Here’s a sad lit­tle piece of rock and roll his­to­ry: the last tele­vi­sion inter­view of Kei­th Moon, mer­cu­r­ial drum­mer for The Who. It was broad­cast live on the morn­ing of August 7, 1978, exact­ly one month before Moon’s death from a drug over­dose at the age of 32.

Moon and gui­tarist Pete Town­shend had flown into New York the pre­vi­ous day to pro­mote The Who’s eighth stu­dio album, Who Are You. In addi­tion to a cou­ple of radio inter­views, Moon and Town­shend stopped by the stu­dios of Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca for a TV inter­view with a stiff and humor­less David Hart­man. Moon appears bloat­ed and unhealthy. At one point he makes a joke about not being in con­trol of his life.

“Are you in con­trol of your life at all?” Hart­man asks.

“On cer­tain days,” says Moon.

“Cer­tain days.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you like the oth­er days?”

“Quite out of con­trol. Amazingly…ah…drunk.”

Moon’s var­i­ous addic­tions had caught up with him by 1978. “Musi­cal­ly,” writes Town­shend in Who I Am: A Mem­oir, “his drum­ming was get­ting so uneven that record­ing was almost impos­si­ble, so much so that work on the Who Are You album had ground to a halt.…[The Who] had just about enough tracks for a record, with very lit­tle addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al to spare. ‘Music Must Change’ was com­plet­ed with foot­steps replac­ing drums.”

On the night of Sep­tem­ber 6, 1978, Moon and his girl­friend Annette Wal­ter-Lax attend­ed a par­ty in Lon­don, host­ed by Paul McCart­ney. Dur­ing the par­ty, and at the mid­night pre­mier of The Bud­dy Hol­ly Sto­ry that fol­lowed, Moon took Clome­thi­a­zole, a seda­tive pre­scribed to help him cope with alco­hol with­draw­al. When he got home, he took more. Wal­ter-Lax found his life­less body when she checked on him on the after­noon of Sep­tem­ber 7. An autop­sy showed that Moon had tak­en 32 tablets of Clome­thi­a­zole. His doc­tor had told him not to exceed three per day.

In a pub­lic state­ment fol­low­ing Moon’s death, Town­shend wrote: “We have lost our great come­di­an, our supreme melo­drama­tist, the man, who apart from being the most unpre­dictable and spon­ta­neous drum­mer in rock, would have set him­self alight if he thought it would make the audi­ence laugh or jump out of its seats. We have lost our drum­mer but also our alter-ego. He drove us hard many times but his love of every one of us always ulti­mate­ly came through.… We loved him and he’s gone.”

For some­thing to help us remem­ber Moon’s con­tri­bu­tion to The Who–both his musi­cian­ship and his personality–here is a video fea­tur­ing his iso­lat­ed drum track from “Who Are You,” the title track on Moon’s final album:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kei­th Moon’s Final Per­for­mance with The Who (1978)

Kei­th Moon, Drum­mer of The Who, Pass­es Out at 1973 Con­cert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over

Good­night Kei­th Moon: “The Most Inap­pro­pri­ate Bed­time Sto­ry Ever”

Here’s a strik­ing­ly uncon­ven­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tion of Lud­wig van Beethoven’s 1806 com­po­si­tion, 32 Vari­a­tions on an Orig­i­nal Theme in C minor, by the Cana­di­an vir­tu­oso pianist Glenn Gould. It was record­ed in Toron­to in March of 1966 for a spe­cial pro­gram, “Con­ver­sa­tions with Glenn Gould,” which fea­tured an in-depth dis­cus­sion between Gould and the BBC arts reporter Humphrey Bur­ton. You can find the com­plete pro­gram bro­ken up into pieces at the CBC Web site. And for an espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing 35-minute seg­ment, in which Gould explains and demon­strates his idio­syn­crat­ic approach to inter­pret­ing Beethoven, see below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Video: Glenn Gould Plays the Gold­berg Vari­a­tions by J.S. Bach

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Pre­dicts Mash-up Cul­ture in 1969 Doc­u­men­tary

On June 5, 1965, Joan Baez played a spe­cial con­cert at the BBC Tele­vi­sion The­atre in Shep­herd’s Bush, Lon­don. Although her fame at the time was new­ly eclipsed by that of her recent­ly estranged lover Bob Dylan, Baez was very much in her prime.

The con­cert was record­ed less than a month after Dylan’s 1965 tour of Eng­land, chron­i­cled in D.A. Pen­nebak­er’s film Don’t Look Back, in which Dylan failed to invite Baez onstage despite the fact that she had intro­duced him to nation­al audi­ences in Amer­i­ca.

Baez plays sev­er­al Dylan songs in the BBC con­cert, along with oth­er folk and pop songs from her reper­toire. Includ­ed is Baez’s first hit sin­gle, her ver­sion of the Phil Ochs song “There but for For­tune,” which was released the same month in Amer­i­ca but would not come out in the UK until the fol­low­ing month. The con­cert was orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast by the BBC as two sep­a­rate half-hour spe­cials, both end­ing with the clas­sic French love song “Plaisir d’amour.” Baez’s moth­er Joan Senior, or “Big Joan” as she was called (and who died this month at the age of 100), can be seen in the back­ground at the 33:30 and 104:43 marks applaud­ing and smil­ing proud­ly. The set list for the two back-to-back pro­grams is:

1. “I’m a Ram­bler, I’m a Gam­bler”
2. “There but for For­tune”
3. “Cop­per Ket­tle”
4. “Mary Hamil­ton”
5. “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright”
6. “I’m Trou­bled and I Don’t Know Why”
7. “We Shall Over­come”
8. “With God on Our Side”
9. “Plaisir d’amour”
10. “Sil­ver Dag­ger”
11. “Oh Free­dom”
12. “She’s a Trou­ble­mak­er”
13. “The Unqui­et Grave”
14. “It Ain’t Me Babe”
15. “Isn’t it Grand”
16. “500 Miles”
17. “Te Ador/Ate Aman­ha”
18. “Plaisir d’amour”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Joan Baez Per­forms at Age 17

Two Leg­ends Togeth­er: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Pro­gram, 1963

Bob Dylan Shares a Drug-Hazed Taxi Ride with John Lennon (1966)