Sea and Sand (RIP, 43 years ago, Keith Moon)

 

 

 

I’m writing this on September 7, 2021, but at this exact moment I‘m in a cabin in the Catskills without a wifi connection. The solitude is good for the soul, and the hiking is even better. But it’s absolute hell when it comes to keeping up with the modern world.

 

Kind of the point, you say? Well, yeah, I try to keep that in mind, but today’s a big day for rock-star deaths, and, among that morbid roll call, none affected me more than the death of Keith Moon 43 years ago today (September 7, 1978). So here I am, chimping some diary -- as Mike Watt would say -- all to keep current as the calendar breezes past.

 

When Keith Moon died, I was 16 years old and deeply into a couple of things in the musical world: The Who and the emerging punk-rock scene, particularly the English edition of all that. Fueling and recharging my musical obsessions on a monthly basis was Trouser Press magazine. 

 

TP was (one of) the (few) thinking person’s rock mag(s) – a real island in a sea of boneheaded dreck. I absorbed so much new info about music from their fannish yet intelligent rants, but I also learned, in large measure, how to write. I remember looking up words that they’d use, just to be sure I was getting their meanings correct, and then I’d use those newfound weapons in writing of my own. Suddenly, my grades in any class that required a term paper were going up. And I shit you not when I tell you that I remember thinking in my first job as a lawyer that Trouser Press had a lot more to do with the high marks I was getting for my legal writing than, say, Oliver Wendell Holmes did.

 

The staff at TP was more collectively into the Who than any other band, When I first subscribed in 1976, I was already a big fan of Quadrophenia and Who’s Next, but TP got me to explore the early days, Sell Out, and non-album tracks like “Naked Eye.” They called the Who “the best everything ever” at the time, and I was a believer.

 

Keith Moon’s drumming was no small part of all that. At the time, before I started playing the drums myself, Moonie seemed like a gloriously enthusiastic nearly-uncontrolled id behind the drums – a perfect anti-hero for a teenage boy. Later, I learned that, amidst the bombast, there was a strategy and even, yes, a subtlety to the Moon approach to power. Specifically, he was tied like a conjoined musical twin to Pete Townshend (and to a lesser extent, the vocals of Roger Daltrey), leaving John Entwistle to color what was left (and color he did). Moonie was a composer and arranger with muscle. I chose “Sea and Sand” – for me, the shining moment of Quadrophenia above many other shining moments on that near-perfect album – as the centerpiece of this post because the interplay between Moon and Townshend is staggeringly perfect. It’s a symphony of guitar and drums, and all around those two instruments are the soaring, howling vocals of Daltrey and the bass gymnastics of John Entwistle. “Sea and Sand” is a truly perfect song. 

But lest one think that such extreme fandom is never malleable, the Trouser Press review of Who Are You -- the 1978 album where it was rumored that Moon had to relearn how to play because his bad habits with recreational drugs had so caught up to him – was lukewarm. At the time, I didn’t want to hear any criticism of my heroes. But TP was right. Particularly in retrospect, that record was a pale imitation of the Who that had preceded it, and Keith Moon’s death just a short time after the album’s release probably should have been the end of the band. It wasn’t, and we’ll save for another day the debate -- and my own near-complete negativity -- over what followed when The Who plowed onward. At the time, though, I was crushed by Moon’s passing. I pretended to love Who Are You – or, more accurately, I probably fooled myself into loving it – and yet I also knew things with the band I loved so much would never really be the same.

 

Fast forward a bit, and when I did finally take up the drums in 1981, Keith Moon played no small part in my getting up to speed. No, I don’t play like Moonie, but I sure as hell tried back then, and, until I developed my own style, trying to copy the moves of Moon the Loon did a lot for my timing and sense of dynamics. 

 

For today, to honor the death of Mr. Moon so many years ago, I’m going to implore you to do one simple thing in the days that follow: take a careful listening tour through Quadrophenia, and be slack-jawed in amazement at the power of the band. Keith Moon’s crucial role in all of that was never more obvious than on that album. Thunder on, Brother Keith, if only in our memories and the recordings that survive.