Keith Moon’s final days were not just difficult for him, but they were challenging for his family and friends too. His declining health took a toll on his relationship with his bandmates, and Daltrey felt helpless. One particular track reminds the singer of this time and brings back some memories that he’d rather forget. (Faroutmagazine)
The final album that the band recorded before his tragic passing was the 1978 release, Who Are You. On the LP is one song titled ‘Music Must Change’ which Moon just couldn’t get his head around. Despite his best efforts, they were forced to recruit a session musician to play the drums on the final recording, which Daltrey regrets.
In 2015, the vocalist appeared on Howard Stern’s programme on Sirius XM and opened up about the negative feelings he holds towards the Who Are You cut. “There is one, and I won’t ever play it again. There’s a song on the Who Are You album, it’s called ‘Music Must Change’. Every time we played that in the studio, Keith couldn’t play the drums to it. It was in a three, four. Keith couldn’t play normal drums. Keith could play great Moon drums, and that was it.”
They tried everything with Moon to help him learn the track, including one extremely unconventional method, but that was also to no avail. Daltrey revealed: “He just couldn’t do that, so he had to do it with a pair of squeaky boots walking the pavement and do a squeaky walk to do the rhythm. Anyway, Keith is not on that recording on the record, and straight after we made that record, he died.”
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For Daltrey, the song is a reminder of that painful time close to Keith’s death, and he also feels regretful about recruting another drummer, which must have been humiliating for Moon. The singer painfully continued: “We played the song when we got back together with Kenny Jones as drummer, and then we dropped it for a long, long time. We brought it back in 2002 for the last tour with John Entwistle, and we rehearsed it, we were going to do it in the show, then John died.”
Daltrey feels like there is a curse attached to ‘Music Must Change’, and for the sake of his and Pete Townshend’s health, The Who will never perform it again.
Keith Moon attacked Roger Daltrey with tambourine after flushing The Who drummer's pills down toilet -The frontman claims he was thought of as 'the enemy' due to his clean-living behaviour. (source theindipendent.co.uk)
The singer, who has released his new memoir Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite, revealed he was thought of as "the enemy" due to his clean-living behaviour in comparison to other members of the notoriously hedonistic rock band.
After flushing Moon's "great big bag full of pills" down the lavatory, Moon apparently "came slashing at me with the bells of a tambourine". The following day, Daltrey was fired from the band. However, he was reinstated after the remaining members were booed off stage" when they performed without him.
Daltrey says he constantly fought with his bandmates Moon, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle, most typically over their drug use, including one fight which got him kicked out of the band in 1966.
"Rock'n'roll had become all about taking as many drugs as possible until you died," he writes, via The Times. "And I was spoiling that. From their point of view it was an intrusion on how they wanted to live their lives. They wanted to be free and I was spoiling that."
He previously spoke about the incident with Moon in an interview with The Mirror, where he said he had to be clean living "to keep the others in line".
"I was the one that didn't take the acid," he said. "All I ever did was pot. I was f***ing boring. It's so intense, the temptation to take something to maintain the balance is huge, You take the downers to bring you out of the clouds after a show. Then you need the uppers to put you right back up there in time for the next one. That's why there are so many casualties in our business."
Once, somewhere late at night we ended up at the Crazy Horse saloon. We go to the door and there’s this guy dressed up as a mounted policeman, and Keith is going, ‘I’m Keith Moon of the Who,’ and the guy is saying, ‘ooo?’ and they don’t recognise him and everything is lost in the translation. Fortunately one of the girls working in the foyer recognises him and suddenly it’s all ‘big celebrity’ and out of nowhere a table and chair and a bucket of champagne arrives.
“After half an hour Moonie says ‘I’m going to take a leak,’ and goes off and I’m left on my own. I’m thinking, ‘Where’s Moonie? Has he passed out?’ I go looking for him. He’s not in the toilet. I go back in the club and I see Moonie sitting at a table with a bottle of champagne. I go up to him and he says, ‘Dear chap, what are you doing here? Do have a drink, sit down.’ I say, ‘Keith, we came in together.’ So now we’ve got two tables going where it’s difficult to get one. He says, Aren’t these girls lovely?’ and he starts taking his clothes off and he’s going to join them on stage. Suddenly he’s got his boots, his shirt, his socks off, and he’s about to pull his pants down, and I’m trying to stop him!”
Carr dragged Moon out of the Crazy Horse and after a couple more champagne-dominated stops around town, “We get back to the hotel about five in the morning and he crashes out.
