Free Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher Page A

with £15 in cash and the forms all filled out, signed by one Alf Moon as guarantor. Gerry half expected the signature to be a fake, but it wasn’t. Keith’s passion for the instrument evident, his friend in the business an ace card, he had talked his exasperated parents into springing for a drum kit – just as he should have been beginning to pay his own way at home.
    That night, Gerry and Keith carried the good-as-new blue Premier kit home on the underground train. There was no feigned sickness, no petty theft at Baker Street, and the commuters suffered no disruption other than tripping over the half-dozen drum cases as they disembarked
en route.
Back at Chaplin Road, Gerry helped an excited Keith set up the kit in the corner of the living room. Mrs Moon looked on expectantly; Alf was working late, as was often the case. Keith got behind the drums and attacked them – like “a complete madman”, said Gerry. “All out of time, like a maniac. Like in a mental home.”
    8 Flamboyant American jazz players with whom Keith would later be compared.

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    I n future years, Keith Moon would often be asked how he came to be a drummer. The answers were usually linear: something about the Sea Cadets marching band, or seeing Gene Krupa toss his sticks showman style, or playing a set over at a friend’s house (that being Gerry Evans) and becoming hooked. But on only one occasion in print did he clearly avoid the ever-shifting historical answer and instead reach for the emotional one.
    “I think the decision was made for me,” he told
Circus
magazine’s Scott Cohen in 1975. “I found out that I really could not do anything else. I tried several things and this was the only one I enjoyed doing.”
    Dropping his guard just for that moment, Keith cracks opens the window to his soul, allowing a small degree of the sadness that was never far from the surface a rare opportunity to breathe. He comes across as he probably really was when the drums discovered him: a little boy lost, searching for some way to make meaning of his life. He also seems to be admitting what many of us have always suspected: that his talent was innate, rather than studied. He almost always declared that he had never taken lessons. But he had.
    Carlo Little was a big bear of a young man fresh out of National Service when he first formed his band the Savages in Wembley in 1960 – and again, a year later, when he and another lad from Harrow called Dave Sutch finally committed to working together. During his two years in the army, Carlo had been doing for real what Moon had been merely playing at with the Sea Cadets; as leading drummer on parade for his battalion, his beat had to be loud enough for 1,000 men to hear it and keep in step. He ensured it always was.
    The last of a generation to endure conscription before it was scrapped in 1960, Carlo was ‘choked’ to have been forced into the army in 1958, just when rock’n’roll was at its peak. Stationed abroad for much of his time in uniform, he emerged with his musical enthusiasm and tastes unaffected, but shocked by the absence of decent live music. “The only groups around were big bands, and they weren’t groups, they were all old men,” he says now, no longer a drummer or involved in the business, but no less imposing than ever. “There was Cliff Richard and the Shadows, but they were just
playing
at rock’n’roll.”
    Indeed, as the new decade dawned it was obvious that rock’s flame was burning perilously low. Elvis had emerged from his own stint in the (US) Army as an all-round family entertainer; Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens had died in a plane crash in America, Eddie Cochran in a car crash in England that also (further) injured Gene Vincent; Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and rock’n’roll pioneer DJ Alan Freed had all been disgraced, Little Richard had ‘gotten religion’. The British rock’n’roll stars like Cliff Richard, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Adam Faith seemed