The one project that broke Keith Moon’s confidence: “He was like a blubbering baby”
As the band themselves would ultimately find out when they tried to replace him, The Who were nothing without Keith Moon behind the drum kit.
After his passing in 1978, the band attempted to continue with Kenney Jones filling the shoes of Moon, but it proved to be a mismatch that Jones was unable to prevent from producing disastrous results.
While the group would eventually disband and then choose to reunite on several occasions, their plight in replacing Moon hasn’t ended, and the less said about the drummer-based debacles that the band have been through surrounding their farewell tour, the better, with their policy seeming to be to fire and rehire Zak Starkey on a continuous rotation.
Moon was irreplaceable, and the band knew that, which is why it felt all the more tragic when the band realised the condition that he had got himself into during a two-year absence from touring prior to his death. Having spent a couple of years away from performing with the band and living in America, Moon had allowed his drug and alcohol addictions to spiral, gaining a considerable amount of weight and living an indulgent lifestyle that had changed him as a person.
The film that the band made earlier in 1978, The Kids Are Alright, was demonstrative of Moon’s brilliance, and his incomparable style as a drummer came across in all of the footage used in the documentary. However, when Roger Daltrey invited Moon to a private screening of the film shortly before its release, it seemingly upset Moon to see what he’d become in the two years since he’d last played, and he broke down upon watching the film with the frontman.
“He was like a blubbering baby,” Daltrey recalled during a 2004 interview with Classic Rock. “He was crying. He was devastated. And I kept saying to him: ‘Keith, you’re the star of the fucking film, you’re brilliant. Without you in it it would be as dull as dishwater.’ And he’s saying: ‘Yeah, but I’m overweight, I can’t drum any more.’”
As much as Daltrey attempted to offer him some words of encouragement, telling him how they’d be back in the studio in no time and see him back to full fitness and health, he didn’t seem to be able to shake Moon out of this malaise. “It must have been like falling off the edge of a cliff for him, because he saw this beautiful young kid go from looking sixteen years old to looking forty in a very short space of time, and he found it very hard,” he continued. “It’s because he didn’t drum. Drummers need to drum. He was devastated.”
It was evident that the key to Moon’s happiness was drumming, and the more he was distracted by the enticing but dangerous lifestyle that living in the US allowed him to flirt with, the more it robbed him of the enthusiasm and opportunity to return to what he loved doing most. With him sadly passing away before the film was officially released, it only stands to show just how tragic the loss of Moon was for The Who and for the whole of rock music.
