Dougal in the Guardian

[Brian Cady]

The Guardian takes up Dougal Butler's agent's offer
for an interview (how many of you got that e-mail?)
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1809932,00.html

Dark side of the Moon 

John Robinson hears how Dougal Butler got over the
Moon 

Saturday July 1, 2006
The Guardian 

Any lingering doubts that Dougal Butler may have had
about terminating his employment with Keith Moon were
swiftly quashed by a meeting with the legendary
drummer's Malibu neighbour. "Steve McQueen came out
and shook my hand," says Butler. "He said, 'I love
Keith. But you've got to move on - you can't live like
that.'"

For Butler this meant his decade-long stint as
personal assistant to one of the most dynamically
talented, but utterly unpredictable figures in
rock'n'roll. A prolific drinker, and destroyer of fine
automobiles, Moon had always been a handful. By 1977,
however, he had become impossible to deal with. Soon,
he would be dead.

Today, Butler is nominally on the phone to help plug
the rerelease of Moon's solo album, Two Sides Of The
Moon. However, a chat with this genial man is also an
audience with a co-conspirator of one of rock'n'roll's
greatest vandals. Butler's ribald book, Moon The Loon
- rights bought by Robert De Niro - helped quantify
the Moon legend. Butler himself, meanwhile, remains
guardian of a rich archive of Moon misbehaviour.

"We were on tour with the Who, in Detroit," says
Dougal. "We were in this five-star hotel and we met
the guy who played John Steed in the Avengers. So we
go round to his room and we're happily having a few
drinks with the bloke out of the Avengers, and the
drummer from Three Dog Night.

"But then Keith took a dislike to this guy out of
Three Dog Night. The previous day we'd bought these
gas guns, so we went and got them, got down on the
floor outside the room, and let them off, bang, under
the door. Then we hear all these dogs yapping. Keith
goes, 'I don't remember any dogs.' We'd got the wrong
room. Turned out there was this woman in town for some
dog show. We gassed her dogs."

Memorable as these larks were, however, as the 1970s
gathered speed, so did Moon's self-destructive
tendencies. When the Who weren't working, there was a
real fear that if he wasn't given something to do, he
might simply destroy himself. The solution? A solo
album.

"So the idea was, advance him some money and hopefully
you'll get some of it back," Dougal explains. "But
we've got to keep him busy."

The virtue in the resulting effort, needless to say,
is maybe more in its expediency than its music. "It's
the most expensive karaoke album ever made," says
Dougal, "but it's a good insight into what he was
going through. It's a laugh."

As Moon's alcoholism, cocaine use and susceptibility
to the flattery of hangers-on thrived under the
Californian sun, these laughs, however, steadily
declined. Ultimately, after "a big barney" and a
subsequent "big punch-up", Dougal took his final leave
of Moon.

After 10 years trying to right the drummer's vehicular
wrongs, it shouldn't be a surprise that some of
Dougal's businesses since have been on four wheels.

"It's all going very well," he says, signing off. "We
provide all the trailers for Midsomer Murders..."

· Two Sides Of The Moon (Deluxe Edition) is released
by Sanctuary on Monday. Premier Percussion has
launched the limited-edition run of Keith Moon's
Pictures Of Lily tribute drum kits. Proceeds from the
first kit go to the Who's Teenage Cancer Trust
charity.


-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com

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