The tragedy of Keith Moon and ‘Don’t Worry Baby’
Breathlessly singing a favourite song as the quiet night becomes silent around Keith Moon, it is difficult to imagine the vibrancy and power he possessed at certain moments during his career.
The tragic figure of Moon is so neatly permeated by party-filled punctuations that remembering his sad demise can feel completely at odds with the pulsating grandeur of the mammoth rock titan he became. Moon’s duality – both the life of the party and the slow stomp toward an early death – is undoubtedly captured in his love and affection for The Beach Boys’ classic hit, ‘Don’t Worry Baby’.
There’s a lot of sunshine to be found within The Beach Boys’ catalogue. For a while, there was no band that better told America’s post-war story than the Californians. They did it through a myriad of musical styles and a humble authenticity. Soon enough, Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys became heroes. While they appealed to the masses, for a certain set of British kids, they became sunny saviours. The dreary grey of little England was becoming more regularly pierced with a ray of golden brilliance from Wilson and his brothers.
For Keith Moon, they became a lifeblood of positivity. He consumed all their music and loved almost everything Brian Wilson conjured up, despite the fact that he was in one of the biggest bands on the planet in The Who. Lead singer, Roger Daltrey, once told Uncut: “The funny thing about Keith, though, he was a total Beach Boys nut. Even in the ’70s, if The Beach Boys had asked Keith to join them and leave The Who, he’d have left us. He was an absolute fanatic.”
While Moon was an unstoppable, hedonistic machine, unceremoniously placing cars in swimming pools, blowing up his drum kits, having cake fights and generally raising hell wherever he could, The Beach Boys remained a slice of heaven. They were the golden light at the end of the dark nights.
But what is often missed by casual listeners who might be keen to write off the group as surf rock nonsense is the darkness that hid behind every track. Wilson was rarely entirely happy when penning his tracks, and while Tony Asher or another money-making maestro usually wrote the lyrics for the group’s most commercial hits, Wilson’s music would belie the intent to write a love song. There’s no better example than 1964’s ‘Don’t Worry Baby’.
Speaking with Goldmine in 2011, Wilson said of the song: “I wrote that with Roger Christian, and it took me two days to write it. I started out with the verse idea and then wrote the chorus. It was a very simple and beautiful song. It’s a really heart and soul song, I really did feel that in my heart. Some say it’s about a car and others say it’s about a girl, who’s right? It’s both. It’s about a car and a woman.”
Lyrically, the song centres on the story of a drag car racer needing the support of his girl before he can hit the accelerator pedal. But, in truth, this matters very little to one’s enjoyment of the track, as the dreary harmonies and melancholy rhythm fill the airwaves. Instead, we are given a universal and attainable depiction of a man needing reassurance. A man hovering over the pedal, heart pounding, teetering between acceleration and collapse. A man in desperate need of a resolution. It has been routinely cited as Moon’s favourite song of all time.
Though he first heard the song at the tender age of 18, as he began becoming a drum-kit monster with The Who, the track became a beacon of Keith Moon’s issues as he slipped away from the party-loving ‘Moon the Loon’ and slipped toward a seriously destructive path.
In 1975, at only 29 and seemingly ravaged by the hardest of days partying, Moon paid tribute to the song by covering it not once but twice on his solo album Two Sides of the Moon. While the tracks are not exactly gold-standard covers, they do reveal Moon’s appreciation for the song and how it might have brought him some comfort.
After all, isn’t that what songs are really there for? Even in our most haunted moments, we can often find a slice of warmth in the tones of our beloved musicians. Songs like ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ provide a sincere and secure place for us to hide, if only for a few minutes. In the gentle repetition of our favourite verse, in the crescendoing chorus or the bouncing rhythm, we can not only seek shelter but perhaps find a former self still playing air guitar or deeply trying to harmonise with a new life.
Moon cut a sad and sullen figure during his final TV appearance in 1978. Bloated, and above all else, broken by the abuse he welcomed on his body, Moon cuts a saddening figure of chemical dependency. “Are you in control of your life at all?” asks the host Hartman. “On certain days,” replies Moon, seemingly unsure of his answer and the road it will lead him. “Certain days? What are you like the other days?” asks the interviewer.
His simple reply: “Quite out of control. Amazingly…ah…drunk.”
During his final months, Moon would attempt to get clean and beat his addiction issues once and for all. But even that offered its pitfalls and, in a tragic twist of fate, sadly led to his death after he took 32 clomethiazole tablets (a drug meant to help fight alcohol withdrawals) and ended a life filled with tremendous highs and pitiful lows.
It’s been noted that during his latter days, Moon would sing ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ over and over again. For many, it might have seemed strange, perhaps even annoying. But it’s easy to see how The Beach Boys and Moon’s favourite song might have given him a sense of control that was otherwise completely lost to him. Within the quiet hum of the repeated chorus, he didn’t have to be ‘Moon the Loon’ but could just be Keith, the young boy who heard about a band from California and held on to a melody for a lifetime.
