Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  We also had yet another change to the lineup. In August 1962, we swapped our drummer, Harry Wilson, for a bricklayer called Doug Sandom. It hadn’t been the plan. Harry was going on holiday so we were only looking for a temporary replacement. The temporary replacement didn’t turn up for his audition. For some reason, Doug turned up instead. We agreed he’d play the second set at the Paradise, a club in Peckham. Doug was better for us than Harry, my best mate since the first day of school, so he got the job full-time. I felt bad for Harry, but the band had to come first.

  That wasn’t my overriding memory of the Paradise. I mainly remember the fighting. Close your eyes and imagine paradise. Fluffy clouds. Harps. Angels. Now imagine the exact opposite and you’ve got the Paradise Club, 3 Consort Road, Peckham. We were there because John knew someone who knew someone who booked venues in South London and, the first week we played, there was hardly anyone in the audience. Just a few girls. At around ten o’clock, their boyfriends turned up with bloody noses and black eyes, having started a brawl at a rival club. The next week, the gang from the other club turned up to settle the score.

  I suppose fighting was common, but it was nothing like as violent as it is today, and they almost always left the band alone. My trick was to find the toughest bloke in the whole place and buy him a drink. That usually worked like a charm. We did have a bit of a fracas in Nottingham much later in our career when a load of Hell’s Angels turned up and demanded that we “play some fucking rock and roll.” There were a lot of them and four of us so you would assume it was a good time to adopt a conciliatory tone. That wasn’t Pete’s approach.

  Emboldened by brandy, he started back at them. I don’t know what he said but he said something wrong. All hell, appropriately enough, broke loose, bottles flew, mostly at him. One of them hit Bobby Pridden, and he was out for the count. The rest of the band scarpered and I was left up on the stage talking to the pissed-off leader of the Hell’s Angels. He was a big fella and he had a ring through his nose. We had a chat and I’m still here, so obviously the chat went well.

  Back in 1962, we settled into a routine. Every morning I would go to the factory, John would push a pen around his desk at the Inland Revenue, Doug would lay some bricks, and Pete would do the art school thing and lie in bed. I’d finish work at six and head round to Pete’s. Sometimes I’d have to drag him out of bed. He wouldn’t have dragged himself out. I think he was smoking dope all day and would have quite happily smoked it all night, too. Or was that art school chic? Either way, we were lucky we had me, chief timekeeper, bloke who didn’t want to spend the rest of his life filing metal, and we were lucky we had Betty, Pete’s mum. She was an absolute treasure.

  Without her, we might have spent a lot longer playing Wednesdays in Paradise. Without her, we might have amounted to very little. She was the first person to have faith in us. She saw that we had something. You could say that she had a nose for it.

  She also wanted us out of her house. There is only so much rehearsing a parent can endure and, when she’d reached that limit, she got us our first agent. With it came our first rehearsal space. Peace and quiet at last.

  On September 1, 1962, Betty frog-marched Bob Druce, a local promoter, to Acton Town Hall to see the Detours headline at the Gala Ball. Even though our triumphant gig made it into the illustrious Acton Gazette & Post, he wasn’t convinced. But lukewarm Bob wasn’t going to stop Betty getting her peace and quiet. So there was some more frog-marching, this time to the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, and after that we found ourselves on the West London pub circuit. It worked like this. You turned up. You played. If you were rubbish, you got packed off in a hail of bottles. If you weren’t rubbish, you were asked back. And that suited us because by now we were pretty good.

  We started building our own audience.

  Mondays, we’d play the White Hart Hotel in Acton. Thursdays, it was usually the Oldfield. Sunday afternoons it was Douglas House in Bayswater.

  That Bayswater gig was also courtesy of Betty Townshend. It was an American officers’ club that she’d got onto through Pete’s dad, Cliff, and there were several reasons we loved it. For a start, we got twenty quid for two hours. They would request a whole cornucopia of American music—everything from Johnny Cash to the Coasters and Roy Orbison—and if we played the Dixieland classics well enough to bring tears to the homesick servicemen’s eyes, we got enough free drinks to see us home in a zigzag. This was also our first glimpse of the American dream. American beer, American whiskey, American pizza.

  We were only a few years out of rationing, England wasn’t famed for its cooking, and supermarkets were virtually nonexistent. We’d grown up with only the little food our parents could put down each day. So we were all as skinny as rails with eyes as big as the plates the pizzas came out on. We’d never seen pizza before.

  We were just as wide-eyed when we started touring the States later in the decade. The contrast was ridiculous. You take off from the Land of Suet, you touch down in the Land of Steak. We’d never seen anything like it. For a long time I used to smuggle back suitcases of steak. I’ve stopped now.

  When we weren’t playing for the Yanks, our fee was £10 a gig or £12.50 if we were playing one of Bob’s south coast venues, which we did frequently. It was on one of those long trips to Margate, Folkestone, or Dover that I broke our beautiful new van. Okay, it wasn’t beautiful and it wasn’t new either. It was an old Post Office Austin with sliding doors that Bob had got us in return for another 10 percent. The main thing was that it worked … or it did until I hit a railway bridge. I can’t remember exactly why I hit a railway bridge.

  Contributing factors would have been (1) I didn’t have a full driving license, (2) I was young, and therefore (3) I was driving too fast. And (4) we had half a ton of gear in the back.

  The front of the van went round the corner but the back continued on. There was a loud bang and some groans from my bandmates, and then we didn’t have a van for a few days.

  But we still had Betty. You remember the winter of 1962–63? No? Well, I’ll tell you. It was snowy. Not “White Christmas” snowy. Siberian snowy. Yeti snowy. Sod this, I’ll see you in May snowy. But right in the middle of it we had a gig in Broadstairs and, even though we didn’t have a van and there was a full-scale blizzard, we weren’t going to cancel. I’m telling you this because when people talk about The Who, you hear a lot about the bad behavior. As this story continues, you’re going to hear a lot more. But beneath all the pissing about, there was commitment, real commitment. Everyone remembers the sex, the drugs, and the rock and roll. I remember that night. A bunch of teenagers (and Doug, who was pretending to be a teenager but was actually married and in his early thirties), and one of their mums, her white knuckles on the steering wheel in a blizzard. Going to the gig in Broadstairs.

  Every few miles, we’d stop and switch around. Two in the front with Betty and three in the back, lying on top of the kit, our noses three inches from the roof. Pete’s would have been a bit closer. I don’t know how she got us there because it was like driving on the Cresta Run. The snow was plowed up twice the height of the van on either side. One slip and we’d have been walking the rest of the way.

  Somehow she did it. I don’t know how many mums would have been that supportive. I have no recollection of the gig whatsoever. Let’s just assume there were hundreds of people in the audience and that we stormed it. Let’s forget that there were only ever about fifty people under the age of eighty in Broadstairs at one time and only half of them would have been allowed out on a school night. The point is, we got there, we did our set, and we got home again.

  Note to those worried about the broken van. Not a problem. It had a huge dent in the front, which we fixed with the help of a lamppost opposite my mum’s house, a heavy chain, and a flying start in reverse. I sorted out the door with some two-by-four timber, a hacksaw, and some sheet metal. Any further dents, Pete painted red to look like dripping wounds. Good as new, except the rest of the band had to cli
mb through from the driver’s seat.

  * * *

  In January 1963 we had another personnel change. Colin left. He was a bacon salesman and he had a company car. He wasn’t going to give up the day job and the bacon for a decidedly long punt at rock and roll. And I was ready to take the lead vocals. Or, rather, the lead vocals were ready to take me.

  At St. Mary’s Hall, Putney, every Sunday night we had begun to support other bands and that had an effect. From the wings, we’d watch Screaming Lord Sutch—the “3rd Earl of Harrow”—who used to be carried through the crowd and onto the stage in a coffin. He was a showman, a precursor to Alice Cooper, and we learned from that. Then there was Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. They were a real act. They had a pirate ship for a backdrop and they were the first band I ever saw using ultraviolet lights. Johnny had an eye patch and leather trousers, which went down very, very well with the girls. He had style.

  He also had a three-piece band—bass, drums, and Mick Green on guitar. Mick had this stunning way of playing—he half plucked, half strummed. He was half lead, half rhythm. Pete saw Mick play and, within a week, he’d got those techniques bang on and, for a while, we became a Pirates clone. And that’s when it became obvious that I should sing. We had Pete and John on guitars, a perfect partnership. And we’d swapped out all the straight stuff, all the Buddy Holly, Del Shannon, and Roy Orbison, for Johnny. Johnny was dirty. Colin couldn’t sing Johnny but I could.

  * * *

  It wasn’t all beat-up vans and Siberian road trips to Broadstairs. There was still a bit of time for girls. Barbara and I split up when she was seventeen and I was sixteen. She had been attracted to me because I was in a band and I sang, and then she was attracted to someone from her work because he had a motorbike. You win some, you lose some, but I knew from the first time I performed that I would win more than I lost. I never had to ask anyone out because they mostly asked first.

  That’s just the way it was. There’s something about opening your mouth as a singer, and I don’t know what, precisely, but women find it attractive. They always did. Look at what Elvis did to them. You’ve got the knickers hitting the floor from twenty miles away. Right up until the US Army got ahold of him, squared him up, and he came out singing like Doris bloody Day. Maybe even after that. And look at Adam Faith. He used to walk into a room and you could hear the knickers going schooop. He wasn’t a great singer. He was a good actor, though, and he only had to open his mouth and the girls would go crazy.

  On paper, you would not have put someone like Barbara with someone like me. She was The Girl About Acton. She had that early sixties look: tight white skirt, white high heels, beehive haircut. She was a serious chick. And she wanted me, the bloke from the factory that wasn’t even a proper factory who happened to be in a band. And then she didn’t because some other bloke had a motorbike. I was gutted for a bit and then I went out with another Barbara. It was just a coincidence.

  Barbara Two had her own flat. She lived on her own and that gave me a lot of freedom. Much better than standing in the door of a prefab in Acton of an evening making polite conversation with parents. Even though, for the record, Barbara One’s parents were absolutely lovely.

  After six months, things finished with Barbara Two, too, and then my memory gets a bit vague. Perhaps I was just enjoying myself. Embracing the revolution.

  It’s hard to explain to people today what a difference the Pill made but it was like someone had let the genie out of the bottle. Women went absolutely crazy, and it wasn’t as if men were going to hold back, was it? And then I met Jackie, and Jackie got pregnant. That was the trouble with that particular revolution. The Pill wasn’t easy to get hold of in 1964. It became easier later in the sixties but, at the start, you assumed everyone was on it and that wasn’t always the case. It was my fault. I never asked her if she was on the Pill. I just assumed she was.

  I first met Jacqueline Rickman at St. Mary’s Hall in the autumn of 1963. Pete was going out with a girl called Delores and Jackie was her friend. She was wonderful but neither of us was ready to have a kid.

  Unfortunately, the sexual revolution was way ahead of the social revolution. If you got someone pregnant, you spent the first few days getting shouted at by your parents and her parents, then you got married, found somewhere to live, and that was you for the rest of your life. And that was me. Jackie got pregnant. I got shouted at by her mum and my parents. Then we got married and on the night of the wedding in early 1964 I moved into her mum’s place. Not long after I turned twenty, I found myself living with Jackie and our newborn son, Simon, in one room, six stories up a council block in Wandsworth.

  At first, I was absolutely determined to make it work. It wasn’t what we’d planned but it was the situation we found ourselves in, so that was that. The problem was that, after years of slogging away in pubs and clubs, things were starting to go well with the band. And life in a band on the up isn’t compatible with a new family. I’d be away for weeks at a time. I’d get home in the middle of the night and would be trying to sleep in the morning. I’d have some money one week and no money the next. I was not the reliable father figure my son, Simon, needed and I wasn’t the caring husband Jackie deserved. That’s what I would tell myself then, as a young man trying to talk himself out of his responsibilities. Years later, it’s still not something I feel at ease with, even if it all worked out okay in the end.

  Back then, I used to spend hours looking out of the window of that one-room flat. I could see across Wandsworth, all the way to Battersea Power Station and beyond. And I could see the van parked down below. I swear it was calling me, tempting me, and that beat-up old van just became more attractive by the day. It represented my dream. To be in a band. To play music. And, after a lot of hard work, we were finally beginning to get somewhere.

  chapter five

  The High Numbers

  The changes had come quickly. First, in the spring of 1964, we got a new manager. Helmut Gorden was a Jewish German doorknob manufacturer who wanted to be the next Brian Epstein. He was a nice guy and he had money that he was determined to waste on a rock band, so it made sense for us to be the rock band upon which it was wasted. He bought us a new van—not new new, but new secondhand and it had windows. He bought us our first professional amplifiers, and he got us into the recording studio. It was never going to go much farther than that, but we owe him a huge debt of gratitude. He was obviously trying to make money out of us, which I don’t think he ever did, but he got us through those years.

  Second, our music was changing. We weren’t just a covers band anymore. We were starting to become a fairly good, fairly original outfit. We were resolving our musical differences. I like that term. It’s so polite. What it really meant, for us, was me and Pete telling each other to fuck off and Doug attempting to play the elder statesman. But by 1963 there were new forces in motion. Everyone wanted the Beatles, of course, so we did the Beatles. We did “Twist and Shout,” and John did “I Saw Her Standing There.” I used to be more into Johnny Cash songs, which seemed to suit our energy better, and they went down really well, but then, slowly but surely, we started introducing Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, and Sonny Boy Williamson. We did “Help Me,” “Boom Boom,” “Big Boss Man,” those kinds of songs.

  But then we started to notice the Rolling Stones. We were on the same circuits as them and they became a huge, huge influence. We’d been aware of the blues, but we hadn’t realized it could be popular. All we wanted to be was popular. The Stones showed that those two things—blues and popularity—weren’t mutually exclusive.

  That’s how it was back then. It was uncharted territory. Everything we tried was new. Today, the whole music industry is geared toward adolescence, but in the early sixties it was all being invented. First, it was all straight, clean-cut, something your parents might approve of. We were so innocent. We were so much younger, less worldly than teenagers today. But then, as we found our voice, it got looser, wilder, freer. It was an incredibly exciting
time. Nothing stayed the same from one week to the next.

  That’s why Pete wanted to play a full blues set immediately. He was always impatient to try the next new thing. I wanted to do the blues, too, but I was also very aware that we couldn’t just change overnight. We had our audiences, built up painstakingly in all those long trips in clapped-out vans. They wanted to hear the hits. This was their Ready, Steady, Go. I knew we had to go slowly.

  Maybe it’s because I came from the street much more than Pete did. Maybe it’s because I realized more than Pete what those nights out were to our audience. What it meant for people working from seven in the morning at a factory, slogging away all week, to go to a place where they could do all the things they wanted to do. If we’d gone and played them a load of strange music, they would have been insulted. If we went too far off on our blues trip in a great big sweep, we’d have lost them, and if we lost them we were fucked.

  Fucked for Pete meant carrying on with his art degree, which meant lying about in bed all day smoking dope, turning up at the occasional lecture to imagine the world from the point of view of a sponge.

  Fucked for me was something quite different. I wasn’t at college. I wasn’t having my arse wiped by the state. I had a whole different outlook on life. So, musical differences.

  We stood up to each other, and Pete could be very spiteful with his language sometimes, which took me straight back to those dark days at grammar school. But the thing was, I recognized his talent. I’m quick to see a path through a problem once I’ve focused on it. If I get too scrambled, my brain goes haywire, but once you get me to focus on something I’m absolutely 100 percent driven. Pete could be all over the place. His default position was scrambled. I suppose I was the ground for his sky. Sky is great but you need the ground, too.