Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  We both got our way in the end. We changed from a covers band to doing more blues and more original stuff, which we both wanted, but we did it gradually, which I wanted. Each week, we’d slip in a couple of new songs.

  Within a couple of months, we weren’t playing full blues but we were close. To keep people guessing, we’d switch in some Tamla Motown and some James Brown. Or some more obscure stuff like Garnet Mimms. Because the problem with blues is that it’s all the same thing. After a while, it can be like listening to paint dry. I love it, but you have to imagine you’re on a dance floor and you’re on a night out, and it’s your only night out that week, and everything you hear is on a twelve-bar riff. Stick some James Brown in and, woohoo, you’re all right.

  The final gear change happened one Thursday night at the Oldfield in late 1963. We were drafted in at short notice after the scheduled act had canceled. We agreed on the condition that we could play what we wanted to play. That night, the audience got a full rhythm and blues set. And we stuck to the same set list the next week. We had changed. Our audience had changed with us. Who knows if I’d been right or Pete had been right. The important thing was that they were still with us. That was the important thing.

  We were developing the way we performed as well. We were finding ways of expressing our aggression. The phrasing of things, the punch of the chords, more onbeat than swing. Our word for it was drive. Let’s drive, we used to say before a gig. Drive. Drive. Drive. I used to feel like we were trying to drive our music through the audience to the back wall. I’ve always done that, even at Woodstock, with no back wall and half a million people stretching over the horizon. I had to drive the curvature of the earth. It’s no good to play at an audience. You’ve got to play to them. You’ve got to try and move them. You have to drive through them. And it works.

  You ask people who saw us from the back of Wembley Arena. Even in the days before big video screens, they’ll tell you they were moved. At least I hope they’ll tell you that. It’s something you’re putting into the music that does it. It’s an energy. You can’t pin it down but there was an energy that we emitted and the audience received.

  That really all started to happen very fast when Keith, the Gingerbread Man, came along. Doug wasn’t changing. He was still playing jazz drum, but two weeks after he left—his missus had had enough of him being in a band—we were playing at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford and this kid comes up in the interval and tells us his mate can play drums better than the session guy we had with us. And then forward steps Moonie, ginger-topped after a failed attempt to go Beach Boy blond.

  “Hello,” he said, cocky little bugger.

  Keith Moon was born in Wembley on August 23, 1946, although he always pretended it was 1947. He was a hyperactive child whose favorite hobbies were The Goon Show and engineering explosions. Predictably enough, he got on with the education system even less well than I did, failing his eleven-plus and ending up at Alperton Secondary Modern. His art teacher described him as “retarded artistically, idiotic in other respects,” and his music teacher said he had “great ability, but must guard against a tendency to show off.” In other words, he was born to be our drummer.

  The session drummer that night chucked him his sticks and we went straight into Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner.” “I’m a roadrunner, honey, and you can’t keep up with me.”

  Keith could. More than that. Halfway through, he started to do his syncopations. It’s all mathematics, isn’t it, drumming, but his mathematics were from another planet. And it gave springboards for John’s little bass guitar flicks and Pete’s power rhythm. It just took things up to the next level. The final gear.

  Immediately. That night at the Oldfield Hotel.

  Keith always claimed he was never officially asked to join the band, but I remember clearly, at the end of that gig, telling him we’d pick him up next week. That means you’ve got the job, mate. It was April 1964, and that was the last time our lineup changed until September 7, 1978. Keith was the last in and he was the first out, bless him. He gave us fourteen years of headaches and laughter in more or less equal measure. From then on we found ourselves locked in this incredibly intense experimental phase. There is a tape of us playing at the Marquee a little later in the year and we do Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning.”

  Classic blues. Then, halfway through it, we go into jazz. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. The gear changes were so smooth. It was like we were telepathic and it was extraordinary to experience. That’s how crucial it was that the four of us ended up together. We were nineteen years old but we were playing like we’d been at it for years. We knew each other. We followed each other. We communicated with each other through the music. And something that gets missed in all the war stories about The Who … we respected each other.

  * * *

  The first time I became aware of the mods was in the autumn of 1963. My sister Carol had a boyfriend from Lewisham and he had a scooter. Pete was very taken with his black shorty PVC coat. He was also very taken with my sister’s mod dance moves. That was how it all started. A PVC coat, herringbone-tweed bell-bottoms emphasizing the bell, and my sister’s minimalist twist. Pete got into his mod phase for the same reason most boys get into anything—because of a girl, my sister. But I think he became a proper mod.

  I was trying to be a mod but really I was whatever the fuck you wanted me to be that didn’t involve sheet-metal work. And if we’re being honest, and we’re not attempting to develop an elaborate cultural thesis to explain everything, it didn’t matter what you called yourself. We were young. Most of us were working class. We had a bit of money to spend on clothes and fags and going out. No national service. No rationing. We wanted to have a laugh. We wanted to enjoy our freedom. All the stuff written about the mods … it’s all with hindsight. It makes it sound like there was a plan. It overintellectualizes it. But there wasn’t a plan. All it was was fashion. You can take one bloke with sideburns and an Elvis jacket and take him through three shops and he’s a mod. But he hasn’t changed.

  The fashion wasn’t coming from art school. It was being created from the streets and it was incredibly transitory. Things would be in fashion for two or three weeks, then out. Way out. There was a period, for example, when ice-cream sellers’ coats were the thing. Overnight, everyone was wandering around in white coats down to their knees. Hardly any of them were selling ice cream. Three weeks later, gone. The trend was to change the trend.

  Having said all that, we did find ourselves at the forefront of a movement in society and that gave the band momentum. If you’re at the forefront of any movement, quids in it will rub off on you. And we got lucky there. Pete Meaden really took us down that road. He came into our lives shortly after Keith, hired by Helmut Gorden to make a supergroup out of The Who. I first met him in early 1964 at the Glenlyn Ballroom in Forest Hill. We were supporting the Stones that night and I was chatting with Brian Jones at the bar. He was raving about a version of “Route 66” they’d just recorded. Meaden had been business partners with the Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and he was there, too, all dressed up like the adman that he was.

  After we’d performed we carried on chatting. He said he thought our band was great, but we had no image. Without any image, we were just another wannabe Stones. “Don’t be the black sheep,” he said. “Be the red sheep.” That was his mantra. Be the red sheep. He was three years older than me, which is a lot when you’re nineteen. So I listened to him. We all did. And the next minute, I’m wearing a white seersucker jacket, a button-down-collar shirt, and a pair of black-and-white shoes (Hush Puppies, modified with paint). A red sheep. The minute after that, he convinced us to change our name from The Who, which he thought was tacky, to the High Numbers, because that week the mod fashion was stolen bowling shoes. The higher the number, the bigger the feet, and the bigger the feet, well, you can work it out.

  Then he made me get my hair cut at Jack the Barber’s. A mod, even a pretend one, can’
t have long, curly hair. It was awful. God, it was awful. I may as well have had the clap. But a mod with short, curly hair wasn’t much better. I used to go through jars and jars of Dippity-Do, an industrial-strength American hair gel, to keep it straight. As long as there weren’t too many encores, one big dollop could keep me on the straight and narrow through a gig. I was like Cinderella, with a curly mop instead of a pumpkin.

  That was all down to Pete Meaden. He knew how to present us. He knew it was all about image. It always had been. Take Dean Martin, cultivating the laid-back alcoholic crooner look with a glass of liquor in one hand and a fag in the other. People loved him for that, but he was stone-cold sober. The liquor was apple juice. In our world, the Beatles were the first pop band. The Stones were their antithesis. We had to find our own niche, something fresh. And that’s what we were starting to find with Pete at those gigs in Forest Hill. They were important. They were close to the heart of the mod birthplace around Lewisham and Bromley, those places. It gave us a base.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1964 we found new management. Or, rather, it found us. We were playing our regular R & B night at the Railway Hotel in Wealdstone, northwest London. The derelict hotel was burned down by arsonists in 2000 and, predictably, there’s a block of flats there now. They called it Daltrey House. The one next to it is called Moon House.

  Back in 1964, the Railway Hotel was our sweaty little low-ceilinged, smoke-filled home on a Tuesday night. At the time, these places always seemed at least eight times bigger than they were. You go back to see them twenty, thirty years later and they’re just these tiny little rooms. But the Hotel was always packed. It was just this mass of people, and in those days people used to dance. There would be maybe one row of people along the front just standing there watching, but everyone else would dance.

  Our PA had come on a bit more by now. We’d borrowed and begged amps, swapped kit, found cheap bits and bobs. We still weren’t making a huge racket like when we became famous, but our noise suited that room at the Hotel. It was loud and the atmosphere was dangerous, which we liked. And then in walked Kit Lambert, attracted, he said, by all the Lambrettas parked outside. All the local mods loved him because he immediately started buying them drinks. And Pete loved him, too, because he was the son of the composer Constant Lambert and his godfather was William Walton. I would have been, like, “Who the fuck’s Constant Lambert?” But then I grew to love Kit, too, because he was a charmer.

  Christopher Sebastian Lambert was twenty-nine when he saw those Lambrettas and walked into our world. He had the air of a well-to-do British officer because he’d been one. After Oxford, he served in Hong Kong before joining two friends from university on an expedition to discover the source of the Iriri River in Brazil. It didn’t go well. One of the friends had the extremely dubious honor of becoming the last Englishman to be killed by an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Kit was held by the Brazilian government on suspicion of his friend’s murder until a campaign by the Daily Express led to his release. He returned to England and became an assistant director on The Guns of Navarone and From Russia with Love. It was quite a start to a flamboyant life. And then he walked into our gig looking for his next adventure.

  “We’re trying to make a film of the new thing coming in,” says Kit. “We’re looking for bands and you’re the best thing we’ve seen. We want to make a film about you. Do you want another drink?”

  Kit wanted to show us to his business partner, who was over in Ireland working on a film with John Huston. We agreed to do an audition at St. Michael’s Church Hall on Askew Road in Shepherd’s Bush. This was the church where my mum and dad were married. It was also the church where, as a child, I’d sung in the choir. Now it was the place where we’d find new management. So a couple of weeks later we were setting up our kit, and in walks Chris Stamp. Talk about drop-dead cool. Talk about a Face. His brother Terence was the film star, and he had an image, but I’ve got to tell you, when you saw them both in the flesh, Chris had the edge. He was only a couple of years older than me, but he had this dangerous streak that Terence never had. He was so sharp. He was East End sharp.

  After the audition, we all went to a Chinese restaurant and Kit announced that he wanted to manage us. He’d already got hold of our contracts with Helmut Gorden and Meaden, and he had a proposition.

  They’d pay us a salary of twenty quid a week and they’d take 40 percent from the gigs. It didn’t take us long to make up our minds. It just seemed obvious. We’d gone along with Meaden’s ideas. We’d done his single, “Zoot Suit,” and it hadn’t even made the charts. We also knew he had no money. Kit, on the other hand, was loaded. Or we thought he was. He had to be, hadn’t he, the way he was flashing the cash around? I found out only a long time later that he had to flog one of his father’s paintings to pay our wages.

  * * *

  So I was twenty, and I was at a crossroads. As things had moved on with the band, I had a very real chance to fulfill my dream. Or I could abandon it and stay with my young family. The second option was the safe one—and, I’ll admit, the honorable one—but it just wasn’t in my nature to take the safe option. You think you can do anything when you’re young. But in some ways it still isn’t in my nature now. I hope I’ve become a bit wiser with the years, but I still believe in luck and in taking chances. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to give it everything I had. And that meant I had to leave.

  A few days after I’d walked out, my dad came to see me. I was unloading the equipment for a gig at the Railway Hotel and he came up and told me to get back with Jackie. I told him, “Dad, I can’t do this marriage bit, this is my life. This thing.” And he just went bananas. He was raving at me right out in the middle of the street, and then he threw a punch. He wasn’t a fighter. It took a lot to get him worked up. Even when I’d been expelled, he didn’t hit me. That night outside the Railway Hotel was the first and only time it happened. I loved my dad, he loved me, and my behavior was terrible for him to endure.

  It wasn’t something I felt good about either. I was a complete arsehole. I was an uncaring bastard. I know that now and I knew it then, but maybe that’s what it took for this band to happen. I was completely driven. I was driven to do what I did all that time and nothing in the world would have changed it. I was like the guy in Close Encounters building that bloody mountain in his basement and not knowing why. At the end of it, you realize why. And you realize that, even though you were a complete arsehole and an uncaring bastard, it wouldn’t have happened any other way. There were no half measures.

  I’m not sorry I did what I did. I took the chance and went for what turned out to be the right thing. Once I’d made the decision, it just made sense. I knew I could do better, and that, when I did, I could take care of Jackie and Simon. I could provide better for them. And I did. As soon as I could, I looked after them. From the 1970s, we all used to go on holidays together every spring. Her family. My family. Old wounds healed and we all had a better life. This life—the one-room council flat, the job in the factory, the nights out gigging—this was no life. More importantly, if I hadn’t walked out, The Who would never have been, not with me in it anyway. The world would have been full of Townshend solo albums.

  I never spoke to my dad about it again after that, though. I felt deeply upset. I knew I’d hurt him and that stayed with me for a long time, even though he never held any grudges.

  When I left, I left with one small suitcase and a guitar. I had the suit of clothes I stood up in, plus a few shirts. If you look back at all the pictures of the band, you’ll only ever find me in four sets of clothes. I haven’t changed. I’m still a really simple bloke that way.

  * * *

  That summer, I lived in our latest, greatest van. It had come with great promise, this van. It had been part of Kit’s sales pitch.

  “You’re going to need a bigger van,” he’d said, “because we’re going to have lights, and the gear is going to be big. And I shall buy you that van.”


  He did buy it, but it wasn’t quite what we’d hoped for. The van that turned up was a fourthhand 30 hundredweight removal truck. It had no windows in the back so I had them cut in, and I put style over substance. It was only when the rest of the band took their seats that we realized the windows were far, far too high. Pure Spinal Tap. Everyone went crazy, but I didn’t mind for three reasons. First, it looked good and, as I’ve already said, looking good was nine tenths of the law. It’s best to have style and substance, but if you can have only one, go for style. Second, it had a little bed space above the driver’s cab. Third, the others refused to travel without a view. They decided to travel separately with Kit in his VW. They got to stay in hotels. I got to stay with Cleo.

  Cleo. The girl who was unfortunate enough to share the little space above the cab with me in that dreadful old banger. She was West Indian and she was and probably still is the most well-spoken girl I’ve ever met in my life. And, believe it or not, I’ve met a lot of well-spoken girls in my time. She was also, entirely coincidentally, Constant Lambert’s goddaughter. Her whole family was really tied up in the theater. I didn’t know who they were. I just fell in love with her. I thought she was drop-dead gorgeous. And she was into her music. She was always trying to turn me on to ska and bluebeat.

  We used to go down to see her family in Brixton. I was the only white boy in the neighborhood, but there wasn’t a bad vibe. They welcomed me and I felt at home. It didn’t have anything to do with color. It was the struggle, the struggle of being at the bottom of the pile. Their music came from a different place from all these crooners. It came from a primal sense of wanting to leave your name on the wall and then get the fuck out of here. That’s what we identified with. Well, I did anyway. It spoke to me. I wanted to leave my name on the wall. And I wanted to get the fuck out of here, too.