That particular night in Denmark there had been crowd trouble. A bottle was thrown at the singer of one of the support acts. The Who had only been on stage for a few minutes when the audience got up from their metal chairs, overwhelmed the inadequate security and invaded the stage. When the band withdrew and the show was halted the audience picked up their chairs and flung them at the stage. Fire hoses were turned on the crowd. By the time the audience had retreated, eye-witnesses said the hall looked as if it had been trampled by wild elephants. The trouble spread into the streets around the venue where irate longhairs smashed shop windows and pitched bicycles into fountains.
Penned in their dressing room, the band dealt with adversity in their customary way. By taking it out on each other. Daltrey, the only member of the group who didn’t take speed, blamed their misfortune on their over-indulgence in pills. What he really meant was the pills made the rest of the band unbearable. To drive home the point he took Moon’s substantial supply and tipped it down the lavatory. Temporarily emboldened by amphetamine sulphate and deprived of the drums on which he took out most of his frustrations, Moon launched himself at Daltrey. This was ill-advised. Neither was a big man, but whereas the drummer generally relied on inciting others to follow through on things he started, the singer could take care of himself. He was the only one of the first wave of British rock stars to cultivate a reputation for being hard, and he had the frame to back up that reputation. He punched Moon. It was only the intervention of security men that prevented the drummer from sustaining further damage and being hospitalized.
In the Who’s dressing room that night something snapped, and there didn’t seem to be any way of mending it. Nevertheless, like exemplary professionals the band fulfilled the terms of their contract by playing the second show in the other venue and then returned to Britain. On the way back it was agreed that Daltrey was no longer in the band.
In 1965 the Who weren’t the only group having this kind of scrap. A few months earlier the Kinks had had a set-to at the Capitol Cinema in Cardiff. On that evening Dave Davies arrived sporting a black eye he’d sustained in a recent altercation with the drummer Mick Avory. That night Dave and his brother Ray took the stage from one side while the rhythm section came from the other, like negotiators arriving for difficult talks on the Korean border. Following the opening song, the reliably incendiary ‘You Really Got Me’, Dave Davies walked over to the drummer, spat in his direction, and kicked his drum kit apart. Roused to a fresh level of fury, Avory seized his high-hat cymbal, advanced on the gaptoothed popinjay in the hunting jacket and crowned him with the heavy brassware with sufficient force to make at least one onlooker suspect he might actually have killed him.
In the course of 1965 a sourness seemed to have entered the beat music bloodstream. There was a hint of jadedness in the air which it was possible to detect in some of the year’s great singles: in Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, the Beatles’ ‘Help!’, the Kinks’ ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’, the Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ and the Rolling Stones’ ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’. The Who’s first album, My Generation, released at the end of 1965, was a carnival of spite. It was such a furious assertion of the rights of man, and only man, that it makes you wonder how its ideas had occurred to a bunch of boys only just old enough to legally drink. Most of its songs were about shrugging off the attentions of women clearly intent on putting their brand on you. As a matter of fact most of these women were scarcely more than schoolgirls. Daltrey had already been forced to secretly marry his sixteen-year-old girlfriend when she became pregnant. Three months after the wedding his new father-in-law turned up just as the band were about to take the stage, pulled Daltrey outside and punched him. Meanwhile Moon was spending every spare moment down in Bournemouth where he was trying to get his teenage love Kim to come across. The songs on that first album were marbled with misanthropy and misogyny but delivered with such panache that they got away with it. They had unique elements: Daltrey’s genius for singing even the most far-fetched lyric as though it had just fizzed across his synapses; Pete Townshend’s guitar flourishes and solos that sounded like electrical malfunctions; Entwistle’s clambering, baroque bass which was busy enough to serve as the lead instrument; and through it all Keith Moon’s drums, which sounded as though they were either on the way to a fire or had just escaped from one. The Who, as everybody realized, were unique. They also appeared to be coming apart.
Roger Daltrey was out of the Who for just two weeks, during which time he slept in the back of the band’s van. This was a perfect metaphor for where his life choices had led him. At the age of twenty-one he had been ejected by the two families in his life, the wife and child on one hand and the band on the other. In those two weeks the Who’s management gave some serious thought to how they might reshuffle the pack to come up with a better group or groups. They eventually decided this would be impossible so a meeting was called and Daltrey was invited to stay in the band provided he mended his ways. He had to accept that he wasn’t in charge and couldn’t expect to tell the other members of the group how to carry on. The rational argument for how the group should continue to function had been roundly defeated. They wouldn’t get rid of the troublesome member of the band because they intuited that it was the troublesome member who provided their spark. Daltrey, the stolid, reasonable one, had to swallow his pride and agree. He knew he had no choice. As he was later to say, ‘If I lost the band I was dead.’ Townshend recognized that they had already created something more powerful than themselves. ‘It doesn’t matter if you get your own way so long as the band keeps going,’ he said.
It says something for the streak of anarchy running through the Who that in the event of a face-off between sobriety and chaos, they chose chaos. Faced with a choice between reorganizing the group so that it ran more smoothly and clinging on by their fingernails to the unsafe vehicle that had brought them this far, they took the latter course. Given a choice between a good lead singer who had put in the hard yards to establish the group and a drummer who seemed to be elevating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder into a branch of the performing arts, they sided with the drummer. Having done this, they released their biggest and most radical record.
In 1965 a hit single quickly brought the band to the attention of a huge general audience. If you appeared on TV shows like Top of the Pops, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Ready Steady Go! in the UK or Shindig!, American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show in the USA – and everybody who got the chance did – you immediately became so famous it was impossible to walk down the street. For beat group musicians who had been rattling round in the back of vans and playing in front of initiates and ace faces, this sudden emergence into a world of fame, acclaim and ready cash was difficult to negotiate. In many cases they had entered the van years as kids from modest, often poor backgrounds and, following a period of profound disorientation and drug use, then been dropped off in a strange old world where they were suddenly expected to behave like young gentlemen about town.
When in October of that year the Beatles, who only three years earlier had been poked and prodded by a London Establishment who couldn’t believe they were entirely real, were driven to no less an address than Buckingham Palace to be installed as Members of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen, it suddenly felt as if the hooligans of yesterday were the national heroes of today and were expected to behave as such. Pictorials in magazines like Fabulous and Rave featured these young princes making cups of tea in posh apartments they clearly saw only rarely. As a breed they were homeless, rootless and restless, waiting only for the next call to get in the back of the van, the van that gave some purpose to their lives.
In 1965 Pete Townshend was installed in a flat in Belgravia, an address no musician with a couple of hits would be able to afford in the twenty-first century. He lived for a time with the Who’s manager Kit Lambert. Lambert and his business partner Chris Stamp raised funds
from the banks purely on the basis of their business address. The act of being the Who had to be maintained twenty-four hours a day. In interviews Townshend claimed to be living a lavish lifestyle, boasting about cars he didn’t own and saying he spent £50 a week on clothes, despite having to borrow a jacket for the photo accompanying the piece. Just for show he had bought a 1936 Packard hearse for £30 and parked it outside his flat. The vehicle soon offended traditional Belgravia residents and was towed away by the authorities; some said it was the Queen Mother who didn’t like seeing the hearse because it reminded her of the funeral of her late husband. In a characteristic case of elevating a fit of pique into a matter of principle, Townshend dashed off his anthem ‘My Generation’ in response, with its stammering vocal and hostage-to-fortune line about hoping to die before getting old. It was to 1965 what Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ had been to 1955, an almost hilarious expulsion of youthful energy, this time cloaked in avant-garde seriousness. ‘My Generation’ became not just a big hit. It was also the defining song of the group and a token of their ongoing commitment to following chaos wherever it might take them. The record climaxed with a furious tantrum from – who else? – their drummer.
The very same things that had made Keith Moon an impossible child made him the perfect rock star. He was hopeless at school and left at the age of fourteen. Moon had such a need to be admired and noticed that it could only be satisfied by being the centre of attention all the time. Not all his school friends remembered his clowning with fondness. Some saw it as a form of bullying. Some felt he was on his way to prison. It was only by becoming a rock star that he could avoid having to grow up. He didn’t want to grow up. At the age of seventeen he had already bought his own gold lamé suit because he felt that this was what rock stars did. He had ‘I am the greatest’ stencilled across his bass drum case. Moon wanted the world on his own terms. Being a rock star gave him the means of doing it. As a civilian he would inevitably have to find a way of maturing, fitting in with other people and curbing his excesses. If he became a rock star he wouldn’t have to do any such thing. As ‘Moony’ he was licensed to do all the things Keith Moon would never be permitted to do.
With Daltrey back on board the Who immediately embarked on a visit to Scotland. They were due to play the Kinema Ballroom in Dunfermline and the city hall in Perth. On the way, Moon asked the new tour manager Richard Cole to stop. Moon disappeared into a shop. He emerged with some fertilizer and a large quantity of sugar. When they arrived at their five-star hotel, the drummer disappeared to his room. In due course Cole’s afternoon tea was disturbed by the sound of an explosion from the room next door. He came out into the hall, and through the smoke and dust materialized the distinctive figure of Keith Moon. He appeared to be seared around the edges but elated at heart, his large round eyes blinking delightedly like a cartoon character who has lit the fuse of a fizzing bomb and lived to tell the tale.
This conflagration inevitably meant the group had to move out of their nice hotel and into a manifestly inferior one down the road. That appeared to be the price the Who had to pay for being the Who they had decided to be. Entwistle and Townshend grumbled. Daltrey kept his mouth shut. The die had been cast.
1965 PLAYLIST
The Rolling Stones, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’
The Byrds, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’
The Beatles, ‘Help!’
The Lovin’ Spoonful, ‘Do You Believe In Magic’
The Who, ‘I Can’t Explain’
Bob Dylan, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’
The Kinks, ‘See My Friends’
Otis Redding, Otis Blue
The McCoys, ‘Hang On Sloopy’
The Beatles, Rubber Soul
1 OCTOBER 1966
REGENT STREET POLYTECHNIC, LONDON
A new sheriff in town
A POPULAR URBAN myth is that the reason ring-necked parakeets are to be found in the parks of London today is because they were brought by Jimi Hendrix in an effort to repaint the dun city in the colours of paradise.
When the real James Marshall Hendricks landed at Heathrow airport in the early morning of Saturday, 24 September he was twenty-three years old. All he possessed was one change of clothes, including a recently purchased Burberry raincoat, and a jar of face cream which he used to combat his acne. Since he didn’t have a work permit his guitar was carried into the country by a member of his new management team, a bunch of apparently well-connected Britishers who had promised back in New York to make something happen for his career. This was something nobody in the United States had managed to do since he’d begun playing professionally eight years earlier.
The key person in the new management team was Chas Chandler. Chas had played bass with the Animals, the Newcastle rhythm and blues group that never graduated from a string of hit singles to the same long-playing El Dorado as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Animals’ recordings had been handled by Mickie Most. Their business affairs had been handled by Mike Jeffery. Both were clever men, far too clever to worry too much about whether the members of the band made any money or not. Realizing that a sturdy aldermanic figure like himself had no future as a rock star, Chas was planning to get out of the band in order to find and manage talent. He was going to do this in partnership with the aforementioned Jeffery. Better the devil he knew.
Chas had found his first client, Jimmy Hendricks, playing in New York’s Greenwich Village. He had been steered in his direction by Linda Keith, who was a girlfriend of Keith Richards. She knew of Chas’s plans and told him this guitarist would be worth seeing. Chas went. He was quite impressed. What clinched it was the fact that in his five-song act, alongside Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’, Hendricks, who at the time was playing as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, covered a song called ‘Hey Joe’. Chandler was fixated on getting somebody to record a hit version of this song, a less than judgemental account of domestic violence, and now here he was faced with this guy who didn’t even have to be persuaded. Plus he looked good and played the guitar with his teeth. How could he lose?
Jimmy had come from a chaotic family background in Seattle, Washington, far away from the heartlands of the blues. The first tune he learned to play all the way through on the guitar was Duane Eddy’s ‘Peter Gunn’. He walked into an army recruiting office in 1961 in order to avoid going to prison for stealing a car. Thus he found himself in the 101st Airborne, who flung young men out of planes and pointed them towards gunfire. Hendricks should have had the foresight to realize he wasn’t cut out for this. He wrote home from Ford Ord, California asking his father to send the one thing that might stop him losing his mind, his guitar. Even though this was in the short period between the Korean and Vietnam wars, when US troops were not regularly in harm’s way, Hendricks was sufficiently keen to escape to have pretended to the authorities that he had all sorts of disqualifying conditions up to and including homosexuality. When he was actually discharged in 1962 the only trade he appeared to have picked up was that of a musician. He had built the beginnings of a name for himself playing to fellow troops. Now his intention was to take that into the outside world.
It wasn’t easy. Over the next four years he was at the bottom of the food chain on the most gruelling treadmill a young musician could be on, the chitlin circuit. Many of the circuit’s venues were in states that preferred to act as though Civil Rights legislation had never happened. Jimmy took whatever work he could get, playing back-up for Slim Harpo, Carla Thomas, Ironing Board Sam and anybody who’d have him. Even at this low point in his career there were two poles to Jimmy’s magnetism: the men admired his playing, the women admired him.
He graduated to playing with bigger names such as the Marvelettes, Curtis Mayfield, the Isley Brothers (the night the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show he watched with the Isleys) and Little Richard. In due course the latter claimed that the guitarist took a lot of his style from him. All were tough bosses. They were believe
rs in polish and professionalism and fiercely jealous of their limelight. Jimmy played in bands where you could get fired for having different-coloured shoe laces. He played in bands that would can you for not wearing your cufflinks correctly. Little Richard would have no compunction whatsoever about throwing you off the bus in the middle of Gutbucket County if you wore a prettier shirt than the one he had on. All of them would assuredly get rid of you for repeated acts of upstaging. Over the period of his time on the chitlin circuit and further scuffling up and down the eastern seaboard with everybody from the Isley Brothers to King Curtis, Hendricks won a great reputation as a player. He had another, slightly less enviable one – as a show-stealer.
Settling in New York in August 1965, he bought Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, which suggested he was thinking beyond the traditional parameters of the chitlin circuit. In Harlem, he complained, he never fitted in. He never felt like one of the brothers. Instead he headed for Greenwich Village and the Cafe Wha?, the same place Dylan had targeted on his arrival in New York four years earlier. There he started to put together an act. This already featured ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Shotgun’ and ‘Wild Thing’. Lots of people saw him play during that time. Many were impressed. The guitarists among them were intimidated. Bob Dylan’s guitar player Mike Bloomfield saw him and said that he didn’t wish to pick up a guitar for the next year. And still nobody took him under their wing. It’s not impossible that this was because of the colour of his skin.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 11