Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  When it came to the name, I quietly pointed out that unless Pete and I had full ownership it would bring the curtain down on any future for the band.

  I also gave them my word that if they gave it to us for a small fee I would do everything in my power to make sure we’d work our way back to the top. This meant the royalties from the back catalog would keep coming and provide a heathy income for them in the future.

  Thankfully, they seemed to understand their position and that under the deal I offered them they had more to gain by keeping The Who going.

  This was the darkest time in the history of the band and I became very depressed by it all. By the time the week of the Teenage Cancer Trust shows at the Albert Hall arrived, I was cracking up. I had no headline act until, at the last minute, I called Eric Clapton.

  “What do you need, Rog?… Okay, I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you so much, Eric. You’re a good man.”

  When you have depression, you go outside and it can be a midsummer’s day with the bluest sky, but it’s as if you can’t find the dimmer switch to turn up the light. And it’s like that for days and days and days. The worst thing is that you go and see the doctor; the doctor diagnoses you and then gives you pills. That’s always the answer. I took those pills for a few days and I walked around like a zombie. It clearly wasn’t helping. It just made things worse. And I just thought, sod this. These are going to turn me into a pudding.

  So I chucked them out and threw myself into projects instead. I did things I would never have done in my life, anything to escape Britain. I filmed the Extreme History series for the History Channel across the United States. I did My Fair Lady at the Hollywood Bowl with John Lithgow. I played a crazy rock star mash-up of David Bowie and Alice Cooper in the comedy series Rude Awakenings with Lynn Redgrave. All these things helped take my mind off the chaos at home, but they didn’t help with the depression. They just postponed it. Every time I went back, the darkness returned.

  In the end, I took a friend’s advice and contacted the hypnotist and self-help guru Paul McKenna. Paul has made a very lucrative career from making big claims. He can make you thin. He can make you quit smoking. He can make you confident. But could he make my lights go back on? I had no idea, but I’m not skeptical about these things. I’ve used a lot of alternative medicines and therapies in my life and I reckon the Western world could learn a thing or two from Eastern medicine. Throwing drugs at the problem is not always the answer. So I went along to see him and he listened as I explained my situation.

  He got to the heart of it very quickly. We hadn’t been able to grieve after John’s death. We had just pushed on through that intense tour and then, only weeks after we’d got home, before we could process it all, Pete was arrested and all our lives got turned upside down. In the face of a sustained crisis your brain stops coping. According to Paul, it shuts down to protect your heart.

  There were times when my brain was telling me I couldn’t go on. The depression was just too intense. I could see no way of getting out of it. I became more and more miserable. So I’m not exaggerating when I say Paul McKenna saved me. He got me through that terrible year and I still use his tapes before I go onstage. You know who your friends are when you’re down. Paul was there for me. So was Eric, Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller, and Kelly Jones. So was Richard Desmond, the newspaper proprietor, who did everything he could to keep the charity money coming in when the chips were down.

  This is a memoir, not This Is Your Life, but I’m still going to use it to say thank you to all those people. The music business can be cutthroat. It can chew you up and spit you out, but those friends kept me going and they kept Teenage Cancer Trust going. Every March, I have to fill six or seven nights in a row at the Albert Hall. I have to find musicians and comedians who are willing to drop everything and come and play for nothing. That’s hard when you’re struggling anyway. It relies on goodwill and I’ll be forever grateful to all the guys who stepped up when I asked for help.

  Pete had to wait a long time to find his way out of his darkness. In May 2003, the charge that he’d downloaded photographs was dropped. They hadn’t found a single picture. He hadn’t been on the website. He hadn’t viewed any images. I’m sure if he had they would have done him. As he put it years later, when he finally felt able to talk to the press about it, “A forensic investigator found that I hadn’t entered the website, but nonetheless, by the time the charges came to be presented to me, I was exhausted.” He had admitted that he’d provided his credit card details right from the start, and that was enough to break the law, so he took that part of it on the chin.

  And in the end we did what we always did. We got back onstage. We were due to headline the Isle of Wight Festival in June 2004, and although I wasn’t nervous, it was obviously a big deal for Pete. He had changed. He’d become more humble and much more approachable. Even though he was innocent, he’d been shocked into it by the humiliation. And he needed to be out there and face the world. Which he did.

  The crowd that night was amazing. It was wonderful to get back out there and realize the nightmare was over, that our audience was still with us, that the music would go on for another few rounds at least. It’s easy to get things out of perspective when you’re caught up in the eye of a tabloid storm. It feels like the whole world is caving in but, for everyone else, it’s just a page in a newspaper that is quickly turned and then used to wrap your fish and chips. That night, no one jeered or whistled. It was our first festival gig since Pete’s arrest, our first in Britain since John had died, and our first time back at the Isle of Wight since 1970. And it felt great.

  Pete’s way of saying thanks came in the form of a song on Endless Wire. He handed me the demo tape for “You Stand By Me” and said, “I wrote this for you.”

  When I’m in trouble

  You stand by me

  When I see double

  You stand by me

  You take my side

  Against those who lied

  You take my side

  Gimme back my pride.

  It meant a lot for him to write that and say that. Of course, he later went on to say that he’d written it for Rachel, his girlfriend, now wife, and that was fine, too. She’d been there for him and she was very good for him. For us, it was simple. Brothers can squabble. They can fight. They can fall out. We’d done plenty of that over the years. But when the shit really hits the fan, you realize that your brother is your strongest ally. I always knew that and I think Pete has come to realize it, too. Come what may, I would stand up for him.

  And I had to do that again sooner than either of us would have wanted. It was 2006 and we were about to release the new album and set off on the new tour. The idea of doing promotion was tricky at the best of times, but after the last few years Pete could hardly be blamed for wanting to avoid the journalists altogether. We agreed to do one interview on Howard Stern’s radio show. We agreed because he promised not to bring up Pete’s arrest. He gave us his word.

  Of course, Howard hadn’t even finished introducing us before he brought it up. Pete stormed out. I ran after him and said, “Come on, Pete, you have to come back. You have to stand up for yourself. The Old Bill says you’re innocent. Say that.” But he couldn’t do it. He was in bits. He was all over the place. So I went back in there and I laid into Howard. I gave him an earful. I’m really glad I fought for Pete. And in 2012, Howard publicly apologized to me and Pete for being such a dickhead.

  Thank you, Howard. Apology accepted—we can all be dickheads. It’s just that some of us can be dickheads more often than others.

  chapter twenty

  I Hoped I’d Die

  We kicked off the Endless Wire tour on the Leeds Refectory stage in June 2006. The university had decided to put up a blue plaque commemorating our 1970 Live at Leeds gig—the one where I oversang—and Andy Kershaw, a former Leeds Uni social secretary, had asked Bill if we’d pop up and unveil it. And, while we were there, do a gig. You can laugh about
the plaque—we’ve been around so long, we are now a historical monument—but I felt quite proud. It’s good to have a legacy and it’s good to think we made our mark. The gig itself was too loud and, because they were filming it, too bright, but you can’t have everything, right?

  We set off happily on another elongated tour across Britain, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, France, Switzerland again for some reason, Austria, Spain, Canada, thirty US cities, back around Europe, back across the States again, and then, at the end of 2007, a one-off gig at Ellis Park, Johannesburg. From start to finish, it was a thirteen-month journey (with a few weeks off here and there) and, apart from the one disastrous night in Tampa, Florida, which I mentioned way back in chapter one, it all went without a hitch.

  Looking back on it now, it’s telling that we ended each night on that tour with “Tea & Theatre,” a simple little song from the Endless Wire album. For me, it summed up exactly how we felt. Where the two of us were in ourselves and where we were with our audience.

  A thousand songs

  Still smolder now,

  We play them as one,

  We’re older now,

  All of us sad,

  All of us free,

  Before we walk from this stage …

  That was it, exactly. It’s reflective, almost melancholy. We had been through a traumatic few years, but our music was still there … smoldering. We were beginning to rebuild. These days, we’re in a better place. We go out on “Pinball Wizard,” “See Me, Feel Me,” “Baba O’Riley,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” We finish with a bang. But, back then, it just felt right to close the show on a more intimate note.

  And despite the minimal promotion we broke even. Yes, this was a tour on which we didn’t lose money. It was also the first time we streamed the gigs on the Internet. How cutting edge of us, even though, with hindsight, that was probably the beginning of the end for a financially viable music industry. The Internet could have been a chance to make music, particularly new music, more accessible, but with it came the music-sharing sites, the biggest thieves in history. All the Internet has done for most musicians is rob them of their income. I don’t mind if you give away all of our music for free, as long as my bills are paid. But it doesn’t work like that. It might one day, but not yet. The way it is today, it’s very hard for anyone starting out in the business. We thought we had a hard time back in the sixties but at least we got paid … sometimes.

  Anyway, the tour was great. So great, we came back for more the next year and toured across America again. In 2006, we had got that blue plaque in Leeds. In 2008, we got the Kennedy Center Honor, traditionally awarded for “a lifetime of contributions to American culture through the performing arts.” We were the first rock band to make the grade and we were British. But that was okay. It felt like the completion of a circle. We’d grown up in postwar austerity. Our inspiration had come from American bands, from rhythm and blues. Our rebellion came from black America’s rebellion. Now we were in the White House, hanging out with the establishment. We were dignitaries. VIPs. Us. To be recognized in America was special. We could have stopped there and been pretty pleased with ourselves, but we just kept playing.

  * * *

  I do get asked, quite often, what a particular gig was like. What was it like at Woodstock? Wembley? The Railway Hotel in 1965? And, as I’ve said earlier, I usually find it quite hard to answer. If the crowd stretches to the back of the pub wall or all the way over the horizon, it really doesn’t make much difference to me. I don’t treat things differently even if the view is different. But the halftime spot at the Super Bowl in February 2010 does stick in the memory. You have a couple of minutes to create a stage at midfield. You then have twelve minutes to blow the bloody doors off. You then have another minute or two to get the hell off. It’s completely crazy. Any other gig, the crew has a day or two to set up, to sound-check, to make sure everything’s plugged in the right place. At the Super Bowl, if one lead is in the wrong socket, you’re screwed in front of seventy-four thousand football fans in the stadium and another hundred million on their sofas. (They record a safety track just in case—to this day, I don’t know if you got the live version or the safety because I’ve never listened to it.)

  So, of course, it’s rehearsed to within an inch of its life. When they invited us, I quite liked the idea of Miami in February. Nice to get a bit of sun. Of course, it was the coldest winter they’d had in years. All week, it was bloody cold and raining. We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed in a giant hangar with the hundreds of volunteer crew until they had got the assembly of the jigsaw circular stage down to a fine art.

  The day itself began glamorously enough with a police escort to Sun Life Stadium. And then we were dumped in a dressing room smelling of jockstraps to wait out the first half.

  Five minutes before you’re due on, you’re waiting in the tunnel. The players rush off, the volunteers rush on, and this is the moment when I try to slow everything down. John McVicar told me that before he went in to rob a bank, he’d be sitting in the car telling himself, over and over, get a grip, get a grip. Because otherwise you’d lose your bottle. I wasn’t going to rob a bank but walking out onto the Super Bowl stage also gets the pulse racing. I wasn’t nervous. It’s just a process. You slow it all down. People don’t realize—or I hope they don’t realize—just how much communication goes on, particularly at the start of a set. Between you and the other members of the band and with the sound guy, the in-ear monitor guy—it’s an intense time. Even in a normal show, there are sixty people working to bring that night off. If you’ve slowed yourself down, it helps to make all the minute adjustments to get it right.

  At no point did I think, “Shit, there are millions of people watching this.” There is no time for reflection. I sang the whole thing and then I was off, the stage was dismantled, and the Saints won the game.

  * * *

  The Quadrophenia tour in 2012–13 almost didn’t happen. Which would have meant our fiftieth anniversary tour wouldn’t have happened. Which would have meant it was all over before we really got back to the joy of being in a band that’s firing on all cylinders. The last five years have been a complete pleasure. The band has been great. Home life has been great. I’ve had time to spend with my grandchildren—more time, perhaps, than I got to spend with my own daughters. But it could have been different.

  In 2011, I sang Tommy at the Albert Hall with my band. As I’ve said, each year, I have to organize six or seven gigs in one spring week for Teenage Cancer Trust. And it’s quite a challenge finding people who are not just on the road but also have a gap in their schedule. That year, after a lot of hustling, I was still one short so I decided to fill it myself. To my genuine surprise, it was a sellout. I’m not being coy here. It wasn’t The Who. It was me and my band. No Pete. No Zak. But people still came and we had a fantastic night.

  Off the back of that, my little band went on tour and, for the first time in a long time, everything ran like clockwork. People turned up on time. People did what they said they were going to do. Lovely.

  This was not how things were with The Who. Although we were enjoying the music again, the grind of touring was hard because people were effing about. If one person’s late for a hotel transfer, then you’re all waiting. And if that happens at every point of the day, you spend your whole bloody time waiting. And it’s not that I’m an impatient man, but I hate lateness. I hate wasting time. If we arrange to meet at a certain time and you’re half an hour late, then that’s half an hour of my life I’m never going to get back. If you have a proper excuse—you got stuck in the lift, you fell down a mine shaft—then fine. But if you just couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed, then not fine. I enjoy my life. I don’t have a lot of it to spare. On tour, there’s enough schlepping already without the extra hassle of standing around in hotel lobbies or departure lounges because one guy couldn’t get his act together.

  So when Pete said we were going to do Quadrophenia the way we
’d always done it with a band that couldn’t get out of bed on time, I just said no. We’d met to discuss it with Robert and Bill. Pete was adamant, I was adamant, and that was it. Another tour that wouldn’t happen because neither of us would budge.

  I remember going off from that meeting feeling quite happy. I honestly thought that would be it because it was different from all the other times we’d stopped. I was enjoying my solo projects. I didn’t need to carry on. Why put myself through months and months of grief? And we’d done Quadrophenia in 1996 and I felt it wasn’t as good as it could have been. Why just repeat that?

  The very first time Pete started explaining all the many complex layers of Quadrophenia in 1972, I clung on to one fundamental idea. There were four guys in the band who represented four facets of the character. Quadrophenia. Simple. When a band is firing on all cylinders, that is how it feels. You’re jamming, you don’t know where it’s going next but when you go, you go, instinctively, together, like a flock of starlings.

  The 1996 version was not like that at all. There were no starlings. There was just a car that kept slipping back to first gear every time it tried to move into fifth. There was a lot of extra stuff that obscured the simple concept that had stuck in my brain all those years ago.

  “If you trust me, I know we can do it in a different way.” That’s what I said to Pete but he said no. We’ll do it with the same personnel and the same format as before. And he walked out.

  Three hours later, Bill called with surprising news. Pete says he’ll do it your way. I had a free hand. Incredible.

  Over the next few months, I worked with Rob Lee, a brilliant friend who did our website. He had brought in Colin Payne to edit the Tommy stage videos with a bunch of students from Middlesex University. On Quadrophenia, they stuck with my simple vision and the whole show developed around the four of us singing on film to our older selves onstage. Colin and Rob helped me get to the heart of what it had always been about. We ended up with a show that felt modern and relevant. That’s always been Pete’s skill: to write music that never ages. But sometimes he needs help telling the story in a way that everyone else can understand.