James Wood On Keith Moon
There are many reasons it's worth your time and energy and money to read James Wood's piece in the new New Yorker about drumming and Keith Moon. Here are a few choice bits:
"How a drummer hits the snare, and how it sounds, can determine a band's entire dynamic. Groups like Supertramp and the Eagles seem soft, in large part, because the snare is so drippy and mildly used (and not just because elves are apparently squeezing the singers' testicles.)"
(Wood should totally be writing for Summer of Megadeth.)
"On both ["Won't Get Fooled Again"] and "Behind Blue Eyes," you can hear him do something that was instinctive, probably, but which is hardly ever done in normal rock drumming: breaking for a fill, Moon fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the line and into the start of the next phrase. In poetry, this failure to stop at the end of the line, this challenge to metrical closure, this desire to get more in, is called enjambment. Moon is the drummer of enjambment."
See the above video for evidence of that. And watch til the end, when Keith gets on the microphone and talks to and insults the crowd (in… where? Houston? Somewhere else?) to see evidence of this:
"It is hard not to think of Keith Moon's life as a perpetual 'happening'; a gaudy, precarious, self-destructing art installation, whose gallery placard reads 'The Rock and Roll Life, Late 20th Century.'"
But I can't believe Wood does not include Tommy—along with Live at Leeds, Who's Next and Quadrophenia—on his list of Who albums he considers "great." (And I was also surprised and sad that he didn't mention Full Moon, the biography written by Keith's friend and drum tech Dougal Butler. It's very entertaining, and quite moving, if I remember it right. But I haven't read it since I was thirteen.)
Moon's drumming on "A Quick One" in the video of The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus is epic: at one point he's both executing a continuous two-handed drum roll WHILE he's methodically bashing the cymbals, then he picks up his tom-tom and lays it on its side over his snare to tap out the accompaniment to the "Soon Be Home" segment, after which he grabs the tom-tom with both hands and tosses it over his head behind him to continue on with the song, and then as the song reaches one of its crescendos some kind of liquid begins spraying out of drum kit as he looks like he's having a seizure…
Oh, yes. God, that performance is amazing. The whole band, actually. And even more powerful, seemingly, in the historical perspective of them coming in to the Stones' house and stealing the show.
To wit, same song, @ Monterey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROQVSPsV2kg
He just never lets up.
That's because 'Tommy' isn't all that great, I'm more surprised he didn't mention 'The Who Sell Out' as one of their great albums.
Tommy just doesn't have the consistently astonishing songs of Quadrophenia or Who's Next. And Live at Leeds sounds nothing at all like their studio work, and is the better for it.
As far as I'm concerned, the Who died with Keith. His was the lead instrument, and it's like Hendrix' guitar: you can replicate it, but you can't duplicate it.
I have it on good authority that the people behind Summer of Megadeth Music Ruining Clog would never, ever equate the Eagles and Supertramp. Because fuck the Eagles.
On Pain of a visit to the Glenn Frey Solo Catalogue Dungeon.(TM).
and the great dumping on of the 70s most over-hyped and under-appreciated band continues. the eagles are actually an incredible album band, much deeper and smarter than their hits suggest. i'll go to my grave defending them. fuck their fans, though.
Right, right, you're bloody well right, you've got a bloody right to say! – me I don't care, anyway.
FULL MOON is the funniest and saddest rock biography. Since I too haven't read it since I was a teenager, I hope it lives up to the memory when I ransack my parents' basement at Christmas time to find it for a re-read.
Now I want to go home and listen to Live at Leeds over and over again, as I did for about a year and half of high school.
I'm a big fan (and a drummer), but to my ears Moon's performance in that version of Behind Blue Eyes is not nearly him at his best. Sloppy, unimaginative and tempo is uneven. He could propel a song beyond where it had any right to go, but in the video above he was dragging. Agree his performance in "A Quick One" from Rock and Roll Circus is great. Another one of my favorite Keith Moon performances is his studio drumming on "Who Are You," as featured in TKAA. By most accounts, toward the end, Moon's performances could be brilliant, but were often terrible.
How does Neil Peart factor into this? Maybe Neil Peart can analyze James Woods filmography?
Sounds like a great read. Too bad Modern Drummer didn't think to run it.