The Who's Pete Townshend would spend most of his career, especially his years as an elder statesman of rock, constantly revising the context and implication of the famous words, "Hope I die before I get old," trying in vain to tone down the nihilistic subtext of his snotty anthem "My Generation." The Who's drummer, Keith Moon, was another story: From his first days with the group, his drinking and drugging indicated that an early death was his all-too-attainable goal. If Townshend was the brain of The Who, Moon was the band's heart, and when he finally lived up to Townshend's mantra of self-destruction in 1978, at 32, The Who died with him. Though it continues to periodically reunite, the band, bereft of Moon's boundless spirit, has become a soulless exercise in crass commercialism. To truly understand and appreciate The Who, listeners must first understand and appreciate Keith Moon, and acknowledge that without Moon's reckless abandon, the group wasn't much. Tony Fletcher's biography, Moon: The Life And Death Of A Rock Legend, traces Moon's hyperactive and excessive life from childhood to his final days with The Who, attempting along the way to discover the mysterious source of his wild behavior. From the get-go, Fletcher notes that his subject's life was made more complicated by Moon's tendency to exaggerate the already-hyperbolic anecdotes that swirled about him like a solar system made up of unsubstantiated stories. Fletcher should be commended, then, for trying to get to the bottom of such an enigmatic and colorful life, one whose legend has been so set in stone that, to this day, most writers don't even get the year of his birth right. Fletcher's long book also refutes several of Moon's most infamous moments, including the falsified tale of his crashing a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool, but for the most part, the drummer's nickname "Moon The Loon" proves fatally accurate. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this portrait is Moon's simultaneous reputation as a madman, family man, and dedicated friend, and it's the sad human elements of his tale that resonate beyond the usual documentation of excessive rock-star exploits.