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The four parts remain in uneasy alliance. When Drummer Keith Moon was alive, he was like a self-contained chain reaction, "our little bit of nasty," as Daltrey calls him. Moon died of an overdose of Heminevirin, a drug he was taking to combat his alcoholism. Moon's passing forced a crisis within the group, the three surviving members re-examining their loyalty to rock, and to each other. Daltrey told Townshend: "Keith's life and death were a gift to the group. A sacrifice to allow us to continue." Townshend recalls thinking at the time, "How can I agree with something as 20th Century-Fox as that? But I felt it too. That besides being a sacrifice, Keith's death had given me a stronghold." The Who asked Kenny Jones to replace Moon, and set about trying to re-create the delicate imbalance of the group. Jones, as affable and easygoing as Moon was looney, plays with all his predecessor's fine fury, matching or surpassing him in musicianship, while wisely avoiding any attempt to duplicate Moon's madcap charades.
If, as Daltrey says, The Who is like a family, then Kenny Jones is still perhaps the orphaned cousin from overseas who has come to start a new life. "The others were a bit arrogant at the outset," Jones reports. "We'd start playing one of their songs, and they'd be shocked I didn't know it. But why should I know Who songs? I had my own band." After a decade and a half spent playing and warring together, the three senior Who members may be like brothers, but with undercurrents of the Karamazovs and an overlay of the Dalton boys. It is not only a matter of maintaining a punishingly high musical standard; The Who has the weight of its own myth and the burden of its own history to support.
Daltrey got the band together. At 15, he left school in London, took a job as a sheet-metal worker that he held for five years. He also made his own guitars and formed a group called the Detours. On the street one day, he spotted "this great big geezer with a homemade bass that looked like a football boot with a neck sticking out of it," and recruited Entwistle on the spot. Soon after that, Daltrey decked the Detour's lead singer and took over the vocals himself. Now the Detours needed a rhythm guitar player. Entwistle mentioned his school chum, Townshend, whom Daltrey recalls as "looking like a nose on a stick."
"The greatest bloody triumph of my schooldays was when Roger asked me if I could play guitar," Townshend recalls. "If he had ever said, 'Come out in the playground and I'll fight you,' I would have been down in one punch. Music was the only way I could ever win. But I've despised him ever since."
All were from a working-class background in London. Daltrey's father was a clerk, Entwistle's a mechanic. But both Townshend's parents were dance-band musicians. "My dad's a great player," Townshend says. "Not a cowboy, but a great player. My mom was a singer. She was a bit of a cowboy." The band found its own cowboy, or show boater, one night when a half-drunk rowdy took the stage, displaced the drummer and gave an uninvited audition that ended when he kicked over the drum kit. Keith Moon was a member of the band on the next date.