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REVIEW: Dear Boy: The Life Of Keith Moon



Jeff Stein: "Now I was wondering if you’d really tell us the truth?"

Keith Moon: "The truth as you want to hear it?  No I couldn’t do that.  You
couldn’t afford me."

Just a little over a year after that exchange was filmed, Keith was dead.
His death sealed him within his own myth, the high-living,
hotel-destroying, car-submerging, greatest rock drummer in history.

Now twenty years after his death, Tony Fletcher has gone after that
unaffordable truth.  In his massive new biography of Keith’s life, he tries
to confirm or deny the barroom stories spread by Keith, his friends and
those who got caught up in his short, bizarre life.

The myths get exploded on page one.  Keith turns out to be a year older
than listed in all the Who biographies, being born August 23rd, 1946, not
1947.  Thus his infamous 21st birthday party in Flint, Michigan turns out
to be his actual 21st birthday.  And the infamy of that birthday party
didn’t actually come from Keith.  He slipped and broke a tooth a few
minutes after starting a food fight and was out of action for the rest of
the night.  It was Herman’s Hermits who did almost all of the hotel damage.
 No car ever went into the swimming pool.  And The Who were never banned at
Holiday Inns (they continued to stay at them through 1967 and 1968).

However, many stories, even ones that seem impossible, turn out to be true.
 And there are many, many funny stories (I particularly love the one with
Keith, Pete and the hotel phone).  But before long a dark side arises.  In
the early part of the book there have been signs; Keith’s hyperactivity as
a child (if Ritalin had been available, would there even have been a Keith
Moon?), the memory blackouts that affect him before he is even 20, and his
extreme possessiveness of his wife, Kim.  By the Seventies, Keith’s
wildness gets so destructive that it begins to wreck his relationships,
both with his wife and his band.

Keith becomes an often angry drunk, and when denied a hotel room to vent
his fury upon, takes it out on his wife.  After he breaks her nose three
times, Kim leaves him.  It’s the most bone-chilling part of the book as she
and their child Mandy try to escape a rock star bent on revenge who has the
local cops and even Kim’s own mother in his pocket.  From there we follow
Keith to Los Angeles and more and more excesses that leave him having
seizures before he even turns thirty.

Fortunately for Keith, this is not an Albert Goldman book.  Fletcher
honestly loves Keith and does the best he can with mere words to analyze
the impact his drumming had on rock ‘n’ roll.  Most interesting here is a
detailed portrait of how Keith’s drumming style came about, an interview
with the drummer who was paid by the teenage Keith to give him lessons, and
a discussion by rock’s best drummers trying to understand his style and
what they see as its glories and its limitations.

Almost everyone who knew Keith well, and is still alive, participated in
interviews for the book with the notable exceptions of Roger Daltrey (who
thought the book would compete against his long-delayed Keith movie) and
Pete Townshend.  Pete’s only message to the author was that he had "no
longer anything to say about Keith that is kind."  The book’s apparent
accuracy is, however, phenomenal.  I only caught two outright mistakes; not
bad for a book of this size.

So if you want to hear all the legends again and read about the wonderful
light-hearted clown, you might want to buy another book.  But if you ever
heard some outrageous Keith story and wondered, "did that really happen?"
or thought, "I wonder what he was really like?", this book provides as much
real information as we are ever likely to know.
UK title:
Dear Boy: The Life Of Keith Moon
by Tony Fletcher
to be published in England by Omnibus Press
(second week of September)
576 pp.
ISBN #0.7119.6625.7
£20.00

US title:
Moon: The Life and Death Of A Rock Legend
to be published in the U.S. by Avon Books
ISBN # 0380973375
$30.00
publication date as yet unknown

		A book review by Brian in Atlanta