Sunday, July 17, 2022

Sunday Music: Who Are You

 



Title track off the eponymous double-platinum studio album in mid-1978, and the last featuring drummer Keith Moon before his death by drug overdose, and ironically pictured on the cover sitting in a studio chair stenciled "Not To Be Taken Away". The track is listed as "explicit lyrics" even now on YouTube, but rather tame by modern standards, in regular unbleeped play for the brief period of time when the FCC let rock stations play the tracks as recorded, and used and excerpted in tamer form in about twenty other media offerings, including as the title music to CBS' CSI.

5 comments:

Matthew W said...

"explicit lyrics"

"working" at a college radio station 30 plus years ago, the station manager was a real dork/idiot/maroon FCC flunkie.
He bitched and wailed every time paper work was not done correctly because it was all government documents.

The album that the station had of "Who Are You" literally had that track scratched off my the idiot manager because of the "explicit lyrics".

So one Friday night I bring my personal album in and play the song.
Somehow he made it to the station even before the song ended !!!

Anonymous said...

Saying Keith Moon died of a drug overdose is not what most of us mean by those words. Keith, who certainly enjoyed the pharmacopia, was an alcoholic. He had been presecribed Heminevrin, a medicine intended to make a person ill if they drank. It appears Keith drank anyway, probably a lot. It was a stupid - and fatal - thing for him to do. But not the image of a junkie with a syringe still in his arm.

Aesop said...

Anon,

Um, no.
Per that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, he was prescribed the Heminevrin you mentioned, a sedative, and was instructed to use it to help with the cravings instead of drinking, but told that on no account should he take more than three pills per day. So, being Keith Moon, autopsy revealed he died not of drinking, as you allege, but rather from the 32 tablets of Heminevrin in his system, six fully digested and 26 undigested, with even just the six sufficient to cause death, and dying of exactly the drug overdose we described.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Moon#Death

We mentioned no syringes, so whatever images you conjured are your business, not ours. But an addict is an addict, and an overdose is an overdose.

Aesop said...

@Matthew W,

How Johnny Fever of you. Well done, sir.

John Wilder said...

Good song. Good times.