Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere The Complete Chronicles of the Who 1958-1978 Andy Neill & Matt Kent Friedman/Fairfax 304 pp. ISBN: 1-58663-591-3 Available from Powell's Books.

Keith Moon was the wild one. In grammar school he played the class clown; he felt that a school day was a success if he got the laughs. He got into music at age 12, and acquired his first good drum kit at 16. He always made a point to suggest that his inspirations were pop drummers (like Ringo Starr or DJ Fontana) and shied from naming jazz figures. Watch him play, and you might think Gene Krupa, but he didn't look for respect of that sort. While playing for a number of Wembley bands, Moon also held down day jobs for a few weeks at a pop. He had 23 in one two-year period. "With my knowledge and personality", he'd tell Rolling Stone, "I was always considered 'management material'" (11).

Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: he eventually landed himself in this book by joining the Who after they fired their first drummer, Doug Sandom. He got the gig because he was the first drummer they found who could play "Roadrunner". He had dyed ginger hair, so he had the look, and he was a madman on the drums. When he tried out for the band, John Entwistle recalled "He broke this drummer's bass drum pedal and mucked up the hi-hat. We thought, 'This is the fella!'" (27).

People my age could say Moon was like the Replacements' Bob Stinson, but he had more success with his instrument. Drugs and drink did not dilute his majesty, and he was easily one of the best rock drummers ever. In a rather famous instance in the seventies, he had to be pulled off stage to receive morphine shots, then came back to pristine form before "collapsing exhausted across his cymbals at the final flourish" (206). It would make Pete call him "a fucking star".

Moon always had ways of getting noticed. If he was not out of it, needing to be propped up behind his drum set and pumped full of stabilizers, he'd play with severe foot injuries (March 11,1975) or with the flu. At a pre-recorded taping of the Christmas Eve Ready Steady Go! special in 1965, "Keith collapsed before they managed to finish ('My Generation') and was carried off" (68). The Who were always at the point of collapse in the beginning years, and Moon popped pills, and made him presence felt on other records and performances. He was "You Know Who" in the liner notes of Jeff Beck's Truth, and on May 18, 1966, he joined Kim Fowley and Beach Boy Brian Johnston as guests at a Tony Rivers show. If you were there that night, you had to pay a pound to get in, and a pound to get out. The show went on forever.

In a book that tries to chronologically present the Who to its fans, Moon shows up a lot, because his life got in the papers. He was the funny guy who got the invitations, and the funny guy that horrible things happened to. When he opened a discotheque on January 4, 1970, his Bentley was terrorized by a group of skinheads. They kicked at it, and slapped it with pennies. Moon's driver, Cornelius Boland, had to get out of the car to "clear a path and was attacked by some of the youths". He died. In another tragic incident, Moon accidentally drove over a dear friend.

Keith Moon died in the same apartment where Mama Cass died. Sober, he had left a Buddy Holly party hosted by Paul McCartney, and returned with wife Annette to the flat. He took several pills "prescribed to aid alcohol withdrawal" and fell asleep (292). When he awoke, he got Annette to make him his normal steak breakfast, and then took more of these Chlormethiazole sedatives. He fell asleep again, began snoring loudly, then died. Speaking for the rest of the band, Pete said "...we loved him and he's gone. The Who? We are more determined than ever to carry on, and we want the spirit of the group to which Keith contributed so much to go on..." (293).

Fans Andy Neill and Matt Kent have designed their authorized account of the Who to end here, and so we are given life portraits of Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, and John Entwistle that also end at the year 1978. They do not go beyond the media's own portrait of these individuals, so the portraits are in sync with the thousands of pictures this book also provides.

It's hard for a Who fan to suspend memory of the 25 years since Keith Moon's death. And so, after hearing Pete talk recently about a childhood during which he was molested, his youth as summarized in this book may seem too idyllic. Other than seeing a newspaper photo of Pete petting his dog, you read about a boy trying to grow up in his father's own musical footsteps. He tries the saxophone, but can't get a note out of it, so settles on the guitar. Rock and roll doesn't gel with him immediately, so he puts down the guitar for a mandolin. Interestingly, he has an easier time learning traditional jazz and bluegrass than learning Chuck Berry songs.

Pete, the Who's primary lyricist, was also once their primary singer, and the book offers anecdotes about Robert Plant and others seeing the Who perform at this time, then offering their own talents. Townshend got the hint his skills weren't the best in this area.

If you're a fan of the Jam, and familiar with their deliberate Mod fashions, you'll notice that they mostly seem to have mirrored the moves made by Townshend and the Who's manager, Kit Lambert. The latter described the young group's "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" as a "pop art record, containing pop art music" (46). (The book appropriately takes its name from this song, as its picture-dominated text implies the same: the Who were as much about fashion as they were about rock and roll.) At this time in 1965, Townshend said the Who stood "for pop art clothes, pop art music, and pop art behaviour...We don't change offstage. We live pop art" (47). Six years later, he would revise this statement, saying "we were not so much a part of it (the Mod image) as mirror. When we were onstage, we reflected the mood of the kids and caught their frustration and aggression" (28).

Townshend was the only member of the group that kept making such pronouncements. Give him a nickel, and he'd define the Who's place in society. John Entwistle, the bassist, was far more aloof, said to reveal more of his personality in his first solo record than his first seven years with the band. As for Moon and Daltrey, they were the "rough boys". They prided themselves on their working class upbringings and their street attitude. To both of them, especially Daltrey, rock was a way to get out of the factory, and the stage a place to get off the aggression felt for the factory. He and Moon never bonded on this one issue, but instead appeared to fight a lot. Both were high-strung, and didn't like to be bucked with.

Compare this to Pete Townshend, who fashioned himself as the arty one, and who would tell Rolling Stone in the eighties that the Who's Next cover was to titillate the boys... who had urination fetishes, I reckon. Surprisingly, very little has ever been made of this Jann Wenner interview. It's almost possible to read it as a publicity stunt, as none of its strange revelations are predicted by anything written in this book. While the more elderly Townshend has often presented the Who as bathhouse rockers for arena-sized audiences, even the original vision for the Who's Next cover was virulently heterosexual -- it showed the band members' heads grinning "from underneath the pubics" of a fat woman (200).

The book will not satisfy those who think that most of Townshend's persona has been built upon fictions, but it does provide enough hints as to why the Who have not lived up to their post-Moon aspirations. Mostly, it paints Townshend as a talented guy whose ideal day is to sit in bed and do nothing. Once Daltrey and Entwistle got older, it just appears they stopped pushing him.

Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere reads like an idealization -- the way that Who fans hope their favorite rock band will be remembered -- and it succeeds on this level. Both Neill and Kent have a knack for ending chapters with the same ambiguities that Townshend put into Tommy or Quadrophenia, while the pictures will make any aspiring rock fan want to imitate the band's look. The book's chronological aspect is admittedly hit-and-miss -- too many entries only state the place the band performed that night -- but it allows for tons of interesting tidbits that probably wouldn't fit easily into traditional narratives. For example, while Elton John was opening for the Who in a band called the Pinsters, he and Entwistle closed out the night drinking and complaining about their limited involvement in their own bands. The story basically just ends there, but such modest anecdotes still make good reading. I especially like how the young Who initially tried to feign a big sound by sticking 12 inch speakers within a monster-sized cabinet -- as if simply seeing such a thing on stage was enough to deafen their audience.

Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere's weight and size make it an impossible tome to read in bed, but it's beautiful to look at, and written with enough style that you can go back to it, reading even the essays again and again. That said, I'd be surprised if the book does anywhere near as much to improve the Who's legacy as Townshend's recent child porn charges have harmed it. Early on in the book, the authors write that the band had a "complete turning point" once Moon joined (27). "Before then," said Townshend, "we were just fooling about".

Since Moon's death, the Who have not only been fooling about -- they have been recklessly trying to undo all the achievements they gave to rock and roll. When I saw them in the late eighties or early nineties, the world's greatest live band put on the dullest, most tiresome show I have ever seen (and I say this even after seeing Pram in concert). Now, even given that Justin guy from American Idol, it's hard to find hair more annoying than Roger Daltrey's, or a sexually confused person who's as unappealing and pathetic as Pete Townshend. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere is wonderful, yet it does not erase any of my current impressions of the Who. They would have been better off paying heed to Tonwshend's gloriously stupid, juvenile swagger, and dying as a group before they got old.

-- Theodore Defosse

The Michael Friedman Publishing Group was founded in 1977 as a marketing and special sales consultancy. 1994 saw them venture more deeply into the world of publishing. They put out The Life, Times, and Music series, a popular collection of illustrated books packaged with CDs, that has sold nearly a million copies. After that success, they more actively publish and sell their own material, while also forming partnerships and alliances with major companies. They now publish more than one hundred titles per year, some of which have been printed in more than ten languages, and produce products for other companies at a rate of about 40 titles per year.