Pete’s decision to isolate himself from temptation was certainly understandable. The Who on the road – in particular Keith at his favourite hotel – were a non-stop party. One of the most treasured memories among one of those who knew him was seeing Moon on his way to the Playboy Club after one of the shows, dancing on the roofs of the taxis outside the hotel wearing nothing but a smoking jacket.
Joe Walsh, now an established solo star, stopped in to see the band at the Navarro to find Keith, as always, living on the brink. “I got off the lift at Keith’s floor and John Entwistle was hanging from the plumbing like an ape in his underwear, with a bottle of brandy in his hand. I said ‘Hi’ to John then I went down to Keith’s room. The door was open. He wasn’t in his room, I went to the window and there wasn’t a ledge, but there was a double window, one window was open, and on the other was an air conditioner, the window mount type, and Keith was outside, standing on the top of the air conditioner, overlooking Central Park. ‘Dear boy, great to see you, great guns, thank God you’ve come,’ and he invited me up there. I just said, ‘No, I’ll be in here.’ This air conditioner was 18 inches long by 12. I was terrified. I was sure he was going to 
fall. I saw no way how he could have got out of the window and climbed up, with a glass of brandy and ginger. I went back in the room terrified and eventually he came back in, and said, ‘What a beautiful evening!
ANNETTE and other girls
Annette was brought into Keith Moon’s roller-coaster world without really having a say in the matter. But like so many other girls who met him and were bedded by him, s
he didn’t object. She was quite effortlessly wooed by his humour, his anecdotes, his warmth, his exuberance, and the constant flow of champagne. At the end of that first night, almost without thinking, certainly without complaint, she followed him back to Egerton Crescent, where Keith was occupying the top floors of Kit Lambert’s house. There was just one problem. He had another girl there.
As far as any such thing was ever ‘official’ in his life, Keith was still dating Joy Bang. But given that the ‘actress’ was flying back to America the next day, her holiday with Keith over, she had turned down the offer of one last night on the town in order to pack. She hadn’t expected him to move on to his next conquest quite so rapidly. Seeing that that was exactly what he had done, Joy exploded in anger, shouting and screaming and cursing Keith. As Moon remonstrated with the American, Annette cowered in the bedroom at the top of the house, wondering what she had let herself in for with this man ten years her elder who commanded such respect at Tramp as to get other people’s dates ejected and who could dare bring a girl home when he already had one waiting for him. She heard them fighting for what seemed like ages. Then it all went quiet. A while later, Keith came back upstairs.
“Sorry about that,” he apologised in his best upper-crust accent. “I just had to make love to her to shut her up.”Annette spluttered her response out without thinking. “Did you really? You’re probably tired then. You might want to go to sleep now.” He did. With Annette.
DRUMS and others Hotels
“I hate drum solos,” he confirmed several months later, when his album was released. “Drum solos are the most boring, time-consuming things. I don’t think the drums are a solo instrument. Drums are there to set the beat for the music.”
When the noise from Keith’s room got particularly excessive one day, the Wilshire management cut off his electricity. Infuriated, Keith responded with a now famous course of action. He moved himself and his furniture out into the hallway, plugged his stereo into the sockets there and sat down in his armchair – naked. It was altogether easier for the hotel to let him return to his room to make a noise than invade everyone else’s personal space.
But that was Keith. For all that he spent like there was no tomorrow, he didn’t crave everyday possessions. “He would walk out of a hotel room and leave his luggage behind, and at the other end buy new gear,” says Annette. And for all that he could afford luxury, he reserved the right to live like a slob. Defending his hotel destruction in the mid-Seventies, he announced, “People ask me if I act like it at home, and the answer is yes.”
Essentially, he acted however he wanted to. One night when Skip Taylor drove Keith home from the studio to the Bel Air house, “He walked down the driveway, and he just dove in to the pool, swam to the other end, got out, said, ‘Okay, cheerio then.’ I was like ‘Holy shit, where is this guy coming from?’ And it wasn’t done to blow my mind, he just did it.”
