| The guy that sat in with The WHO ?
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I looked it up.
For those of you younger types, a kid in the audience in 1973 got the chance of a lifetime to sit in for the passed out Keith Moon..
Read on:
Thomas Scot Halpin has the greatest rock concert story of them all. He went
to see The Who and ended up onstage as the band's drummer. It was Nov. 20,
1973, at the Cow Palace, opening night of the "Quadrophenia" tour. That
notorious show was the last San Francisco Bay area performance of the rock
opera until last weekend, when the band returned to perform it in San Jose,
Calif. Nobody caught his name, but everybody remembers the skinny kid
plucked from the audience to replace the legendary Keith Moon _ the one-man
lunatic fringe who went down that night like concrete, passed out at his
drum kit. Halpin, then 19, in low-slung bell-bottoms, tight T-shirt and mod
haircut, coolly took the seat of his idol, picked up the sticks and laid
down the beat for three songs. Then he took a bow, arms around Pete
Townshend and Roger Daltrey, as if he had belonged there all along. "For
some reason it keeps coming up," says Halpin, who had scalped a ticket to
the sold-out show. "It's like one of the few times you could play royalty."
In the documentary "The Who: Thirty Years of Maximum R&B," singer Daltrey
recalled that when Moon collapsed for the second time that night, Townshend
called out for a substitute. A sea of hands shot up and a line of drummers
formed at the stage entrance for auditions. This doesn't square with the
way Halpin remembers it.
Now 42 and a painter, Halpin splits his time between San Francisco and
Bloomington, Ind., where he was tracked down earlier this month for one more
go-round of every teen-age garage drummer's fantasy. The Who was the most
drum-driven band in rock, with Moon an unorthodox showman who did flips and
walked on his drums. He would pound the air and contort his face, but he
never missed a beat. Though his playing was erratic that night, a bootleg
recording of the show indicates that Moon made it through 70 minutes and all
the Quadrophenia material, including "Bell Boy," his drum and vocal
showcase. Then the band went into "Won't Get Fooled Again." Moon reared
back to hit his cymbal and went right off his stool. "The guy was
completely a locomotive, and then suddenly they pulled the cord. I thought
it was Keith Moon theatrics," recalls Halpin, who was watching from the side
seats with Mike Danese, a hometown pal from Muscatine, Iowa. Two stagehands
picked up the slumping drummer and carried him offstage, feet up. This also
was not beyond Moon's sense of drama, but then the houselights went on.
Backstage it was determined that he had probably overdosed, possibly on PCP,
or angel dust. An injection of cortisone got him back onstage after a
20-minute delay, but it wasn't long before he went down again. When
Townshend called out, "Can anyone play the drums?" Halpin and Danese were
already at the edge of the stage. 'And my friend starts saying to the
security guard, 'He can play,'' Halpin says. In truth, he hadn't played in a
year, but that didn't slow the braggart Danese, who made such a commotion
that promoter Bill Graham appeared. 'He just looked at me and said, 'Can
you do it?'' Halpin doesn't recall his answer, but Danese assured Graham
that he could. "The story was that I stepped out from in front of the
stage, but that's not what happened," Halpin says. "Townshend and Daltrey
look around and they're as surprised as I am," he says, "because Graham put
me up there." With a shot of brandy for his nerves, Halpin shook hands with
Townshend, then sat down at the drum set in front of 13,500 critics. "I get
onto the stool. Was it still warm? Who knows? I'm in complete shock," Halpin
says. 'Then I got really focused, and Townshend said to me, 'I'm going to
lead you. I'm going to cue you.' I'm laying down the beat. They're doing all
their 'Live at Leeds' kind of stuff, and then I don't remember what
happened. I guess I played a couple more songs. It was such a weird
experience.' The bootleg reveals that Halpin drummed through the
traditional "Smokestack Lightning" and "Naked Eye," from "Odds and Sods,"
closing with the anthem "My Generation." He was onstage for about 15
minutes. "I played long enough with them that no one booed and no one threw
anything at the stage," he says. Afterward, he was invited backstage and
managed to get Danese back there as well. They were escorted into a party
room, and Daltrey gave him a tour jacket and promised him he'd be paid $
1,000. Danese recalls that "Daltrey was drinking Jack Daniels straight out
of the bottle." Halpin remembers mostly the buffet table. "We were about the
last ones to go," he says, "because we're eating all this food and taking
food with us." To do so he put down his souvenir tour jacket and sticks,
and somebody snatched them. Then he drove his Volkswagen Beetle back home to
Monterey, Calif., woke up his girlfriend and told her the story. He might
have passed anonymously into lore, but pop critic John Wasserman put out an
all-points bulletin in a column titled "Mystery Drummer Into the Breach,"
and the mystery drummer responded. Then Townshend sent him a thank-you
letter from Los Angeles, but it did not contain the $ 1,000 Daltrey had
promised. Perhaps his memory was clouded by that Jack Daniels. As a result
of his fame, Halpin got an audition (but no job) with Journey, and Rolling
Stone magazine named him "Pick-Up Player of the Year." The Who returned in
1976 for a series of shows at Winterland, and Halpin went down there to see
about some unfinished business. Again without a ticket, he waited four
hours at the limo entrance until he found a way into the show. Afterward, he
found Graham, who took him backstage to meet Moon. The drummer was his old
self, changing clothes in front of everyone, blathering nonsense. "He said
something, and I couldn't even figure out what it was," Halpin says. Like
many Who purists, Halpin lost his heart for the band when a drug overdose
finally killed Moon in September 1978. When The Who documentary aired on
PBS a few years ago, Halpin got his moment of screen time, though he wasn't
mentioned by name. Somewhere in the Bill Graham Presents archives, a video
of the whole show exists. Halpin would like to see that, to fill in the gaps
in his memory. He'd also like to see the paycheck Daltrey promised him.
"That's $ 1,000 plus interest," he says. "Let's figure it out |
