Why Keith Moon was so essential for The Who
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Credit: Far Out / Alamy / Wikimedia
How to play drums like Keith Moon
For his legendary status in rock and roll, Keith Moon doesn’t get the level of respect that he deserves as a musician. Chalk that up to his wild offstage antics, uniquely crazed energy, and infamous deterioration towards the end of his life, but here are some terms that get attached to Moon’s name: sloppy, unfocused, manic, overblown, and overrated.
Moon’s own assessment of his skills was modest as well. “I suppose as a drummer, I’m adequate,” Moon self-deprecatingly told Melody Maker in 1970. “I’ve got no real aspirations to be a great drummer. I just want to play drums for The Who and that’s it.”
Pete Townshend seemed to agree. “Keith Moon’s drumming was an expression of his personality and his ego and his grandiosity and his ridiculousness and his theatricality and his sense of humour!” Townshend explained during the Classic Albums episode on The Who’s Who’s Next. “A lot of what Keith did was incredibly funny… just different variations of that played very, very fast. And sometimes he’d play ‘dum dum dum dum duda-duda-dum dum’ and then fall on the floor.”
But Moon’s other bandmates were more sympathetic. “If we played back our song in the studio, if we put the drums up we’d know what song it was because he always played with the vocals,” John Entwistle explained during the episode. Of all of Moon’s bandmates, Roger Daltrey was the most complimentary of his playing style.
“A lot of people really, really, really have never understood how important Keith’s drumming style was to The Who,” Daltrey explained. “And I kind of pictorially describe it as if you imagine Pete and John as two knitting needles and Keith was the ball of wool. He would kind of keep it all together, and with the vocals on top, it would produce a product. If you take Keith out of it, it would just kind of [fall apart].”
It was Who’s Next producer and engineer Glyn Johns who probably summed up the enigma of Keith Moon best. “I think that his image sadly being a little off the rails was something he promoted, and it actually got him talked about the most out of any drummers in any band as a result because he became a personality: his unpredictability,” Johns shared. “But if you talk to Who fans, I think you’ll find that they all thought he was a brilliant drummer, and if you talk to musicians they would agree and they would say the same thing. They would talk about his drumming ability far more than the other episodes of his life.”
Indeed, you don’t have to go too deep to find drumming legends like Dave Grohl, Roger Taylor, Clem Burke, and Mike Portnoy singing the praises of Moon the Loon. Just about anyone born after 1960 who picked up a pair of drumsticks has heard, and likely been inspired by, the singular playing style of Keith Moon. Look no further than perhaps the greatest rock drummer of all time, Rush’s Neil Peart, to properly sum up the genius of Moon.
“It is certainly true that Keith Moon was one of the first drummers to get me really excited about rock drumming,” Peart told Modern Drummer in 1980. “His irreverent and maniacal personality, as expressed through his drumming, affected me greatly. [He taught me] a new idea of the freedom and that there was no need to be a fundamentalist. I really liked his approach to putting crash cymbals in the middle of a roll. Then I got into a more disciplined style later on as I gained a little more understanding on the technical side. To me, he was the kind of drummer who did great things by accident rather than design. But the energy, expressiveness and innovation that he represented at the time was very important and great.”
Keith Moon’s personality was fully formed from the day he appeared as a “ginger vision”, according to Townshend, at an early Who concert and officially took over the drum stool. But it took a while for his style to be fully unleashed on record. On early Who records like ‘Happy Jack’ and ‘I Can’t Explain’, Moon’s frenetic style is let down by the modest production standards of the time. Moon is clearly dying to burst out of the confinement, but his restriction to a small drum was holding him back.
The breakthrough came on the band’s fourth single, ‘My Generation’. Raucous and wild unlike any record that had come before it, ‘My Generation’ featured a simple chord structure and ample space for Moon to let loose. Between each vocal fill came an opportunity for Moon to unleash the beast, and in the song’s explosive finale, the untamed id of Moon was shown to rock audiences for the first time.
But to anyone who claimed that Moon couldn’t keep time or play complicated rhythms, ‘My Generation’ acts as a perfect counter. Moon’s shuffle pattern features the kind of wrist dexterity largely reserved for jazz drummers, while his ability to stop and start along with the pauses for Daltrey’s lead vocals proved that he had a strong inherent sense of timing.
Over the next few years, Moon began to establish the setup that best suited his style. That configuration of drums and cymbals relied heavily on rack toms and crash cymbals – for Moon, it was the more the merrier. At one point, Moon completely excised the hi-hat from his setup, a decision that would cripple any other drummer. Moon also added double bass drums for an additional wallop, something that can best be heard on the Live at Leeds album.
As The Who became more ambitious in their scope, Moon was right alongside his bandmates in stepping up his technical abilities. Tommy‘s ‘Underture’, Who’s Next‘s ‘Bargain’, and Quadrophenia‘s ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ showed that Moon understood the delicate balance between his indefatigable style and the need for restraint when a song called for it. The flash and aggression of his hits are usually what Moon gets tagged for, but these are perhaps the most important examples to point to when assessing Moon’s drumming abilities: his understanding, however brief, of keeping things simple.
If you simply flail around the drum kit in a drunken fury, you’ll find that you don’t actually sound a whole lot like Keith Moon. In order to accurately replicate Moon’s style, you have to focus on fills that follow vocal patterns, working up your double bass drum dexterity, and an aggressive style that plays into each individual song rather. For better or for worse, everything that Moon played in each Who song was different, and what he left behind were some of the most fascinating and exciting drum tracks in the history of rock and roll music.
