by Jim Shepard
After Tommy came out he said to a BBC interviewer, “Where did ‘See me, feel me, touch me’ come from? It came from a four-and-a-half-year-old in a fucking unlocked bedroom in a house with a madwoman. That’s where it came from.”
WE MET ROGER when we were thirteen. He beat up a friend of ours and Pete shouted that he was a dirty fighter because he’d kicked the boy when he was down. Roger came over to us and said, “Who called me a dirty fighter?” And Pete said, “I didn’t.” And Roger said, “Yes you did.” And he took off his belt and whipped Pete across the face with the buckle. We should’ve taken it as a sign.
Every time he came up to us in the corridor at school we thought, “Oh my God, what’s he going to do now?” He was a horrible, horrible boy. A real kind of spiv. And then one day he stopped us and said, “I hear you play the guitar.”
He was the balls of the band when we started out. He ran things the way he wanted. If you argued with him you got a bunch of fives.
He was a shit singer at first, but nobody needed a singer in those days anyway. What was needed was somebody who could fight, and that was Roger.
We listened to records and copied what we could. We rehearsed together in the front room of Pete’s house. He had a good guitar that he’d paid for himself with a paper route. Our rehearsals never went well. None of us had much talent. A month or so of that and his grandmother came in shouting, “Turn that bloody racket down!” And Pete said, “I’ll do better than that,” and smashed his guitar against the wall. A hideous big cuckoo clock pitched from a nail from the impact. He bashed it to smithereens with the remnants of his guitar while we stood there. The little wooden cuckoo ended up atop my foot. He said, “Now will you fucking get out of my life?” and she stomped out.
The three of us stood about looking at the wreckage, and Roger said, “What now?” When Pete didn’t answer, I said, “Another paper route, I think.”
Someone at Philips offered a record deal if we dropped our drummer, because he was too old: thirty-six. Keith was there and said, “I can do better than him.” At his audition he broke the drum pedal and high hat and put a hole in the skin. “I’m hired, aren’t I?” he asked when he finished, and saw us all looking at him. We met Kim a year later in the Disc A Go Go in Bournemouth.
Nights he wasn’t home I phoned her, but couldn’t bring myself to speak. “Oooohhh,” I’d say, holding the receiver to my chest. “Owwwwww. Uuunnnrrh.”
“Sod off,” she’d say, after a moment, and hang up.
NO ONE REMEMBERS where the name came from. Maybe a guy who’d been a friend of Pete’s. The Who: it made people think twice, and worked well on posters because it was so short and printed up big.
PETE’S NORMAL STATE when awake was also frustration, and back then it was particularly hard. There were a lot of brilliant young players around. Beck was around; Roger first saw him in a band called the Triads or the Tridents or something and came back and said there was this incredible young guitar player. Clapton was around. Page. So Pete was morose that he couldn’t manage all that flash stuff. So he just started getting into feedback. And he expressed himself—as he put it—physically. I always thought of it as making up visually for what he couldn’t play. He got the windmill bit from watching Keith Richards warm up backstage.
CHARLIE WATTS said that the first time he came to hear us, he looked at our drummer and thought, My God, that guy’s not doing the same number. All those mad fills. Then he realized that our Keith had left the backbeat behind. Charlie’d been sitting there going, “This is rubbish,” until it hit him that Keith was another lead instrument. One night at a club, everyone else passed out, Charlie said, “It’s exhilarating hearing you lot trash numbers everyone else does so faithfully.” I don’t think I ever told the rest of the band. If you couldn’t stay awake, you missed praise from the Rolling Stones: that’s the way I looked at it.
FROM THE BEGINNING, we had just these massive, massive amps. People came just to see them. One atop another on both sides of us, like an ogre’s steamer trunks. At small clubs Pete had to turn some sideways to fit them all onstage. People like the T-Bones, and Clapton and the Yardbirds, had only these little Vox AC30s. Doctors issued warnings about our concerts in the local papers. Word got around that outdoors at Croydon, we’d surpassed 120 decibels.
Even so, the big power chord sound that Pete got wasn’t only his amps. He also used hugely thick strings, and hit them so hard that he shattered picks and tore the skin from his fingerprints. Really, the sound came from us playing as a three-piece band, but trying everything we could to sound like more. In any number, Keith or I might take over the lead while Pete bashed out the chords.
A journalist for the NME saw us on one of those Maximum R&B Tuesday night shows at the Marquee. He said we sounded like someone chainsawing a dustbin in half. It was one of our favorite notices.
OUR FIRST TIME on Ready Steady Go! the producers never knew what hit them. We took over the show by blocking anyone who wanted to get in who wasn’t our sort. We nicked their tickets and filled the place with our audience, all mods. No one else could get past Roger. He shoved someone from BBC security who tried to intervene down two flights of stairs and the poor sod never came back. The Hollies, who were on before us, didn’t know what was going on. They found themselves surrounded by all these step-dancing geeks all dressed alike. The geeks seemed to be singing our lyrics to Hollies songs. Then for our first number the director had the genius idea of putting Keith and his whole kit on a rostrum with wheels, and having everyone push it this way and that through the crowd. Pandemonium. Geeks were knocked hither and yon. The BBC’s big old cameras could barely roll out of the way in time. Between numbers our crowd kept swaying and singing, like at a football match. You couldn’t hear Roger announcing the next song. Mods then wore all these old college scarves and at the end they tossed them all onstage. The four of us just held our poses after the last note, festooned.
I WANTED MY SONGS to be like songs no one else was writing. My bandmates didn’t agree on anything except the notion that my songs were inferior. Keith was the nicest about it. He said, “What do you give a toss what we think?”
But the truth was I was trying something different, dark, in a childrens’ book sort of way. “Silas Stingy”; “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” They weren’t autobiographical; God knew, I wasn’t one for opening up. What was I, a can of beans? Kids responded when the singles came out; kids loved “Boris the Spider.” Keith and Roger came round a bit when they saw that, and we talked about releasing a kids’ rock album, but it never happened. The songs all ended up as B-sides.
I wrote two about Kim, though nobody knew it: for a year or so our concerts always opened with one—“Heaven and Hell,” about the perils of mortal misbehavior. Its position on the playlist didn’t mean the group was any more enthusiastic about my writing. Everyone just thought it was a good song to tune up to. It featured a lot of open strings.
The other was “Smash Your Head Against the Wall.”
OUR BIGGEST HITS involved Pete’s mock-baroque bits, like the pseudo-flamenco thing he used to kick off “Pinball Wizard.”
I always admired his handling of his songwriting. He said what he wanted to say and ignored or patronized our suggestions about ways he might improve. He told us during one depression, “I’m sulking because you don’t worship me for making your lives financially viable.”
A JOURNALIST doing a behind-the-scenes piece wrote long harrowing accounts about Keith and Roger and Pete, and then when it came to me, the article said only, “Entwhistle was never around— permanently asleep, apparently.”
Oh, he was a miserable bastard, that John Entwhistle. Who else wrote horror songs for children? Dressed all in black and kept to himself and then moped about when people left him to his own devices? “Why haven’t they come and coaxed me out?” he said to himself. Sold himself as his best friend’s best friend when all he was thinking was, He’ll never know how lucky he is. Angry about most things and
frightened about everything. Guilty of all he saw in others, and maestro of a self-pity as vast and chilly as the North Sea—
THERE’S A CERTAIN attack a bass guitarist gets in his style when he’s miserable. All great bass guitarists are miserable.
THE ROCK GODS did four things for us: they sent us Keith, kept me miserable, gave Roger his ego, and put the idea in Pete’s head of writing for Roger as an alter-ego. Pete would no more expose himself directly than I would—his own family never really got to know him—but when it came to Roger, he got, in his songs, the braggadocio, the grandiosity, the aggression, the flash, the emptiness. We all kept waiting for Roger to go, “Hey, wait one minute . . .”
Pete wrote his best about characters he could see from the outside. When he got introspective, it turned into melodramatic dross. If you want my opinion.
By 1966 he was writing for Roger’s voice—for those things in Roger that he thought he was lacking. He didn’t have one of the most crucial things Roger had: that conviction. Which was why he was no good in fights. He also certainly didn’t have Roger’s magnetism. Or his looks. All he had was talent. He hoped. He was this angry nose with a guitar.
What he was trying to do was to get himself halfway to Roger, and drag Roger halfway to him. They resented the way they used each other, but they never stopped taking full advantage of it.
WHEN PEOPLE THOUGHT about The Who they thought about Pete and Keith, playing music and tearing into controlled substances as though they had only twenty-four hours to live. From the very first there were nights when they didn’t remember who they were, walked offstage and into the audience, got into fights and got the daylights beat out of them. In Birmingham two security people were sent to hospital trying to protect them. By our first U.S. tour of ’68, the only bandmember who could fight, Roger, would be sitting with me in the dressing room sipping carbonated water and wondering where they’d gone to.
I’d phone up Kim and let her know where Keith could be retrieved in the morning.
They’d married in March of 1966 at the registry office in Brent, in Middlesex. It rained the entire day. Our manager’s idea was to keep the marriage a secret at the time.
They had a daughter, Mandy, that July.
He was a lunatic for the clubs, before and after Mandy. There were nights I worked through the playlist thinking this was the night I’d phone Kim and finally explain myself. I’d watch Pete pinoning around in his white boiler suit, Roger in his buckskin fringes swinging his mike like a lasso, Keith in his cartoon T-shirts, spinning and pinwheeling his drumsticks into the light—Substitute: me for him; substitute: my coke for gin; substitute: you for my mom—at least I’ll get my washing done—and I’d funnel all motion into two hands, not moving my feet twelve inches the entire show, all in black so that I’d disappear even sometimes when lit.
ONSTAGE WE WERE the musical version of a row in a moving van. But what was the alternative? We were never one of those Serious bands, all dignity and sobriety and “minor sevenths” this and “atonal chord progression” that in interviews, that pillaged mediocre classical music and traveled with a Philharmonic in tow. We were a gang of louts you wouldn’t trust round your back garden, never mind your mum’s china. We were best booked into rough places. Anywhere else, we didn’t fit in, and we weren’t happy, anyway. We performed Tommy at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and Keith screamed over Pete’s big finish, “It’s like playing to a fucking oil painting—” And the crowd cheered, like it had been saluted.
ONE NIGHT in the rear of a club, lying on his back buried in Skol and Carlsberg bottles, Keith told me that every morning he went home, he and the missus smashed up the flat with fights. It was terrible for little Mandy. “What should I do?” he asked. I didn’t say, You can’t go on like this, or Stop what you’re doing, for fuck’s sake. “She’s a great woman,” I managed instead. “She is, she is,” he agreed with a moan. In Tottenham he took a hammer to all nine pieces of his kit at the end of “Magic Bus.” Roger threw his microphone off into the seats. Pete toppled a stack of amps and bounced his Rickenbacker on the debris. By that point if we waited too long to lose our tempers, we’d start to hear during the breaks, “Throw something! Smash something!”
Because what did that kind of music come down to, in the first place? What was the audience at a concert saying, if not, You stand there so we can know ourselves?
Of course, the crashing irony was that all of our songs had always been about pathetic little wimps: Can you see the real me? Can you? Can you? But we were presenting pathetic wimps with anthemic power: my hair-raisingly overamped bass, Keith’s Hammer of Thor drumming, Roger’s Valkyrie voice, Pete’s power chords. At times I thought Quadrophenia was the best thing Wagner ever wrote. Here it was the story of a sad little mixed-up kid and every track on it sounded like a war cry, like something designed to terrorize the natives.
Rage in the service of self-pity was what we’d always been about. It was what rock had always been about.
I GOT MARRIED. A lovely woman, at the Acton Congregational Church, a year after Keith and Kim. I was going to be a homebody and not hang out and about anymore. It wasn’t good for me.
Recently my wife turned up an old battered and juice-stained appointment book from 1970, and after a few pages I couldn’t bear to read any more: 9/12, Munster, Germany, 9/13, Offenbach, Germany, 9/16, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 9/17, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 9/18, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 9/20, Copenhagen, Denmark, 9/21, Aarhus, Denmark . . .
IT WAS A MATTER of being bored with who we were, with being selfish fuck-ups each and every night and each and every gig. For all our arrogance. Keith took to traveling with a hatchet and chopping hotel rooms to bits: televisions, chairs, dressers, cupboard doors, beds: the lot of it.
His version of himself was Moonie the amiable idiot, the genial twit, the victim of his own practical jokes. He broke his collarbone, knocked out his front teeth, gave himself three or four concussions. But he was only playing the same game as the rest of us. Look at photographs of us next to Roger: it’s like three frightening goons with Jesus of Nazareth. During a backstage squabble, Pete shouted, “I don’t know who’s worse: Mr. God’s Gift to Hammersmith or the rest of us with our Self-Hatred badges.”
“I vote for the Wooden Indian,” Keith called from the floor. He liked calling me the Wooden Indian when he was in his cups.
“I’ve done it again, haven’t I, Wooden Indian?” he’d say in those wee hours when he was back in Kim’s shithouse. She finally moved out, though she kept track of him through friends. I finally phoned. We chatted and I didn’t even mention if she needed anything, etc. I phoned back a few weeks later and she was out. She went on holiday. The holiday extended itself. Years trooped up my chest and down again. Round about this time, Pete helped his friend Eric Clapton take the great love of his life, Patti Harrison, away from her husband, George. I didn’t talk to him for a month. About the same as George.
“YOU LOVE ME or not, Ox?” Moonie would say when he’d been the cause of particular unpleasantness: when there was a mess to be cleaned, or so forth. So when he died, why would we have done the right thing? Why would we have acted adequately? When had we acted adequately our entire lives?
He came apart step-by-step, over years. Cry for help? He started his when he was ten. The man broke his wife’s nose with his head. He burst into tears at stoplights. He was arrested for disorderly conduct in a mortuary. He paid New York cabbies to blockade each end of a side street so he could throw all of his hotel furniture into the street. In Boston in ’76 we kicked off “Substitute” and I looked back and there was no one behind the drum kit. He’d pitched over onto his face. He was ambulanced to the hospital. The crowd rolled forward in murderous little wavelets until it finally sank in that Pete and Roger were promising a make-up concert at the end of the tour.
He had no direction, no nothing. “Why don’t I ever, like, pick up a bloody book?” he asked me once. I gave him back the old Entwhistle silence.
He used to tell us he was the best Keith Moon–type drummer in the world. Alcohol, downers, uppers, painkillers, horse tranquilizers, anything you could fit in a capsule or pour down your throat. “Fuck-all drank all my maple syrup,” Pete complained one morning on an American tour. In one recording session he just lay on his tom-toms, and when I asked if he was okay he said, “God, it’s hard.” Roger asked me to talk to him. “He might listen to you,” he said. “His old lady’s worried to death.” She’s talked to you about it? I remember thinking.
He was the original Madman who had to outdo everyone else in rock. And imagine what kind of degenerate one had to be to outdo everyone else in rock. Eventually it got so bad that even he had to go for the cure. He started calling each of us each night to say good night and that he loved us. You’d pick up the phone and only know who it was because he was crying so hard. A week into that his girlfriend found him dead in his apartment from an overdose of Heminevrin, the drug they gave him for his other addictions. When I heard I thought: we must’ve saved his life thirty times, getting him up and walking around, getting him to a hospital. I thought of him saying, “John, let’s throw it over and join the Beach Boys.” I thought of the nights I’d gotten him on his feet and he’d slurred some version of, “John, you’re me only friend.”
I asked if anyone had contacted Kim. The police had. After a few drunken nights I went over but she only talked to me through a crack in the door.
“I can’t face anyone right now, John,” she said. I could hear Mandy wailing in another part of the house.
“We’re thinking of you,” I told her. I hung my head and clasped my hands before me, like the undertaker. Still all in black. “Let us know if there’s anything that would help.”
“Poor Keith,” she said.
The three of us remaining filled the airwaves with talk of how The Who couldn’t go on without him. Then we went on without him.