Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  * * *

  In the end, the band got back on the road again because of a con man and a large bag of cash. We didn’t know he was a con man at the time. All we knew was that an agent had called the office to say that Michael Fenne, the CEO of dot-com company Pixelon, wanted us to play a show in Vegas in October 1999. He was a huge Who fan. He’d be honored. And he’d pay us two million quid.

  The deal came with one big string attached. One of us would have to go to Cannes to publicize Pixelon at some tech event. And, of course, the one of us would have to be me. So off I flew with Harvey Goldsmith and a whole file of information to present convincingly. You’ll be astonished to hear that I am not an IT expert. I know very little about computers or the Internet. I know nothing at all about how they actually work. But what the hell? I’m an actor. I can learn lines.

  My talk at the conference lasted about twenty-five minutes. I explained how Pixelon’s software would enable users to stream films via the Internet. Of course, these days, with fiber optics, that’s just normal. But in 1999, you still had to “dial up” to get on the Internet. The idea of downloading anything more than a couple of short emails was revolutionary. Or so it said in my briefing notes.

  I think I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. No one booed. But then came a surprise Q and A. That would have been the time to fake a stroke, but I’d spent the last few hours listening to all the salespeople jabbering on and, frankly, they all sounded like they were winging it, too. This was the height of the dot-com bubble. It was a time when you could sell anything to do with technology, no matter how ridiculous, as long as you sounded convincing.

  Somewhere in the briefing notes, there was a section on “band widths.” Anything to do with bands—even the width of them—I could spiel. So I blagged it and I got away with it. There was even a round of applause (maybe they were just being polite). And then we all flew to Vegas to earn a fast buck.

  A few weeks after the Vegas job, the truth came out. The whole thing had been a hoax. There was no such technology. Worse, Fenne was not Fenne. He was David Kim Stanley, a convicted con artist and fugitive who’d been on the run since 1996. He’d raised more than twenty-eight million dollars for his venture and spent sixteen million dollars of it on the free launch party. It wasn’t just us. The lineup included Tony Bennett, the Brian Setzer Orchestra, the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Cole, and KISS. And we all got paid. It seems Stanley just wanted to throw the biggest ever free party for rock fans and his own mates. The strangest thing of all was that Stanley, aka Fenne, the world’s biggest Who fan, never showed his face at our gig. Maybe he was wearing a disguise. Maybe he wasn’t the world’s biggest Who fan after all.

  Still, that gig and the two we agreed to do on the back of it for Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit in California brought us back together again. It was the first time since 1983 that we’d played as a five-piece. We had Zak on drums and John “Rabbit” Bundrick on keyboards. And we were playing the hits. For the first time since 1966, we were opening with “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere.” We did “Pinball Wizard,” “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “The Kids Are Alright,” and “My Generation.” We were another step closer to where we’d been however many decades earlier.

  * * *

  Toward the end of 1999 I had a call from Bobby Pridden. “Cyd,” he said (he’s called me that ever since I found him and the roadies broken down sixty miles from a gig in Newcastle in 1969 and flagged down a Cyd Transport flatbed truck to take the gear the rest of the way), “John’s in trouble again.”

  John was the Ox onstage, stoic and unemotional. Offstage, he was extravagant. Even a two-million-dollar gig in Vegas wouldn’t keep him going for long. He lived like Elvis and it never seemed to bother him that he didn’t have the income of Elvis.

  His Graceland was Quarwood, a fifty-five-room Victorian Gothic pile in forty-two acres of deepest Gloucestershire. It was approached, as a real estate agent might say, by a long driveway and an entrance with stone lions on plinths. The first thing to note is that there were two cottages on the property a little way from the main house. His mother, Queenie, lived in one with his stepfather, Gordon, whom John had hated ever since he’d moved in with Queenie. Right outside the kitchen back window was a fenced-off chicken run. Of all the possible places to keep chickens on those fifty-two acres of land, it seemed like a strange place to settle on.

  “A bit smelly and noisy to have outside your mum’s window, eh, John?” I asked him one visit. “Why don’t you move the chickens somewhere they won’t bother anyone?”

  “They love it there and Gordon hates chickens,” he replied with a smile. As I said, John had a spiteful side. He loved getting revenge.

  The second thing was Quarwood itself. In the grand hallway you were greeted by a regiment of suits of armor. From the wrought-iron cantilevered staircase, John had hung a life-size Quasimodo from a rope. If you survived the entrance, you’d end up in this grand kitchen–dining room, which he’d made from five rooms knocked through. The walls were lined with bespoke walnut dressers and on every shelf and picture rail he’d hung these really tacky limited-edition plates depicting scenes from the American Revolution, Jane Austen novels, and the reign of Queen Victoria. He must have had about five thousand plates in his collection. You needed a drink after getting through all that and, fortunately, he had a large bar area filled with the stuffed marlin and swordfish he’d caught whenever he was doing his Hemingway impression. He’d even gone to the trouble of putting one of those battery-powered moving hands in the mouth of a shark. He kept skeletons in some of the bedrooms in case anyone was feeling too relaxed as they turned in for the night. It was like the Hammer House of Horror crossed with the foyer of a Vegas casino.

  The suits of armor were reproductions from Harrods. The plates were from Harrods. In fact, almost all the stuff was from Harrods, a shop I’ve been determined to stay out of for my entire life. I’d like to have it on my gravestone, Here lies Roger Daltrey. Died and never set foot in Harrods. John felt differently. He liked everyone in the village to see the Harrods van coming through the gates. Even when the money ran out, even when his old employers at the Inland Revenue came calling with a very large bill indeed, he didn’t stop shopping there. It was one of several bad habits he’d picked up playing the extravagant rock star.

  He was an alcoholic and he had a good nose for hoovering up whatever was left of the party. And, by the end of the nineties, it had all caught up with him. So I went to see Pete at his home in Richmond and asked him to help out. We should get the band together. Properly.

  Pete wasn’t sure. He was an addict himself. He knew the risks. If we helped John out, we risked becoming his enablers. Maybe tough love would work better. In this case, I was convinced it wouldn’t. John would never change. But after talking for two hours, Pete still wasn’t sure so I left him to chew over it.

  The chewing worked. He came back and said he wanted to do a huge tour. Thirty dates. Forty. Bigger than anything we’d done for a long time. I was happy not only because I needed the cash and John needed the cash, but because this is what I do. All the other stuff, all the other variations on performing, never matched up to the unadulterated joy of being in The Who.

  So off we went into a whole new millennium on a proper “Hello—we’re back” tour. I don’t think we actually called it that but that was what it was. We started in Tinley Park, Illinois, and four months and thirty-seven gigs later we ended up at the Albert Hall in November for two charity shows for Teenage Cancer Trust. This was a charity both Pete and I had been patrons of since its inception in 1990. We were back like I always thought we would be, ever since I decided to call it quits in 1983. After all the experimenting, it turned out that the original format—a rock band playing rock music—worked. Who would have guessed?

  chapter nineteen

  Brothers

  In the days immediately after the Twin Towers came down on September 11, 2001, the Robin Hood Foundation called to
say it was putting on a show at Madison Square Garden for all the first responders and their families. This time, there was no protracted discussion. Of course we’d be there. There was no question.

  “Great. We’ll send a jet.”

  “Send me a United Airlines ticket,” I replied. Because fuck them. I’m not giving an inch. I’ll be there and I’ll fly with an airline the terrorists attacked.

  The dilemma was what to play. The overriding emotion at the time was total shell shock. How can you possibly come up with a set list for that?

  For once, Pete had the straightforward solution. He just said let’s do what we do. Let’s play rock. And he was right. It was the only way to do it. So we went out and we played “Who Are You,” “Baba O’Riley,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

  We’ve been lucky enough to play a lot of special venues. We’ve headlined all the great festivals and walked out on all the biggest stages. In 2010, we played the halftime show at Super Bowl XLIV to a television audience of one hundred million. In 2012, billions watched us close the London Olympics. I’ve always said you treat each event, no matter how momentous, as just another gig. But that night at Madison Square Garden was different. It was special.

  We played to a whole sea of uniforms—mostly fire department but thousands of cops and paramedics as well. They’d got in with tickets and, if they didn’t have tickets, the uniform was the ticket (as well as a free pass at the bar). The place was packed, the beer was flowing, and it was raw grief and raw defiance in one extraordinarily intense burst of emotion. And it was hard to get through, hard not to let that emotion completely overwhelm you because, in between all the firemen at the front, they had some of the children of the guys who hadn’t made it out. They were wearing their dads’ helmets.

  Off the back of that night we decided we would tour again in 2002. It just felt like the right thing to do for the band. We played a few gigs in England at the start of the year and I remember feeling optimistic about another big American road trip. We’d wasted so many years doing nothing. Why waste any more? The world had changed. It had become darker. It needed music to heal itself. I needed to get back on the road.

  After rehearsing in London, we flew to California at the end of June, ready for our first gig in Vegas. The day before the gig, I was in Los Angeles having lunch with my daughters in this tiny little Korean restaurant in the Valley. I couldn’t have been happier. I had my family with me. I had the band. But then the phone rang and it was Pete asking where I was. I told him and then he wanted to know if I was sitting down. I asked what’s up and he just said it.

  “John’s just died.”

  “Oh.”

  John had heart problems and in those last years it was beginning to show. He had a pallor to him, the pallor you have if you’re still starting the day with a brandy for breakfast. But even the obvious visual signs that all was not well didn’t make him slow down. He was unconditional about how he wanted to live his life, and fuck you if you didn’t like it.

  So he would have liked the way he went. He’d gone to bed the night before with a nice lady and whatever magic powders he had to hand, and he’d never woken up. He died of a heart attack in room 658 of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas. If they’d put a glass case round his bed with him still in it, he would have been delighted. He would have thought, this is exactly where I deserve to be. Rock and roll.

  His timing was terrible, though. Checking out one day before a huge tour, he had left us well and truly in the shit. There was no time to grieve. No time to think about what, if anything, we could have done differently. I went over and saw Pete and I knew we had to be a bit clever. We didn’t know what had happened, but we were pretty sure they’d find drugs in him. And we were looking at twenty-seven shows across the United States and Canada. Of course we were insured, but the insurance would have been null and void if we’d canceled. That’s pretty high up the list of exclusions. No payout if Class As are involved.

  Far too soon, Pete and I had to have the conversation. We’d survived Keith. Could we survive this? We’d have to! Once again, it wouldn’t be the same but the music was good enough. We could do it together. The two of us. We just had to knuckle down and get through these shows. All twenty-seven of them. We had no option. You have to understand what it’s like the day before you start a tour. You’re in the red. You’ve paid for the rehearsals, the insurance, the rentals, the crew, everything, and you’re in the hole to the tune of a few million quid. You’re as indebted as you ever want to be. You pay off the debt through the tour. The weight lifts. The overwhelming sense of impending financial calamity fades away and, only in the last few shows of thirty or forty do you finally make it into the black. If you’re lucky. That’s the economics of a tour. It’s all on us—the three of us. Or now just two. So we had to carry on. We moved the two opening shows to the end of the tour, but only three days later we would walk out onstage and we’d perform.

  The same day we found out John was gone, we managed to get hold of Pino Palladino. It wasn’t like trying to find a replacement for Moon. By now, the die was fixed. John had changed the way the bass was played. He’d established his own neoclassical art form. He’d brought the bass guitar into the limelight. Pino was a master. He could channel John and channel the Who vibe. We had three days to rehearse and on July 1, 2002, we walked out onstage at the Hollywood Bowl.

  It was emotional. It took a lot out of us. That sense that you have no choice but to perform, that you have to find the energy, is hard. We were upset. We’d lost John. It took everything just to walk onto the stage. Each performance teetered on the brink of the abyss and Pete and I had to fight each night to keep it all in check. And, of course, we ground through those dates; we drove through with the intensity of a band fighting the darkness. The audiences felt it. They felt the intensity and the anger and the emotion, and it was a good tour. It might even have been our best tour. Despite everything, we were back on top, playing to twenty to thirty thousand people a night. When I focused on that, it felt great.

  Then, suddenly, at the beginning of October, I was home and I had time to breathe. That’s when it hit me. Once the crisis was over and I was back in Sussex, looking out across the hills, thinking about what had just happened, that’s when I struggled. John had checked out like the rock star he was. For everyone else, he was a story. For me it was real. It hadn’t been real for four months and now it was. No one around me could understand that. They hadn’t been there. They didn’t know what it had been like. On more positive days, I could take solace in the fact that at least we were okay. Me and Pete and the music. That was enough. And then, a few weeks later, we lost that, too.

  * * *

  On January 13, 2003, I opened the newspaper to discover that Pete had been arrested for accessing child pornography. He’d put his credit card details for access to a site that turned out to be part of an FBI sting.

  The first thing I did was to call up his brothers. I knew what the news was doing to me and Heather so I called Paul and Simon, who had become like brothers to me. I asked if they were okay and of course they weren’t. It was a complete nightmare.

  I didn’t call Pete for three days and then I saw a photograph of him getting out of the back of a police car. He didn’t have the standard-issue blanket over his head. He wasn’t trying to hide. In fact, he was looking directly at the cameras. I knew that look. When he has something difficult to say, he looks down, but here he was, fronting up. Right then, I knew that he hadn’t done anything. He was innocent.

  I called him and asked what the hell he was doing. And then I tested him. Couldn’t he have said someone else got hold of his credit card? And he said, “No, you don’t understand. I did it. I put my credit card details in. I wanted to find out where the money went.”

  I told him he was a stupid, arrogant twat but I knew he was telling the truth. He’d been on at the government for several years. He was furious that his young son could access pornog
raphy so easily. And the response was always the same. There’s nothing we can do. One site closes down, another one pops up. So he concocted this plan to follow the money. He thought he could prove that the credit card companies were taking money from child pornographers. I didn’t know enough about computers to know if it was a good plan. All I know is that it was a horrendous time. Pete was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the press. They didn’t know his history. They don’t know how much work he does for charities supporting abused people. They don’t know how much of his life was tied up in the abuse he endured as a kid. It’s in Tommy, but everyone drew their own conclusions.

  The investigation took months. Pete had about thirty computers and they went through every one of them with a fine-tooth comb. And for that entire period it was as if a huge dumper truck of shit had been poured over everything. All our lives, including our families. Everything we’d done. Everything we’d achieved.

  And in the middle of this we had John’s family asking for their share of the profit from the tour. There was also the issue of the ownership of the band name. It would have been impossible for us to go on into any kind of future having to pay John’s estate to use The Who, the name we’d always called ourselves.

  It was left to me to meet with John’s mum, Queenie, and his only son, Christopher, to sort out the mess. We met on neutral ground at my old mate Nobby the Fiberglass Kid’s house in Chiswick, but it didn’t make it any easier to sit opposite them and tell them there wasn’t going to be any money from the tour. If anything, the estate should have been thankful to Pete and myself for fulfilling the contract. If we hadn’t, they would have had the pants sued off them from all sides.