<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During the summer of 1967, I was making the transition from Jr. High to my freshman year in High School.\u00a0 Little did I know that events taking place across the pond in London during the first six months of that year would have such a profound effect on me.\u00a0 The wheels really started turning in the latter half of 1966, but the fruit that would fall from London\u2019s musical tree began dropping fast and furiously in the first six months of 1967.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The big name bands that we now associate with 1967 were in the process of forming, breaking up, reforming, or just hitting their stride in the fall of 1966.\u00a0 The Who were typical of the bands in the \u2018just hitting their stride\u2019 mode although there were periods where they seemed to be ready to join the \u2018breaking up\u2019 category.\u00a0 Their seemingly happy go lucky drummer, Keith Moon, had been in the band some 18 months by November of 1966, but for some reason he kept looking for a new gig.\u00a0 Moon was insecure and positive he was going to be bounced from The Who.\u00a0 Guitarist Pete Townsend blamed Keith\u2019s \u2018paranoia\u2019 on the copious amount of drugs and alcohol he was consuming.\u00a0 Moon was newly married and his wife Kim was decidedly in a family way, but it didn\u2019t keep the mercurial Moonie from living his normal, party around the clock lifestyle.\u00a0 The Who seemed to be like a pressure cooker with no safety valve simmering on the back burner waiting for enough heat to build up enough to cause a serious explosion.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One telling event that lit the fuse on the powder keg of musical creativity that came out of 1967 London took place in May of 1966 and Keith Moon was at the center of it all.\u00a0 It seems Moon had an enduring fondness for surf music.\u00a0 Moonie couldn\u2019t sing on key to save his soul, yet he convinced the other members of The Who to let him take the lead vocal on their cover version of <\/span>Barbara Ann<\/span><\/i> (with the others harmonizing loudly enough to cover up his off key singing).\u00a0 Keith found out that one of the Beach Boys touring musicians, Brian Johnston, would be in London checking out the local music scene.\u00a0 Fan-boy Moon showed up and offered to guide him around swinging London town.\u00a0 It is to Moon\u2019s credit that he knew about Johnston being in the Beach Boys.\u00a0 Johnston\u2019s biggest contributions to the band were made when they were touring.\u00a0 The Beach Boys never toured in the British Isles and not being credited on their albums made Johnston a rather well kept secret, but not to erstwhile surf music fan Keith Moon.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Moon ushered Johnston around the clubs and introduced him to the scene.\u00a0 Johnston was staying at the Waldorf and was surprised one evening when Moon, all of 19 years old at the time, rounded up John Lennon and Paul McCartney to drop by and meet a real Beach Boy.\u00a0 After the usual rounds of drinks, card games, and conversation, Johnston asked if anyone would like to hear the new Beach Boys album he had brought with him.\u00a0 When their own revolutionary album <\/span>Rubber Soul<\/span><\/i> was released near the end of 1965, Lennon and McCartney had opened the door for a new era where albums would become more like works of art than just a cash grab assembly of a band\u2019s singles.\u00a0 The Beatles were fans of Brian Wilson and Phil Spector and were no doubt anxious to hear what new sounds were coming out of California.\u00a0 In this case, what they heard was Brian Wilson\u2019s masterful <\/span>Pet Sounds, <\/span><\/i>(which had been inspired by The Beatles\u2019 own 1965 masterpiece, <\/span>Rubber Soul<\/span><\/i>)<\/span>.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>As Lennon and McCartney listened to <\/span>Wouldn\u2019t It Be Nice?, God Only Knows, <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Caroline, No, <\/span><\/i>Paul remembers thinking, \u201cOh dear me, this is the album of all time.\u00a0 What are we gonna do?\u00a0 <\/span>God Only Knows<\/span><\/i> is the greatest song ever written.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The listening session with Johnston spurred McCartney to go home and write <\/span>Here There and Everywhere, <\/span><\/i>a song that would come out on The Beatles\u2019 <\/span>Revolver<\/span><\/i> LP three months later.\u00a0 <\/span>Revolver<\/span><\/i> was the precursor of the biggest album release of 1967, <\/span>Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band <\/span><\/i>(which McCartney has repeatedly confirmed, \u201cwas inspired by <\/span>Pet Sounds<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0 Surf music fan Keith Moon may have acted as the catalyst in this case (by putting The Beatles and Brian Johnston in the same room to listen to <\/span>Pet Sounds<\/span><\/i>)<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>but Moon didn\u2019t particularly like the record.\u00a0 Always a purest at heart when it came to surf music, Keith described their new direction as, \u201cJust one big drag.\u00a0 I don\u2019t get a thing out of what Wilson\u2019s doing now.\u00a0 He\u2019s cut the pop song up into one big clinical thing.\u00a0 It\u2019s all bits of tape stuck together.\u00a0 None of it really means anything.\u201d\u00a0 Most of England must have agreed because <\/span>Pet Sounds <\/span><\/i>sold rather poorly in Britain.\u00a0 The Beach Boys previous work (five top five albums and three top singles in the United Kingdom) had some Brits ready to transfer the crown of \u2018most important band in the world\u2019 from The Beatles to the Beach Boys.\u00a0 When they moved away from their tried and true hit formula, the Beach Boys record sales in England faltered and The Beatles retained their crown.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Before Johnston returned to the United States, he got to experience what can only be described as the \u2018best\u2019 and \u2018worst\u2019 of the British music scene.\u00a0 The \u2018best\u2019 occurred when Moon brought Johnston around to the set of the popular <\/span>Ready Steady Go! <\/span><\/i>TV studios so they could do a live interview with the Beach Boy.\u00a0 With Entwistle along for the ride, they had some drinks, popped some pills while hobnobbing with the other acts on the show, and completely lost track of the time.\u00a0 Eventually, they made it to The Who\u2019s gig at the Ricky Tick club only to find Daltrey and Townshend already playing their set with the rhythm section from the opening act filling in.\u00a0 The Who\u2019s bassist and drummer were three sheets to the wind and angry by the time they displaced the faux back line.\u00a0 Daltry and Townshend already had a head start in the angry department so by the band\u2019s instrument smashing finale, things got out of hand.\u00a0 The ugly end came when Moon was smashed in the head with one of Townshend\u2019s guitars as the curtain closed.\u00a0 As Johnston told the story in Tony Fletcher’s book <\/span>Moon, <\/span><\/i>\u201cI don\u2019t know what sparked it off.\u00a0 I just remember watching from the side of the stage and all of a sudden . . . they got in the biggest fight I\u2019ve ever seen.\u00a0 Guitars are swinging, everybody\u2019s just in a frenzy.\u201d\u00a0 When Johnston left for America the next day, he recalled thinking, \u201cThe concert was one of the best things I\u2019d ever seen, although maybe <\/span>God Only Knows<\/span><\/i> was more fun to do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Moon and Entwistle resolved that they had had enough of the \u2018Rog and Pete show\u2019 and were going to leave the band.\u00a0 Moon had already courted the drum throne in The Animals and The Nashville Teens, but nothing had ever come from these overtures.\u00a0 By the end of 1966, Jeff Beck came calling and added his voice to the conversation, soon to be joined by other not yet household names like Rod Stewart, John Paul Jones, and Jimmy Page.\u00a0 Beck had joined Page in The Yardbirds at Page\u2019s invitation and when the lineup gelled with both playing guitar, the band cooked.\u00a0 Beck soon grew tired of the tour grind and bolted during a North American tour.\u00a0 In November of 1966, he began working on solo material.\u00a0 After a chance meeting at a pub, he had invited Moon to join him at a session with pianist Nicky Hopkins, bassist John Paul Jones and his old guitar slinger friend Jimmy Page.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Lacking a singer, the only track that showed potential from this two day recording session was the instrumental <\/span>Beck\u2019s Bolero<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 While this performance has been widely heard on Beck\u2019s album <\/span>Truth<\/span><\/i>, the drums are credited only to \u2018you know who.\u2019\u00a0 After adding the scream at the break between the acoustic opening to the thrashing second half (yes, that was Moon screaming), Moon smashed his cymbal so hard that it knocked over the main drum mic.\u00a0 With the drums now pushed to the background and the cymbals thrashing in the foreground, it wasn\u2019t the greatest recording, but the track did convince Beck that he wanted Moon in the band.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The only other drummer with the same potential as Moon was Johnny Mitchell but by this time Mitchell had been rechristened \u2018Mitch\u2019 and was working with an imported American guitarist that everyone was soon to know.\u00a0 Beck admits that he tried to pry Moon from The Who, but once he found a singer in Rod Stewart, he was forced to move forward with drummer Mick Waller (who wasn\u2019t a bad choice, he just wasn\u2019t Keith Moon).\u00a0 Page had also been impressed with Moon at the Beck session and he too tried to lure the drummer and Entwistle into his new post-Yardbirds band.\u00a0 When The Who rhythm section decided to stand pat, Page had to \u2018settle\u2019 on a lineup that included John Paul Jones (from the Beck sessions), and the relatively unknown Robert Plant on vocals and John Bonham on drums.\u00a0 Beck has mentioned that what they had achieved quite accidentally was the template that would become Led Zeppelin.\u00a0 We are pushing the story a bit here as Led Zep wouldn\u2019t release their initial album until 1969.\u00a0 Let us get back to our 1967 timeline.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Strangely enough, both Moon and Mitchell hailed from Ealing and even though Moon thought of drummers as a fraternity of brothers in the music business, he really didn\u2019t like Mitchell.\u00a0 Mitchell had worked at Jim Marshall\u2019s drum store (yes, the same Jim Marshall that gave us the fabled line of Marshall amplifiers).\u00a0 The frequent jams held at the store made Mitchell a known quantity.\u00a0 His jazz background made him a different drummer than Moon, but he could be just as powerful as Moon. \u00a0 When The Jimi Hendrix Experience ended up signing with the same label as The Who, there was some angst around Who-ville;\u00a0 someone else was trolling their musical territory.\u00a0 Even though The Experience were the new kids on the block, they received more label support than The Who and therefore broke in America in a big way.\u00a0 The Who\u2019s initial releases on this side of the pond made barely a ripple.\u00a0 The Who would just have to wait their turn to make a splash in America.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the summer of 1967, I found myself being called to rehearse with a band of my sister\u2019s classmates (recent high school graduates) who went by the name The Self Winding Grapefruit.\u00a0 The previous December, they had drafted me (as an eighth grader) to play with them at my sister\u2019s Christmas Party held in our basement.\u00a0 When summer arrived, if their drummer didn\u2019t show up to rehearse (which apparently happened quite often), they would call me.\u00a0 At one of these rehearsals, Mike McKelvy (who would eventually play in the fabled Marquette \/ Ann Arbor band Walrus) stopped by with the first Hendrix album, <\/span>Are You Experienced?<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 When he dropped the needle on <\/span>Purple Haze,<\/span><\/i> I nearly fell off the drum stool.\u00a0 McKelvy had just returned from California with the album but suffice to say, as soon it was available locally, I had a copy and Mitch Mitchell became another one of my drum instructors.\u00a0 The Who would eventually crack the US airwaves with their single <\/span>I Can See For Miles<\/span><\/i>, making it the only Keith Moon entry in my practice routine.\u00a0 By then, I had already gone bonkers for Mitchell, John Densmore (The Doors), and Hal Blaine (the ace session drummer who played on a lot of the hit singles released in those days).\u00a0 There were a lot of talented drummers around for me to learn from in 1967.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The summer of 1967 was truly an amazing summer for music.\u00a0 Little did I know that some of my best drum rehearsal albums were a direct result of these interacting musical moments in London.\u00a0 Just when we thought it couldn\u2019t get any better,<\/span> The Beatles<\/span> dropped <\/span>Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/span><\/i> on the world.\u00a0 Would they have written this masterpiece if Keith Moon had never introduced them to Bruce Johnston?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 The Who were relatively unknown in America in 1967 save their package tour opening for Herman\u2019s Hermits and their atypical Who single <\/span>Happy Jack<\/span><\/i> that had stalled at number 22 on the charts.\u00a0 Moon and The Who would chart their own course and become innovators in their due time (<\/span>Tommy, Quadrophenia, Who\u2019s Next<\/span><\/i>), but helping set off the explosion of music that came out in 1967 is still a pretty neat part of their legacy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Who weren\u2019t totally excluded from this momentous summer in the States.\u00a0 Their rise up the record charts in America was kick started by their appearance at the fabled Monterey Pop Festival in June.\u00a0 The Who weren\u2019t keen on following Hendrix in the concert order.\u00a0 Relieved at winning a coin flip ensuring they would go on before him, The Who made sure that they played their\u00a0 best instrument smashing finale as a sort of calling card (though playing rented equipment left much to be desired in their live sound).\u00a0 London indeed made an impact on the summer of 1967 on both sides of the pond and The Who did their part to help it along.\u00a0 The music that blasted from radios in both the US and the UK would eventually become the foundation of what we know today as Classic Rock Radio.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video – Okay, 1967 was not so long ago we didn’t have color TV . . . but B&W was still just starting to give way to that marvel of the age….big screens would come later!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During the summer of 1967, I was making the transition from Jr. High to my freshman year in High School.\u00a0 Little did I know that events taking place across the pond in London during the first six months of that year would have such a profound effect on me.\u00a0 The wheels really started turning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,8,6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-new-music","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1981,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions\/1981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}