Keith Moon: Drumming as “Inspired Vandalism”

Updated on December 2

Little did I know that James Wood, the fine literary critic for the New Yorker, is also a self-taught drummer and a huge fan of The Who — and especially drummer Keith Moon. So it was a bittersweet delight to read his tribute to Moon in the Nov. 29th New Yorker. (Available only to subscribers online; however, he also has a podcast about Moon.)

It’s bittersweet because Moon died in 1978, a casualty of the kinds of beasts that nearly devoured Johnny Cash. But I still remember what it felt like to hear “Who’s Next” and “Live at Leeds” for the first time, music so propulsive that it felt like (barely) controlled chaos — just listen to the first 60 seconds of “Young Man Blues” to hear what I mean. Wood offers a description as good as any of The Who’s sound:

Pete Townshend’s hard, tense suspended chords seemed to scour the air around them; Roger Daltrey’s singing was a young man’s fighting swagger, an incitement to some kind of crime; John Entwhistle’s incessantly mobile bass playing was like someone running away from the scene of the crime; and Keith Moon’s drumming, in its inspired vandalism, was the crime itself.

There’s no doubt that hearing The Who (and Cream) instilled in me a love of bands powered by strong, active rhythm sections. “The Who had extraordinary rhythmic vitality,” Wood writes. (For that, Entwhistle deserves much credit as well.) I have long liked drummers who did more than just keep time, and as Wood notes, that trait was Moon to  the core:

 … the modest and the sophisticated drummer, whatever their stylistic differences, share an understanding that there is a proper space for keeping the beat, and a much smaller space for departing from it, like a time-out area in a classroom. …

Keith Moon ripped all this up. There is no time-out in his drumming because there is no time-in. It’s all fun stuff. … He did keep the beat, and very well, but he did it by every method except the traditional one. Drumming is repetition, as is rock music generally, and Moon clearly found this repetition dull. So he played the drums like no one else — and not even like himself. No two bars of Moon’s playing ever sounded the same; he is in revolt against consistency.

There have been other great rock drummers (Wood mentions John Bonham and Phil Collins as well), but in the end no one has ever matched Moon. I once heard U2 in a radio concert cover The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and though I think Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. are a great rhythm section, they could only offer a pale imitation of Entwhistle and Moon. The song just didn’t have the same energy. Neither did The Who after Moon’s death.

Wood’s article gets quite technical in describing what set Moon apart (and it wasn’t just his energy), but it never bogs down. He mentions a YouTube clip (apparently now removed from YouTube due to copyright issues), which isolates Moon’s drum track from “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” While it surely helps if you know the recording well, the clip is fascinating beyond what I expected; without the rest of the band, you hear all sorts of extra flourishes in Moon’s work. “The drumming is staggeringly vital, with Moon at once rhythmically tight and massively spontaneous,” Wood writes.

Of course, as Wood notes, Moon’s manic drumming mirrored his out-of-control life off stage, and years of drugs and alcohol had already taken a toll on Moon’s skills before he overdosed on a sedative designed for symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. But as is the case with so many others who died too young, our memories of Moon are frozen in time with his vital youth. Many thanks to Wood for remembering Moon’s artistry so well, while not overlooking the beasts that claimed him.

Below: This clip is of Wood himself, entertaining his children with some finger drumming. Once a drummer, always a drummer — and his kids are delighted. 

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“God’s Great Restoration Project”

By your faith in Christ Jesus you are united with God’s great restoration project. By your faith in the Cross of Christ the restorative power of redemption flows into your life. By your faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of the Son of God, you are connected through God’s grace to recover all.

In a world of loss and disappointment, it is faith that believes a crucified carpenter from Nazareth is the risen Son of God that will enable you to overcome the world of loss and disappointment and bring you to a place where you can truly say you have recovered all.

— Brian Zahnd, What to do on the Worst Day of Your Life

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Johnny Cash: “A Contrarian Prophet”

I confess: I am not a country music fan. Never was.

But as I grew up, that meant I needlessly allowed that “country” label to close the door to the remarkable music of Johnny Cash. What a fool I was.

In recent years I’ve tried to make up for lost time by exploring Cash’s music, and I still have a lot of catching up to do. Tony Blair of Eastern University offers an insightful discussion of Cash in the most recent edition of Prism magazine:

 Johnny Cash was both a representative of the evangelical movement and a contrarian prophet to it. …

His view of the kingdom of God never fit comfortably within the contours of classic evangelicalism, and he had a persistent habit of singing, even writing, music that many evangelicals of his generation considered to be the work of the devil. He associated with people most evangelicals considered to be to be on the wrong side of the kingdom, supported social causes that were not popular among white evangelicals of his time, and embraced believers (and nonbelievers) who approached God sincerely in ways different from his own. …

And, finally, … he could be critical of his fellow believers. You’re so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good, he sang to them in one caustic song. Sinners loved him for it.

Cash’s life was ablaze in contradictions and personal failure, but as you listen to his music you realize how aware Cash was of those contradictions. Perhaps that’s why much of his great music identifies with others who are down and out — no more so than in “Man in Black”: 

I wear the black for the poor and beaten down

Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town

I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,

but is there because he’s a victim of the times

I wear the black for those who’ve never read

Or listened to the words that Jesus said

About the road to happiness through love and charity

Why you’d think he’s talkin’ straight to you and me

Cash may have enjoyed great commercial success, but it was not because he wrote “safe” music that gave us the easy comfort of glossy platitudes. Songs such as “Folsom Prison Blues” drew their power from his identification with his characters, both in the horror of their actions and the depth of their sorrows. This dynamic also drove his choices of songs to cover in his stunning late-career “American Recordings” album, such as the song “The Beast in Me”:

The beast in me

Is caged by frail, fragile bars

Restless by day and by night

Rants and rages at the start

God help the beast in me

Many of the praise songs that waft through church services talk about sin, but they are pale, formulaic clichés compared to the stark honesty evoked by a song like “The Beast in Me.” Imagine singing this as a confessional at church on Sunday.

Cash wrestled with more than a few beasts, but he could confront them in song because he also was aware of the power of grace — which is why he also covered songs such as “Why Me Lord”:

Why me Lord

What have I ever done, to deserve even one of the blessings I’ve known?

Why me Lord

What did I ever do that was worth love from you and the kindness you’ve shown?

Lord help me Jesus

I’ve wasted it so, help me Jesus

I know what I am

Now that I know that I’ve need you so

Help me Jesus, my soul’s in your hands

Back in the mid-1990s, U2 closed out its oft-overlooked album “Zooropa” with a song called “The Wanderer,” not only written for Johnny Cash but sung by him. It was a perfect fit:

I went drifting through the capitals of tin
Where men can’t walk or freely talk
And sons turn their fathers in.
I stopped outside a church house
Where the citizens like to sit.
They say they want the kingdom
But they don’t want God in it. …

I went out there in search of experience
To taste and to touch and to feel as much
As a man can before he repents.

After Cash’s death, U2 performed “The Wanderer” for a TV special. It was a fitting farewell.

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Those Socialist New Testament Christians

One more Thanksgiving note, as I do my best to avoid Black Friday.

According to John Stossel of Fox News, along with some revisionist historians and members of the Tea Party, the Pilgrims were lucky to survive a misguided experiment with socialism. Never mind that the word “socialism” (much less the concept) didn’t even exist during the 17th century. According to this version of history, only when the Pilgrims embraced capitalism did they find prosperity.

For more details on these arguments, Kate Zernike offers a good overview.

It’s easy to re-read history on our terms, imposing our ideologies and assumptions to suit our purposes. It is much better to struggle with understanding lives as lived in another time, another place. The past is always more complicated than we suspect, and our attempts to make sense of it are best informed by humility.

With that in mind, I wonder how the critics of Pilgrim “socialism” make sense of Acts 2:42-47:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.

All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their numbers daily those who were being saved.

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“Cultivate Thankfulness”

Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ — the Message — have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives — words, actions, whatever — be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.

— Colossians 3:15-17, via Eugene Peterson’s The Message

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Thankful for a Good Laugh

Lord knows, we need it right now. Courtesy of The Onion.

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Investing in Ourselves, or Others?

Today’s New York Times finds the right verb for this front-page story (emphasis added):

With a Swagger, Wallets Out, Wall Street Dares to Celebrate

As unemployment remains high and many more scrap to make ends meet here — and whole nations totter at the brink — corporations hoard their cash from record profits while the investment pros at Wall Street firms continue to live on a planet largely removed from the rest of us.

Even plastic surgeons reap the benefits of such largess. The Times quotes one woman who runs a Brooklyn insurance company:

(She) says that over the last two years she cut her annual spending on cosmetic surgery in half, to about $3,000. She is now spending at pre-2008 levels.

“I have to meet a lot of people, and this is part if investing in myself,” she said.

Take a moment to compare what you find in the Wall Street story with an insightful op-ed by Harvard Professor David B. Hall. His topic: a reassessment of the Puritans and their contributions to public life in the colonies. He notes:

The colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.

Hall, who has a book on the Puritans coming out in April, argues that much of our understanding of the Puritans is constricted by our incomplete view of their lives. A fuller understanding of Puritan life is instructive for us today as we view our growing inequality and disconnection from one another:

… our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.

Hall’s essay grabs my attention because he does not suggest the kind of quasi-historical nostalgia for the colonies and a “Christian” nation that distorts our public discourse today. We are better off understanding the Puritans in all their complexities and contradictions, so that we can better understand our own — and respond accordingly.

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“The Temptations of Hubris”

James K.A. Smith’s new book, “Letters to a Young Calvinist,” though not aimed at someone such as myself (well, at least the young part), does take me back to formative events in my journey of faith.

Back in high school, my spiritual development revolved around Young Life. There were a couple of guys, named Mike and Tom, who graduated a year or two earlier and took off for college — Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., to be specific. A fateful choice.

During term breaks they returned home determined to meet with those of us still in high school. They shared “discoveries” that made everything about the Christian faith fall into place. In short, it was TULIP, otherwise known as the Five Points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistable Grace and Perseverance of the Saints.

Their enthusiasm was boundless, and they spent hours schooling us in these doctrines of the Reformed tradition. It felt like we were being offered membership in an exclusive club of believers who really “got it.”

Add to that equation a new Young Life leader. He would invite me and a few others to drive over to Ligonier, Pa., to what was then known as the Ligonier Valley Study Center, run by R.C. Sproul. There the inculcation into the Reformed tradition deepened, aided by the then-novel distribution of cassette tapes for listening at home. 

As a high school kid, I was grateful for the kind of adult attention my Young Life leader supplied — I remain so today. But as I got to know him more closely, I also saw a great deal of anger. He told me that Fuller Seminary was going to hell in a handbasket in a dispute over the inerrancy of Scripture. (Hey, I hadn’t even heard of Fuller.)

He also questioned whether those “Arminians” were even Christians at all because they didn’t buy into TULIP. He introduced me to Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann as enemies, to neo-orthodoxy as a fraud. And he drew from the work of Bill Gothard for teachings at Young Life meetings; I remember my friends Mike and Tom going off to Basic Youth Conflicts workshops. On the instructions of Gothard, they said, the teaching materials had to be treated as exclusive property, which one could not see or fully grasp unless you attended those workshops in their entirety. (A great way, coincidentally, to protect proprietary interests.)

Essentially, my Young Life leader seemed like he was at war with the world. I tended to look past that because he was so kind to me, but this undercurrent of conflict was always present. It was accentuated when I visited Ligonier; no matter that the time was intellectually stimulating, I felt little in terms of love or warmth, and that sense nagged at me. But these were serious people with serious business, carrying the mantle of true faith against liberal theology.

Eventually, I also got to look through the written materials of Basic Youth Conflicts (early 1970’s edition) on the sly before my freshman year at Penn State. This same adversarial vibe permeated these texts. Moreover, when I looked up Bible citations used to support the teachings, the connection between the verses and the teachings were, to be kind, cryptic. At the time, I figured, I just wasn’t smart enough to get it. Now, I realize there was nothing to “get”; the connections didn’t make sense because, um, they didn’t make sense.

Where does this leave me now?

As someone anchored in the Reformed tradition, I remain grateful for the spiritual journey triggered by these experiences. At the same time, as someone by temperament who leans toward what I’d call “terminal seriousness,” I came to understand that this expression of the Reformed tradition wasn’t — and isn’t — healthy. It feeds too much the tendency to view others with suspicion: Are you on my side or not?

This is what happens when ideological/theological litmus tests trump grace, allowing our own confidence in God to, in fact, limit how God can be at work in the world. It is a failure of vision fed by pride.

And that brings me back to James K.A. Smith’s book. Almost immediately, Smith turns his attention to this form of spiritual pride, which he likens to a “theological West Nile virus.” He draws from his own journey as a Pentecostal who embraced the Reformed tradition, thrilled by his discovery but now aware of its intoxicating tendency toward arrogance. He warns:

If you don’t recognize the temptations of hubris early, the infection of religious pride soon spreads, and you’ll find that Reformed theology is reduced to polemics — and the worst kind of polemics: directed only at other Christians.

Though this kind of pride is hardly limited to Calvinists, I am thankful to see Smith place this warning at the start of this light, breezy and humble book. It reaffirms what the Reformed tradition has to offer while offering an appropriate cautionary note — with a much-needed warm heart.

As I read “Letters to a Young Calvinist” I also am reminded of God’s sense of humor, considering that now I teach at a Wesleyan school. Calvinists may have their five points, but Wesleyans have their Quadrilateral (Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience), and I’ve also grown from my more intensive exposure to that strain of faith.

No matter the tradition, all of us who embrace Christianity face choices not only in what we believe but also how we believe. It is a test: How do I treat others with whom I differ? To what degree does grace manifest itself in those spaces between believers?

To what degree do we yield to the “temptations of hubris?”

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“Existence is a Vulgar Absurdity”

The Onion News Network is coming to the IFC cable channel in January. If the show matches this classic clip from 2008, when a football team suffers an existential crisis, then The Daily Show will have some competition.

Here’s a preview for the show, with the motto “News Without Mercy.”

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“Everything is a Gift”

In a word, Reformed theology is fundamentally about grace.

At its heart, Calvinism is simply a lens that magnifies a persistent theme in the narrative of God’s self-revelation: that everything depends on God. Everything is a gift. …

So we might say that grace goes “all the way down.” To merely exist as a creature is to be dependent on the gift of existence granted by a gracious God: to be is to be graced.

— James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist

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