Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  The giant pink Styrofoam phallus that came home with me at the end of the shoot had been used as a prop in one of the fantasy scenes. It had looked a little forlorn in the store cupboard in Shepperton but not as forlorn as the end of the second penis, which had been guillotined off in one of the more disturbing fantasy scenes. I decided I had a better use for them at home.

  Tommy had become a really big film and movie stardom was creating a whole new set of privacy issues with my nosy next-door neighbor. He was constantly opposing anything I wanted to do on my thirty-five acres of land. Even though the hedge along our boundary was ten feet high, I would frequently catch him peeping through. So I thought I’d give him something to look at.

  One wonderful evening, I erected the erection in the center of the circular drive in the front garden. Very early the next morning, there was a loud knock on the front door. I opened it to find a burly police sergeant and his colleague desperately attempting to keep their faces straight.

  “I’ve come with a complaint about the erection, sir,” he said, as seriously as possible.

  “Oh, you mean the prick,” I replied.

  The officer nearly bit his tongue off.

  “Who’s complained?” I asked.

  “We’re not allowed to say.”

  “But why would anyone complain, officer? No one can see it.”

  “You do have a point,” smiled the sergeant. Off they walked across the drive to give the phallus a closer inspection before getting back into their car and driving off. I think every police car in the whole of Sussex must have driven up my drive over the next four days. I’ve never seen so many smiling policemen and -women. On the fifth day, there was another loud knock. I was greeted by the sight of the chief of Sussex police. He had an expression that suggested a very bad toothache and he didn’t beat around the bush.

  “Mr. Daltrey, do you think you could remove your erection from the front lawn?”

  “But no one can see it, unless they’re trespassing or they’re a Peeping Tom.”

  “Technically, you are correct,” he replied, “but your neighbor is making my life a misery. Could you remove it to keep the peace?”

  He should have marched next door to make the correct arrest but, by this time, I’d had my fun and I felt rather sorry for him. So I removed my eight-foot penis and replaced it with the guillotined three-footer instead.

  * * *

  Tommy premiered in March 1975 and, while Tina Turner, Elton John, Ann-Margret, the Stones, the Beatles, Dean Martin, Pete, Keith, and John attended the various extravagant launch parties across America, I was still finishing Lisztomania.

  Heather was at Pembury Hospital, awaiting the arrival of our second daughter, Willow. I wasn’t there as much as I would have liked for Willow’s first year. We found a nanny. She came via John Paul Jones, a Led Zeppelin nanny, and she was more Mary Poppins than Mary Poppins. But in those short periods when I was home it was idyllic. I could look out across the Sussex hills and feel the calmness come back. If I hadn’t had that—the family, the quiet, the place where none of the rest of my life had any impact—it would have been much harder. Because that year was hard. The attention the film directed my way was huge—a different level from anything I’d had in The Who. I remember I was in some shopping mall in Texas, promoting my second solo album, Ride a Rock Horse. It was just a signing but there were thousands and thousands of people there. It was a mob and they were there for Tommy. Forty-odd years later, I can make some dry observation about life imitating art. At the time, it was scary, very scary. The hysteria was daunting and I couldn’t handle it. I lost my way a bit.

  As soon as Tommy was released, Hollywood came calling. I was nominated for a Golden Globe. Most Promising Newcomer, don’t you know. I didn’t win—Brad Dourif (Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) was obviously a more promising newcomer that year. Ann-Margret won best actress and Pete got an Oscar nomination for his score.

  And, suddenly, I was on the American chat shows, and I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t cope with that level of scrutiny and the interrogation. I’d been doing interviews for years, but this was more personal and more intense. On a very basic level, my accent hadn’t adapted at all for an American audience. I couldn’t understand them. They couldn’t understand me. Culturally as well as literally. There’s an art to American entertainers. The way they talk to an audience—it’s a whole different class of comfort and ease. I just let the old nerves creep back and with them came the s-s-s-stutter.

  It should have been a fairy-tale time. Boy from Shepherd’s Bush makes it to Tinseltown. Particularly given the fact that it was a pretty grim time to be living in Britain. This was 1975—the height of socialist Britain. Harold Wilson was prime minister again, top earners were paying 98 percent tax, and all the bands were going into exile (we were one of the very few that stayed). The whole country was grinding to a halt. If I was going to bugger off to Hollywood, now would have been a good time to do it. But I quickly realized that it was all phony. It was a fairy tale. Behind all those sparkling smiles and gushing compliments, there was a complete lack of sincerity.

  As you climb the greasy pole, people think you move in these exalted circles. Was I friends with whichever actor or whichever musician? First of all, if anyone ever asked if I knew someone, my first instinct was to deny it. That’s just an old habit from my days on the street in West London. No, guv’nor. Never seen him before in my life, just in case I’d be putting them in a frame.

  Second of all, I didn’t know everyone in my world. I’d met them because it was a small world, but did I know them? We rose up performing with the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks. But I was never really friends with any of them. We passed like ships in the night. They did their gig, we did ours. If we happened to be on the same bill, it didn’t make much of a difference. Robert Plant became a proper friend and so, later, did Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. Just a few people in the business but it’s not big numbers. The band was my immediate family and, beyond that, I had my friends, my proper mates. To get to really know someone takes time and we never had time. And I never enjoyed hanging out at posh events, air-kissing celebrities. I was always nervous. Still am. At any gathering, I don’t do it easy. I always end up in a corner, smashed up against a wall.

  I find small talk very difficult. Maybe it’s just collateral damage from years of being pushed and pulled at by people I’ve never met and never wanted to meet. These days, I love a dinner party. Six people maximum. Any more than that and I can’t hear. My hearing has got so bad, that’s the limit. And if there are only six people, you get through the small talk pretty quick. Anyway, Hollywood was and still is the extreme version of all that meaningless hobnobbing, and I was a fish out of water.

  The same people who assume you spend all your time partying with the rich and famous also ask if you’ve changed. The answer is that you haven’t. Despite the ridiculous whirlwind you’re living in, despite the dramatic change in circumstance, from skiffling teens to one of the biggest rock bands in the world, you don’t change. It’s all the same, only bigger. But people around you change, and I think that’s what causes the insecurity. Every person you meet, you think, are they what they seem? Are they being straight with me? It’s the same in any walk of life but when you’re famous it’s like you’re putting a magnifying glass on everything. Small things become enormous. People think you’re different and you’re not. How some of these celebrities today are going to manage when they get older I have no idea, because some haven’t even got a core talent to fall back on. After their fifteen minutes, there is only darkness. Or I’m a Celebrity.

  Under the magnifying glass, all the accompanying noise and light that came with film stardom was too much. So I came back from the Land of Eternal Sunshine to the Land of Eternal Taxation, took a deep and grateful breath of Sussex air, and returned to the relative sanity of life in a rock band.

  chapter fifteen

  By Numbers

  Pete had been strug
gling with the same realization about fame when he composed “How Many Friends.” He said he wrote that song “stoned out of my brain in my living room, crying my eyes out, detached from my own work and from the whole project. I felt empty.” Which is not how a soon-to-be Oscar-nominated rock star is supposed to feel. We recorded that track and the rest of The Who by Numbers album in Shepperton in the spring of 1975, right in the midst of all the craziness. New Musical Express (NME) described it as “Pete Townshend’s suicide note.” He was giving long interviews full of self-loathing and loathing in general. He said our audience was rubbish and that we were rubbish on the last tour.

  He’s always told us how he feels via the medium of media. Why didn’t we ever talk face-to-face? Why didn’t he just pick up the phone? I don’t know why. I really didn’t understand it. But I suppose we weren’t like that.

  I’m a deeply private person—why else do you think it’s taken so long to write this autobiography?—so having my voice criticized by him in the full glare of the newspapers really hurt. I’d like to think we’d talk now. I think we’d pick up the phone. We have talked, face-to-face, man-to-man, at critical stages in our lives. I went to see him when he was stuck on heroin and, to his credit, he checked into rehab. He obviously listened. In that sense, we were very, very close. In difficult times, we are there for each other. We are friends. Not in the sense that we’d call each other up and go out for a meal. Social niceties are not our forte. But we have a bond. It’s hard to describe but I think that’s the point.

  A lot of people are too frightened to talk to him—he lives on a different plane to the rest of us and it’s not linear. Sometimes, with no warning, for no reason, he can cut you to the quick. He can come across very mean, and, as I’ve said, even spiteful, but that’s not what he’s like deep down. He’s not the sort of person you want to hurt. I never wanted to hurt him, not even when I knocked him out. But I’ve never been frightened to talk to him and tell him how it is (although I do steer clear when I read the warning signs).

  Pete, on the other hand, could only communicate his musical struggles through the press. He never came to us when he was in trouble. He never shared his problems. Maybe we could have kicked things around. We could have helped. Things do get solved in the studio, but we never, ever got into that position. He just told journalists in order to tell us how bad we were.

  I’d been at the same gigs he was complaining about. I’d listened to John and Keith one night at the Rainbow Theatre, desperately trying to keep up with Pete. He got drunker and drunker and wilder and wilder until he became musically incoherent. And then, a week later, I think he’d taken a shot of heroin or something. He was off in different keys, on some wild trip, without warning or signal. It was a nightmare. And then, months later, we read that it’s us. It was John and Keith that were crap, not Pete.

  How could he turn around and tell them, via NME, that they were crap? They weren’t crap. They were brilliant. They were dancing on pinheads.

  There were three of us onstage working our bollocks off. The Who wasn’t crap that night. Pete was crap that night. Well, he was never crap but he was drunk. Or off in the clouds. Take the responsibility. He could have admitted he was drunk, that he was under pressure. But he blamed us, and I stood up for the band. Of course, the music press loved the bickering. Rock stars wrestling. It sells papers. But I was genuinely pissed off.

  On the management side, our relationship with Kit and Chris had deteriorated to the point that we were suing them, and they were suing us. We’d come full horrific circle from that first meeting, full of optimism and promise, in the Railway Hotel in 1964 to two enemies on opposite sides of the boardroom table, flanked by lip-licking lawyers. Our foundations were crumbling and if we had unraveled completely that summer, imploding on our own success, no one would have been surprised. That was what happened with bands far less volatile than ours.

  But then, by October, we were starting out on tour again. Pete had spent the summer with his family in America, baring his soul to Murshida Ivy Duce, the confidante of Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. The command that came down from Ivy Duce was “to keep playing guitar in The Who until further notice.” Frankly, I couldn’t have agreed more. I only felt negative about playing with The Who in one period in our entire half century working together and that was still four years.

  Pete kept saying we were a nostalgia act. He said he hated touring. I’ve already said it was different for him. I couldn’t sit on my arse and live off royalties. I had a young family and two kids elsewhere to support. But that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to keep going. You have to tour. If you don’t tour, you’re dead. You’re gone. All those people predicting our imminent demise would have been proved right if we’d stopped. I’ve seen only a few bands go away for a decade and, when they come back, they’ve still got it. They pick up right where they left off. But more often than not, they don’t come back. Or, if they do, their fire has gone out. Luckily, or as a result of divine intervention, Pete overcame his many objections to our continued existence and so we set off on the road once again with our new, brilliant, morose album.

  In some ways, The Who by Numbers is my favorite album. It was our seventh studio album and I remember we didn’t have a clue what we were doing.

  Pete just chucked a load of songs at me, I chose the ones I liked, and he was surprised by my selection. For me, songs like “Imagine a Man,” “How Many Friends,” and “However Much I Booze” expose our vulnerabilities and the album is wonderful for that. It’s about inability in the bigger sense. I saw the lyrics and I thought, this has to be sung. If this can grab the ear of anyone of our age through this period of our lives, it will speak to them. And that’s all I cared about.

  We began with eleven dates in Britain and, after a rusty start, everything just came together. It felt like everyone wanted to be there. After the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, we arrived in the States at the end of November to play across the South. The venues were getting so big that we needed more sound and light. John Wolff, our production manager, was like a kid in a particularly outlandish sweetshop. He was experimenting with lasers and holograms, all pioneering stuff, and by the end of 1975 our crew was moving unprecedented amounts of kit from gig to gig. We had three argon lasers—one at the back of the stage and two on either side—and they were so powerful they had to be rigged up to the nearest fire hydrant to keep them cool. It was worth it, though. People had never seen anything like it back then. It blew their minds. It was genius lighting.

  We didn’t know it then, but this was us at the very height of our powers. When we picked up again in the early spring, Keith was in trouble. A couple of years after Kim had left him, he’d moved to California. He was out of reach. We had never been that close—we were friends, but we never ever mixed socially; it just wasn’t part of our deal. That began to change when we were filming Tommy and then, when we were trying to get him home, we became much closer.

  I went over there once to talk to him and it was a shock. It was like a flashback to the teenage Keith’s bedroom wall in Wembley. It had all become real but the reality wasn’t like the teenager’s dream. He had bought the beach house next door to Steve McQueen in the Colony, the most expensive part of Malibu. Annette, his new Swedish girlfriend, looked exactly like Kim, the spitting image of a Californian surf chick. I arrived thinking, this is going to be great, but when I walked into the lounge with its huge picture window looking out on the Pacific sunsets, it was obvious that all was not well. The room was empty apart from two sofas and a giant Persian rug. On the rug were a dozen piles of dog shit. And the two of them hadn’t noticed. Or they didn’t care.

  The dream of living next to his screen idol hadn’t worked out for Keith either. The first sign was that the border between the two properties was lined with trees. Not hedges but full-size tropical rain forest trees.

  McQueen had craned in these giant tubs with giant palms to try to keep Moon out. The relationship could have wor
ked a lot better. They had central things in common. Both of them were from working-class backgrounds, both of them were under the spotlight, both of them were struggling with fame. They could have helped one another. But when Keith first went over to introduce himself, he upset McQueen’s sixteen-year-old son, and when the resident guard dog bit him he bit it back.

  The result was a reckoning with McQueen at the Malibu district attorney’s office, a chance to start again, but Keith chose to wear his Rommel uniform to the meeting and it didn’t go well. He then installed spotlights shining on McQueen’s beachfront in the hope of spotting Ali MacGraw, McQueen’s wife, in the nude. Hence the palm trees.

  I went to talk to him because anyone could see he was out of control in California. He had no money and any money he could get his hands on, he was spending. When we refused to give him any more cash, he borrowed ten thousand dollars from our agent, Frank Barsalona. A week later, he came back and asked for more. Frank, quite understandably shocked, pointed out that no one, not even Keith Moon, should struggle to last a week on ten thousand dollars. Keith explained, quite understandably, too, that he had had to hire a plane to fly a banner reading “Happy Birthday Ringo.”

  On March 9, 1976, we were two songs into the show at the Boston Garden and Keith collapsed. The official explanation was that he had flu. The real reason was the usual one. Brandy and barbiturates, culminating in a rush to Massachusetts General. This time, there was no Scot Halpin from Muscatine, Iowa, to save the night. We hadn’t got far enough into the gig to get away with it. We just walked off. The crowd was disappointed and the band was fed up with him. The next night, we were staying in New York. Keith was at the Navarro. I was at the Plaza with Heather. Word came through that he’d cut his foot badly in his suite. I remember saying to Heather, “He’s trying to destroy himself.” And I decided, in the middle of the night, to go along and see him.