Two sides of the Rock drummer solo album - part 1

Part 1 - Keith Moon's Two Sides of the Moon


Keith Moon is a lot of things, but i suspect prolific waster of other peoples' money is pretty close to the top of the list. Bad for investors, great for anyone who made their living cleaning up the debris left in the wake of his Tasmanian Devil like rampage through life.

The story goes that in between a bunch of John Lennon produced album and the filming of Tommy, Moon convinced everyone to help him make a solo album so he could pretend to be a Beach Boy. He barely plays drums on his own record, instead just singing and taking tons of drugs and threatening to take a pick axe to the record exec's desk if he didn't pay for the elaborate cut-out cover concept. I've chosen to be delicate and not show the other side of the moon with an actual moon in the form of presumably that lady's butt sticking up in the air. Ringo Starr gets credit for naming this album.

There's really no way this can't be terrible, so let's just dive right in.

Crazy Like A Fox is perfectly lovely old-school Rock and Roll with Piano and backup singers.

Solid Gold is terrible. He's doing that funny voice like McCartney does on Uncle Albert and such.

Don't Worry Baby is equally terrible. It's almost like an Edith Massey or William Shatner version than anything.

One Night Stand is one of the selections from part of the sessions where he wanted to do a bunch of Country songs, but everyone else said "hell no, knock that crap off."

I zoned out and looked at side b, this thing ends with some sure to be enthralling "rap" from Ringo, so we got that trainwreck to look forward to. Right now we have to get through this slower and significantly less enjoyable version of classic Power-Pop Who's The Kids Are All Right with a god awful Animalesque drum solo for no reason.

Side B really isn't that bad, except for In My Life, that's objectively horrible. There's definitely a conceptual problem here. This is supposed to be ridiculous, raucous, raunchy, crazy, loony, hysterical....

No, it's not. No part of this sounds like it was fun, everybody loses. Oh god, Together is like a Conga line at a Ministry of Silly Walks convention. That interlude of sub Dad joke level banter leaves everything to be desired, and the best part of the whole thing is it's over.

This is not wacky, or over the top, or scandalous. If you randomly inserted a track or two in any rock and roll playlist no one would even guess in a millions years that it's Keith Moon, or care, or think anything is out of the ordinary other than that these are random covers and this is a randomly uninteresting cover album like everybody else was making at the time.

A couple songs are legit stinkers with no redeeming quality, but mostly it's just "meh." Seems like the two sides of the moon are just dumb and dumberer. I wonder if the drummer from Vanilla Fudge can do a better job....

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