Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  “Okay,” I said.

  They put me in this striped Victorian swimsuit in a Victorian tin bath, and then they got out these four huge vats of Heinz Baked Beans.

  The beans had just come out of the fridge and they were freezing. They were still runny but only just. After ten minutes, I started shivering so they got a two-bar electric fire and stuck it right round the back of the bath. After five minutes, it started to get really hot. I should have moved the hot beans at the back round to the front, like you do in a normal bath, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

  I was in there for about forty-five minutes, and I swear the ones round my arse were cooked by the end of it. I went home and bosh, pneumonia. I couldn’t stop shivering but I had a burnt arse.

  It’s a great album cover, though, and it’s one of my favorite albums. I love it because it’s a real tribute to those days before the BBC hijacked pop music. What we hear now is what Mother wants us to hear. The DJs on the pirate ships were real music fans, and the competition between them made them all musically adventurous. Back then, everyone listened to them, and the music was real. It was an outlet for our generation’s music, and the BBC hated that. They hated losing control. With the government, they did everything they could to stop the pirate stations or, at the very least, stop kids listening to it. And they succeeded. There’s a lot I love about the BBC but there’s a lot I loathe, and that’s right at the top of the list.

  On January 20, 1968, we arrived in Sydney for an eleven-night tour of Australia and New Zealand. It was us, the Small Faces, and Paul Jones, who had left Manfred Mann by then. Paul was a good singer and a good harmonica player, but he was a different class of rock star. He was Oxford-educated. The others spent most of the trip taking the piss out of him, but I got on with him. I got on with Stevie Marriott, too. I admired him. I thought he was one of the best British rock singers of all time. Him and Terry Reid. Anyway, that was the good thing about the tour. Hanging out with other singers, not just the usual animals in my band. The bad thing was everything else.

  Pete opened proceedings by punching a reporter who asked him how he felt about the devalued pound. It wasn’t a particularly friendly question to throw someone who had just flown thirty-six hours via Cairo, Bombay, Karachi, and Singapore, and it went downhill from there.

  Australia is like any other part of the civilized world today but, back then, it was like nowhere we’d ever seen. Every building still had a tin roof. There was no air-conditioning. Wherever we went, there were screaming girls and, just behind them, a posse of their redneck boyfriends trying to beat us up.

  We played two nights at Sydney Stadium, a massive old structure with a revolving stage that, in better days, hosted boxing matches. The idea was that you’d play a couple of songs facing one third of the audience and then some heavies would winch you round so you could play the next couple of songs to the next third, and so on. Halfway through the Small Faces set, the stage got stuck. None of the heavies could budge it. None of the technicians could fix it. It still wasn’t working by the time we came on. Which means, if my maths is correct, two thirds of the audience only ever saw the backs of our heads.

  The whole tour was a disaster. The sound was shit. I couldn’t hear anything. The equipment was shit and it was borrowed, so they didn’t like it when we smashed it up, which we did because it was shit. The press had it in for us because we were young and British, we had long hair, filthy mouths, and we were shagging their daughters.

  And then one of us dared to open a can of beer on an airplane. It happened the morning after the gig in Adelaide. We had been put on a 10:00 a.m. flight back to Sydney. It’s never a good idea to be around a rock band at ten in the morning and it wasn’t long before a ruckus broke out.

  Bobby Pridden, our sound man, had opened a bottle of beer. What was the big deal? Well, it turns out you’re not allowed to consume alcohol when you’re flying over the state of South Australia. Not in 1968, anyway. Who knew? But Bobby’s beer was the fuse that sparked an inflight mini-riot.

  First of all, I heard someone, probably Steve Marriott, telling the stewardess he was fifth in line to the throne and he could do what he wanted. Then, when the captain was called, Bobby concluded their heated discussion by shouting, “How dare you call me a scruffy little man when your shirt isn’t even properly cleaned.”

  Well, that was it. The captain stormed back to his cockpit, sparked up the tannoy, and announced that he was diverting the plane because of “a disturbance.” The next thing we knew we were landing at Essendon Airport. You would think they would just have chucked Bobby and Steve off the flight for their outrageous behavior, but no, all nineteen of us, the bands and the roadies, were ejected. It was fabulous. We marched off the plane in a long line with our hands up in surrender and, of course, the entire press corps was there to catch it on camera.

  Frankly, if you pissed your pants Down Under in those days it would have made the front page for a week. That’s how much of a backwater it was. So this was a big story. It was tabloid gold and it would keep them going all year. “Invasion of the Pop Singers” was the front-page headline in the Melbourne Age the next day.

  The captain of the next flight to Sydney refused to let us board, and we were allowed on the one after that only when we promised, crossed our hearts and hoped to die, that we’d cause no trouble, not that we had in the first place. Just to be absolutely sure, two dour security officials flew with us.

  By the time we got to New Zealand, we’d received a telegram from the Australian prime minister, John Gorton. “Dear Who’s,” he wrote. “We never wanted you to come to Australia. You have behaved atrociously while you’ve been here, and we hope you never come back.”

  Pete took that literally and said, “Right, fine, we’re never going back.” That was a mistake. In the late nineties I went back on my own and I could see it had completely changed. I told him we were mad not to go there. When we finally did go back in 2004, he told the audience that he’d been wrong. And those shows went down great. Our audiences had dropped away a bit but that’s what happens if you don’t go back for thirty-six years. The second time we went, the numbers were great again. You’re only as good as your last show.

  Less than a month after we left Auckland, we were in California, setting off on the first of two big tours of America. Once again, I was on the hamburger diet, trying to save some cash. I was tired of renting a flat in St. John’s Wood. It was getting quite claustrophobic. You couldn’t go outside. There were always girls outside, girls everywhere. Heather and I were in the top flat and every time you looked out they’d be there, in the front garden. It can’t have been much fun for the neighbors either, but I was surprised how well they treated us. And the girls were all right, too—they didn’t scream. It’s just that there was no privacy at all. And, just up the road, the Walker Brothers had a flat, and they did have the screamers. Even at two hundred paces, it was loud enough to make sleep difficult.

  The plan was to come back from the American tours with a grand to put a deposit down on a house outside London. Trying to spoil the plan, of course, was Keith Moon. If 1967 was the year he discovered cherry bombs, 1968 was the year of the Super Glue, the piranhas, and the snake. The Super Glue is self-explanatory. I just feel sorry for all the hotel maids confronted with suddenly immovable furniture and toilet seats and wineglasses on the ceiling. The piranhas were John’s idea. He was quiet and in the background, but he was very much a member of Keith’s cohort. He had more of a mean streak than Keith, though. Look at the lyrics to “Boris the Spider,” which he wrote. He had a dark side. And it was him who put the piranhas in the hotel bath. I can’t remember whose bath it was but I remember looking at the piranhas and thinking they didn’t look very aggressive. John got sold a lemon.

  The snake was definitely not a lemon. I was given it by this girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was one of the stranger gifts I’ve been given but she was a Native American, and I was very grateful.

  The
bull snake looked almost identical to a rattlesnake but it didn’t have a rattle. Or a deadly bite. We used to carry this false rattler around in a pillowcase, and we called him Adolf. Moon kept borrowing him “for a bit of fun.” He’d pop up with a grin, take Adolf out of his pillowcase, and disappear. The next minute, you’d hear screams.

  Adolf became a huge focus of attention on the flights, and he was an integral part—a fifth member—of our band for at least three weeks. The trouble was, we couldn’t get him to eat. We tried everything, but he wasn’t interested. He just kept trying to escape. He was an incredible escapologist. One minute, he’d be having a snooze in his pillowcase, the next he’d be gone, up on the pelmets, out of the tiniest crack in a window. It was almost as if he didn’t like touring with us, and I knew how that felt. I liked that snake. Adolf was calm and quiet—two attributes that were in rare supply in the rest of the band.

  We lost Adolf in San Diego. He was in the motel room and then he wasn’t. We searched and searched but he was gone. I like to think that there’s still a grotty room somewhere in the wrong part of San Diego where people go in and they never come out. And there’s a thirty-five-foot-long bull snake who finally found his appetite.

  When Adolf left, Keith fell back on his trusty supply of cherry bombs. At 4:00 a.m. on April 5, we were thrown out of the Gorham Hotel in New York. It was a pretty funky hotel but it was nice. I liked it. I was having a good sleep. And then I learned that Keith had thrown cherry bombs from the ninth-floor window. He’d blown up a toilet and a nice old lady in an elevator. So we were all out. There was only enough time to dress, half asleep, grab my things, and step out onto West Fifty-Fifth Street.

  Worse, the Gorham let every other hotel in Manhattan know what had happened so it took until 6:00 a.m. to find a place far enough away and unscrupulous enough to take us. We ended up on the beltway out toward the airport. The next night, we were booked at the Waldorf. A step up from the Gorham. They insisted on a cash surety. We didn’t have the cash. So we were thrown out before we even had a chance to unpack. And when Keith couldn’t get back into his room to retrieve his luggage, he blew the door up with the cherry bombs he had left over from the night before. We were turfed out onto Park Avenue.

  So that was the Waldorf, the Gorham, all the Holiday Inns, most of the Hiltons, and some of the Sheratons. Once we got bigger and more organized, I started to stay in separate hotels from Keith. If I found somewhere at least a block away, I was guaranteed some kip. That was important, not just for my own sanity but also for the gig. If I didn’t sleep, I couldn’t sing.

  Back then, I just got used to it. Half the time I didn’t unpack, just so I had less packing to do when the manager or the police came knocking. Don’t think a good number of the hotels really minded too much. Officially, of course, they all minded. Unofficially, I think a number of them loved us. We paid cash for the damage. I’m guessing some claimed insurance as well. They got the cash and they got some nice new interior decoration. Over the next decade, at least one of the hotels managed an entire renovation. I’m betting that when they thought they needed a room remodeled, they would allocate that room to Keith. And Keith would then oblige by wrecking it in the night and paying for it in the morning. They were onto a winner.

  * * *

  Miraculously, I came home from the first US tour of 1968 with a bit of cash. I got back to Heather on April 8, knackered and sleep-deprived, but I had that precious grand in my pocket. Just enough for the deposit on our first house. The problem was that I still had the sideways Aston and I was sick to death of it. So I took the precious grand to the car auction and bought a lovely old Mark 10 Jag.

  Heather went apeshit. She told me to take the Jag back. I tried to point out that you couldn’t take a car back to the auction, but ten stressful minutes later I was taking it back. I called George the Weld and we went through the car’s contract. We found enough wrong with it to get my money back.

  I was out of the doghouse but I had to spend the next few months in a Mini. It nearly broke my back, especially as one of the gigs was in Inverness. But it meant I wasn’t getting shouted at by Heather anymore. The car after that was a sit-up-and-beg Volvo, by the way. Keith and John had their chauffeured Bentley. Pete had all manner of sports cars. I just needed something to get me from A to B without breaking down or upsetting my beautiful Glaswegian-New Yorker.

  With the change left over from the Mini, I managed to get a mortgage, and that summer, while I was off on another long US tour, Heather moved into our first home, in Hurst, Berkshire. These days, the home counties are full of aging rock stars. They’ve all moved out of town in search of peace, quiet, and a place to keep their guitar collection.

  It was not the thing to do when we did it. Elder Cottage was only thirty miles from London but it was a big step. Everyone we knew was in town. Nobody we knew was in Berkshire. Alvin Lee moved in round the corner and so did Jimmy Page, but when we went it felt like we were the first.

  But I didn’t give it a second thought. I wanted to live in the country. I think I always did. It was a deep psychological need. The happiest times of my childhood were when I skipped away to the river or found some overgrown bombsite to play in. It was pure wilderness. The wrecked basements had filled with water and become a home to frogs and toads, and me and my mates. It had all reverted to nature, forming a string of natural tunnels and hideouts. When I was older and unhappier, when I played truant and went down to Dukes Meadow out of sheer desperation to escape the hell of school, it was the peace and quiet of the river that made me feel grounded for the first time. During childhood, I had to find nature in West London and now I had a chance to find it for real.

  The village was great. It had a butcher, a baker, a post office—everything for your everyday needs. The Green Man pub was its life and soul, just as it had been since the 1600s. We could just walk in and we were accepted. More or less. All the City gents used to get off the train at Twyford in their pinstripe suits and bowler hats and come into the pub to see the freak show.

  I was just back from a summer in America. I’d come back with a brand-new Chevy Stingray that I’d bought in Detroit, and which was already quite a sight for the locals. But in California I’d seen the last of the straightness going out and the whole hippie thing coming in. The frock coats and ruffled shirts were gone. The dandy was no more. I was growing my curly hair. I was out and proud. And I started borrowing all Heather’s catwalk clothes. I took her boots on tour. I wore her white leather jacket. We made it up as we went along, which was brilliant. Fashion was getting more flamboyant in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, but Haight-Ashbury was a long way from Hurst. Those pinstriped regulars thought our threads were hilarious, but they got to know us and we all became good friends.

  Pete would have hated the idea that these stockbrokers were getting on with us, but I didn’t give a shit. It was a pub. Pubs are only ever as good as their landlords, and Jim and Anna at the Green Man were the best. There was no piped music. Conversation ruled and it was an absolute delight. Our home was a fifteenth-century cottage with very low ceilings. Heather and Devon had to bend down to get inside but I was just the right height. It was romantic.

  I was twenty-four and I suppose I was settling down. We all were. Keith had married his Leicester surfer girl, Kim, and they already had a kid. John married his childhood sweetheart, Alison, and they were living in domestic bliss in a semidetached house in Acton (the address of which John had immediately changed to “The Bastille”). And Pete had married Karen the year before. I didn’t go to the wedding. Heather wanted to go but she had bronchitis, and there were too many people there with shows to do. We couldn’t be responsible for wiping out half the country’s vocalists. So I volunteered to stay home and look after her. That wasn’t an excuse. She was very ill. But I’ll be honest, I didn’t like weddings. I’d already had enough bad experiences at them. I prefer funerals. I’ve always preferred funerals.

  People go to weddings, they get pissed, they h
ave an argument, and it ends in a fight. At a funeral, everyone’s happy to see each other, they’re all saying nice things about the dead bloke, and then they go home happy.

  Anyway, the point is we weren’t teenagers anymore. We weren’t living the lives of wild bohemian rock stars night in, night out anymore—well, not when we were home, at any rate. As a band, we weren’t hanging out together either. When I wasn’t touring, I spent most of my time in Berkshire. Rock years are like dog years. We were getting on a bit in rock years.

  I was a commuter. I didn’t have the pinstripe suit, but every day I’d drive in to IBC studios and, most nights, I’d drive back again. We started recording Tommy in September 1968 and we were supposed to be done by Christmas. Fat chance. It was March before we got to the final sessions. Seven months. Our longest time together in the studio by a long stretch, but Tommy wasn’t like any other record we’d done before. It wasn’t like any other record, full stop.

  The main thing I remember is that I loved the idea. I loved it the first time I heard it. I can’t remember exactly when Pete first mentioned it to us. He’d been scribbling away on the endless tour bus journeys around America and he’d told Melody Maker he was doing a rock opera called Journey into Space. He told Rolling Stone a lot of things, all in one go. But by September he had a sketchy outline. Tommy was deaf, dumb, and blind, and he experienced life completely through vibration. I just loved that. Music is vibration. That’s the whole point. It was an abstract idea, but I knew there was something in it and I just went with it.

  When we started it, it was only going to be a single album. And as the songs came through, Kit guided it into the story it became. People tend to forget that Pete didn’t write the whole of Tommy. It was his inspiration, but it was about as collaborative as anything we ever did. It wasn’t at all formed at the start.

  He used to turn up with demos every morning. They were brilliant but by the time it had gone through the studio it had moved on. The story kept changing. Fragments of songs grew into whole plot lines. It was like putting a jigsaw together with no picture, no straight edges, and half the pieces missing, but it was completely absorbing.