release of an expanded edition of Who Are You, which I’ll never buy, was encouragement enough to listen to a stream of the album. I was hesitant to rouse the ghosts of earworms past, which naturally happened anyway, and now “Guitar and Pen” is stuck inside my brain on repeat. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it; the band itself never played the song live, not even once.
Moon doesn’t sound bad on “Guitar and Pen,” but famously he was omitted altogether from “Music Must Change” because he couldn’t fathom the 6/8 time signature. That’s apropos; recently producer Glyn Johns told Rick Beato, “he (Moon) hit things as hard as he could and as fast as he could, until the end of the song.”
In 1978, Moon was coming off a lost weekend that lasted three years, and the making of the Who Are You album was complicated by his diminished physical condition. But after listening to it again, I’m struck by the thought that even if Moon had been able to perform at his peak as “the best Keith Moon-style drummer in the world” (his own self-description), it might not have mattered.
Pete Townshend was the primary songwriter, and at the time he described his songs on Who Are You as conscious efforts to expand the band’s perimeter and escape status as a dinosaur in the face of punk and new wave. In short, apart from the title track, there weren’t many opportunities for healthy Keith Moon-style drummers to excel on Who Are You, much less spent or degraded ones.
Townshend’s songs might have well been solo tracks (as always, Roger Daltrey manned up to interpret them as best he could), and by album’s end, bassist John Entwistle’s three contributions are the most memorable: “Had Enough,” “505” and “Trick of the Light.”
Leave it to Moon the Loon to die shortly thereafter from an overdose of a drug prescribed him to help cope with alcoholism. It’s awfully hard to imagine an 80-year-old Moon still walking the earth, and even harder to believe he’d still be playing drums like he once did.
Insofar as the seemingly endless same-set list-again tours since the mid-90s are concerned, Ringo Starr’s son Zak Starkey struck me as the finest of Moon’s successors; Starkey would perform the necessary “classic” fills, but otherwise offered a Moon-like groove sans violence.
After all, Moon bought Starkey his first set of drums. Had Moon survived, perhaps they’d have played together on stage.
During all the 47 years since Who Are You, I’ve struggled constantly to maintain my affection for a band that has released a grand total of four albums of original material during the years to follow. The remaining two octogenarians’ recent inept, Keystone Kopsian firing of Starkey on the eve of The Who’s presumably (really, maybe, possibly) farewell “Song Is Over” tour has at last squelched my interest in what remains of the band’s career.
Quadrophenia (1973) is my favorite album of the rock era, and nothing is likely to change that. Townshend always will be one of rock’s great talkers, until his own end. But in my own dotage, The Who’s primacy amid my musical life has drifted inexorably into the rear view mirror. I enjoy finding quality younger bands to fill the void.
In his early thirties, Townshend was quoted as fearing the band’s decline into existence as “desperate old farts.” Prescient indeed; meanwhile Keith, you are missed, although rock is more dead than alive, and I’m glad you didn’t have to witness the soul-crushing inevitability of Auto-tune.
You sang out of tune, naturally. Ah, but those drums!
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