Pete knew it wasn’t going well, too, even if he didn’t admit it. The pressure on him was immense and he was drinking more heavily than ever. Onstage, he’d get through a bottle of brandy, and drunk musicians don’t make good musicians. I’d like to hear some of the live recordings from that period and see if my memory of it is what it really sounded like. Because I hear everything from the front of the stage and it’s a strange place to inhabit. You’re naked to the audience. You never see the band. You can turn to them on a solo and work with them, but you could never do that with John because he was statuesque. You couldn’t go near Keith because he was thrashing away and you’d lose the rest of the band. And with Pete it depended on the night.
All the time, the amp stacks were getting bigger. We’d moved from Marshall to Sound City in the late sixties. Then Pete and John worked with Dave Reeves to create a customized Hiwatt Electronics stack in 1968. That was upgraded to the Super Who 100 model in 1970, which became the DR103W model in 1973. Which, in short, meant I couldn’t hear bloody anything of the vocals.
It was a crazy time, absolutely crazy. Even before we set off to tour Quadrophenia, we were struggling. The rehearsals at Shepperton were exhausting. That’s what sparked the fight that ended with Pete unconscious on the floor and me screaming for an ambulance. Halfway through the rehearsal, I just got fed up with the film crew, who were supposed to be recording a promo for MCA and hadn’t even bothered to get their cameras going. “When are you going to start filming then?” I asked. “When I’ve lost my bloody voice? This is a hard piece and I am only doing it once.” Quite reasonable, don’t you think?
Pete, fueled by the best part of a bottle of brandy, went off like a firecracker. He was up in my face, prodding me. “You’ll do what you’re fucking well told,” he sneered. This is not the way to talk to me, but I still backed off. The roadies knew what I was capable of so they sprang into action and held me back.
“Let him go!” screamed Pete. “I’ll kill the little fucker.” They let me go.
Next thing I knew, he’d swung a twenty-four-pound Les Paul guitar at me. It whistled past my ear and glanced off my shoulder, very nearly bringing a much earlier end to The Who. I still hadn’t retaliated, but I was beginning to feel quite put out. He’d called me a little fucker, after all.
Finally, after almost ten years of Peaceful Perce, after another left hook narrowly dodged, I replied with an uppercut to the jaw. Pete went up and backward like he’d been poleaxed. And then he fell down hard, cracking his head on the stage. I thought I’d killed him.
To make matters only slightly worse, our publicist Keith Altham chose that moment to bring the American managing director from our newly signed record company onto the sound stage. The bigwig’s first sight of his big new signing was of the lead vocalist knocking the lead guitarist out cold.
“My God,” said the horrified MD. “Is it always like this?”
“No,” said Keith. “Today is one of their better days.”
I wound up in the back of the ambulance, holding Pete’s hand, racked with guilt. I was the one who had been attacked, but somehow I ended up feeling responsible. It was just like being back in the playground at Acton again.
Thankfully, Pete survived, but for the rest of my life I’ve had to listen to him blaming me for the bald spot on the top of his head. To this day, I think he believes I was the aggressor but this is how I remember it.
It was pressure and alcohol that caused the fight and it didn’t get any easier on tour. For the first time, we were trying to work with tapes. All very futuristic and pioneering, but you had to be able to hear the tempo and the rhythm. If you lost that, you were screwed. Poor old Keith. I don’t know how he did it. Playing to click tracks was a nightmare. It was like putting handcuffs on us.
That all came to a head at the Odeon Newcastle on Fireworks Night, of course, 1973, just two weeks after the last fisticuffs. Pete threw some equipment at Bobby Pridden. Now, Bobby had been our sound engineer forever. He was still touring with us until earlier this year, which is remarkable because, after me, he is, geographically, the closest man to Pete during a gig. And when a gig goes bad, you want to be the farthest man, geographically, from Pete. Bobby has had more guitars, amps, and tape decks thrown at him over the years than any man, even a sound man, deserves, and on that night it probably wasn’t his fault. We were just trying to be too ambitious.
It was so hard to do the things we take for granted today. Everything now is digital. Everything is numbered. You’ve got a standby of this and a standby of that and you just push a button and off you go. In those days, you had to line up the tape, which, for any kids reading, was an actual tape, and you had to get it just right. Even if you managed that, the tape could and very often would split. It was a nightmare. So many things could go wrong, and they did. Where we were with sound in the early seventies was where we were with my guitars in the late fifties. Sticky tape. Splints. Wings and prayers. And an ever-present propensity for the whole thing to fold in half.
Of course, that was the whole point of rock. We were being incredibly ambitious because nothing was ever too ambitious in rock in the 1970s. The Beatles were a little four-piece band in the middle of a stadium, which was ridiculous, but it worked because of the hysteria. Once the girls stopped screaming, it would have been four pinpricks doing not very much. We couldn’t hide behind the hysteria so we had to do more. We had to fill the stadium. We couldn’t rely on screens because they didn’t exist. We just had lights and we had sound. That’s why it became so insane onstage, why we were trying things we couldn’t rely on, and why septuagenarians Pete and I have to ask you to say that again, only a bit louder.
And it’s why Bobby got a tape machine thrown at him that night in Newcastle.
“The Who—A Ridiculous Display of Unwarranted Violence” was the headline in the next day’s Newcastle Evening Chronicle.
Tempers flared after drummer Keith Moon had trouble with headphones. He let the drumsticks fly as the sound engineers battled to fix them. Then Townshend intervened. He ripped out backing tapes and heaved over equipment into the side curtains. The three other members of the band—lead singer Roger Daltrey, guitarist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon—just stared. It was, in my opinion, an extremely childish publicity stunt with potentially damaging effect on the thousands of youngsters who invariably follow their idols in all they do. Otherwise, they were musically immaculate, as always.
To me, that’s why the critics, however good they were, never quite got what we were about. It might have felt “musically immaculate” to them but to us—and to Pete especially—the smallest glitch in the groove caused by a poxy tape machine felt like a major bump in the road.
It wasn’t a publicity stunt. Not even close. It was pure frustration, spilling over. The next two shows at the Odeon passed without incident. Then, after three shows at the Lyceum in London, we set off for America and yet more disaster.
* * *
Tuesday, November 20, 1973. The Cow Palace, San Francisco. The start of the US–Canadian leg of the Quadrophenia tour. The band’s 1965 promise to stay off the drugs until after the show had been, how shall I put it, fraying. Before the show, Keith drank a bottle of brandy chased down with a handful of horse tranquilizers and something else we never quite discovered. Partly, he was an addict. Partly, he suffered from stage fright. People assume that someone like Keith, a natural performer, a natural show-off, couldn’t possibly have nerves, but he did. He could be hard on himself and some nights he would be throwing up for hours in the room next to mine, waiting to go onstage. Sometimes it was too much of whatever he was taking. Sometimes it was plain old fear. He was close to the wire a lot of the time. That night, he crossed it.
The show started comparatively well. The click tracks were working. Bobby had nothing thrown at him. Then, Keith started to flag during “Drowned.” He picked up again for “Bell Boy” but when we reached his solo in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” he ground to a complete
halt.
“We’re just going to revive our drummer by punching him in the stomach,” said Pete in his usual sympathetic fashion. “He’s out cold. I think he’d gone and eaten something he shouldn’t have eaten. It’s your foreign food.”
You’ve got no idea what it feels like to be up there standing on a stage in front of fifteen thousand people, all hyped up, all screaming at you, and your drummer is face deep in a snare. In the end, he just collapsed flat on his back. There wasn’t panic. Even though you’re in the shit, you know you’ll get through. That’s the beauty of rock. It’s so irreverent, you can make a show out of almost anything, even an unmitigated disaster like this. If the drummer’s out on his back for the whole show and people are chucking water on him, you can still make a show of it. As long as you’re making a noise, as long as you’re creating a performance, you’ll get through it. Rock fans are not like any other audience. They’re forgiving. They appreciate improvisation.
Still, it would have been nice to have some drums. A lifeless Keith, eyes rolled to the back of his head, was carted off by the roadies and chucked in a cold shower. A doctor injected him with something and he was back onstage. This time he got to the end of “Magic Bus” and then you didn’t need a doctor to tell you he was out for good.
“Can anybody play the drums?” asked Pete. “I mean somebody good.” Up came nineteen-year-old Scot Halpin from Muscatine, Iowa, and we got through “Smokestack Lightning,” “Spoonful,” and “Naked Eye” before finally throwing in the towel. We survived the night and, miraculously, Keith did, too, but I could have killed him. We all could have done.
The next day, we found him in the hotel reception languishing in a wheelchair. He wasn’t exactly contrite. He was wearing a big grin and an even bigger fur hat he’d taken a shine to. Naturally, it came with buffalo horns. Whatever industrial-grade medication he’d taken, it had left him paralyzed from the chest down. Like sherpas, we had to carry him onto the plane.
There was a day’s rest before the gig at the Forum in Inglewood but Keith still wasn’t quite right. The doctor had propped him up at the drum kit with a needle going into his ankle. It took him four days to get all his feeling back. First, it was his arms, which was useful for the performance. Then it was his waist, then his bits and pieces, then, finally, his legs.
The doctors were always there, on the fringes, ready to supply whatever was needed in whichever given situation. Yes, doctor, we’d like some uppers. Yes, doctor, now we need some downers. It was all perfectly legal and aboveboard. Ethically, it was probably a gray area.
Most of what Keith took was on prescription. I used to smoke a bit of pot in the gaps between tours, but I kept out of it all until I damaged my shoulders and got stuck on painkillers. Horrible things and they took a long time to kick in. Then I got addicted to sleeping pills, which was worse. I couldn’t sleep because there was just so much adrenaline. It’s impossible to come offstage and have a decent kip. Not a chance. I used to destress with birds and booze, but that wasn’t a solution anymore so I got into Quaaludes, or Mandrax, as it was called in Britain. First manufactured in the early seventies, it was a barbiturate-derivative depressant and it was horrible stuff. The side effects were horrendous: depression, fatigue, unpleasant dreams, ataxia, headache, numbed emotions, double vision, dizziness. It got pulled off the market and banned once people realized how potent and addictive it was. But I had to sleep.
We were doing longer and longer shows. We were hitting three hours, which required huge levels of energy and concentration, so I became obsessed by sleep. It became the thing in my life. And, as any insomniac will tell you, if you think about sleep, you worry about it, and then it becomes even more elusive. I just lay there each night thinking, I have to go to sleep now. If I don’t, I won’t make it through tomorrow’s show. It’s going to be too late. I have to sleep. Now. Hurry up and go to sleep. Maybe I should have counted sheep.
The Mandrax was prescribed quite innocently by my own doctor rather than one of the mysterious tour suppliers. Those guys were too busy keeping Keith upright. The doc didn’t want to give me the pills, but I was desperate. I told him I wouldn’t make it through the tour without them and eventually he relented. That’s why there are so many casualties in our business. It’s so intense, the temptation to take something to maintain balance is huge. First, you take the downers to bring you out of the clouds after a show. Then you need the uppers to put you right back up there in time for the next one. I never needed the uppers. I never did the full Elvis. But kicking Mandrax was horrible. It’s cold turkey for two weeks and you wake up through these endless, restless nights, feeling like you’re falling off a cliff. I still have trouble sleeping. Even when I’m not touring, I struggle. There are times, usually in the very small hours, when I’d trade it all in for the ability to get into bed and fall asleep. I wouldn’t, of course, but I don’t think you’ll find many performers who sleep well after a show. If they do, they’re probably not doing it right.
By the time the tour moved on to Canada, Keith had regained the full use of his limbs. A fully mobile Keith is a dangerous animal and his brush with paralysis hadn’t made him any more circumspect. On December 2, our American record company, MCA, threw an after-show party at the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal. We were playing the next night in Boston and I had a killer sore throat so I went to bed, miserable, with my Mandrax and all its accompanying side effects. I left the rest of the band to it.
At some point in the night, Keith decided to redecorate the entire hospitality suite with his own abstract ketchup art before Pete helped him shove a large marble table through a wall. After they’d thrown several other items of furniture into the pool, they scarpered off to bed. At four in the morning, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived in force and dragged sixteen of us off to the nick. There was no point telling them I’d had absolutely nothing to do with it—you could see they were in no mood for due process—but I did try to tell them they’d arrested Mike’s nurse.
Mike Shaw had been with us since 1964. He and Chris Stamp were childhood friends and he’d been working as a lighting director in the theater before he came to do the lighting for The Who. He was an energetic mod with a very dry sense of humor; he was a great part of the management team. But in 1965, just as we were beginning to make it big, he was taking the minivan back from a gig when he drove into the back of a truck just south of Stafford. He survived but he broke his neck and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. We did the best we could for him and he never complained, even though it was so hard for him. He continued to work for Track and he still came everywhere with us, but he could do nothing without his nurse. I explained all this to the cops that December night in Montreal, but they didn’t care. The authorities always hated people like us, and these authorities were the worst we ever encountered.
We were all locked up in pens. I was with Bill Curbishley and, as you can imagine, he’s quite cool under lock and key. As soon as he got in, he just lay down on the bunk and stayed there motionless, almost like he was meditating. What a professional. I was pacing around like a caged animal, which is not the way to do time. The others were all in the adjacent pens looking miserable. There was only one person missing. Keith bloody Moon. At some point much, much later, there was a huge ruckus and in swans Moon in his tiger-skin coat doing his best Noël Coward.
He looked at the meanest buzz-cut Mountie in the room and, with a dismissive wave of the hand, said, “Could you make mine with two sugars, dear boy?” He then turned to the next Mountie along and said, “I think you’ll find I booked a suite.” I’m sure that didn’t help expedite our release.
In the end, they held us for eight hours and let us go only when the local promoter agreed to pay six thousand dollars in cash to cover repairs. The whole thing was ridiculous. It was only a wall, a window, and a couple of bits of furniture. I told you before, hotels saw us as a chance to refurbish.
We missed our early afternoon flight, just about made the
late afternoon flight, and arrived onstage at Boston Garden ten minutes late, which, all things considered, was a miracle. I remember we played one of the best shows on the tour. It’s amazing what being let out of the cage after eight hours can do to your energy levels.
Unfortunately, getting locked up before every show wasn’t an option. We limped on to the end of the tour—through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and then four nights back in London at the Sundown Theatre in Edmonton. When I finally made it back to Sussex on Christmas Eve 1973, I was knackered, but I was also relieved. I needed stability and I had my family at home waiting for me.
It wasn’t just Heather and Rosie. The entire Daltrey clan invaded that Christmas. We’d sent a coach up to Shepherd’s Bush to collect all the uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, second cousins, third cousins, and fourth cousins six times removed. We had a roaring fire and a roaring knees-up, singing all the filthy Cockney songs, just like the old days.
Some of my friends in the business found it hard coming off tour. Trying to readjust to a normal family existence after the madness of three months on the road was a struggle. Me? No problem. I was young. I lived in the moment. If the moment involved standing in front of thousands of people with a drummer passed out on his drums, I’d just deal with it. If it involved hosting a hundred aunts and uncles, nieces, third cousins, and nephews twice removed, no problem. Some moments were better than others and, that Christmas, I had one of them. Mum and Dad were there and, at one point during that week of celebration, Dad looked me in the eye and said, “Isn’t it grand?” He was happy and that meant the world to me.
chapter fourteen
And Action …
It had been on the cards for a long time. Tommy: The Movie. Ever since he’d gone off to the Amazon with two friends and a camera in 1961 to make an expedition documentary, Kit had fancied himself as a film producer. Chris had the same affliction. More than the album, the live shows, and the full-scale opera house productions, he saw Tommy as his ticket into the movie business proper. And so he’d been going around separately from Pete, touting his own script. Then there were some other film people over from America and it all sounded like it was going to happen. Then it didn’t, then it did, then it didn’t again. Things are always off and on in the film industry, but because it was Kit and because it was not your average film, it always felt more off than on.
Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite Page 16