The twisted irony behind Keith Moon’s last-ever live performance in 1978
In 1969, there were countless bands that were a perfect fit for the Woodstock line-up. With counterculture at its peak and music delivering a soundtrack for it, it wasn’t a case of who the organisers could get to play, but who would they be brave enough to leave off the bill?
Naturally, British bands had a tougher time advertising themselves for the line-up, with the festival being stateside and all, the likely American candidates all populated the bill: Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Grateful Dead. But ever since they released ‘My Generation’ in ‘65, there was simply no ignoring the role The Who played in shaping the liberal resistance.
With that seminal track, they outlined the attitudinal blueprint for counterculture that would develop into the hippie movement come ‘69 and Woodstock. So it was only right that the London band travelled to the promised liberal land and played the iconic ‘60s song, along with a string of other hits that were fitting of the expansive and open-minded environment.
But clearly, within the four years since the release of that song, something had changed within the band, particularly Pete Townshend, who had become disillusioned with the hippie movement and then outrightly annoyed with it by the time the band walked off stage.
During The Who’s set, political activist Abbie Hoffman joined the stage and used The Who’s allotted set time to storm the stage and provide a rousing address to the turmoil that served as the socio-political backdrop to the festival. It wasn’t tone-deaf, as really the entire festival was an exercise in rallying strength in the resistance, and so Hoffman’s speech was just another chapter in that story.
But while Townshend did agree with Hoffman’s sentiments, he was left frustrated that Hoffman chose his band’s time as an opportunity to take the stage and then eventually pushed him off toward the wings with his guitar.
Something about that incident left a sour taste in Townshend’s mouth, so much so that The Who’s ‘71 track ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ in response and as a bold announcement of his abandonment of the hippie resistance.
Townshend explained, “I wrote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ as a reaction to all that. ‘Leave me out of it. I don’t think you lot would be any better than the other lot!’ All those hippies wandering about, thinking the world was going to be different from that day.
“As a cynical English arsehole, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them and shaking them and trying to make them realize that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change.”
Ironically, it would become the last song Keith Moon would ever play live with the band, after they performed an intimate set of three songs in May of ‘78, four months before his death. After playing ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘My Wife’, the band ended with ‘I Won’t Get Fooled Again’. There may not have been a man who better captured the free spirit of the ‘60s than Keith Moon, and sadly, he bowed out with a song that subtly slandered it, because Townshend was too grumpy to share the stage with an activist.
