Nostalgia Kinky

I think of Keith Moon often these days.
I think of this image of Keith Moon often.
Especially as the year progresses here in America and
we slip deeper and deeper into an abyss
from which we won’t emerge,
I think of Keith Moon
and this I think of this image from the cover of WHO ARE YOU album often.

At the end of THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT after The Who have just given the most emotional performance of their lifetime, an exhausted but triumphant Moon leaps from behind his drum set to embrace a near tearful Pete Townshend, who wasn’t sure Moonie could get through the show. That moment will never leave me. That embrace will never leave me. That embrace was part of LIFEHOUSE, Pete’s beautifully haunted and terrifyingly accurate predication of our future.
That embrace for a moment became Pete’s ‘one note’,
the one thing that could connect us all and help us escape.
That embrace was the promise of Rock and Roll.
That embrace was freedom,
That embrace was compassion.
It was just a moment,
and then it was gone.

Within a few weeks of the embrace, Keith Moon was dead but he left us all that DEFIANT message on the cover of his final album with The Who and I think of those words nearly everyday as these wreckers of civilization try to take everything away from us.
“Not to be Taken Away.”
I repeat it like a mantra these days.
Like a fucking mantra…
Not to be taken away,
not to be taken away,
not to be taken away…

Things are going to get a lot worse.
A lot worse and I’m already seeing people I’ve loved all my life accepting the most deeply immoral and evil things. Making excuses for it, not wanting to fight at all. Or just ignoring the most heinous things, the ‘terrible things happening outside’.
I don’t know these people I’ve known all my life.
It’s devastating.
Who are these people?
Who are these people?
I know who I am.
Fucker, I know who I am and I know who I love and I know who I’m taking care of.
This is just about right and wrong.
Not to be taken away, not to be taken away, not to be taken away.

A shattered Pete Townshend elected, often at the expense of his own mammoth legacy, to continue on without the raging Moon. He predicted it all. The deepest moment on the WHO ARE YOU album occurs during the controversial “Sister Disco” as Pete promises to stay by his ultimate healing stone of Rock and Roll as age withers them both away.

“I will take over your grief and disease
I’ll stay beside you and comfort your soul
When you are lonely and broken and old.”

So here we all together.
Deep in this together.
I know who I am.
I know who I love.
I know who I’m taking care of.
I know who my family is
and someday we’ll all
‘sleep together in the caravan’.
This is just about right and wrong.
It’s not difficult.
Boycott, speak-out, be a good ally.
It’s not difficult.
This is just
right and wrong.
I’m Not to be taken away, not to be taken away,
We’re Not to be taken away, not to be taken away.

-Jeremy Richey, July 2025-