Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde
Keith Moon in New York, 1968
As I noted on Wednesday’s Midweek Update #5, August 23rd 2023 would have marked Keith Moon’s 77th birthday; sadly, he died on September 7, 1978, just two weeks after his 32nd birthday. Twenty years after his untimely demise, my biography Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon was published in the UK. Four months later, in January 1999, it was rebranded Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend for US publication. (Why? See here.1) It has subsequently been translated into French, German, and Portuguese, turned into a graphic novel, optioned for a movie that I wouldn’t bet the house on being released in my lifetime, and has never gone out of print.
Rather than overtly mourn the 45th anniversary of Keith Moon’s death, on September 7, 2023, I will be celebrating The Life Of Keith Moon with an in-person event at the Orpheum Theater in Saugerties, New York, complete with drum clinic. (Details here and here.) For those who don’t live in the Hudson Valley, there is a live online streaming event the following day, September 8, at 7pm UK time (2pmEST/11amPST) on YouTube, where I will be interviewed by Jo Kendall, and where we will be taking written questions, all being well with the technology. You can bookmark that YouTube page now, here.
From early September onward, I will be posting selected manuscripts and stories from the 100+ interviews that I conducted for the Keith Moon biography. These will be for paid subscribers only, so you may want to consider coming on board with a monthly or annual subscription.
In the meantime, what follows is an extract from the book. It’s an account of the events of April 4 and 5, 1968, when The Who were in New York City. In many ways it typifies the madness that surrounded the band at the time, which occurred in part because of the questionable sanity of their life and soul, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll drummer that ever lived, Keith Moon.
IN FEBRUARY 1968, THE WHO returned to America for a six-week tour, at the beginning of which they recorded a new American single ‘Call Me Lightning’, a heavy R&B-influenced number that hearkened back to the Who of 1966, and as such sounded positively old-fashioned after the advancements made on ‘I Can See For Miles’. It was backed by John Entwistle’s ‘Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde’, a typically wry song about a schizophrenic personality, whose character changed upon drinking his 'potion'. The single was immediately released to an American audience all of a sudden fanatical for new Who material. By the time the Who made it to New York in early April having traversed the rest of the country, including parts of the Deep South, ‘Call Me Lightning’ was already on its way up the charts.
On April 4 the Who arrived in New York, where their agent Frank Barsalona had invited the band to dinner at his midtown Manhattan apartment. Townshend stayed away: he and Barsalona had spent much time together over the past year and agreed it would be best for the other members of the band to get to know the agent equally well.
Barsalona and his wife June were teetotal, but they didn’t stop Keith drinking copious amounts of wine with dinner; that was to be expected from him. Afterwards, they moved into the living room, where Barsalona appeared so confident in his opinion that the Who were about to break huge in America that he turned the conversation to investment. The idea of the Who having money for anything other than paying off their debts had never crossed their minds, so one of them asked Barsalona what he would recommend.
"Well," said Frank who, as the Who’s American agent only, was blissfully unaware of what troubles the group might have experienced in other countries, "the one last area in the world which is open for investment that's closest to what America used to be is Australia. If I had the disposable money to invest, I'd consider looking into Australia."
Moon instantly jumped to his feet. "Fucking Australia!" he cried. "I hate that fucking place." Then he was up on the sofa. "Kit Lambert, fucking Kit Lambert... If I had him here, I'd smash his face in."
He was spilling his wine all over the floor as he ranted, but that was only the half of it. Keith had gone through a "complete transformation", as Barsalona recalls it. It was as though a different person had suddenly emerged from inside him, and a frightening one at that. He literally had to be shaken to his senses. When he came to, he looked around him – at everyone’s expressions and the mess he had made – and he was immediately contrite.
The conversation resumed gingerly, deliberately steered in a different direction. "But then something triggered in his mind and he went back to the Australia thing," recalls Barsalona, "and he went back to this whole thing about how they were arrested in Australia on a plane and thrown out of the country." And again, as soon as he sparked, Keith changed character. Not in a way that threatened violence on any of those around him, but certainly in a manner that suggested a real problem.
"Moon, forget about it," Barsalona implored as he grabbed hold of the drummer. The others too tried to convince Keith that what was done was done, that they were never going to go back to Australia, that there was no reason to ruin the night. But as he again snapped back out of it as suddenly as he had lost it, Keith realized the night was already ruined – at least from his own point of view.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so upset right now that I'm making a fool of myself. If you don't mind I'm going to go."
Keith left for the Gorham hotel nearby and John and Roger stayed behind. Immediately Moon was out of the apartment, Entwistle turned to Frank and June Barsalona.
"You know my song ‘Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde’?" he asked. "Now you see what my inspiration was. This is the first time you've seen it, but we see it all the time."
*
AN HOUR OR SO later Daltrey and Entwistle themselves returned to the Gorham. Word had come in that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis and half of black America was taking to the streets in anger. The Who had important headlining shows at Bill Graham’s newly-opened Fillmore East venue over the next two nights, and they could easily be jeopardized by any urban unrest. Tomorrow was obviously going to be a difficult and extremely busy day. Barsalona was just heading to bed to get an early start on it when the phone rang. It was Pete Townshend, phoning from the lobby of the Gorham. The Who were being thrown out of the hotel.
Barsalona immediately got dressed again, and ran over to 55th Street. A phalanx of police were outside the Gorham, looking decidedly uneasy. Barsalona wondered initially if it had anything to do with reactions to Martin Luther King’s death but then figured it couldn’t do, not at a midtown hotel. He went into the lobby to find three of the Who looking abject and annoyed. That one member was not with them – Keith Moon – made it all too clear what, or rather who, the trouble was about.
"Roger takes me outside," recalls Barsalona, "and I'm looking at the policemen looking up, they're looking up at this ledge, and on this ledge is this crazy fucking Moon, and he's doing this crazy laugh, and he's throwing cherry bombs down on the police! I said, 'Oh my god!’ and this police captain says, ‘Do you know that fucking nut up there?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you want me to speak to him?’ And he said, 'You'd better, ‘cos his ass is going to jail.'"
That was one problem they could all do without. Any serious breach of the peace and it would be difficult to get Moon back into the country again – in which case you could forget about the Who making enough money to invest in a new kitchen, let alone in Australia.
Barsalona quickly found the hotel manager, who was every bit as agitated as the police captain. With good reason. Prior to throwing cherry bombs from his ninth-floor window onto the street – and police – below, Keith had blown up his toilet, and with it the entire floor’s plumbing.
The hotel manager, the police captain and the agent got to Moon’s room. Keith was still out on the ledge; in his state, it was remarkable he hadn't fallen to his death. Barsalona leaned out the window to talk to him. "I said, 'Come on, you've ruined a real lovely night. Why?' He started swearing: 'Fucking everything.' He'd gone back to the hotel and got drunk. Eventually I got him back in, and once he came in he was alright. It was only while he was outside he was crazy. I said, 'You've got to tell them you had a bad reaction to a drug or something.' So when the captain starts asking him, he comes up with this amazing excuse that I would never have thought of about what was wrong with him and what he had been taking. I talked to the captain as well and surprisingly they didn't arrest him. They let him off."
Keith’s quick thinking, even in his inebriated, aggravated, half-crazed state, had once again got him out of trouble lesser people would have been imprisoned for, but it didn’t alter the fact that there were damages to be paid, and that the Gorham, the hotel at which most rock bands were welcomed, demanded the Who leave immediately and never come back. In a move befitting the group’s logic, they promptly checked into the Waldorf Astoria, arguably the most prestigious hotel in the city.
The following morning, the Who had a photo session. It had been arranged by Nancy Lewis (who was now working for publicity firm Rogers and Cowan, representing the Who and other acts), and it was to form part of a spread for Life magazine about ‘The New Rock’, featuring seven groups who represented the most promising talent in the world (including the Doors, Cream and Jefferson Airplane). In other words, it was arguably the Who's most important American photo shoot to date.
But when Lewis finally tracked the band down, they weren’t speaking to each other. Or rather, they weren’t speaking to Keith. Pete, citing his lack of sleep, made it quite clear that he "wasn’t going to go for any fucking picture for any fucking Life magazine". That Townshend had his fiancée Karen Astley with him, and that she too had suffered because of this extreme example of Moon’s behavioural swings only added to the guitarist’s aggravation. John Entwistle too would call it the most frustrating and unamusing episode he ever experienced of Keith’s character changes and potential for devastation. Finally, sharing their frustration but with the additional burden of her own responsibilities, Nancy Lewis burst into tears. Only then did Townshend agree to the photo shoot. The photographs, by Art Kane, were taken at the foot of Grant’s Tomb, with the group draped in a giant Union Jack flag, apparently feigning sleep. Except that they weren’t: all of them were exhausted from Keith’s activities the previous night and the changing of hotels in the middle of it, and had to be woken at the end of the shoot. (The photo made it across a double page spread in Life at the end of June and was later used as the sleeve for the soundtrack to the movie The Kids Are Alright, and more recently, on the BBC sessions CD released in 2000.)
In the meantime, although New York City did not follow Washington DC, Detroit or Chicago by rioting and looting in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination, many of the city’s nightclubs shuttered their doors, and the Fillmore consolidated the Who’s two shows into one. The band performed a stellar set that further enhanced their live reputation, but still their troubles with Keith and hotels were not over. The Waldorf Astoria, clearly unnerved at the prospect of letting the Who stay in their esteemed premises, had demanded cash up front, which proved to be less than immediately forthcoming. Now the hotel refused the group admission to their rooms – where stood their luggage – until the issue was resolved. Though it was through Keith’s own doing that they found themselves in this predicament, he cared only about extricating himself from it. As always, he had some cherry bombs in his possession. As he later, proudly and succinctly, recalled, "I blew the door off the hinges and got my luggage," following which, the Who were promptly kicked out of, and banned from, New York’s illustrious Waldorf Astoria.
The next night at the Fillmore, Pete Townshend apologised to the audience for being down, explaining that the band had been kicked out of three hotels in one day. With word rapidly spreading on the hotel grapevine that there was a group in town with a drummer called Keith Moon who should not be allowed to check in under any circumstances, the Who were suddenly unwelcome at all the best hotels in one of their most frequently visited cities. Townshend found sleeping space with friends in the city that night, and the others ended up staying on their tour bus. The next time they came to town, in August, they would be reduced to staying at, of all ironies, the Holiday Inn.
The Who went ahead and played the Fillmore East on April 5 and 6, 1968. The second show was recorded, and in 2018, the tapes were salvaged, fixed and mixed and released as a triple LP. I have it on vinyl and it is phenomenal.
For more on my Keith Moon biography (and my other books), please visit my formal website, where you can also find links to online bookstores. I ALWAYS encourage people to buy from their local independent bookshop first, and from A****n only as a last resort.
The US publishers were concerned that a book entitled Dear Boy would be seen as homo-erotic rather than as a book about The Who’s drummer, who used the expression all the time, and of course to whom it applied in kind. To some extent I now have my revenge, having called my current music project The Dear Boys. And in 2023 nobody thinks to question it.