Midweek Update #5: August 23, 2023
Celebrating the Life of Keith Moon, Confessions of an Ex-Zine Editor, The Best of Jamming! and Latest Sh*t
It is August 23rd, 2023. Keith Moon would have been 77 years old today. It is difficult to imagine Keith, the original Wild Man of Rock, making it to such old age, but it is even more unpleasant to remember that shortly after his 32nd birthday, in the early hours of September 7, 1978, Keith died from an overdose of the very pill he was taking to help withdraw from alcohol. As many of us know, all too ironically – proving that God does indeed have a sick sense of humo(u)r – The Who had only just released the album Who Are You, in which Keith, in full riding regalia, was asked to hide his paunch by sitting forwards against a chair from Shepperton Studios emblazoned with the words “Not to be taken away.”
While the tabloids had a field day with what they saw as his justifiable/justified self-inflicted demise, his death marked the end of The Who as rock’s greatest band, and the start of a long journey for my then 14-year old self, already a massively committed Who fan, towards writing Keith’s biography. That book came out (in the UK) in September 1998, 25 years ago itself, and was, it is fair to say, a massive success – on a scale, frankly, that neither myself nor my publishers at the time, Omnibus Press, quite anticipated. The timing of Keith’s death was awful. But without planning it, the timing of our book on his life turned out to be perfect, and that book – Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon in the UK, Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend in the USA, and with various other titles in French, German and Portuguese – has remained in print for a full quarter-century. It seems to be what I am best known for, and at times has overshadowed my other books, but as with a hit songwriter, I guess it’s not the worst problem to have in the world!
To celebrate The Life of Keith Moon, I will be hosting two separate events around the date of his death. The first is on the evening of September 7 itself, a Thursday. I will be appearing in person at the Orpheum Cinema in Saugerties, New York where, thanks to a creative booking policy, we already presented a highly successful R.E.M. event back in April. I will not so much read from the book – though there will be some of that – as I will talk about it, and about Keith’s life, and show some videos, and take some questions… And I will be joined by Jason Bowman, the co-founder of the incredible Rock Academy where I work part-time directing shows, and an incredible drummer/drum teacher. Jason will break down some of Keith’s most (in)famous drumming to demonstrate the great player’s technique. Tickets are only $11, and on sale now.
For those of you who don’t live in the area but wish you could attend, there is a second event, on Friday September 8, at 7pm UK time (2pmEST, 11mPST), live at YouTube. This is being hosted by Omnibus Press, where I will be interviewed by Jo Kendall, we will take written questions on the night, and with luck, it will go off without a hitch. The streaming page is already up and waiting, below; follow through and bookmark it here:
To get us all further in the mood, this weekend’s long read will be about Keith Moon. Further interview archives from my Moon book and elsewhere are forthcoming and will be available for paid subscribers only; my intent is to make my Substack reward my writing time in a way that social media does and cannot, so I would like to ask the rest of you to consider a paid subscription, and if not for Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, then for one of the other writers I recommend here. Thank you very much to those who already did so.
A new edition of The Fanzine Podcast was published overnight. This is the podcast that grew out of a more dedicated Jamming! Fanzine Podcast that we set up to co-promote my compendium on my old (fan)zine, and I am having a wonderful time with it, talking in more general terms to fanzine writers past – and present, as in the case of Alison B. and her incredible Confessions of an ex-Zine Editor. This is a memoir in zine form about doing a music zine and going off the deep end with drink and drugs, a diary of her lost year before recovery that is full of some of the funniest themes I’ve ever seen in a zine - and yes, that is praise of the highest order.
Alison was joined on this episode by Jane Appleby, who produced NINE different ‘zines in the 1990s and early 2000s, with such wonderful titles as Pussy Rock and Trophy F*ck. It was a great conversation for me especially, because it got me out of my comfort zone of talking to former editors I already know (or knew of) and into a chat with a couple of people that became part of the culture long after I’d become a Stateside family man; in Alison’s case, my first podcast with someone actively producing a zine right now. The episode should be on all podcast platforms (if it’s not on yours, please let me know), and you can access those platforms with just one more click from here or here, but because Spotify makes it so easy to embed in to Substack, you can always just go right ahead and listen away.
You can purchase Confessions of an Ex-Zine Editor from Alison’s Ko-Fi page, but also her Bandcamp page. Who knew Bandcamp sold books? But I have decided to take advantage myself and will gradually be uploading extra stock of my own that is, frankly, taking up necessary space. I am starting, appropriately, with The Best of Jamming! Selections & Stories from the Fanzine That Grew Up 1977-86. This is aimed mainly at American readers, for whom books otherwise come shipped from the UK. At $30, I can’t promise to beat Amazon’s price, but I can offer you a personally inscribed copy, and you won’t be paying to put Jeff Bezos on the moon and his employees into physical therapy rehab.
The next episode of my other podcast, One Step Beyond, will feature myself and partner Paula Lucas talking about our trip to Costa Rica, where Paula bravely signed up for a typically Tony “let’s do five different locations in 10 nights and still call it a holiday”… um, holiday? It was a wonderful experience and we look forward to talking about it from a properly cultural/environmental/travel-tips perspective, because One Step Beyond is all about “positively engaging with the world outside our door” and Costa Rica is the perfect place to do so.
On each of these Midweek Updates, I am recommending another Substack account, and today I encourage you to visit, follow and pony up a paid subscription if you can for Dan Epstein’s Jagged Time Lapse. I mentioned Dan’s music in my first Substack article Digital Conversion Therapy, but, like me and mine these days, that’s a mere hobby sideline compared to his professional career as a writer.
Dan is a new arrival to the Hudson Valley and a new good friend, which is rarely the case with fellow music journalists: contrary to Momus’ straight-faced question to me back in the 1990s, “so do you, Frank Owen and Simon Reynolds all hang out together in New York at night?”, there is no guarantee that two people who write about music will share much else in common.
Fortunately, Dan and I share a LOT in common – from a love of soul music to a love of The Jam, to enjoying talking about this over a pint, along with an equal passion for a national sport (Dan has written books about baseball; if you know me at all, you know I have the Crystal Palace FC emblem tattoo’d on my shoulder). We may even collaborate on a project exclusively for Substack subscribers in the near future (you have been teased!). In the meantime, Dan’s weekly writings about music, mostly from a reflective, archivist perspective, are among the best I have found on Substack. They can take the form of Top 10s, as when Cynthia Weil recently passed away, or a lengthy one-off about a single obscure single, as with 1971’s “40 Acres and A Mule” by Sound Experience. Conveniently for my recommendation here, Dan just offered his unpaying subscribers a 10% discount to his paywall posts to celebrate one year on Substack: to quote directly, the paywall access includes “interviews with music legends like Robbie Robertson, Smokey Robinson and the battling Reid Brothers from The Jesus & Mary Chain, excerpts from my in-progress teenage musical memoir, and deep dives into such pop cultural ephemera as that Rod Stewart rumor.” The post Dan sent out about his Substack journey is itself a proper little memoir article, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed if you click on through.
While there’s always new music for me to recommend – I am especially taken by Staten Island working class hero Kevin Devine’s new recording of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds,” an incredibly specific and arguably dated subject matter, but a song that lends itself to the sparse acoustic interpretation and reinforced O’Connor’s incredible power and perspective as a lyricist and composer. (I have also been meaning to share the Facebook post by Sinéad’s original publicist Elaine Shock that she wrote the week after the singer’s untimely demise; it’s very powerful and it is here.)
But because there is far too much new music for me to ever keep up with, I rely on other people to do it for me. The best of them all – seriously – is my old schoolmate John Matthews (aka Johnny M), who at the age of 59/60 still has the hippest ears of anyone I know. His “Latest Shit” playlist on Spotify is, per his own words, “forever changing” and it demands to be listened to sequentially, as it moves from chill ambient through to rock, dub, dance and all the rest. John, like me, believes that good music is good music is good music, though as he tends to wear hip clothing too, I can’t say he doesn’t like labels! John was actually one of my three guests on the first episode of the Jamming! Fanzine Podcast, “From Classrooms to Clubs…” Not only do I love that I have friends who go back almost 50 years, I love it even more when they love music like I do. Cheers John; mine’s an IPA.