The ban wasn’t the end of the world—all publicity is good publicity and the ban lasted only until 1993—but the fifty-thousand-dollar cost of draining the pool and fishing out the Continental or the Cadillac was.
We had already shelled out a thousand dollars for entirely understandable reasons in Montgomery, Alabama, after a duty manager made the huge mistake of asking Keith to keep the music down. Keith had responded by blowing up his toilet with a bag of cherry bombs, small but very powerful fireworks shaped like a bomb from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. He loved his cherry bombs. He bought them by the sackful. “That, my dear boy, is noise,” he’d told the manager who billed us for the damage and chucked us all out. When you traveled with Keith, you got used to changing hotels in the middle of the night.
Everyone assumes life on the road with Moon must have been hilarious, but when you think about it soberly, most of it wasn’t. When he could stand up and let loose on one of his soliloquies it was hysterical, but that was only about 20 percent of the time. The rest of it, the pranks, the explosions, the general devastation, there was usually someone at the other end of it having a pretty miserable time. The last gig of the tour took place in Honolulu on September 9 and it was very nearly our last gig with Keith. I suppose you could say that about a lot of gigs, but this was a special one. He decided to go surfing as soon as we got there. He got the board, he got the shorts, and he just announced he was off out. He was from Wembley, North London. He didn’t know anything about surfing, but that wasn’t going to stop him. This was part of his life plan. He used to have three posters on that bedroom wall in Wembley. The first was a surfer girl standing in front of a Ford Woodie with surfboards on top. The second was the Beach Boys. The third was Steve McQueen. He invented a life in his head in Wembley, and then he went out and did it.
By the time we’d got to Hawaii, he was already well over halfway there. He’d married Kim Kerrigan a year earlier and even though she was born in Leicester, she was the spit of any of those California surf chicks. He was already best friends with the Beach Boys. It would be a few years before he’d move next door to Steve McQueen, but on that beach in Hawaii he was going to do “surfer.”
I’m still surprised he survived. It could easily have gone the other way. Because Keith, a Wembley boy through and through, did not understand that the waves don’t just come in. He didn’t know about rip tides and the razor-sharp coral underneath them. He came back out again some time later like the creature from the blue lagoon, bleeding heavily and half drowned, delighted to have ticked another thing off his list.
And then we went home, via The Smothers Brothers’ Comedy Hour at CBS. One last chance for a final bit of publicity. Again, we have Keith to thank for that. We were due to play “I Can See for Miles” and “My Generation” and, at the end, Keith was to set off a smoke bomb. We rehearsed our little spot in the afternoon and it all went fine. After a lot of discussion, the studio fire marshal was happy with the extent of the planned explosion. But Keith wasn’t.
In between rehearsals and broadcast, between the first and second bottle of brandy, he convinced one of the pyrotechnic guys to see it his way. He wanted a bigger bang. That was his motto in life, and nothing, not even live television, would stop him.
The resulting explosion knocked me several feet forward, covered the entire stage in smoke and dust, and interrupted the live transmission for a couple of seconds. Keith was closest to the epicenter but escaped with a gashed arm. Pete took the full force of the explosion and spent the next few minutes tamping down his burning hair and wondering if he’d ever get his hearing back. He did, twenty minutes later, but it was never 100 percent again.
It was an explosive end to an expensive tour. We should have been going home happy and loaded, but it didn’t work out like that. I’d spent the whole trip being careful what I spent. I’d wanted to come home with more than I’d gone out with so I’d limited myself to a strict diet of one hamburger a day and a few other tidbits. I’d stuck to it right across the States, and when I got back to L.A. I went to see Frank Barsalona, our agent, to ask him for my share of the profits. “There aren’t any to share,” he said, quite apologetically.
I pointed out that I’d spent the last three months eating one hamburger a day. I’d hardly spent anything. And he just said, yes, but do you know what Keith spent?
I could imagine what Keith spent but I’m still suspicious about that. There was always some suggestion that the Continental/Cadillac never ended up in the swimming pool. Or, if it did, that our management exaggerated the size of the salvage bill to get their hands on our money. I wasn’t there and most of the people who were there were too out of it to provide reliable witness testimony. A few years ago, I challenged Chris Stamp on this. I asked him straight if he’d seen the car in the pool. He said he had. He swore blind he’d seen it with his own eyes. I’m still not convinced. Given the extent of the swindling going on, who knows? At the time, I believed them. I believed Keith had blown all the tour money. Either way, I came home from our first big money-spinning trip with less cash than I’d gone out with. I had to borrow the money for my flight home.
It hadn’t been a complete waste of time. We’d made bad headlines in the newspapers and good headlines in the music press, which was the right way round. We hadn’t exactly cracked America, but we’d certainly put a big dent in it. That autumn, “I Can See for Miles” made the Top Ten in the US charts.
I went home skint.
It was always good to get back from a tour. To reacquaint yourself with home comforts. While I was away I’d let my mates borrow the beloved Aston Martin DB4 I’d bought at the end of 1966. The first morning back I took it for a spin. As I pulled away from the curb, it sounded great—smooth as a baby’s bum, as they say. When I got it up to 40 mph, though, it started to crab slightly sideways. At 70, the back was trying to overtake the front. Something was definitely amiss. Something had happened. It was only as I came to park it that I worked out what. The Aston was only two feet longer than the Mini I’d pulled up beside. It was almost two feet shorter than it had been when I’d left. Great for parking. Not great for driving.
With sheepish grins on their faces my mates owned up. They’d driven it up the arse of a coach full of women on the King’s Road, showing off. And then they’d got it “fixed.”
I was in my early twenties when I’d bought that car. I didn’t have a regular girlfriend. I had nothing else to worry about. So I spent all my time hanging out with my petrolhead mates from Acton and Chiswick. There was George the Weld, Jaymo the Rub, and my best mate, Nobby the Fiberglass Kid.
George had a repair shop just round the corner from Chase Products in South Acton. I say repair shop. It was another asbestos-lined shed in a yard he shared with Franie the Rag and Bone man (a real-life Steptoe, horse and all). We all spent every day in George’s yard trying to keep our respective cars on the road, going faster, looking cooler. Alongside Franie’s horse and cart, my Aston, my pride and joy, looked really cool. Or it did right up until my mates decided to take it up the King’s Road. Losing two feet off that car felt like losing two inches off my dick.
And then, less than a week later, it didn’t seem to matter so much. I found the girl I would spend the rest of my life with and my world was turned completely upside down.
* * *
If I’m honest, I hadn’t given Heather another thought since we chatted in our dressing room at Murray the K. And then, not long after getting back to London, I was sitting in the Speakeasy Club just behind Oxford Circus. It was three in the morning, I was jet-lagged, and I was reading a book. I can’t remember which book—let’s say Dostoyevsky—and then a girl’s voice says hello.
I look up and all I can see is legs. Skirts weren’t really very long in those days. They left a lot of space for the legs. I looked up a lot farther, and there were those beautiful eyes again. Heather, five feet eleven of gorgeous redhead, was looking down, smiling, and she said, “Don’t you remember me?”
“I’m Heather,” said Heather. “You’re friends with Catherine. She’s been trying to call you.” Catherine was the girl who’d introduced us and now she was about to have a baby. It’s none of your business which of my fellow musicians was responsible but she needed somewhere to stay.
She’d been calling the number I’d given her after we met up a few times in New York but with a Mayfair code. She never assumed a rock star would be living in Maida Vale. She would have done if she’d known who was running our accounts.
“Course she can stay,” I said.
“Can I stay, too?” Heather asks.
“Course you can.”
It frightens me to think how differently things could have turned out if she hadn’t found me at the Speakeasy. Jimi Hendrix had been after her that night. He’d been after her for a while. She was his Foxy Lady but never his. If she’d gone home with him instead, then my life would have gone down any one of a hundred other paths, and none of them would have been as good. I would have lost the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I would never have known it. Instead, I got Heather, and Jimi went home with someone else.
I’m tired of wasting all my precious time
You’ve got to be all mine, all mine
Foxy lady
Here I come.
Unlucky, mate. Of course, we were meant to be together, me and Heather. Her family’s from my manor. We only really found this out recently when my daughter looked us up on an ancestry website.
Heather’s parents emigrated straight after the war and brought her up in America. But her grandparents lived at 62 Stowe Road, Shepherd’s Bush. Two doors along from my dad and his six sisters. Two doors.
What are the chances? What I really find mind-blowing is that my parents and her gran met each other loads of times. Christmases. Birthday parties. Weddings. And not once did they ever work out that they’d been neighbors-but-one. The families must have known each other. In those days you knew everything about your street. You knew what underwear everyone was wearing from what wasn’t on the line. Doris is wearing her red bra today. But not one word, all those years. Okay, they’re from the loose-talk-costs-lives generation but, really, you’d think it might have cropped up just once.
It was my good fortune that Heather was raised in New York on stories from the olde worlde. She had Glaswegian-Irish blood on her mother’s side and Shepherd’s Bush Irish on her dad’s. Her parents were always building Britain up and so she loved being around British people. She liked the way we dressed. She liked our hair.
“It was a different type of boy than you met in America,” she says now. “Even though you had comparatively terrible teeth.” She’s talking generally. The reason most of us had bad teeth was an unintended consequence of the welfare state. It might sound like bullshit, but the truth is that NHS dentists were then, and maybe still are today, paid by the amount of fillings and extractions they could rack up per month. If the system works that way, everyone had bad teeth.
When we first met, Harold Wilson was prime minister and Heather was appalled by his black teeth.
“Well, he smokes a pipe,” I explained.
“You can’t be a prime minister and have black teeth,” she said. Wilson’s teeth aside, she looked kindly upon Englishmen and, in particular, upon Englishmen from Shepherd’s Bush. This gave me the edge over Jimi. My daughter, by the way, traced the Daltrey family tree back to 1509. My ancestors were Huguenot lacemakers in Nantes.
Creative people, those lacemakers. And they got right up the pope’s nose. Rebellion is in my blood.
chapter nine
Tommy
By the end of 1967, The Who was starting to do more experimental stuff in the studio and we were starting to laugh a bit together again. We had survived the first climb of our roller-coaster ride, and the first fall. And now we were building up for the loop-the-loop. It had taken those two years, but I think that’s when we were together again. It’s surprising that any bands stay together for any length of time because of the ingredients it requires. You have to have a certain amount of madness. There’s some madness deep down in us all. With the four of us, it was nearer the surface. Madness. Ambition. Ego. Paranoia.
The paranoia was the real killer. If you asked Keith if he felt undervalued, he’d say yes. The Ox (John) would then chip in and say he was more undervalued. And Pete would chip in and say, “Fuck you all, none of you appreciate the pressure I’m under.” And I wasn’t a stranger to deep insecurity. That was the nature of The Who. It was founded on each other’s paranoia.
I can remember Kit once chalking up the definition of paranoia on the blackboard in Track Records’ offices on Old Compton Street. “A paranoiac,” he scribbled, “might be loosely defined as someone who knows what is actually going on.” I don’t think we knew what was actually going on, but we thought we did.
All this is why the average rock band completes its full life cycle in eighteen months. Record deal. Hit record. Debut album. Difficult second album. Falling-out. Breakup. The End. But if you can survive that first stage of the roller coaster, it makes something special, something that can’t be touched. You always feel like you’re on a precipice—that you could fall at any moment. But if you can keep it all together, you might just be in for one hell of a ride. For us, that was Tommy, the first rock opera. We didn’t know it. Pete still had to pluck it out of his brain and I still had to find my voice, but it was just around the corner, waiting to change everything.
For now, we were in and out of the studio, recording The Who Sell Out, our “pop art” album, a stepping-stone between our earlier records and Tommy. The legal disputes had been resolved and Shel Talmy was long gone. A year earlier, Track Records had been set up to “give us more control.” The deal was that Kit and Chris would get 60 percent of Track and we’d get 40. A nice not-even split. It would never work like that—not at all—but for now, we were focused on the next step.
Talmy had always been happy churning out remakes of the Kinks. Like a lot of producers, he didn’t see the point of fixing something that wasn’t broken. He just wanted the same thing again and again. But he got the job done. We could go into the studio, lay down an A side and a B side, and be in the pub two hours later. With Kit, it could take a whole day to do one track and it would involve eight hours of searching for inspiration. I always thought it was worth it, though. Something new would come out of it.
If you listen to “Rael,” you would never guess, or I hope you would never guess, that it was done in a studio in New York that was smaller than your bathroom. Recording it was pure musical adventure. All those harmonies, building and building from a nutmeg of an idea. It helped that Pete’s lyrics were just so different from anything else that was out there.
The Red Chins in their millions
Will overspill their borders,
And chaos then will reign in our Rael.
He wrote that in the autumn of 1967, six years before the Yom Kippur War, and half a century later look where we are with the world. History repeats itself. It repeats itself far too often and “Rael” was prophetic. Pete was prophetic. The rest of us understood that. We could recognize it. It wasn’t always clear and it was never easy, but we could see Pete’s gift and that he was trying to do more than just write another pop song.
I’m not political in that sense, but I’m aware of what’s going on out there. And I do try and think, how are they ever going to solve this rather than just going round and round making the same mistakes? I could see that what Pete was doing was a way of opening things up to get people thinking. “Rael” was a ridiculous pop song but it was extraordinary, too. It was a big step on from “My Generation.” Which was a relief. A huge relief.
They were still smashing instruments. That went on for a while. But it wasn’t the only thing we were about. The mini-opera on The Who Sell Out was a taste of what was to come. And it pushed me farther. I had to find di
fferent voices to match these different lyrics.
I couldn’t just use aggression or blues swagger to get through it. I had to change. Mick Jagger has always sounded like Mick Jagger with his mock-American blues voice, but with Pete’s music I didn’t want to sound like Roger Daltrey, circa 1966. The more I changed, the more Pete became intrigued by it. He wanted to know how much farther he could develop it.
It helped that I was growing up. I was growing into my own skin and I was growing my own curly hair. I had moved into a proper flat in St. John’s Wood with my proper girlfriend. We had an arrangement that suited me perfectly. I paid the rent. She bought the food. This meant I only had to find money—it was about fourteen pounds—once a month and there was always food in the cupboard. It was relative domestic bliss and it meant I had someone to mop my brow when I was ill.
And I was ill, almost as soon as she moved in, thanks to the photo shoot for that album. Each of us was shot posing in a mock advert. Pete got Odorono. Keith got Medac, a fictitious acne cream. John timed his arrival at the studio late enough to get the girl in a leopard-skin bikini. Smart bastard. I got the short straw.
I turned up at the shoot and David Montgomery, portrait photographer to the stars, said, “I want you to sit in a bath of baked beans.”
Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite Page 10