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.)