Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  That summer, we were just working. Working, working, working. We played 236 shows in 1965. We were existing on three, four hours’ sleep a night. Show, sleep, drive, show, sleep, drive. I think I had it better than the boys because they were still cramming into the back of Kit’s Beetle. But then, at some point, Pete got a Lincoln Continental and Keith and John got a Bentley. They also got a chauffeur because neither of them could drive. That suited Keith. The boy from Alperton was in his own version of Pygmalion. He was Eliza Doolittle. Kit was Professor Higgins.

  We used to go to a Chinese restaurant called the Lotus House on Edgware Road. Kit went in there with no money, we’d all eat and drink lavishly, and at the end of the night he’d sign the tablecloth. In those days that was acceptable tender, and he got away with it. Most people could manage that trick once or twice. Kit did it for most of the sixties. He did it with checks and he did it with contracts. After seeing an up-and-coming guitarist play one night in 1966, he took his manager to dinner at the Lotus. The manager was Chas Chandler, the guitarist was Jimi Hendrix, and by the end of the night Jimi was contracted, by tablecloth, to Kit.

  That’s how Kit rolled. People admired him. They just assumed, from the cut of his jib, that he was a trustworthy, upstanding member of society.

  Keith didn’t just admire him. He became him. It took about six weeks from the first time they met. After that, Keith could do a perfect Kit Lambert. All his mannerisms, everything. It was like sitting down with Kit. He mimicked him for laughs but it quickly became more than that. All that “My dear boy.” He wasn’t speaking posh sarcastically. He really decided to become grand. He got the Bentley. He got the wardrobe. He became an aficionado of fine wines and brandies. Those long nights at the Lotus House became like master classes. Kit and Keith would work their way through all the vintages, comparing tasting notes, before Kit scribbled his signature on the tablecloth.

  That’s something people get wrong about Keith. He was never just a boozer. He was a connoisseur of booze. When we were filming Tommy in the 1970s, I remember he went into a bar in a hotel in Portsmouth and he asked for a Rémy Martin and a mixer. The barman pointed out that it didn’t matter what brandy he used if he was going to mix it. He wouldn’t know the difference.

  So Keith made him a bet. He told him to line up all the brandies on the shelf and add ginger. “If I can tell you which one is the Rémy Martin,” he said, “then you buy the drinks for me and my mates for the rest of the night. If I can’t, you can have my car.”

  The barman agreed. Keith went along the line of brandies like he was in a Bordeaux wine cellar. And he picked the right one.

  * * *

  So that was the summer of 1965. A lot of work, some largely constructive arguments, and Keith working tirelessly on his knowledge of brandy. It was a harmonious summer. This is something you don’t hear very much about us. People assume we were fighting all the time. It’s not true. Most of the time we were larking. A lot of the time we were talking about the music and the direction. The fights and the flare-ups? Most of it wasn’t real. Most of it was image. It’s all about jeopardy. We were a dangerous band, always teetering on the brink, always on the verge of a fistfight. That’s what people want from their rock bands … the constant potential for destruction. You couldn’t have another band that just got on. The Beatles were already the best of mates … or they were in the early years. And that suited their style of music. It wouldn’t have suited ours. Where’s the drama? Where’s the danger? We did things differently.

  Some of it wasn’t just for show. Sometimes the fights and flare-ups were real. But they were, usually, good things. They kept the engine turning. They didn’t happen very often and the rest of the time we were having a great time. Look at the photographs. Mucking about. Larking. There was some scowling, too, but that was just a bit of attitude for the cameras. In June 1965, Melody Maker wrote, “Every so often, a group is poised on the brink of a breakthrough. Word has it, it’s The Who.”

  And it was The Who. We were poised. We were on the brink. And then we went on our very first European tour and everything unraveled. It is possible that you’ve heard the story about the time I was slung out of the band. Out of my band. Several people have told the story before. But this is my version and it’s the honest truth, swear on my life. No, swear on Pete’s life, because fifty years is a long time and there’s a very slight chance I might get one or two details mixed up.

  We were on tour in Europe and everything was going wrong. Some of it wasn’t the band’s fault and some of it bloody well was. Early in the month, the van with all our kit inside got nicked from outside Battersea Dogs Home, which was ironic because Cy, our roadie, had been in there inquiring about a German shepherd to beef up our van’s security. The kit we then had to borrow for the tour kept going wrong, even when Pete and Keith weren’t smashing it up.

  The first gig, in Holland, went well, but somewhere between Holland and Denmark they picked up a sackful of purple hearts and that was it. The playing went out of the window. The tempo started getting faster and faster. There was no control. It was a mess.

  We got to Aarhus, Denmark, on Sunday, September 26, 1965, and the hall was filled with five thousand pissed-up Danish farmers. The band was halfway through the second song when all hell broke loose in the crowd. Chairs were smashed. Bottles were flying: it was turning into a full-scale riot. That was the second shortest show we’ve ever done.

  It made headlines in the next morning’s newspapers but we’d already moved on to the next show in Aalborg. That was where everything really unraveled. Maybe it was a combination of the drugs they’d taken and the nerves, but the show was a mess. I tried desperately to get the lyrics in and the vocal loud enough, but they just played louder and faster. It was a cacophony and something had to give. A band of musicians with this much talent, and it was all getting flushed down the toilet. So I decided to flush something else down the toilet instead.

  While the band smashed up the stage at the end of “My Generation,” I stormed offstage and went straight to Keith’s suitcase in the dressing room. I thought: I’m going to stop this once and for all. It took five seconds to find his stash, this great big bag full of pills in his suitcase. Black bombers. Purple hearts. You name it. And I just flushed the bloody lot down the toilet.

  Of course, Keith came straight offstage behind me, wanting another pill. And he starts shouting, “What’s happened to them? What’s fucking happened to them?”

  So I told him I flushed them down the toilet.

  This made him angry and he came slashing at me with the bells of a tambourine. I suppose I was lucky that was all he had to hand. So there I was, faced with a furious Keith and his percussive attack, and I fought back. And it wasn’t a bad fight, but it was a fight, and I finished it. The next day, we flew home. I was summoned to Kit’s office and told I was no longer part of The Who.

  chapter seven

  Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

  It had been three against one for a long time, and that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with a prodigious amount of drugs. Ever since they got into amphetamines and I hadn’t, we’d moved apart. I’d tried purple hearts a couple of times, but they didn’t work for me. All I did was chew my lip for a few hours. They gave me a dry throat and I couldn’t sing. A guitarist doesn’t give a shit if he’s got a dry throat. He just drinks more booze, which is what Pete did. But I couldn’t sing on pills. So it was a straightforward decision. I was either going to be a good singer, and care about what we were doing on a stage, because this was my life and I was going forward with this. Or I could chuck it in right there. I knew how tough the bloody competition was. There were some great bands out there, fantastic bands, and they never made it. I didn’t want to be part of one of those bands. So I left the other three to it.

  I’ve watched so many friends turn into absolute arseholes on drugs. And when you’re in their company, it starts off and you’re all mates, but then someone disappears to t
he toilet and they come back and then someone else disappears, and before you know it you’re not sitting with your friends anymore. It’s like you’re at a different party.

  So many times in my life I’ve had to be tough with people stuck on drugs. The ones I was tough with are still here. The ones where I wasn’t tough enough didn’t make it. And that’s something I think about often. It’s something I think about when we perform today. The two of us that are left. But this put me in the minority, not just in the band but in the whole of bloody London.

  Everyone in Soho was on these pills. You queued up for your ticket. Then you queued up for your drugs. It was that open (and still is). And when the government caught on and started fining dealers, they just switched to other pills. French blues. Dexies. Black bombers. Stronger and stronger. No bloody wonder Keith, the boy who had blown us away with his first rendition of “Road Runner,” couldn’t keep the beat anymore. I knew, right there, that I was the enemy. Rock and roll had become all about taking as many drugs as possible until you died. And I was spoiling that. From their point of view, it was an intrusion on how they wanted to live their lives. They wanted to be free and I was spoiling it. The next day, we traveled back home separately and then I was told I was out.

  For two days, I grieved. It was like a death. It was the end of everything. Five years slogging away, sacrificing everything, for nothing. And then, a couple of days after that, I pulled myself together and started making plans for a soul band. I called up old mates, planned a repertoire. It no longer felt like make-or-break because I would just carry on, like I always had. I wasn’t going back to the factory.

  And by now I knew I could sing. All the pop songs were easy to sing—you just sing ’em. There’s nothing deep about them. We hadn’t got to the point where Pete’s writing would demand something different, something I would feel less sure of.

  In September 1965, I was still a confident singer. I knew my voice was having an effect on the audience and I liked being in a band, so I was just going to get on with it. My future wouldn’t be with The Who, but I would be all right. We weren’t earning money anyway so it didn’t make much difference.

  The situation didn’t last long. They did a few shows without me, and they were getting booed off the stage. I didn’t feel bad about that. They deserved it. But within a few days, Kit and Chris were knocking on the door saying, “They need you back in. They’ve lost it without you.”

  I’m not sure the band realized that. I suppose when you’re in there playing, you think it’s as good as it always was, but it’s not the same if you’re looking at the band from outside. All of a sudden, the chemistry’s gone. I knew, once Keith joined the band, we had all the ingredients. If one of us wasn’t there, it didn’t work. It would have been the same if John had got thrown out. Or Keith. It was like that when he died. There was a hole we could never fill. It wasn’t to do with his ability. It was his persona, and the way it fitted in. We were all individuals who made the one that was The Who. None of us could be replaced.

  Luckily, they listened to the management. They agreed. There were conditions on both sides. They’d have me back as long as I didn’t beat the crap out of them or flush their stash down the bog. I’d go back as long as they didn’t take drugs before a show. I didn’t care what they did offstage, but when we were onstage we were a team and we had to work together. This was going to be professional. We were going to be the best at this. They had to arrive compos mentis. It wasn’t a lot to ask. That was the deal and they kept it well into the seventies, when Keith started to take stuff onstage again.

  I’d like to say we’d put it all behind us and moved on but that would be a lie. I was back in the band, but the others begrudged my return. They were still pissed off, Moon in particular. And now that he was released from the threat of violence, he would do everything he could think of to rile me up. He was a master of the verbal and he knew exactly which buttons to push to get me going. If anything, John was worse. John had a very spiteful streak. There were shades of Cousin Kevin from Tommy. I don’t know if it was because he was an only child, but he could be mean and he could say smart-arse things that deserved a punch in the mouth.

  In my world, the world I’d come from, you would have got a smack in the mouth for saying the things he said to me. He knew this. Keith knew it, too. They knew about my red mist.

  After Denmark, they wasted a lot of energy trying to find the point at which I’d bite. It went on and on for months, years even, but I never did. It must have driven them mad. I had a trick, you see. It’s a trick you need a lot when you’re in the music industry. I used to imagine myself as a duck. An acid comment here, a trashed hotel room there—they were raindrops rolling off my duck’s back. A Zen duck. That was me. Quack, quack.

  * * *

  On October 13, 1965, two weeks after we split up, two days before we got back together again, we arrived at IBC studios in Portland Place to finish our much-delayed debut LP. I think the atmosphere was quite frosty, which was a good thing because we were going to record “My Generation.” Pete had written the song six months earlier, shortly after his vehicle of choice—a Packard hearse no less—had been towed from outside his Belgravia flat on the orders of the Queen Mother. Why? It reminded her of her late husband.

  That was just the sort of thing that could wind him up for a week. How dare she.

  The first demo he played us was much slower. More of a chink-a-chink-a-chink Bo Diddley number. I didn’t like it. Kit wasn’t sure either, but he told him to keep going. The second demo had the key changes and the call and response, but it still didn’t feel right.

  Then we got to IBC studios and Keith just stuck it on the onbeat (i.e., the most accented beat in the bar), which gave it the kick up the arse it needed. That was the thing about Moon—he was never a conformist drummer. He never practiced. He just did it. When you tried to pin him down to a straight four-four time (i.e., four beats to the bar), it was impossible. He could do it but it killed him to do it. The whole reason for his genius was the absolute, utter anarchy. So he was off, on the onbeat, full of aggression. I tried to follow him and I stuttered on the first line. Next take, I corrected it, but Kit popped out and said, “Keep it. Keep that in.” Pete had a long “fffff” in the demo. “Why don’t you all ffffffffade away?” But it wasn’t a stutter. Not until Kit came out and said keep it. “Keep that blues stutter.” And it worked. To me, it wasn’t a sign of weakness. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was aggression, pure aggression, pushed forward by that onbeat. Bottled-up rage, barely controlled, spilling out onto vinyl, shouting out I hope I die before I get old.

  Almost all the great things that happen in studios are accidents, and that’s when you’ve got to rely on your producers to spot the ones that work and the ones that don’t. Pete always hated Kit’s production. I understand technically why Pete didn’t like it. Some of the mixes Kit did were terrible. He was always a bit bass-light, which used to upset John, but recording circumstances were difficult in those days. We only had a three-track recorder—eight-tracks were still three years away—so we didn’t have a lot to play with. But Kit was incredibly adventurous. He’d fly in, throw everything at the wall, tear it down, and rebuild it. We’d do layers and layers. We’d do harmonies all over the place, building them up by bouncing one track onto another on those three-tracks. This allowed us to get the backing vocal harmonies sounding like we were a twelve-piece vocal group. The price to pay for this was that these things had to be mixed at the time of recording and that mix could never be changed. Put on too much echo and the result was permanent.

  “My Generation” didn’t need all that. It just needed a punch. It was another street song, like “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere,” and I think, Zen ducks aside, we were all in the mood for a bit of aggression. We were in the mood to tell everyone to f-f-f-fade away. So the stutter stayed, we crashed through the rest of the album, and we went home.

  The track was released at the end of October and the album
came out on December 3. It should have been a great end to the year, but it wasn’t quite like that. I was still the enemy. Everyone was talking about leaving. Keith and John were going to do their own thing. Keith asked Paul McCartney if he could join the Beatles. “We already have a drummer,” said Paul. Then he was going to join the Animals. Then he was going to join the Nashville Teens. Pete was going to join a supergroup with Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson.

  The legal battles didn’t help. Kit and Chris had fallen out with Shel Talmy. For five months, they were in and out of the High Court, trying to break Talmy’s contract, and all that time we couldn’t release any more music. Given that the average band lasts eighteen months and we were far more volatile than the average band, five months was a lifetime.

  But we just kept gigging. We played our last show at the Goldhawk Road Social Club on December 3, 1965. This had been our home turf since the beginning, so it’s been described as an important moment. A turning point. The night we left our mod roots behind. It certainly wasn’t a particularly salubrious night. Someone remembers a bouncer with a big stick on the end of a chain. But there was always a bouncer and they never needed big sticks on chains. They were massive. And I think the audience has made much more of it than we did. We weren’t leaving them. We were moving on because we couldn’t get them all in the place. I wasn’t moving on from being a mod either because I was never a mod in the first place.

  I’ve always been the same through my life. I never liked uniforms. When everybody else was wearing mod gear, I’d wear a leather jacket. And when they were wearing leather jackets, I’d wear a suede coat. We might have been the mod band. Dressing like a mod did the job for a while. But I didn’t feel that we had to answer to anybody. I felt, and Pete did, too, that by the time we were making our own music, people were following us for that, not how we dressed.