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Audiobook. Dear Boy: the Life of Keith Moon! Part 1. Author: by Tony Fletcher. A biography of Keith Moon, the drummer with the Who, who died in 1978. The video series contains 51 photos from the original book and 310 photos of Keith Moon from a different period! Information was gathered from friends and family, and associates in the music industry such as Alice Cooper, Jeff Beck, and Kenny Jones, and the author suggests that Moon’ssubstance abuse brought on schizophrenic tendencies! Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the photographs in this book, but one or two were would be grateful if the photographers concerned would contact us. A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library. For all the children who never got to know their fathers. And for Campbell, may that never be the case. Foreword. How do you attempt to capture an exploding time bomb? These were the first words put to me by one of the vast number of people I talked to while researching the life of Keith Moon. They were spoken by Mark Volman who, as a member of the Mothers of Invention and half of Flo and Eddie, came to know Keith through their appearance in a Frank Zappa movie and then during Moon’s three years’ self-destructive downswing in Los Angeles. But Volman’s was merely the most succinct of many similar observations that revealed much about Keith’s evasive character in a few words while emphasising the difficulty of saying everything about him in a biography. Even those closest to him in life sometimes found themselves stymied when attempting to define him in death. “It just felt like he was going to explode,” his former wife Kim McLagan, who through ten years of a turbulent personal relationship came to know the adult Keith best – and worst – said to me at one stage. “There was just so much in there.” On another occasion, she told me, “He was a star,” only partly referring to him as a mortal celebrity. Her real meaning was revealed when she continued, “And he illuminated so many other lives.” I prefer to think of him as a comet, blazing through and enlightening our earthly experience while burning himself put in the process. But I’ll take any form of cosmic comparison, including the double definition of the word ‘star’ and the lunar association of his name, if only because Keith Moon’s existence was so utterly – and in all senses – out of this world. To be sure, the personality traits that mark us as individuals can usually be traced back through our bloodline. Musical prowess is often hereditary. Alcoholism is now recognised as a genetic illness. Spousal abuse tends to be part of an ongoing, hard-to-break generational cycle. Tendencies toward comedy, acting and public performing are all usually attributable, at least partially, to one’s parents and upbringing. Not so with Keith. There was absolutely nothing in his family background that gave even an inkling as to what his life would become. Quiet and unassuming, disciplined and accepting, teetotal (yes]), loyal, and unquestionably loving, his parents were the living embodiment of every government’s dream subjects. The subsequent life of Keith John Moon – the blazing comet, the shining star, the full moon brightening the night sky – had nothing, and yet everything, to do with this almost crushing normality. From the earliest age, Keith Moon proved himself an exception to all known rules, and upon discovering this about himself, he made it his purpose in life to challenge them in everything he did. He revolutionised the concept of the drummer in rock’n’roll and pop music by rejecting the previously accepted constraints, leading from the back as was almost unheard of rather than offering mere support as was then the convention, filling spaces that had always been left open, leaving gaps where usually lay the beat. He achieved greater international fame than his instrument was meant to inspire, only to treat that celebrity status as an ongoing opportunity to send up the whole notion. He sneered at the dominant British stiff upper lip, while appropriating it so effectively as to delete his working-class background at will; he threw his head into the cavernous jaws of certain disaster time and again, including tempting fate with an almost unparalleled intake of alcohol and drugs, and emerged on every occasion (but the last) just about whole, beckoning the world to laugh with him at his apparently charmed existence. He never encountered a situation so formal that he could not denoble it by stripping naked, never met an important person he could not cut down to size with an instant one-liner, never knew the meaning of the word ‘embarrassment’...
