Keith Moon, the late drummer of The Who, was so effective that without his rhythmic dexterity, it’s certain that the British band wouldn’t have established themselves as one of the most genre-defining acts of their era. His intensity proved the perfect ballast for the searing guitar of Pete Townshend, the rumbling low-end of John Entwistle and frontman Roger Daltrey’s chesty melodies. However, Moon also found notoriety for his many extra-musical activities. He was just as known for his predilection for hijinx and destruction as he was for his musical genius.
A larger-than-life character, Moon impacted culture so much that he even thought a classic song by his British Invasion peers, The Beatles, was written about him. This is according to Pete Townshend, who writes in his 2012 memoir, Who I Am: A Memoir, that when The Who toured America in 1967, they listened to The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s and Moon was convinced that one of its tracks was about him.
“On this tour, we listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and not much else,” Townshend recalled. “The shock-wave it caused challenged all comers; no one believed The Beatles would ever top it, or would even bother to try. For me, Sgt. Pepper and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds redefined music in the 20th century: atmosphere, essence, shadow, and romance were combined in ways that could be discovered again and again. Neither album made any deep political or social comment, but ideas were not what mattered. Listening to music had become a drug in itself.”
Although Townshend was blown away by the out-there sonics of Sgt. Pepper’s, Keith Moon was more fixated on believing that one of the tracks seemed to be about him. “Keith Moon had become convinced he was ‘Mr. K’ in The Beatles’ song ‘For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ from Sgt. Pepper,” Townshend said. Notably, in the track, Mr. K is a “celebrated” performer in the circus.
“He played it constantly, and his ego began to get out of control,” Townshend continued. “It could just as easily have been about Murray the K.” As fans of The Beatles will know, Murray the K was an influential New York DJ who frequently referred to himself as “the fifth Beatle” during the early days of Beatlemania, when the sounds of the British band were sweeping across America.
Despite Keith Moon’s paranoia that he was Mr. K, the song was inspired by a Victorian poster for a famous circus leader, Pablo Fanque, who is also mentioned in it. Fanque’s troupe was one of the most popular in Victorian Britain for over 30 years, in an era deemed the golden age of circus. The first recorded Black circus owner in Britain, Fanque also performed in the act, with his most famous stunt leaping over a carriage riding a horse.
Lennon once explained the song’s origins: “There was Henry the Horse in a song I wrote called ‘Mr Kite’. The lyrics, which I got most of it off, were from an old poster for an old-fashioned circus from the 1800s, and it was all about a fair, and the horse was there, and they said Henry the horse was horse [heroin] which I did know anything about.”
Listen to ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ below.
