Keith John Moon was
born
on August 23, 1946 in Wembley, Northwest London. He was eldest child of Kitty and Alfred Moon, who later had a pair of daughters, Linda and Lesley. Many consider him rock's greatest
drummer
, though his first musical instrument was the bugle at the age of twelve when he joined the Sea Cadets. The bugle led to the trumpet, which followed the instrument he was famed for. He was also a great showman, considering stunts such as blowing up his drum kit on The Smothers Brothers show without anyone's knowledge about it. People often refer to his innovative, creative, and most of all wild style of drumming. He first started out drumming at the young age of 16 as the drummer for a band known as the Beachcombers. While with them, he began to perfect his style of drumming.
Keith-"I'm a total extrovert. I love to be involved. I don't like this great big kit in front of me and the audience. I envy the guitarist, who can go over and get that much closer to the audience. I can't do that; I have to sit at the back, so I acted in a different way and started to to draw attention to the drums in a different way, by acrobatics and all the tricks."
In his 1957 school report, his art teacher declared him "Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects." He never did well at school and left at the age of 14 in 1960, the same year he started to play the drums.
He bought his first set of drums that year:
Keith-"They were seventeen pounds and it was a really old, old kit. I just bashed about in the garage. Then I started playing with a jazz band."
"I think the first time I really got bitten by any sort of ambition was when I was about fifteen. I saw all my friends were getting jobs in banks, and I got a job as a salesman. I knew then there was no way I was going to stay in that kind of business. I could earn more on the weekend playing drums in some local bands. When I first dropped out of school, I was getting 4 quid a week, and I was earning that just playing at weddings and parties with a local rock band. So I decided to stay in the music business."
While in The Beachcombers, there was word going around that a popular band, The Who, known at the time as The Detours, were looking for a new drummer. So one Thursday night in April of 1964 Keith showed up at a club where the band was using a replacement drummer. His inebriated friend approached them and asked if he could audition on stage near the end of the gig and that his mate was far better than their session drummer. They decided to run through the rock classic "Roadrunner". Keith put forth a fast and furious rendition, breaking the bass drum pedal and the head of the snare. The rest of The Who knew that they had found their new drummer.
John Entwistle remembered his first meeting with Keith: "He brought up this little gingerbread man, Dyed ginger hair, a brown shirt, brown tie, brown suit, brown shoes. He looked just like a little gingerbread man. He got up on the kit, and we said, 'Can you play "Road Runner?" 'Cause we hadn't come across a drummer that could play 'Road Runner' with us. And he played it, and we thought, 'Oh this is the fellow'. He played it perfectly."
