Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  Pete would lay down the tracks and if anybody had a suggestion we’d throw it into the hat. I worked on the harmonies. I spent a lot of time trying to work out the voice. With Kit’s help, it changed from something quite vague and philosophical into something set in the real world, in Britain. Pete gave the job of Uncle Ernie to John, which worked perfectly. Musically, John was very clever and his view of life was pretty dark, so he wrote the character in a particular way with a really ominous tone. That might have had something to do with the fact that John’s dad left him and his mother in his early years. His mother married again and John never had a good word to say for his stepdad. I think it’s fair to say he hated him. Uncle Ernie, a character we’d all seen as a bit of a joke, became a lot darker once John got hold of him.

  It was Keith’s idea to send Tommy to the holiday camp at the end. It was based on a very dark joke at the time. The concentration camp—a holiday that lasts forever. My apologies to my Jewish friends for our lack of feeling, but that was where humor was in those days. You wouldn’t get away with it now. You wouldn’t get away with that whole story today.

  Pete never talked about where all this was coming from and we never asked him. We just let him get on with it. If we’d started to analyze it too much, it would have slowed his process. We’d still be in the studio now. And he needed the freedom.

  It was only when we finished the jigsaw that we saw the complete picture. Even then, it’s not exactly the clearest picture, is it? Some of the songs just don’t fit into any plot. But I’ll tell you what, even to this day, when you play Tommy in its entirety, it’s so complete; it’s so wonderful. The simplicity of it. The power in the lyrics. The journey. It builds and builds. It was still building when we took it out of the studio. And it was magical to play right from those opening chords. It was so unrock, but rock. It was genius. And Pete deserves everything he got from it.

  It was only when we took it out live that I really got to grips with where I could go with my voice. We rehearsed it at the Southall Community Centre in March 1969 and, by the fourth run-through, we’d worked it out. It was a live stage show and I felt like I’d been set free. Everything I learned to do with my voice came from Tommy, and it happened in those four rehearsals. I just changed. It was always in my voice. I’d been getting there with Pete’s earlier songs but Tommy brought it out like that.

  We had one weekend of student gigs in Scotland before we launched Tommy with a press preview at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho. The journalists were all pissed before we got on. They all heckled when Pete introduced it as “a story about a boy who witnesses a murder and becomes deaf, dumb, and blind. He is later raped by his uncle and gets turned on to LSD.”

  So we turned the amps up even louder and just went for it. An hour solid. Driving, driving, driving. No pauses for wild applause or critical derision. No breaks at all. They left with their ears ringing. None of them knew what had hit them.

  chapter ten

  Escape to the Country

  By the time Tommy was released in Britain on May 23, 1969, we were off touring in the States. We started well with three nights at the Grande Ballroom in Dearborn, Michigan, and another three in Boston, all building to a three-night, six-show marathon at the Fillmore East, New York. Ever since the first live rehearsals in Southhall, I knew we had something magical on our hands. This tour was going to take us to another level. And then came the man in the sports jacket.

  It was half ten, and we were playing “Pinball Wizard” in the middle of the second show the first night at the Fillmore, when this bloke jumped up onto the stage and grabbed the microphone off me. I grabbed it back and told him to fuck off, but he kept struggling. As we were wrestling with it, I noticed Pete crossing the stage toward us, doing a Chuck Berry duck walk. Perfectly on beat, he kicked the bloke in the balls, then I grabbed the mic, and we finished the song.

  The next thing I knew, Bill Graham, the promoter, is on, pointing out that the bloke in the sports jacket, the bloke Pete kicked in the balls, was a plainclothes member of New York’s elite tactical police force. He’d tried to commandeer the microphone because a fire had broken out in the Chinese supermarket next door. The building needed to be evacuated.

  It’s lucky he didn’t get the mic. He would have caused a riot if he’d stopped us right in the middle of a song. Bill had been preparing to make a low-key announcement at the next break. That’s how you evacuate a crowd in the middle of a gig. Calmly.

  But the next thing we knew there was a warrant out for our arrest. The copper was claiming he showed me his badge before we attacked him. I tell you now, hand on heart, he never showed his badge. And even if he did, which he didn’t, I wouldn’t have seen it. You’re in a different world up there when you’re performing. I wouldn’t have had a clue what some random bloke was showing me.

  It didn’t matter. Pete and I were fugitives. We were on the run. We didn’t go back to the hotel. We didn’t dare. Instead, we called International Rescue, which, in our case, was the network of girls we knew in New York. Pete stayed with Mandy Wilson. I ended up on the other side of town with Jenni Dean, another of our happy band of wonderful women. I woke up to the sound of Hispanic women shouting at each other through the tenement windows. Word came through the groupie grapevine from Kit and Chris that they had negotiated our surrender. We were to hand ourselves in at the Ninth Precinct police station, so we did. For nine hours we were stuck in the cage getting eyeballed by our fellow prisoners while Kit tried to convince the coppers not to charge us with felonious assault. They should have been glad nobody died but the authorities relished any chance to have a pop at a rock band.

  Eventually, I got off without charge. Pete was done for third-degree assault and arraigned for a court hearing the following week. We got back to the Fillmore just in time for the 8:00 p.m. show.

  * * *

  I always knew we’d never make it on records alone. You had to see us live. When people saw us live, we had them. By 1969, we had reached a new level of performance. Unlike any other band, The Who had a bass player who played like a lead guitarist, a guitarist who played like a drummer, and a drummer who, instead of playing just four to the floor, gave you the whole score. Physically, I had been transformed as well. I was playing the character and I had absolute freedom of expression in sound and movement. Sometimes I was on my own. Sometimes I was synchronized with Pete’s great windmilling arms and Olympic high jumps. Moon was upstaging his own upstaging. It was ballet.

  By the time we reached Chicago, the show had got longer. It was an hour and ten minutes, then an hour and twenty, then it pushed beyond that. And there were no breaks. What we’d started at Ronnie Scott’s had grown into one continuous ninety-minute show, and at the Playground in Chicago it just all came together. The audience started off sitting down and then halfway through they all stood up. You could feel the tension building and then, at the end, they just went crazy. It was new for us and it was new for the audience.

  By the end of the summer, the physical and emotional exhaustion of touring Tommy had taken its toll. We’d dragged ourselves to the farthest points of America and Canada, we’d flown home to share a fraught gig with Chuck Berry at the Albert Hall, and each night the performance just kept building. It was intense. The reward? Tommy became our first album to get into the Top Five in the USA. And then we had to do Woodstock. I say had to because even though it’s gone down in history as a seminal moment in twentieth-century culture it wasn’t much fun. Three days of peace and love? Do me a favor. It was crazy even before we arrived. Pete spent several hours in the traffic jams. Other artists didn’t make it at all. The whole place was chaos.

  Fortunately, I had a different mode of transport.

  “Chuck will drive you,” Heather’s mum had said while we were visiting them in Connecticut. Chuck and Helen, Heather’s parents were still young. They wanted to go to Woodstock. We wanted them to drop us off and leave as quickly as possible, but you can’t have everything. So we all piled in
to their bright red VW Beetle—Herbie goes to Woodstock—and when we reached the traffic jams I told Chuck to drive us up the hard shoulder.

  “Don’t worry if the police stop us, Chuck. I’ll sort it out.”

  No one minded. Everyone just waved Herbie through.

  We made it through in the early afternoon of Saturday, August 16, 1969, at what we thought would be something to behold. On every news outlet in America, Woodstock was THE story. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. The crowd on site was estimated at half a million. Many more were still trying to get there despite the governor of New York declaring it a national disaster. If the governor of New York tells you something’s bad, you know it’s going to be good.

  The destination we arrived at was a little different. A Holiday Inn with a large sign saying Camp Tranquility. All the bands were there. Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Grateful Dead, Hendrix … the musicians had the rooms and the roadies and technicians slept in the corridors. Everyone all just hanging around and waiting their turn to go to the site. And we waited and waited and waited. At about 7:00 p.m., we drove to the backstage area in the obligatory Hertz station wagon. And waited some more. You hope things will be running like clockwork but at festivals in those days, particularly inaugural festivals, they never were and they certainly weren’t at Woodstock. We were due on in the evening but by four the next morning we were still hanging around backstage in a muddy field waiting. And waiting some more.

  Even at the best of times I hate doing nothing. Doing nothing while you’re waiting to play to half a million people is the hardest thing in the world. It’s not because of the half million people. It’s never mattered to me if I was singing to one man and his dog in a pub, eighty thousand people at Hyde Park, or half a million on a dairy farm in the Catskills. In my mind, I always treat it the same way. Give it everything you’ve got to give. And that’s hard if you’re waiting. It’s the boredom laced with the tension. You have to be ready. You have to keep a grip. But you can’t go over the boil.

  Keith found it harder. He used to get terrible nerves. He used to throw up before gigs. He was terrified of that first stroll out onto the stage. It came a lot harder to him. I think that’s what kicked off his alcoholism. The fear of going onstage. He’d have to have a drink to settle his nerves. The first drink was a brandy. The second drink was a large brandy and then it was the bottle. And he hadn’t even gone on yet.

  I imagine he found that fourteen-hour wait at Woodstock particularly hard. There was no food backstage. Everything was laced with LSD. Even the ice cubes had been done. Fortunately, I’d brought in my own bottle of Southern Comfort so I was fine right up until the moment I decided to have a cup of tea. That’s how they got me. A nice cup of hallucinogenic tea.

  Everything was breaking down. Everything and everyone was soaking wet. There were constant power cuts. People were climbing up on the stage, climbing up the lighting rigs. Pete said he saw a kid falling from one of the rigs and possibly breaking his neck. It was billed as an Aquarian Exposition—three days of peace and music. But it was chaos.

  And then halfway through the night the organizers decided they weren’t going to pay us. Our fee was $11,200, most of which we’d already spent on the flights for us and the crew. We needed the cash to get home and pay the bills, so we refused to go on until we were paid. There’s a story about how a bank manager was woken in the middle of the night and put on a helicopter to crack the local bank’s safe, retrieve our cash, and chopper into Woodstock to pay us in crisp stacks of twenties. It’s a great story but it didn’t happen. Our tour manager just eyeballed the organizers until they gave us a check.

  After all the arguments, the hallucinations, the mud, and the chaos, we were finally onstage, sometime after 5:00 a.m.

  About a month earlier, I’d woken up from a particularly vivid nightmare. It was the kind you have when you’re a kid. I was looking out on some barren, smoke-filled landscape. There were guard towers with searchlights scanning around and there were helicopters overhead. It was a subconscious approximation of Vietnam. Looking out into the predawn gloom of Woodstock, making out the vague shape of half a million mud-caked people as the lights swept over them, I felt in my sleep-deprived, hallucinating state that this was my nightmare come true.

  The show didn’t feel like it went well. The monitors kept breaking. The sound was shit. We were all battling the elements and ourselves. It didn’t help when a political activist called Abbie Hoffman climbed onto the stage at the end of “Pinball Wizard,” grabbed Pete’s mic, and shouted, “I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison!”

  Naturally, Pete booted him off the stage before threatening to kill the next person who tried to take his mic. Music and peace.

  Somehow, we kept going and every time we felt like we were losing it, we dug in a bit deeper. Then, shortly after six, we got to “See Me, Feel Me” from Tommy and the bleeding sun came up. Right on cue. You couldn’t have topped it. After all the shit we’d been through, it was perfect. It was extraordinary. It was one of those moments you couldn’t ever re-create if you tried. Once in a lifetime.

  Except exactly the same thing happened again on April 25, 2015, a mere forty-six years later. We were due to headline at the New Orleans Jazz Festival and it had been pissing with rain all day. A tropical storm had just been through and the whole place was drenched. It’s always chaos when it’s so wet. It plays havoc with the electrics and it’s always disconcerting when you see an amp half submerged in a foot of water. I got to the trailer, looked out of the window, and told Mitch, my assistant, not to worry. I’d sort it out. He said, doubtfully, “Okay, Roger.” Cynical young man. And I started shouting at the sky, “Stop it! Stop now! We’ve had enough of this crap!”

  And it did. Right on cue. Like someone had turned a tap off. Mitch didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything but, to be honest, I was just as shocked as he was.

  The sky was dark gray when we went onstage. It stayed like that right up until the end of “Pinball Wizard.” As I opened my mouth to sing “See Me, Feel Me,” the sun broke through. Absolute magic. That’s what I love about live shows. Things can happen. Some of those things are bad. Some of them are good. Occasionally, they’re magic. That was one of those twice-in-a-lifetime moments.

  Two weeks after Woodstock we played the Isle of Wight Festival. There was no Herbie this time. We went in by helicopter, which was significantly more rock and roll, particularly given that a piece of board from the festival’s makeshift H for helipad sign dislodged and flew up into the rotors as our pilot was trying to land. We did the last few meters of the journey “at speed.” The helicopter was knackered but we were all fine. That’s not normally how things end up if you crash a helicopter. We went onstage, we played Tommy, we flew back to London in another helicopter. Job done.

  Who paid for the helicopters? Track Records. Who paid Track Records? Us. After Woodstock, the money had really started rolling in. Life magazine had done an entire commemorative issue on the festival, and I was the lucky bloke who occupied the photo on the center spread. Me and my fringe jacket. It was a new level of exposure and our careers rocketed almost immediately. For the first time, we had to start using pseudonyms when we traveled. Inevitably, this became another source of mischief. I’m not sure what the receptionists would have thought when Lord Elpus, John Fitzperfectly, and Miles Apart checked in for the night but it gave us a laugh.

  In 1969, Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. Friends came over to watch it with us because we were the only people in the village to have a color television. It was a huge great cube of a thing providing thirty-six inches of the very latest in audiovisual technology. Everyone was excited. The moon landing … in color. What a moment in history. Only trouble was that space is black and the moon is white. Armstrong wasn’t exactly making the most of the Technicolor broadcast either.

  “What do you think of the color TV, th
en?” I asked one of the old boys, jokingly.

  “Fantastic,” he replied, genuinely enthralled.

  That was the year people started to describe us as millionaires. I might have had enough cash for a posh television, but millionaires? That was a load of bollocks. It was bollocks because all the money we were supposed to be making was getting spent. It was rolling in and it was rolling out again on legitimate expenses and less legitimate ones. We had our forty-sixty deal, but in reality it meant very little.

  In 1969, cocaine arrived in the music industry. It had always been around, but now Chris and Kit started getting into it in a big way. Kit would have a line when he woke up. He’d come into Track Records at eleven. He’d have a joint. Then he’d drop a few pills. Then he’d have another line. Then he’d go out for lunch. He was a drug addict and you don’t want a drug addict running your business. Particularly if your business is rock and roll. The bigger we got, the more money we made, but the faster and more wildly Kit spent it, the less of any percentage we saw. By the end of 1969, we were the biggest rock band in the world. We were headlining festivals. We were the first band to sell out six nights at the Fillmore West in less than an hour. We were filling opera houses. And we were barely breaking even.

  * * *

  Four days into the new decade, Keith Moon ran over and killed his chauffeur and bodyguard, Neil Boland, outside Keith’s friend’s pub in Hatfield. It was an accident. It was a panic reaction to escape a mob of skinheads. They’d followed him out of the pub, trying to pick a fight. They surrounded the car and started attacking it. Neil got out to clear the way. Keith drove away. In the chaos, no one realized Neil had fallen under the wheels.

  I phoned Keith the next day to ask if he was okay. He said he was but of course he wasn’t. He was obviously in deep remorse. They tried to do him for manslaughter. He got off with a charge of drunk driving but he still had to relive the whole thing in court and I don’t know how he got through that. He didn’t get away with it, not by any stretch. He was haunted by it, and his drinking just got worse and worse.