FULL MOON : The Amazing Rock & Roll Life of Keith Moon, late of The Who, late of The Earth was initially published in 1981. Written by Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler, (Keith Moon’s Man Friday / Confidant / Longtime friend). FULL MOON recounts Butler’s decade in the employ of rock’s greatest drummer and mad man. The book is not only one of Rock music’s best memoirs but definitely one of its funniest. Written in a casual tone that heavily utilizes British slang (it comes with a glossary to help the uninitiated cope with phrases such as bunny, cobblers and geschvinn.) Full Moon has one of the strongest narrative voices you’ll find in rock biographies. Dougal welcomes you into the hedonism of Moon’s life without pulling punches or passing judgement. He allows the reader into the melee of smashed gear, demolished hotel rooms, and pillow fights with naked Canadian masseuses.The reader essentially becomes a fly on the wall during the Golden Age of Rock music. But be careful – there are many televisions thrown through those walls and windows.
There’s that time Keith and Dougal do a spontaneous road trip to Tangiers, and from Tangiers it’s off to Gibralter, and then Gibralter bores so the lads head off to Malta like they’re in some alchol and coke fuelled Bob Hope & Bing Crosby film. Oh, and of course there’s the time with the hookers in the Indian restaurant but you best read that for yourself.
For me the book is a suitable companion to Hunter S Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Like Fear & Loathing, Butler’s book brings you into the pharmaceutically charged belly of the beast. The intoxicants and the damage to hotels are non-stop. And both books are intimate snapshots of an era, specifically the late 60s and 1970s.
“This erratic ten-year roller-coaster ride is fuelled by great quantities of medicines washed down by greater quantities of other medicines – mainly brandy and champagne – which is, of course, why no prolonged time with Moonie can be remembered as a simple and straightforward narrative.” – Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler
In fact, I’d say that the misadventures that Butler relates of his time with Moon makes the Hangover films look as tame as My Dinner With Andre. Keith Moon did it all and for the most part he did it first. In regards to hotel destruction Butler writes, “I am quite prepared to bet my entire boodle that Moonie is by far and away the World Champion of Hotel Destruction. He is the Jessie Owens, the Muhammad Ali, the Sterling Moss of this activity.” Oh yes, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen may have been in the running but they were simply following the template that Moon had created and continued to refine.
Butler takes us to L.A. as his boss joins John Lennon’s Lost Weekend with Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson. This group of rockers party like depraved frat boys while recording Harry Nilsson’s album Pussycats. During one session drummer Jim Keltner along with Ringo and Moon get ready to drum along to ‘Rock Around the Clock’, but before they do Butler is asked to deliver each of them phials of amyl nitrate (a favourite of Hunter Thompson). Butler obliges. “There is more speeding around than the Indianapolis 500 … They play like they all have just one minute to live.” Indeed much of the book is about the debauchery of life with Moon. Sometimes the tales are hilarious and others are horrific. Some are somehow both. And other are surprisingly touching, such as the accounts of Moon’s soft spot for the impoverished who he on occasion put up in the swankiest of cosmopolitan hotels.
“During that time no one knows Moonie better than me because no one, not even his wife, spends as much time with him as me,” writes Butler.
Full Moon is a good starting point for any Who fan, or Classic Rock reader. It’s essential reading, as is Tony Fletcher’s Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend. Moon is an exhaustively researched book that unfolds the entire life of The Who’s drummer from his rambunctious childhood to his early death in 1978. Moon, it seems, displayed many of his most infamous behaviours while still a boy: Speaking out of turn, pranks on locals, destruction of property and mimicry were all on display while at Alperton Seconary School for Boys in the late 1950’s. Throughout the book Fletcher outlines in detail the psycho/social traits that made Moon both the fascinating jester and the fabulously frenetic drummer that he was.
“Keith’s adult problems were to be the textbook worst case scenario of untreated hyperactivity, in which depression, psychiatric disorders (including Borderline Personality Disorder and elements of schizophrenia), alcohol and drug abuse, and antisocial and violent behaviour all helped chase him into an early grave.
Along with the dutiful and well-told chronology of Keith Moon’s life Tony Fletcher details precisely what made Moon such a unique and phenomenal drummer. This is something I’ve found sadly missing in most written accounts of Moon because his antics beyond the drum kit were so over the top and legend-worthy that they overshadowed his unorthodox artistry as a drummer. We learn of his early days in the pre-Who band The Beachcombers that Keith was always aware of the importance of showmanship. The baby-faced Moon of the Beachcombers would spin his sticks and throw them in the air while playing like his drum hero Gene Krupa. Regularly the band would receive complaints at shows that the drummer was playing too loud. Fortunately for Keith – and The Who – he would find another local band who wanted to play just as loud as he did.
In terms of Moon’s technique Fletcher nails it precisely and is able to break it down in layman’s terms. For example, of the song ‘The Kids Are Alright’, from The Who’s debut album, Fletcher writes, “On this his tour de force, Moon pulled every trick in the book without ever sounding awkward. On the verses and choruses he hit the snare hard on every beat … thereby emoting the optimistic dance floor feel of the lyrics….In the bridge he then moved effortlessly to a syncopated rhythm to reflect the vocalist’s newly enunciated doubts….He tore into his battery of tom-toms like a champion boxer, retreating occasionally, as if subdued, before attacking again when least expected.”
With regards to Moon’s work on The Who’s groundbreaking rock opera, Tommy, Fletcher states, “He treated the drums as an instrument to be played alongside, rather than behind the guitar and bass. While (band manager) Kit Lambert fantasized about using an orchestra, Keith Moon went straight ahead and played as if he were in one… It’s not too bold a claim to state that Moon’s performance is a pivotal and pioneering triumph in modern music.”
Fletcher spends a good chunk of the book setting the record straight and trying to separate fact from fiction. He asserts that once a story is repeated often enough in music circles it takes on a life of it’s own. But Fletcher makes the point (as does Butler in his book) that Keith Moon NEVER drove a car into a swimming pool and certainly not the Holiday Inn swimming pool in Flint, Michigan while celebrating his twenty-first birthday. Fletcher also points out that it wasn’t really even Keith’s twenty-first birthday as he had lied about his birthdate years earlier. At the time of his death many reported his age to be thirty-three when it was actually thirty-two.
Regarding the fact and fiction of Keith Moon his friend and bandmate John Entwistle is quoted in Moon as saying, “You forget what an arsehole he could be. A lot of it is really funny when it comes back as legend, but when you were there it was a pain in the arse.”
Perhaps the most fascinating element of Fletcher’s Moon comes early in 1976, when The Who, on Pete Townshend’s urging, held an intervention with Moon concerning his alcoholism and erratic behaviour. By that point his behaviour was not just costing the band money for hotel repairs but it was adversely effecting his health and playing as well. He was sent to Dr. Meg Patterson who had helped Eric Clapton fight his heroin addiction ( and would latter help Townshend in the early eighties).
While in the care of Patterson and her husband, parapsychologist George Patterson, “Keith confessed that his demons were far more literal than anyone had realized. They were, he told Patterson, living with him inside his mind. They had names – Mr. and Mrs. Singh – and they were taking him over.” The details of this episode are truly spellbinding if beyond belief for many readers. Fletcher himself suggests that Keith’s manifestations of madness may have purely psychological roots. His close friend and former alcoholic, guitarist Joe Walsh, is quoted in the book saying, “There’s all kinds of monsters and demons in there, and at some point there is no turning back.”
Keith seemed to be making advances toward sobriety while with the Patterson’s yet as soon as he was let loose on the 1976 North American tour his Dionysian side ran amuck once again. And of course it was all to excess, even by Keith Moon’s standards. Twice in the first two nights in the U.S. he almost killed himself. Once by drug-overdose, and once by cutting open an artery in his foot while trashing his hotel room.
Keith’s final two years were spent oscillating between inebriation and brief periods of sobriety. The tragic irony is that his death on September 7th 1978 was not the result of some madcap hotel misadventure but from an overdose of heminevrin, a drug that was prescribed to him to help him sober up. And one that is not supposed to be prescribed to out patients. Certainly not a patient like Keith Moon, who on the day of his death ingested thirty-two heminevrin pills.
And I must state clearly that Dougal Butler was not working for Moon at the time of Keith’s death. Dougal served Keith above and beyond the call of duty during his time with the drummer. (Read Full Moon and tell me otherwise.) He had moved on to saner pastures by September 1978. As an insider, and as one of Keith’s few real friends, Butler is quoted extensively in Moon. “I wouldn’t have had those pills in the flat. I would maybe have let him have one or two … and the rest I would have kept on me.”
One of Moon’s famous comrades in craziness, Alice Cooper, said about his passing, “I wasn’t surprised when Jim Morrison died. I wasn’t surprised when Janis Joplin died. I was surprised when Keith Moon died. Because he had no death wish. He was having too much fun.”
Both books are excellent rock biographies. Full Moon is the break neck snapshot of Moon the Loon written by a loving friend, while Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend is a thorough and much needed cautionary tale of one of the twentieth century’s most incredible musicians.
The Buzz Terminal 