Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (128 page)

Now we know why ‘Leaving Here’ stood out. The recording was in fact part of a session with Shel Talmy, in April 1965 – a full ten months later – for the prospective debut Who album. This recording and many other cover versions were scrapped in favour of Townshend compositions and the eventual
My Generation
LP. The covers were finally reassembled for the long-overdue 2002 double-CD reissue of
My Generation:
an ‘alternate take’ of ‘Leaving Here’ opens the bonus CD and Keith’s drumming is, almost snare roll-for-cymbal crash, identical to the previously released version. Certain aspects of what is noted on pages 90 and 91 now have to be read taking into account this new information.
¹¹⁴

More than any other legend surrounding Keith Moon, it’s the events of August 23, 1967 – his 21st birthday party at the Flint, Michigan Holiday Inn -that have been most frequently discussed and disputed. It almost broke my heart to report, in the earlier editions of this book, that Keith had not driven a car into the hotel swimming pool that night, and that the Who had not been subsequently banned from Holiday Inns as a result. But perhaps I need not have worried. The power of myth appears stronger than that of the written word, and many people still believe one or both of those legends to be true.

Other media investigations have mostly, in essence if not detail (the latter being beyond precise confirmation by this point!), confirmed the version reported in
Dear Boy.
In the VH1
Behind The Music
profile on Keith, researched in 1998 just before
Dear Boy
was published, the Who’s tour manager Tom Wright stuck to his account, as originally printed in Richard Barnes’ book
Maximum R&B
, that Keith only threw his body into the swimming pool, that the pool was empty at the time, and that Keith lost his front tooth as a result. And for the Channel 4 documentary
The Real Keith Moon
, Herman’s Hermits bass player Karl Green stayed with his version of events as summarised on page 197.

Then, in 2003, Channel 4 commissioned a series entitled
Rock’n’Roll Myths
, one episode of which focused purely on this question: did or did not Keith Moon drive a car into a Holiday Inn swimming pool the night of his 21st birthday? Three members of Herman’s Hermits (Karl Green, drummer Barry Whitwam, and singer Peter Noone) were interviewed on camera; despite predictable variations on the details, all agreed on the same key fact: at no point did a car end up in a swimming pool.

“I love all the stories, that he went on and he drove cars into pools, but that never really happened,” said Noone. “He’s getting his stories mixed up there, because it was never on the bill we paid,” said Whitwam, while Green concluded, a little cryptically, “It was my recollection that it wasn’t at the Holiday Inn in Michigan.”

That, you might think, is that. But then, for the 25th Anniversary of Keith’s death, in September 2003, the highly regarded American National Public Radio show
Weekend Edition
ran a story on Moon’s life, for which I was interviewed. Asked to cite “a story that has survived as one of the myths surrounding Keith Moon, and what the truth is behind it”, I opted for Keith’s 21st birthday party. When the show was broadcast, my opinion was followed on air by that of Roger Daltrey; asked the same question, he turned it on its head.
¹¹⁵

“I read these biographies where they say that ‘this never happened’ and ‘that never happened’,” he said, “but I was there and I know it happened, so I think, ‘Well what bloody group was I in then?’ I read that the car in the swimming pool on his 21st birthday party wasn’t actually there. And yet I saw it. We paid the bill. It was $50,000. I just remember the car in the pool, and the chaos, and people going crazy and Keith being rushed off to the dentist – after being arrested. And us having to find $50,000 to pay for the damage to the hotel. But then I read in a biography that that never happened – so maybe I’ve been living someone else’s life, I don’t know. Then again, they were interviewing ex-alcoholics and drug addicts, so I suppose they’re bound to get a very blurred view of what actually happened.”
¹¹⁶

Daltrey’s memory, though it appeared to jar with everyone else I had tracked down from the party, was soon joined, in print, by Pete Townshend. Responding to a question about the incident in an e-mail exchange for a special Who edition of
Q
magazine, he stated, “I was asleep by the time the Lincoln (Convertible) thing happened. I have seen photos, which never lie.”

On the
Rock’n’Roll Myths
TV Show, I had suggested that the photo of Keith’s Rolls Royce in the pond at Tara around 1973 (see page 335) has led many people to convince themselves that they’ve in fact seen a picture of a Lincoln or Cadillac in a Holiday Inn swimming pool; I can now only surmise that Pete is among them!

Yet, in mid-2004, I received an excerpt from the book
Local DJ
, the self-published memoir by that era’s influential Detroit radio DJ Peter Cavanaugh, who attended the party and wrote the following account all these years later.
¹¹⁷

I contacted Cavanaugh, who had not seen my own book. When I sent him the relevant text, he replied by e-mail, “I would suggest my own testimony be reviewed as additive to, not contradictory of, your own exceptional observations.” (Reading Cavanaugh’s copy again, it’s hard to see it as anything
other
than a contradiction. But still …) Cavanaugh then suggested I contact Bruce Wensch, proprietor of the Flint Guitar Company, who not only attended the concert at the Atwood Stadium, but was at the Holiday Inn three times in less than 24 hours that day: in the afternoon preceding the show, at Keith’s post-show party, and again the following morning.

Wensch’s memory of what took place is almost photographic, partly because he was just 15 at the time, wide-eyed and completely sober, and therefore unlikely to forget the night – and also because he took photos throughout. A self-confessed “science oriented nerd who was really interested in photography” but also a rock’n’roll fan who understood that the Who would be part of the “Holy Trinity of Rock” with The Beatles and the Stones, he was given free tickets and near enough all-access by a local DJ who hooked him up with the Herman’s Hermits National Fan Club. (The President of the Club was flying in for the show from Madison, Wisconsin; recall again just how popular Peter Noone and co. had been over the past few years across mid-America and this is not so trivial as it may now sound.)

The afternoon of August 23, Wensch visited the Holiday Inn, camera in hand, where he met Moon, John Entwistle and Karl Green when they came out to lounge by the pool. Consistent with so many other people’s memories of Moon, Wensch found the drummer extremely friendly, eager to learn about the boy’s own life – all the more so once he found out that the 15-year-old was a potential musician – and excited to know about Flint and what they could expect from the audience. (Detroit had been one of the Who’s first break-out cities, and the Flint show, in the automobile-producing town 60 miles away, offered a genuine opportunity to steal the limelight from the Hermits.) Kit Lambert then showed up “with his latest ‘boy toy’”, says Wensch, and also with a birthday present for Moon: an attaché case that opened to reveal tumblers and mixers, essentially a ‘portable pub’. Lambert and co-manager Chris Stamp had also visited the nearby packaged goods store, Boaker’s, on Fenton Road, to purchase drinks for the post-show party; the store later claimed to have been virtually cleaned out to the tune of $400.

A grateful Moon took immediate advantage of his birthday gift and the alcohol; it’s already written that he was drunk by the time he took the stage. At the Atwood Stadium, in and on high birthday spirits, Moon preceded the Who’s performance by racing round the field in a bright orange shirt and then drop-kicking a plastic container over the goalposts. This shameless piece of crowd-pleasing served to get the audience on the Who’s side for what was reputedly a ragged performance.

Moon had earlier invited Wensch to his post-show birthday party, but the 15-year-old had to wait until after Herman’s Hermits played to catch a ride with a friend to the Holiday Inn. By the time he got there, he recalls, choosing his words carefully so as not to incriminate the guilty completely, “There was a big commotion going on on the second floor. There was a scuffle with a fan in a room, and I think it was in Keith’s room, and I think they made an arrest. There was a local ‘yahoo’ by the name of Dennis Williams who pretended he was the brother of Keith Relf (of The Yardbirds). He dressed extremely Carnaby Street, very very mod, and called himself Jim Relf. This guy got on Keith’s nerves, and I believe that Keith probably got a little hostile. And Dennis Williams ended up with a scar. The Sheriff was called -his name was Sheriff Bell – and I believe Keith actually had to go to the County Jail.”

Members of the Who entourage immediately set “chase” to bail Keith out, but because the tour was leaving town the next morning anyway, the Sheriff may have been inclined to let Keith go with no more than a warning; charges do not appear to have been pressed. “They allowed Keith to finish out his party as long as he behaved himself,” recalls Wensch.

Of course, Keith had no intention of behaving himself, not on such a major occasion as this. Back at the Holiday Inn, meantime, the $400 of spirits – not to mention various hallucinogenics – were having the predictable effect on the many party-goers, whose behaviour was becoming increasingly rowdy even without the ringleading assistance of Moon. Wensch recalls that it was the Blues Magoos, loaded on psychedelics, who began throwing Keith’s Premier drum kit birthday cake around the room; that Keith’s clothes were indeed torn off, which “didn’t seem to be that big a thing in British culture, but in American culture was extremely risqué”; and that the party soon gravitated from the conference room to the pool area alongside, which had a fence around it. “Assorted different people in the entourage and females actually ended up in the pool. And I don’t believe everybody was clothed -which I thought was pretty unusual at 151”

Wensch says Moon lost his front tooth when he and Peter Noone attempted a dramatic salute with their full drinking glasses, only for Noone to accidentally hit Moon square in the jaw. This differs with the now widely accepted story of Keith losing it when tripping on the floor, trying to escape a birthday ‘de-bagging’, but is nonetheless consistent with the notion that it was knocked out at some point while food and drink flew freely – and literally -round the room.

The hotel manager, having now lost control of the situation, apparently called the police who, rather than arrest members of pre-eminent teenybop band Herman’s Hermits, resorted to damage control, to which end, guns may well have been drawn. (The three Herman’s Hermits members disagreed with each other on this detail in the
Rock’n’roll Myths
programme.) “The cops made everybody who had a registration at the hotel go to their room while everyone else was cleared out,” recalls Wensch. “At that point, it was practically a lock down.” While the most blatant freeloaders and liggers were forcibly ejected from the premises, those associated with Herman’s Hermits -including the Fan Club officials and the newly hired 15-year-old photographer – stayed behind to work out a photo shoot the following morning.

“There was a relative state of tranquillity for a short period of time,” says Wensch, and the police duly departed. At this point, many of the touring musicians, in the testosterone-driven midst of their youth, a long way from home, by now extremely inebriated – many of them on hallucinogenics that could perhaps have been rendered a ‘bad trip’ by the police presence – and absolutely furious that their party guests had been sent away on no less an occasion than the illustrious Keith Moon’s 21st birthday party, decided to wreak revenge on the hotel.

In his original interview for this book back in 1996, Karl Green described what happened next: “We had raids with fire extinguishers. We had to pay for a load of cars to be resprayed. We broke the railings off around the pool and threw them into the pool. All the snack machines were dragged off the walls.”

Wensch’s account is almost identical – except that he also recalls “a case of motor oil that somebody found, punctured and poured over the cars too”. He confirms the Hermits’ claim that the Who themselves were barely involved in the destruction: Moon, having previously been hauled off by the Sheriff as a troublemaker, was forcibly restrained from joining the gang by Chris Stamp, who kept him under something approaching ‘room arrest’, with John Entwistle for additional company, numbing his dental pain with additional alcohol.

Wensch returned the next morning for his photo assignment to find the swimming pool cluttered with glasses, chairs, bottles, even guitar cords – but no car. (That would have been hard to miss.) He witnessed the hotel manager demanding payment for damages in cash, and recalls Chris Stamp insisting that all members of the Who put their hands in their pockets as a point of principle. And he took pictures of a hung-over Pete Townshend sitting on his briefcase while waiting for the bus to take the groups to their tour plane.

Entwistle and Green both claimed in interviews for this book that they did not catch that plane, but rather a chartered flight later in the day with a recuperating Keith Moon. Wensch says that his photos confirm that these three did not board the bus at the Holiday Inn that morning. This all makes sense if, rather than being taken to the dentist in the midst of the party, Moon was in fact accompanied by his touring friends, along with either Chris Stamp or tour manager Ed McCann, in the morning.