Do Me Good

The Zoo Crew has got a real left-field one on the turntable for you Zoo Freaks, and if you have been riding with us over at THE ZOO you already know we like a record that comes with a story longer than the song. Tonight that record is "Do Me Good," sung by Keith Moon, the drummer who turned a kit into a carnival, pulled from the orbit of his only solo album, Two Sides of the Moon. It is not one of the tracks that hit the shops with the original LP in the spring of 1975. It is the leftover that tells you what Moon was still trying to do after the critics had already had their fun.

Steve Cropper wrote "Do Me Good" and produced the session. Cropper is the Memphis guitar man from Booker T. and the M.G.'s, the fellow behind so many Stax sides that still sound like a warm room. In August 1975, months after Two Sides of the Moon had already come and gone, Moon booked time at Clover Recorders in Los Angeles for what was supposed to be a second solo album on MCA. The label never finished the project. Three songs survived in good enough shape to travel: "Do Me Good," another Cropper tune called "Real Emotion," and a cover of Randy Newman's "Naked Man." When Repertoire Records put the solo album back out in 1997, those Clover masters rode along as bonus tracks, which is how most of us first met "Do Me Good." The later deluxe sets keep a scrap of studio chat from the same date, filed under the title "OK Mr. Starkey," which is about as Moon-and-Ringo as a tape box can get.

The room that day was ridiculous in the best Hollywood way. Session notes and fan discographies that have been passed around for years put Moon on vocals and drums, Ringo Starr also on drums, Klaus Voormann on bass, Joe Sample on piano, Booker T. Jones on Hammond B-3, Cropper and Lee Ritenour on guitars, and Ron Wood overdubbing more guitar later. David Bowie is credited with the backing vocals. Picture that for a second. The man who smashed hotel rooms is out front, the Beatle who kept time for the world is behind him, and the Thin White Duke is in the blend. Moon was not using the date to show off the octopus arms. He was trying to be a singer in a soul-leaning little band, which is the whole joke and the whole charm of his solo years.

That is the thread that runs through Two Sides of the Moon, and you cannot really hear "Do Me Good" without it. Moon had watched John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey put out their own records, and with Pete Townshend heading that way too he decided he wanted a side of his own. His good friend Ringo Starr helped him into the Los Angeles studios and, by most accounts, came up with the album title, a neat little line about the drummer and the fan who wanted to sing the songs he loved. Instead of a drum showcase, Moon sang the lot. He only sat at the kit on a handful of tracks, among them "Crazy Like a Fox," "The Kids Are Alright," and John Lennon's "Move Over Ms. L." The rest of the time the drums belonged to people like Jim Keltner, Curly Smith, and Ringo, while Joe Walsh, Harry Nilsson, Flo and Eddie, John Sebastian, Dick Dale, and half of Fanny wandered through the party.

Moon told people the album was him living out a fantasy, and the sessions behaved like one. Recording vocals one night under a low ceiling full of spotlights, he took an ashtray to a bulb every time the tape stopped because he had missed a note, and he finished by wrecking the whole fixture. The first pass, produced by Mal Evans, was scrapped. Skip Taylor and John Stronach rebuilt it. MCA watched the bill climb toward a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Moon himself later called the "Don't Worry Baby" single a really poor record, and the radio spots he cut with Ringo joked about a collage of rubbish, which is a very Moon way of getting ahead of the reviews. Brian Wilson, who wrote that Beach Boys song, was said to have been moved to tears when he heard Moon's version, and not the happy kind. None of that stopped Moon. He went back in with Cropper and cut "Do Me Good" anyway, which is why the song feels like a second chance rather than a leftover from the main album.

If you want the man before the myth, you have to go back to Wembley. Keith John Moon was born there on 23 August 1946, a working kid with no reason on paper to become the loudest drummer in Britain. He fell for surf music at school, took early lessons, and started sitting in with local cover bands, the Escorts, Mark Twain and the Strangers, and then the Beachcombers, a semi-pro outfit doing Shadows tunes and the like. He learned some of his wildness from Carlo Little, the drummer who had played with Screaming Lord Sutch. On the Beachcombers job he was already a showman, once "shooting" the singer with a starter pistol. By day he worked in the sales department at British Gypsum, selling plaster. He wanted out of the day job more than anybody else in that band.

In April 1964, still seventeen, he went after the open drum stool in the Detours, the group that would become the High Numbers and then the Who. Doug Sandom had just left. The story Moon told for years, and the one the others mostly backed, is the night at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford. He had dyed his hair ginger and put on a ginger cord suit, which Pete Townshend later called a ginger vision. He had a few drinks, asked the drummer if he could play a couple, and got up for Bo Diddley's "Road Runner." He went at the kit so hard he broke the bass-drum pedal and split skins. He figured that was the end of it. Roger Daltrey, who was doing the talking then, came over and asked what he was doing the following Monday. Moon said nothing. Nobody ever formally told him he was in. He was simply there, and he stayed. The plaster job did not.

That is the fellow on "Do Me Good," a dozen years and a mountain of hotel bills later, still the surf-record kid who wanted to sing the songs he loved, still dragging famous friends into the room, still refusing to sit the dance out. The estate keeps his name moving on the Keith Moon Facebook page, on Instagram, and on X, where the posts still sign off like the old loon never left the party. The band's own write-up of how the Wembley kid joined lives on the Who's Keith Moon page. Fans comparing notes on the solo sides and the old stories gather in the Who Fan Page group. The old keithmoon.com address now points at an insecure page, so we are leaving that one off the card. Spin "Do Me Good" loud, Zoo Freaks. Cropper wrote it, Ringo sat in, and Moon sang it like a man who still believed the second album was coming.