Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  The crime Bill got sent down for was a bank van robbery in Erith, Kent, in 1963. At the time, it was one of England’s largest armored truck robberies, but Bill had nothing to do with it. The whole of the East End underworld knew who did but they kept schtum. So did Bill. Unfortunately, one of the investigators had it in for him (another story involving planted fake bank notes and a thrown pint) so Bill got fingered for it anyway.

  At trial, the evidence against Bill was flimsy. The coppers claimed he had an association with one of the other alleged gang members. They had a witness who said she saw someone who looked like Bill driving the getaway car. And they put up a uniformed policeman who described a five-foot-eight man with bushy, frizzy hair running from the bank van to the getaway car.

  Now, Bill was well over six feet tall and he was a mod. His hair was mod short. Nothing frizzy about it. But in his summation, Justice Thesiger said, “Well, you might think, members of the jury, that Curbishley when he was running from the bank might well be stooped over and look five-foot-eight and, with the wind rushing through his hair, it would look frizzy. And indeed bushy.” Unbelievable leading of the jury.

  Bill was found guilty and got sent to Durham Prison to share a block with the Great Train Robbers. That could have been it for him—if you’re flirting with the criminal life, getting locked up young can make it hard to ever go straight. But Bill spent most of his time in solitary. He studied while he was away. He got his A-levels, he did courses, he kept his head down.

  After a few years, he was moved to Leicester. And then Reggie Kray had a word with his governor, told him Bill had been fitted up, and that governor got Bill moved to Wormwood Scrubs. So he was back in London, still protesting his innocence. Eventually, Bill’s story made the front page of the Sunday Mirror. “Are these two men innocent?” was the headline, followed by an account of how Bill and the other alleged robber, Billy Stuckle, had been wrongly accused. As if by magic, Bill was summoned to the parole board a few days after Christmas 1970.

  They said to him, “We’re going to recommend you for a working-out scheme from Pentonville for three or four months, and then you will go on parole.” He said, “Why?” So they said, “Well, we think you’re a suitable case for parole.”

  “No you don’t,” said Bill. “You fucking know I’m innocent.” Under protest, Bill was out, out of his stint in the “merchant navy.” Stuckle got out not long after and was dead within months of his release. “In my opinion, it was the prison that killed him,” says Bill. It must be hard enough doing time when you’ve done the job. But when you’re innocent? Well, Bill survived but he missed the sixties. He did seven years of hard labor and solitary and then he was turned loose without so much as an apology. He called Mike Shaw, one of his oldest friends from Canning Town, and the next day he was working at Track. It was a lucky break for him and a lucky break for me.

  It was only a few months later that I had it out with Kit and Chris in the basement at Track and reached the decision that I needed a new manager. Bill had already tried to talk them round to my solo stuff. He’d told them, “If we work his album and he has success it will be the best thing we can do for him and us. He will have self-confidence, he will feel himself. He should be made to feel equal.” And, as he puts it now, “They fucking laughed at me. They said you can fucking do it if you want to.” So Bill said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  From the minute I made him my manager, I started making money like I never had before. It was all down to him, because when he arrived Kit and Chris were already out of control. In fact, it might have all unraveled sooner if Bill hadn’t learned the ropes so quick. He had no choice. No one else was running things. It was a mess.

  I didn’t go into Track that often, but the way Bill tells it they treated it like their own private cash machine. Kit would roll in around lunchtime, take whatever cash was in the safe, and, if there wasn’t enough, he’d have a check made out to himself and then head out to score.

  The way it was structured is that Track would split label profits fifty-fifty with Polygram. That was clever. They managed the bands, put them on the road, produced the albums and released them. They made money at every stage. But they also controlled the artist’s royalty, which would have been 15 percent of retail. When they started signing other artists—Marc Bolan, Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Brown, Thunderclap Newman—all those royalties went into a separate account under Mammoth Records. Occasionally, they’d dish a bit out to Jimi and the others, but they always kept the bulk of it. And half the money coming in from the deals with Polygram.

  As I’ve said before, we were supposed to be partners. Kit and Chris had promised the four of us 10 percent each of Track. I still have the letter. It’s been chewed up by my dog, but I’ve kept it to remind me. It would have been an enormous amount of money but none of us ever saw a penny.

  Meanwhile, Kit had a fifteenth-century palace right on the Grand Canal in Venice. I never went but I’m told it’s beautiful. Monet painted it. Ruskin was very keen on its encrusted oculi. It belonged to countesses, diplomats, and Venetian royalty. And then Kit Lambert. Both Kit and Chris had large houses in Knightsbridge as well.

  By the early seventies, Kit and Chris were heroin addicts. And when you’re a heroin addict the fear of running out of money is real. So they were cutting deals with promoters where they’d get a smaller amount of cash up front rather than a fair share of the total profit at the end. Like any addicts, they just wanted to get their hands on the cash. I’m sure they didn’t sit down and say, “We’re going to steal this money.” I’m sure they told themselves they were only borrowing it but it’s no different. It’s desperation.

  Bill puts it a different way. In his opinion, Lambert and Stamp always felt they were superior to the band. Moon was the clown, Entwistle was the anchor, and Townshend was the genius whom they doted on and cultivated. I was someone they put up with.

  If it had been up to me, we would have got rid of Kit and Chris sooner. We would have got rid of them the moment I knew for a fact they were ripping us off. I knew they were shifty for years but it’s different when you have conclusive proof that the two people who are supposed to be managing you are stealing from you.

  I got the conclusive proof not long after I’d come back from touring my solo album. Kit and Chris said, “We’ve got The Who a three-album deal with MCA and it’s a million dollars an album.” Great. “And your percentage of every album is $529,325.” Hang about.

  Our percentage for the record contract was 60 percent. I knew that, no matter how often you run it through a calculator, $529,325 is not 60 percent of a million dollars. It was even more ridiculous than that. The figure ran all the way down to cents. I might be a Shepherd’s Bush boy but I’m not stupid. So I called them up and asked them to run through it again. They came up with the same number. I asked if they were sure and they said they were. So I called Ted Oldham, our lawyer, who confirmed the band was due 60 percent of a million dollars per album. My Shepherd’s Bush mathematics was correct. And he was quite clear. Kit and Chris were screwing us.

  I spoke to Keith and John and told them I didn’t want people I couldn’t trust handling my business anymore. It wasn’t about the money. Even though we had families to support, it was never about the money. I always knew how lucky we were to have anything, to have found each other, and to have found those two. I always valued their creativity and how much they’d done for us. I just didn’t want them managing the band anymore. I wanted to break the management deal, bung them 10 percent, and keep them on for their creative value. I wanted them involved but I didn’t want drug addicts with their hands on the purse strings. Keith and John saw my reasoning, but Pete wasn’t interested. He wouldn’t sign the thing to get us out of the contract. I told him we had to do something about it. He said he didn’t want to and that was that. Who money was pocket money for him.

  So nothing happened until he went to America a year or two later and found out they’d been at his publishing money as well. I
don’t know how much they’d taken. It was none of my business but that’s when the shit really hit the fan.

  Rather than keeping them on in some capacity, they were out for good. Pete threw the book at them. In 1976 the rest of the band asked Bill to manage them. They’d watched Bill handle everything for me and they wanted him to do the same for them. I stayed out of that. I would have preferred to keep Bill all to myself. But I suppose it was inevitable. When everything came to a head, Bill was the obvious choice to manage The Who. And so Kit and Chris were out. They lost Track. They lost us. And we lost them. I always felt bad about that because I was the bastard that instigated the split. It wasn’t the split on my terms in the end. It went much further.

  I’ve never held grudges. I’ve always moved on. Forgiven if not always forgotten. But you have to clear the air and that never happened with Chris or Kit. Kit died in 1981 and he went to his grave thinking he’d been unfairly treated by the band. I saw him a few months before he died. He came for lunch down in Sussex and he was in a deeply melancholic mood. Bill saw him just before the end and Kit kept telling him, “Just make sure you get paid.” He had that drug addict’s paranoia. Bill gave him some cash and wrote him a check. He came back an hour later, bruised and in tears. He’d tried to score some drugs and they’d smacked him around a bit. So Bill gave him some more cash and arranged a car for him to get home. That was the last time any of us saw him.

  He was only forty-five when he died. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after falling down the stairs at his mum’s house. It was a horrible end for a man who had meant so much to the band. Somehow, Chris survived. He cleaned himself up and became an addiction therapist in New York. We became friends again and, in 1992, remembering his love of the film business, I asked him to coproduce a film idea I’d had about Keith Moon. (I still have the idea but, back then, pre-Tarantino, no one understood our script because it wasn’t written with a linear time frame.)

  Chris and I stayed very close friends right up until his death in 2012. He would mentor me when I lacked confidence. He encouraged me greatly to pursue my vision of how to present my upcoming solo tour of Tommy and The Who’s next Quadrophenia tour. In 2008, when we received the Kennedy Center Honor in Washington, Chris was alongside me with his beautiful wife, Calixte, at the White House and State Department. He deserved to be there for what he and Kit had given us all those years before.

  For many years we had spent holidays together in the West Indies and that’s where Calixte, Chris’s daughter Amie, Heather, and I gave him a Viking burial. I have no idea why but on that particular morning I was driven to give him a special send-off. I built a boat of palm leaves and whatever else I could find on the beach while the girls collected flowers from neighboring gardens to cover his ashes. By the time we were finished, we’d built a proper tropical/Viking burial ship, complete with a dried banana-leaf mast. With the help of some flammable jelly, Chris had a burial at sea, from a beach off St. Kitts.

  And yet, despite all those years of friendship, he never admitted he’d done anything wrong by us. Not once. They made a whole film about the two of them a couple of years ago, Lambert & Stamp. I did all I could to help Chris and the producers complete the project. I gave them interviews and full access to early film clips I owned. And even then, in all the interviews in the film, Chris never explains the real reason we had to get rid of them as managers. That was the great shame about the film. It was supposed to be journalistic, but they told only half the story. The film’s version of the truth is that we got rid of them because they were bad managers. Never once have I said that they were bad managers. They were the best creative managers a group could wish for, but they were addicts. If only Chris had just said, “Look, we were out of our boxes … there was so much cash about and when you’re hooked on drugs you need a lot of cash, and, yes, we were spending your money.” Well, that would have been the end of it for me. But he didn’t come close. And the film’s record of half-truth brings it all back to me and it left me angry.

  Yes, they had been integral to our success. Yes, they had been on top of the world with us. And, yes, they’d been absolute pioneers in the rock industry. But when the money and the drugs started rolling in, the 1970s became like the Wild West for swindlers, and they’d taken the wrong path. They never got over it. Kit died far too young. Chris lived with it for the next forty years.

  chapter thirteen

  Family

  IN 1972, Heather and I had our first daughter, Rosie. Given the chaos and instability in my professional life, it was a godsend to do the family thing properly. I never had a relationship with my first family. I did eventually. As I’ve said, we all used to go on holidays together. Jackie and her husband, their two kids and our son, Simon, used to come away with my second family. We went to Florida and Portugal together. We went to the West Indies. The whole caboodle. But for the first few years I had no role with my son. And I deserved that.

  It was different the second time around. I was happy. I was with Heather, the love of my life, and we were in the first flush of marriage when the kids started coming along. And although I was still away a lot, I had some time to be with them and I enjoyed it a lot. It was still hard going away and coming back—Rosie and then Willow, who came along three years later, always changed so much, even if it was a short tour. It was only when we had our son, Jamie, in 1981 that I really got to have a go at the hands-on-dad routine. But all through those early years, it didn’t matter how crazy things got on the road, I knew I was always coming back to stability. I got very lucky there. The other guys in the band all had quite troubled relationships and, as I’ve already suggested, that’s the norm in my world. It could easily have been the norm for me. It’s very hard to find a girl who would not just put up with all the rock and roll crap but also stand up to you, stand with you, tell you what’s what, help you navigate your way through the madness. Heather was my equal. She was and still is my partner in everything.

  We had lots of neighbors with kids so it was very communal. There were always kids hanging around, other parents helping out, sharing the load. We had someone up in the cottages with two kids and it was an open-door life. It was idyllic.

  * * *

  You can’t spend all your time enjoying yourself, though, can you? My sabbatical ended with Quadrophenia. First off, I want to say that I always realized, recording-wise, we were an acquired taste because of the material. But I also always recognized that what Pete was saying, how he was verbalizing it and where it came from, made it groundbreaking stuff. Although it felt like it at the time, it wasn’t just a fleeting thing. Those feelings he conveyed in his music were timeless. You can be sixteen, seventeen today, pick up Quadrophenia, and feel like those lyrics are talking to you. I see it now when I’m performing. There are plenty of old codgers rocking out to us like they have for half a century. But their grandkids are there, too.

  And they’re going nuts.

  Second off, making Quadrophenia was not all sweetness and light. Pete’s idea, his next big concept, came in a flash of inspiration when we were building Ramport Studios in an old church hall on Thessaly Road, Battersea. We built a lot of things in the 1970s. There was no point trying to keep any cash, not when the government was taking 98 percent of it. So we had projects and one of them was Ramport. The plan was to build a quadrophonic studio—surround sound, very futuristic. The only problem was that we didn’t know very much about building studios. It looked great and, when you played in it, everything sounded great. But the sound we were hearing playing back was a distortion of the true sound.

  When we played it back in a different studio (built by someone who knew what they were doing) it didn’t sound right at all.

  Still, it gave Pete his flash of inspiration. “There’s this guy with double schizophrenia,” he said. “It’s the four members of the band and the music is the person.”

  I got it. I got it immediately even if everyone else didn’t. He went off to scribble and then, because Ra
mport wasn’t finished, we went back to Stargroves to record it a few weeks later. Immediately, things started to go wrong.

  On the first day, Kit turned up with a huge feast of food. It was typical Kit. Flamboyant and generous, though I’m sure we were paying for it. I had accepted that Kit wasn’t going to get the boot and I was getting on with it. But Pete had other ideas. When Kit turned up with his elaborate feast, he flew into a rage. Maybe he was pissed off after all. Maybe it was more to do with that recording session in New York for Who’s Next. That was what Pete cared about. The music. The process of making music. He would give Kit a pass on stealing from us, but if he interfered with the sessions, that was unforgivable. Pete never explained why that feast pissed him off so much, but it was the last time we saw Kit in the studio. He was replaced by Ron Nevison and I have no idea where he came from. We should have gone for Glyn Johns, who stepped in on Who’s Next and did a brilliant job. Why fix what ain’t broken?

  Anyway, I was never happy with the original mixes on Quadrophenia. Things happened on the vocal tracks that were irreparable. They added echoes and effects that couldn’t be removed. When you try and remix it, you can’t really improve it very much. I remember when I heard it in our flashy quadrophonic studio at Ramport for the first time, I thought it was amazing, but when I heard it on the record it just sounded flat. I know it wasn’t me. I’ve always blamed it on the mix. That flashy studio wasn’t tuned right.

  I blamed it publicly. I told an interviewer, “Since Tommy, we’ve lost our light and shade, I found it a lot less rewarding. Too loud.” Pete was, of course, unhappy with my comments but I was only being honest. I felt that a certain amount of power had been lost. The vocal had been smoothed out and that took the power away. And the way we appeared to respond to this loss of light and shade was to get louder.

  That’s how I knew I was right. Everyone was playing with a level of desperation. If it isn’t going well, play it louder.