FULL MOON: The Amazing Rock and Roll Life of the Late Keith Moon

From about 1967 to 1977 Butler was personal assistant to rock-drummer Keith Moon of ""The Who."" And here, in an elaborately slangy style (part cockney, part grafitti, part drily ironic), he offers non-chronological anecdotes of Moon's farcical, foul, self-destructive behavior: ""Moonie simply behaves like a lunatic virtually all the time."" He was the ""King of Hotel Wreckers,"" terrorizing hotel managers with noise, garbage, breakage, and filth (""on tour you can shit a lot and never shit in your own nest""). He traveled with an 8-track cartridge box filled with ""medicines"" (uppers, downers, blues, reds, greens, purples)--the taking of which often led to stomach pumps, mid-concert emergency injections, and/or physical restraints. He was addicted to racing cars and the drunken driving of them He beat his adoring wife Kim, who was too normal for him (""She talks to her friends and does not throw beer at them""); girlfriend Annette took his lifestyle more calmly, though even she objected to the nonstop copulations with groupies (""Look, Dougal, he's fucking this chick in front of me! In our house!""). He would arrive at a nightclub ""absolutely stark bollock naked and spreadeagled on the bonnet of his Corniche,"" and he enjoyed such larks as dressing up in Nazi uniform to frighten the working-class Jewish refugees in Golders Green. On the more positive side, Butler mentions Moon's Monty-Pythonesque camaraderie with Ringo Start and Harry Nilsson: ""I never see three guys who are more on the same wavelength."" And there's a bit of charm in a weird evening with Moon, ""Barry the Poof,"" a transvestite, and a pub-ful of Welsh miners. But, as Butler himself says, ""reading through this account. . . it occurs to me that nothing really happens."" And fans of The Who will be disappointed with the near-total lack of musical interest here. So, though Butler's raunchily black-comic approach is in some ways preferable to the worshipful sentimentality of much pop-music biography, a little of these wild, druggy, slapstick episodes goes a long, long way.