Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  I liked the mod thing in the early days. I liked the zoot suit. I liked the drape jackets, the Edwardian look, with the really stiff collars and studs. That was sharp and I liked to dress sharp. I got that from my dad. He had two shirts. One was his best shirt, the other was his work shirt. He changed the collar every other day, and he had cuffs but no sleeves. But he looked sharp. My dad always looked sharp. So I liked looking sharp, too.

  But then it started to get into jeans and Fred Perrys, then the parka. It was all too much. It was stifling invention. People telling me what to wear was exactly what I didn’t want to do.

  So I was wearing what I wanted and I was living how I wanted. I wasn’t in the van anymore. I was going up in the world. For a while, I’d kipped in the office, which was a room in Kit’s flat at Ivor Court, at the top of Gloucester Place.

  Every morning, there’d be some boy making coffee in the kitchen. Kit would walk in, make some excuse about why he was there, and send him on his way. I knew Kit was gay. I knew he liked young men, but he never hit on me. Not once. Perhaps I wasn’t his type. Perhaps he knew he wouldn’t have got very far. After all, I was dating his father’s goddaughter. But then, somehow or other, Cleo and I just drifted apart and I met up with a girl called Anna from Muswell Hill. She lived with her flatmate Gitta, so I shacked up in Muswell Hill with them. And that was my life. Driving to a gig, playing the gig, going back to Muswell Hill. Simple.

  While I was doing that, Pete was making further forays into his own psyche. By 1966, he was really beginning to write his own songs and they were … different. We’d had a string of decent enough hits. Whatever we did next, we’d still get on Top of the Pops. So Pete wrote “I’m a Boy.”

  Bloody hell. A song that was supposed to be part of a rock opera called Quads about a future where parents can choose the sex of their children. A couple have three girls but the fourth child is a boy. The mother isn’t happy. So she brings him up as a girl. He questions his gender identity. It was, like so much of Pete’s music, way, way ahead of its time.

  One little girl was called Jean-Marie

  Another little girl was called Felicity

  Another little girl was Sally-Joy

  The other was me and I’m a boy.

  I found this very, very difficult. I was all right with the line “My name is Bill and I’m a head case” but the rest of it, a boy struggling to find his identity, was hard. Up until this point, the band had been molded around what I did. Pete wrote it, but I sang it. I wasn’t in charge but, onstage, I could do what I wanted. They fitted around me and so did the songs. It wasn’t like that anymore. My confidence had been knocked.

  All I remember was that I listened more to Pete’s voice on the demo tapes and how he was singing it. I tried to get his voice into my voice. I tried to sing it like a vulnerable kid. When I listen to “I’m a Boy” now, I think it kind of works, but I didn’t think it did at the time. Not at all.

  I thought it sounded like I was singing down a tunnel. I’ve never liked listening to myself sing. I hate it when I’m out and I hear myself. You either listen to us at one of our shows or you listen to us on your own. If you want to kill a party, put a Who song on. If you want me to leave your party, put a Who song on. I don’t want to hear it. It’s bad enough when my voice crops up on television, which happens quite a lot these days and usually when you least expect it. The other day, I was watching a documentary about paddle steamers on the Clyde, and they used a bit of bloody “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” I mean, why?

  So you get the picture. I’ve never liked the sound of it but I know when it’s good. It’s not the voice itself, it’s the vibrations. And the vibrations didn’t feel good once we moved deeper into Pete’s brain.

  As I’ve said, I already knew my job was to be a portal for Pete’s words. Realizing that, accepting it, embracing it, was what these years were all about. Between “My Generation” and Tommy, it was all about finding that vulnerability. It wasn’t easy.

  “Happy Jack,” a song about a bullied tramp, was even harder, and then we did “Pictures of Lily,” a song about a boy having a wank to an old black-and-white photograph. It was all about adolescent insecurities. It wasn’t really my thing.

  I just never had to fight for a girl. I’ve already told you, that’s one of the great things about getting up onstage with a microphone. It just happens that girls like it and if you’re nineteen, twenty years old, it’s not a bad thing to happen. It meant that I really wasn’t tuned in to insecurity the way Pete was. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t insecure. Deep down, I was just as insecure as everyone else. I could be a front man onstage before thousands of people. I could hold my own with anyone. I could present the image of a rock star. But I wasn’t confident about myself. Not even close. And I just hid it with bravado. That only began to change when I met Heather.

  chapter eight

  Dippity-Don’t

  The first time I woke up next to the woman I’d marry and spend the rest of my life with, she screamed, “Your hair! Your hair!” This was quite a normal reaction with the birds. The Dippity-Do magic would wear off as we slept. My hair would be straight when we went to bed and it would be curly when we woke up. The poor girl would scream, I’d apologize, and then I’d run off to the bathroom to sort myself out.

  This time was different. I was halfway through the apology, getting ready to make the run for the bathroom, but she stopped me.

  “What have you done to it?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “That’s how it is.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Well, that was it. Within a week, I was going around with curly hair. That’s how it has always been with Heather. She gave me confidence. Not bravado, but real confidence. There’s a huge difference.

  She already knew who I was before we were introduced in New York in the spring of 1967. Chris Stamp had met her the year before and he’d decided to show her and her friend Devon, a beautiful six-foot-tall black girl, the publicity photos of “the next big thing in rock and roll.”

  The girls took one look at our photos and announced that it would never work. We were just too ugly, Devon told him. Heather thought Keith was “okay” and I was “not bad” but the others? “Poor Chris, it’s never going to happen,” Devon decided.

  We first met when we were doing the Murray the K Show at the RKO 58th Street Theatre on The Who’s first trip to America. Murray was a hotshot New York DJ. He was a weird, sleazy guy—he liked to call himself the fifth Beatle—but you played at his show because then he’d play your record on the station. The show itself ran five times a day and we played nine days in a row.

  We’d go on, do three songs, and then we’d have to sit around in the dressing room waiting for our next slot. That’s when I first met Heather. There was a lot of time to meet people.

  She had been a model on the show before and now she was here just hanging out with her friends. We said hello, we chatted a bit, and that was it. I was with a girl called Emmaretta. She was a backing singer for lots of different artists—she had a great voice and a bubbly personality. She went on to become an original cast member of Hair on Broadway. Heather was with a guy from Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was like that. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone was always with someone but that someone changed all the time. It was a small scene, and we were all friends.

  We were loving it, of course. We couldn’t believe our luck. All these beautiful, exotic American girls and they were into us. Heather told me that British boys took American girls by storm. We were sharp dressers, she said. We strutted around like peacocks. And we were better in bed. That’s what she says. And at the time we didn’t complain.

  People call these girls groupies, which is a horrible name. They were much more than groupies and it was never just for the shag. These were real friends. They saved a lot of lives and I think we saved some of them. Because, despite all the people, all the noise, and all the partying, life in the middle of that world could be lonely. And it was t
he same for them.

  They were all models, dancers, singers—people who were connected in some way or in several ways to the arts. They were all living in that bubble, working hard then going to clubs and parties. It was companionship as much as it was anything else. We shared a lot and we used to have so much fun. They could all sing, and, boy, could they dance. They could all put on little shows in those dingy little dressing rooms. They made all that hanging around waiting to go onstage bearable.

  Anyway, that’s when I met Heather, that night in New York, and I didn’t take much notice of her, beyond registering that she was a cracker. She thought we were behaving like a bunch of kids, which might not have been the best first impression, but it was true. After we’d talked for a while, she went off with the guy from the Andy Warhol Superstars and that was the last I saw of her for five months. Five more months of Dippity-Do.

  * * *

  The whole point of going to New York was to try to break into America. We’d never made much of a dent, partly because of our last American record company, which didn’t get us at all, and partly because the English scene was way ahead of the Yanks. But now we had a new record deal and a tour lined up.

  So a couple of months after we got back from New York, we were back in the States, first for a five-night stint ending in the Monterey Pop Festival, then for a ten-week, coast-to-coast tour with the squeaky clean Herman’s Hermits.

  We began by flying to Detroit, Michigan, for a gig just up the road in Ann Arbor. It was a great place to start. It was the only place in the USA where our records had ever had decent radio play. Detroit was blue-collar. They were our people. They had a different accent but everything else was the same. They had the same traditions. They lived their lives the same way. And they came to our show and went crazy.

  Then we went out to dinner with Frank Sinatra Jr. and a load of Detroit mobsters. That was a culture shock.

  A couple of nights later, we were playing with B. B. King at this club called the Fillmore West in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. Total contrast. The audience didn’t know what to make of us. They looked puzzled, then they all sat down, then they went crazy. They were already well down the psychedelic hippie road. I don’t think they knew what to make of a bunch of pasty boys from West London.

  The day after that, we toddled off down to Monterey for the pop festival. And we were traveling in our first stretch limo and, to this day, the most uncomfortable car I’ve ever been in. Bone-breaking, it was, but we felt good in it. We felt posh.

  The festival itself was pure summer of love. Everyone was feeling the vibe. Peace, love, and understanding. And then we arrived and changed the vibe. We were scheduled to play the same night as Jimi Hendrix. This was bad news, because Jimi had stolen Pete’s act.

  We first met Jimi when he came to see us recording at IBC in London at the end of 1966. When we’d finished, we all went over to Blaises nightclub to see him make his British debut. Everyone was there and we could all see, immediately, that he was a threat. Everything Pete had been doing with his guitar since 1964 Jimi was doing. He was just so charismatic. It was unbelievable. His band was as carefully put together as ours was. It was perfect. Hendrix would turn on a dime but Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell would match him note for note. They would know, immediately, where he was going and they’d go with him. You can’t buy that. It’s a gift. They had it and we had it. It’s extraordinary when it happens, and when you see it you’re touched. And everyone in Blaises that night, Clapton, Beck, us, we were all touched. Pete, of course, put it more strongly. He said he was destroyed.

  Jimi did it all in a very short period of time. We first saw him in 1966 and he was gone by 1970. Who knows where he would have gone to with his music? He would have changed like we changed. He wanted his music to be more like jazz, he wanted to change, but the audience didn’t. They just wanted more and more and more and more. It’s like Cream. The audience wanted more and more Cream music and the band couldn’t keep it up. There was nowhere to go, and that’s pressure. That’s why so many rock bands implode.

  Jimi wasn’t there yet at Monterey. He was on the up. He was a star and he was backstage, face-to-face with Pete, arguing about who should go on first. Eventually, it ended in a coin toss, which Pete won. We went on first, thank fuck, and left the stage and the audience and our kit in pieces. Jimi came on next and set his guitar on fire, but it didn’t matter. It was still a defining moment for us. The Americans saw us. They saw what we could do live. And I did it all wearing a bedspread I’d bought from the Chelsea Antiques Market. That was the way back then.

  None of the rock bands had stylists or designers. Every tour, we all went off digging around the King’s Road, looking for something, anything that would reinvent our look. The fringe waistcoat I wore at Woodstock came from a shop in Ealing. The Indian brave outfit I wore for our tour in 1975 was a set of chamois leathers, bought from a local garage in Sussex by Heather, hole-punched and stitched together by Daltrey’s Personal Tailoring Services Ltd. Miles Davis’s wife called Heather to ask which designer had made that costume. The next time we saw him perform, he was rocking the same look. I doubt very much he got it from his local garage. For me, it didn’t matter where anything came from. The important thing was to be the red sheep, not the black sheep.

  The bedspread worked that night in Monterey. I celebrated our success with a couple of drinks and a joint that Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the “King of Acid,” or “Bear” as everyone on the West Coast knew him, had given me. “Never do anything more than a joint,” Owsley said as he handed it over. “It won’t suit you.” Owsley was the first bloke to mass-produce LSD. He churned out five hundred grams of purple haze between 1965 and 1967. That’s a million doses. And here he was telling me to steer clear, so I did.

  The joint was the American version of the Camberwell Carrot, a great cheroot wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It took most of the night to get through, but I didn’t mind because Catherine, Emmaretta’s friend, had come back to my motel to help me. She was a beautiful blond girl and everyone had been chasing her. I’d been with Emmaretta and she’d been with Eric Clapton when we first met, but at Monterey she was mine to share that wonderful, mentholated joint with.

  The others celebrated with 2.5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine. Pete spent the entire flight back from Los Angeles to New York staring fiercely at my caftan coat. God knows what was going on inside his head but he kept gibbering on about rainbows. That was a long six hours, and then I had to get them all through immigration at JFK for the flight back to London. That’s not easy when everyone’s tripping but there was no option. We had no money for another flight. Two good things came from that journey. Pete got the idea for “I Can See for Miles” and he decided that drugs were bad.

  For the next few days in London, we lived in the recording studio, working on our next album, The Who Sell Out. Then, on July 7, we began our first full American tour, and it was wild.

  * * *

  For the Herman’s Hermits tour of 1967 we had a private jet, which sounds very flash, but there were two small problems. First of all, it wasn’t private—we had to share it with the Hermits, who were all right but they had their name plastered on the side, which pissed us off. Second, it wasn’t a jet. It was a DC-8 four-prop and it was on its last legs. In a very former life, it had been some kind of cargo plane and they’d converted it into a tour plane with about as much style and panache as I’d converted our old tour vans. There were wooden bunks along the back and a few seats in the front.

  Cruising speed was supposed to be 350 mph but, because the plane had so many holes in it, it couldn’t pressurize so we had to fly at a low altitude. It never felt like we were flying much above stall speed. And because we had to fly so low, it used to catch all the thermals. When we crossed the deserts of Arizona or Nevada, it was like being stuck on a roller coaster at a particularly poorly maintained theme park. For several hours at a time.

  We wouldn’t have been the first musici
ans to go down in a plane someone hadn’t coughed up enough cash for and we wouldn’t have been the last either, but we never worried. If you’re going to go, you’re going to go, and if things like that bothered you, you’d never leave the house. That plane lasted half the tour, which is twice as long as any of us expected it to last. After an emergency landing on a foamed runway at Nashville after one of the engines packed in, it was retired, and we carried on by bus.

  These days when we tour we travel in complete luxury. It’s great, of course. I’m not complaining. It means there are no distractions. No one’s tearing a hotel apart. No one’s getting us thrown out onto the street at four in the morning. It means I can put all my energy into my performance. The first time round it was a party and that was great, too.

  If we weren’t traveling after the gigs, we’d go back to these fantastic little motels. They weren’t five-star by any stretch of the imagination—they were more like military barracks—but they always had a pool in the middle, and we’d always end up seeing who could jump the highest into them. Keith always won because he just went straight off the roof. We were having the time of our lives. The gigs were going great—we were partying our way across America—and, of course, there were always girls hanging around. Most importantly, for the first time in almost two years, the others were beginning to treat me like one of the band again.

  On August 23, 1967, in Flint, Michigan, Keith Moon turned twenty-one. He chose to mark the occasion by getting us banned from every Holiday Inn on the planet, and I wasn’t even there. I’d seen him in the morning, and he was already pissed so I decided to spend the rest of the day in the company of a talented, beautiful guitarist called Patti Quatro. The next morning, I woke up to a long story and a longer bill. A drum company had delivered a cake with a girl in it. Keith had started a food fight with the cake and had knocked out two of his front teeth. Keith had been to an emergency dentist and required no painkillers to have his teeth fixed. Keith came back from the dentist and drove a Continental or a Cadillac (depending on who you ask) into the hotel pool. Keith was arrested, held for the rest of the night, and then escorted to the plane by the sheriff, who warned him never to set foot in this town again. All in all, a fairly typical night out for our drummer.