Читать книгу Mad, Bad and Dangerous - The Book of Drummers' Tales - Spike Webb - Страница 16

Bob Henrit recalls another incident involving the celebrated Mr Moon.

It’s mid-day Friday. I’m sitting at the bar in my drum store, Henrit’s, on Wardour Street in Soho, reflecting on the past week. It’s been a long one. Hard work, but business is good. So good I’ll have to order some new stock. Bang on cue, I hear the sound of The Who blaring out of the windows of an approaching car. Soon a Rolls-Royce pulls up outside the shop. I go to the door and a voice pipes up from the back of the Roller: ‘Dear boy! How about a snifter?’

Soon I’m sitting in the back of the car sipping a large brandy. My host and companion is Keith Moon. It’s his weekly visit to the store. When he’s not working with The Who, he’s here to share a brandy or seven, 12 o’clock sharp. We discuss music, gossip, this and that. Then Keith says: ‘Dear boy, I have something to show you…’

We get out and go round to the back of the car, where his chauffeur opens the huge boot: ‘I don’t need these any more…’

There must be at least 40 snare drums, laid side by side. I can see at a glance that it’s a collection of top names in drums, including Keith’s favourite, the Gretsch DRB Special. ‘Are they any use to you?’

The problem is, I’m not sure if these are intended as a gift or whether Keith is selling them. But what strikes me as bizarre is how, as a drummer, 40 unused snare drums can no longer be of any use to him. Is he about to retire? Or is his current snare drum supply of such gargantuan proportions that these are simply surplus to requirements? In any case, I’m not entirely comfortable with the situation so I think it best to politely decline, for the time being at least.

Bob never found out where the snare drums came from, or where they ended up. But he did discover that they didn’t actually belong to Keith Moon. Nor did the Rolls Royce. In fact, pretty well everything Keith had belonged to The Who. Of course, the band wouldn’t have had a problem with Keith riding around in a Rolls Royce and behaving erratically. It was good for publicity. Even when Mooney was not being particularly outrageous, his gestures were always grandiose to the extreme: some people might turn up with four snare drums, but not 40.

But when you think about it, Moon’s behaviour captures the more eccentric slant on a drummer’s distinctly different outlook on life. It’s about not doing things by halves.