‘A full-length rock opera that for sheer power, invention and brilliance of performance, outstrips anything that has ever come out of a recording studio.’
Leonard Bernstein on The Who’s Tommy, 1969
‘I must admit to finding it pretentious in content, and not worth a single chorus of “My Generation”.’
George Melly on The Who’s Tommy, 1970
‘I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in fucking mud, smoking fucking marijuana. If that’s the American dream, let us have our fucking money and piss off back to Shepherd’s Bush, where people are people.’
Pete Townshend on the Woodstock Festival, 1969
There was no escaping Jim Morrison’s picture. The lead singer of the American psychedelic group The Doors had been photographed with his shirt off, his face framed by a halo of ruffled curls and his arms outstretched as if he was preparing for crucifixion. Pete Townshend had struck the same Jesus Christ pose onstage many times in The Who’s early days. The difference was that the bare-chested Morrison looked like a hippie messiah, and Townshend had been a gawky art student trying to distract the audience from the size of his nose.
It was 2 August 1968, The Doors had just reached Number 1 in America with ‘Hello, I Love You’, and The Who had arrived in New York to support them at the Singer Bowl. ‘The Doors had become meteoric,’ said a glum Townshend, ‘and Jim Morrison’s Christ picture was all over fucking New York.’
The show started late and the 16,000-strong audience was already hyped up when The Who appeared. By the time The Doors arrived, they were even more stoned, drunk and excitable. The black-clad Morrison teased the audience between songs and relished his obvious power. By the end of the set, many fans had smashed up their seats and rushed the stage.
Pete Townshend told the press that he’d watched a young female fan rush up to touch Morrison during the gig, only to be thrown off the stage by his bodyguards with such force that she cut her face on one of the barriers. The unquestioning hero worship, the hero’s indifference and the ugly violence inspired Townshend to go back to his hotel and write a song for The Who’s next album.
Townshend had started to plot out what would become Tommy while the band toured America in the spring. Stuck on a bus for hours at a time (one trip from California to the next gig in Vancouver had taken three days), he had time to fill.
To begin with, Townshend wrote an essay about a young boy, who dies in a car crash and is spiritually reborn. The story was influenced by Meher Baba, but also by the works of the Sufi writer Idries Shah and the German author Hermann Hesse, whose 1922 novel Siddhartha, about a young man’s quest for spiritual illumination, had become a set text in hippie circles. Townshend’s young hero was a Hesse-like ‘seeker’ looking for answers, but his story flitted between real life and a dream state.
‘I got a letter from Pete in Miami saying he had developed this idea called “the Amazing Journey”,’ recalls Richard Stanley. ‘It was obvious that it was quite different from anything he had thought about before.’ To help explain the story, Townshend drew a diagram ‘to show the aspect of illusion and the aspect of reality’ in which his hero existed. Back at Ebury Street, he showed the diagram to Stanley. ‘He seemed pretty confused,’ admitted Townshend. ‘When I look at it today, I feel the same way.’
The next stage was to strip out what Townshend called ‘the double-barrelled plot’, and make the story more linear. At least that was the plan. Townshend wrote a lengthy poem, in which his young hero is taken ill, falls asleep and meets his spiritual master in a dream. After being abandoned by the master, the hero is reincarnated several times before waking from the dream and being reunited with him in what is presumably real life.
But the poem, like the essay and the diagram, was gradually discarded. Instead Townshend extracted a few lines to use in what became one of the finished album’s songs, ‘Amazing Journey’. The central character in the story had now become a deaf, dumb and blind boy who existed in what the composer called ‘a world of vibrations’, where he experienced touch and feelings as music. Townshend posited the idea that his disability was a metaphor for ‘what the wise men of the East say – that we are essentially deaf, dumb and blind to our spiritual potential.’
This character gave Townshend’s bandmates something they could latch on to. ‘Pete’s ideas and thoughts were so out there, he was always pushing boundaries,’ Roger Daltrey told the author in 2014. ‘But there would always be one sentence that came out of that rambling brain of his that made sense. With Tommy, it was – “Imagine living life and all you can feel are vibrations”.’
Away from the band, Townshend used Richard Stanley and Mike McInnerney as sounding boards for his ideas. ‘I think Pete saw people as bits of Lego,’ offers McInnerney. ‘He had this way of looking at people, and saying, “You’re a bit of that person and a bit of that.” I remember being in the kitchen at Ebury Street – I have these big memories of sitting in kitchens talking in the sixties – and Pete was talking about pulling together these ideas for Tommy. It was like Lego again – separate things happening.’ There was something else emerging as well: ‘You could see the influence of Meher Baba on this idea of the disabled kid. That intrigued me the most.’
Townshend went public with his ideas in a Melody Maker interview in May 1968. He was writing a rock opera; it might be called The Amazing Journey; it might be called Journey Into Space. He hadn’t decided: ‘The theme is about a deaf, dumb and blind boy who has dreams and sees himself as the ruler of the cosmos.’ Shortly after, he settled on the name Tommy because it was a traditional post-war English name, but also, said Townshend, because the second and third letters ‘o’ and ‘m’ reminded him of the Hindu mantra, ‘om’.
It wasn’t until The Who went back to America that Townshend discussed the idea with a journalist again. A fortnight after The Doors concert, The Who arrived in San Francisco to play three nights at the Fillmore West. After the second show, Townshend found himself at the house of Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady, with a group of Casady’s friends, including Rolling Stone magazine editor Jann Wenner. In the absence of Richard Stanley or Mike McInnerney, Townshend turned to Wenner. The pair’s late-night interview would be reproduced across two issues of Rolling Stone. At one point during the conversation, Townshend was convinced that his drink had been spiked with acid. ‘He said he felt as though he were beginning an LSD trip,’ said Wenner. ‘But I hadn’t slipped him anything.’
Townshend outlined his story, which Wenner was convinced ‘he was making up as he went along’. It was still a jumble of ideas; some elements were hangovers from the essay and poem, but others were new. He told Wenner about the boy’s father’s frustration with his son’s disability and how ‘the father starts to hit him … and he doesn’t feel the pain … he just accepts it’, and how when the boy is left in his uncle’s care, ‘his uncle starts to play with the kid’s body … and the boy experiences sexual vibrations’.
Wenner was quick to pick up on the trend in Townshend’s song-writing; what he described, in the parlance of the late 1960s as ‘a young cat, our age, becoming an outcast from a very ordinary sort of circumstances’. As the night wore on, Townshend told Wenner that when he was a child he’d spent long periods of time with his parents when other children’s parents were at work; but that he’d also spent long periods away from them; and that they’d never stopped him playing music, smoking pot or having sex. He remained profoundly confused about his childhood: ‘The whole incredible thing about my parents is that I just can’t place their effect on me, and yet I know it’s there.’ He still wasn’t making the connection between the sex and violence in Tommy’s story and his relationship with his maternal grandmother.
The following day, he met up with Rick Chapman, a Californian who ran the Meher Baba information service from a PO Box in Berkeley. While talking, Townshend rolled a joint. Chapman gently pointed out that Baba opposed all drug taking. Although Townshend had been telling the music press he thought dope should be legalised, he often sounded as if he was saying what he thought The Who’s fans wanted to hear, not what he believed himself. Unlike The Beatles, The Who hadn’t signed a recent petition in The Times calling for the legalisation of marijuana. Nevertheless, dope was an intrinsic part of Townshend’s relationship with music, and had been since lying stoned on the couch listening to Jimmy Reed in Sunnyside Road. At Chapman’s suggestion, he vowed to give up smoking dope and gradually weaned himself off the drug over the next few months. ‘It was the biggest surprise of my life,’ he wrote later, ‘to discover that I could still get into music straight.’ Townshend was changing, but it would be a while before his band-mates and his managers fully understood why.
The Who flew home from America at the end of August, ‘flat broke and busted’, as Roger Daltrey put it. Richard Barnes’ observation that by 1968 they no longer spent all their time thinking about being The Who was borne out by their personal circumstances. The band members had all settled down with their respective wives and girlfriends, though some had settled more successfully than others.
Roger Daltrey had now moved out of London with Heather Taylor and into a fifteenth-century cottage in the Berkshire village of Hurst. The couple would eventually marry in 1971, as soon as his divorce from his first wife was finalised. In contrast to Daltrey’s escape to the English countryside, John and Alison Entwistle had acquired a semi-detached house in Pope’s Lane, in Ealing, all of six minutes from Entwistle’s childhood home. The bass player installed a suit of armour in the hallway, and turned a box room into a studio.
In the meantime, the Moons were still ensconced in their Highgate flat which now bore a permanent reminder of one of Keith’s reckless nights out: a champagne bottle embedded in the plaster over which he’d hung a fancy picture frame. Moon never told visitors that it was there because he’d thrown it at Kim during a drunken row. ‘I would give any woman who lived with Keith Moon the Victoria Cross,’ says his former driver Dougal Butler.
Pete and Karen’s late-night conversations with the McInnerneys carried on as before, but in the kitchen of their newly acquired eighteenth-century Georgian house in Twickenham, opposite Eel Pie Island. The couple’s newfound domesticity prompted Kit Lambert to start referring to them as ‘Lord and Lady Townshend’. ‘Kit was particularly jealous of my relationship with my wife,’ said Townshend. ‘He found it an irritation that he didn’t have the access to me that he used to have.’ Lambert’s hold on his protégé would weaken further still the following year when Karen gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter Emma.
Lambert may not have approved, but others liked the change in Townshend. In 1967, Richard Barnes had left England and taken a road trip around Europe. He had fuzzy memories of spending a day in Istanbul on LSD and another on opium. When he met Townshend again, Barney thought that the idea of following a guru was passé but admitted that his friend seemed happier than he had done in years. ‘Pete always seemed to be a bit torn anyway’ he says now, ‘between being this mad hellcat rock ’n’ roller and wanting to go home and listen to classical music.’
Townshend had converted two rooms in his new family home into a studio, and covered the walls with pictures of Meher Baba. Even though they knew that it was the inspiration for The Who’s next album, Townshend’s bandmates didn’t share his interest. ‘It was difficult for the people around me to accept that I was leading a very different life,’ Townshend told Q magazine. ‘Roger and Keith didn’t take the piss. John Entwistle would – I think he was embarrassed by it.’
Daltrey confided that he found Townshend’s obsession ‘a bit of a puzzle’. Mike McInnerney remembers broaching the subject with Keith Moon, however, and being pleasantly surprised: ‘I think he had a kind of spiritual side himself, Keith. He might have been mad, a spiritual fool, if you like. But I think he respected the kind of feelings that Pete was getting.’
The Who started recording Tommy at IBC Studios in mid-September, with producer Kit Lambert assisted by in-house engineer Damon Lyon-Shaw. It was make-or-break time. ‘This was the one where we were going to sink or swim,’ admitted Chris Stamp. ‘We had to do something big – had to risk everything.’
Stamp and Lambert’s hopes of having a Who album out in time for Christmas were soon dashed. As always, Townshend had produced meticulous demos, which he brought to the studio and played to his bandmates. Of the songs that would make it onto the finished album, Townshend had already written ‘Welcome’, ‘Amazing Journey’, ‘I’m Free’, ‘Sensation’, inspired by the Australian groupie, and ‘Sally Simpson’, about the girl he’d seen mistreated at The Doors concert. But there were also gaping holes in the story and several scraps of half-finished ideas. At the end of a long day at IBC, Townshend would often return to Twickenham to make sense of these embryonic songs, turning them into demos in time for the next day’s session.
It was an arduous process, but The Who worked uncharacteristically well together. When Townshend revisited the original tapes decades later, he was surprised by how much laughter he could hear between the takes. Kit Lambert, meanwhile, was in his element, overseeing the sessions with his shirttail hanging out, a Player’s cigarette smouldering between his fingers and a bottle of something alcoholic open on the mixing desk. As well as firing off countless ideas and suggestions, Lambert turned up one day with a portable roulette table to keep the roadies occupied. He was also there to calm the situation when one of The Who’s crew went on to the studio roof to smoke a joint, took the wrong staircase down and ended up in the Chinese Embassy next door.
The band’s economic circumstances meant that they still had to play weekend gigs to pay for recording time. Come Friday night, The Who, with their heads still reeling from Tommy, would drive off to play their past hits and smash their equipment in a university hall, before pocketing the cash and driving home. More than once, they had to wait outside the studio until a Track Records cheque cleared IBC’s bank account.
In the middle of the sessions, The Who released a new single, ‘Magic Bus’. Except it wasn’t new at all. The Bo Diddley-inspired song had been briefly considered as a follow-up to ‘My Generation’, and then abandoned. While drunk one afternoon at IBC, though, The Who recorded a new version. ‘It was a gas, and had a mystical quality,’ said Townshend, who nevertheless dismissed the song’s freestyle lyrics as ‘garbage’. ‘Magic Bus’ would become one of The Who’s most popular live songs, but in 1968, it sounded like a throwback to the past.
To launch the single, Track’s publicist Vernon Brewer hired an open-top bus, a baby elephant, a cockatoo and a lion. The bus carrying the animals, The Who and a pair of what New Musical Express called ‘dolly birds with micro skirts’ set off from outside the BBC’s Lime Grove Studios, heading for the King’s Road. Who songs blasted out of a pair of speakers as the band threw streamers and sweets at passing pedestrians, and posed for photograph with their menagerie. ‘I’m not saying what Keith did to that elephant,’ admitted Daltrey. ‘But it staggered off the bus.’
‘Magic Bus’ was a modest hit in the UK, but became the first Who single to break into the US top thirty. After four years of doggedly trying to crack America, they had finally managed it with a song they’d once rejected. Having tired of waiting for a new Who album, Decca’s American wing also put out a cobbled-together collection of studio tracks confusingly titled Magic Bus: The Who on Tour. To the band’s chagrin, the LP went on to become the first Who album to reach the American top thirty.
Chris Stamp protested loudly about Decca’s money-spinner, but Track put out their own Who compilation in the UK soon after. Direct Hits was another hotchpotch of singles and random studio tracks, although the legal bust-up with Shel Talmy meant there was no ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ or ‘My Generation’. Track Records had a Who album out in time for Christmas, it just wasn’t Tommy.
Instead, Track’s biggest victory in 1968 would come courtesy of Jimi Hendrix. The Who Sell Out’s photographer David Montgomery shot a cover image featuring naked women of various shapes and sizes for Hendrix’s third LP, Electric Ladyland. The nudity had been another Lambert/Stamp brainwave, and Track Records took over the window of the fashion boutique I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet on London’s Piccadilly Circus to launch the album.
‘We covered the window with covers except for one small area,’ says Vernon Brewer, ‘and then hired some scantily clad models to dance in the window. It stopped the traffic.’ The police were soon called to disperse the crowds gathered outside, but the publicity stunt worked. Electric Ladyland became a UK top-ten hit in October and soon went to Number 1 in America.
Back at IBC, The Who worked hard on what Townshend was cautiously describing as ‘a song-cycle with a spiritual theme’ and Lambert was loudly declaring ‘a rock opera’. Having used an orchestra on Arthur Brown’s debut album, Kit wanted to do the same with Tommy. Townshend had been studying classical composition, but rejected the idea. ‘I didn’t want to make a studio masterpiece,’ he explained. ‘I wanted to make an album The Who could play live.’ Instead of an orchestra, Townshend played keyboards and Entwistle the brass instruments.
Tommy was further delayed because every time Townshend came up with a new idea for it, the album became longer. As the narrative evolved, The Who had to tweak their existing songs or re-record them altogether. ‘It just started to drive us mad. We were getting brainwashed by the whole thing,’ said Entwistle, who also admitted that he had no idea what the album was about.
‘Keith and I used to play cards with John and Alison when The Who were doing Tommy,’ says Dougal Butler, ‘and I can remember them talking. There wasn’t conflict as such. It was more a case of, “Where is this album going?” Because it was all in Pete’s head.’
Kit Lambert’s task then was to tease the story out of Townshend and help turn it into something everyone else could understand. ‘Kit suggested I bring the story into the real world, and make it about Britain and real life,’ Townshend told the BBC, ‘and drag it out of Persia and India and Sufism, and that I start the story at the end of the Second World War and bring it up to the modern day.’
Townshend agreed. In doing so, he gave Meher Baba a less prominent role, something that made the management feel more comfortable. ‘We didn’t want to be promoting a guru,’ admitted Chris Stamp. ‘We wanted to bring the theme of spirituality down to a more day-to-day rock ’n’ roll level.’
Lambert also proposed making Tommy’s sensory deprivation the result of a real-life trauma. This appealed to Townshend who had been considering making Tommy autistic. The medical profession had only acknowledged the existence of autism in the 1940s, and information about the condition was still scarce. In Richard Barnes’ essay for the 2013 Tommy box set, Townshend explained he’d read that autism could be the result of a childhood trauma and heard about a therapist who used music as a way of connecting with autistic children.
The story of Tommy now began with Tommy’s mother giving birth to a son, while her husband, Captain Walker, is missing, presumed dead, in the war. Walker reappears several years later and discovers that his ‘widow’ has a new lover, whom he murders in front of his son. Tommy’s parents tell the boy that he didn’t see or hear anything. He responds to the trauma by falling into a near-catatonic state, losing his sight and his hearing, but able to experience the outside world through a series of visions and sensations.
Neglected by his parents, Tommy is left in the care of others, and is tortured by his cousin and sexually abused by his uncle. A drug dealer takes the boy to a prostitute who gives him a hallucinogenic drug that she wrongly believes will awaken his senses. A doctor later convinces his parents that their son’s symptoms are psychosomatic and tells them to put the boy in front of a mirror as part of his treatment. ‘Somewhere I read about an autistic child who had stared constantly into a mirror, as though he was the only person in the world,’ Townshend told Barnes.
Tommy repeatedly stares at himself in the mirror, until his mother smashes the glass in frustration. This violent act reawakens his senses and is interpreted as a miracle cure. Tommy goes on to become a spiritual leader, and attracts a devoted following, but his disciples turn on him when he fails to impart the meaning of life.
Interviewed in 2004, Townshend said that he didn’t realise he’d been writing his own story until 1991 when he was involved in a Broadway musical production of Tommy and started asking his mother about gaps in his childhood memories. In his autobiography, though, he said that he found it tough to write about Tommy’s sexually abusive uncle even in 1968, because it stirred up memories of Denny, and her ‘half-deaf boyfriend’, the man he was made to call ‘uncle’.
Townshend first hinted at what had happened in an interview with Q in 1996: ‘I think it’s quite possible when I was with my grandmother, she had a boyfriend who came into my bedroom. I don’t quite get what happened.’ After that, he didn’t speak publicly about it again for several years.
When it came to the songs about the abusive uncle and cousin, Townshend asked John Entwistle to write them for him. Entwistle went home to his box-room studio and composed ‘Cousin Kevin’, a song about a school bully who burns Tommy with cigarettes and holds his head under the water in the bath, something Townshend later said that Denny had done to him. Entwistle was unfazed by the commissions, as he’d witnessed plenty of casual cruelty during his time at Acton County.
Entwistle’s second composition was ‘Fiddle About’, a macabre nursery-rhyme-style song about Tommy’s ‘wicked Uncle Ernie’, with lyrics in which he orders his nephew to pull down the bedclothes and lift up his nightshirt. Years later, Townshend explained how Entwistle understood the subject because they’d both known children who had been abused in the church choir and in the Boys’ Brigade. ‘It was discussed then,’ said Townshend. ‘But what hadn’t happened was victims coming forward. We knew what it was, and there were shades of things that had happened to us. Someone would say, “In the scout camp, the scout master came in and his trousers were down …”’ Then someone else would say, “Oh, that’s nothing …”’
What Townshend ended up writing was a story about the experiences of many post-war youths, including himself, his bandmates and The Who’s audience. ‘I wrote the story,’ he said, ‘before I knew what I was writing about.’
Captain Walker’s return from the war, in the song 1921, to a wife who had found someone else and to children who didn’t recognise him, also struck a familiar note. ‘These were the stories I grew up with in my neighbourhood,’ said Townshend. His parents had split up for a time, and it was Betty Townshend’s boyfriend, not his father, who’d brought him home from his grandmother’s.
Tommy’s parents ordering him not to speak about the murder was another familiar scenario. ‘I remember growing up with boys that were four or five years old during the war,’ Townshend told the author, ‘and you’d know that something dreadful or bizarre had happened to them.’ His suspicions would be confirmed years later at therapy groups for survivors of childhood abuse: ‘Sometimes guys in the groups would take me aside and say, “I was shipped out in the middle of the war to Wales, and the guy that ran the farm believed the Germans were going to take over and he just had his way with all of us. And after the war we were shipped home and I said, ‘Dad, Dad, that farmer …’ But my Dad said, ‘Shut it! He saved your fucking life. You didn’t see it. It didn’t happen.”’
Townshend’s experiences with LSD fed into ‘The Acid Queen’ in which a prostitute gives Tommy a hallucinogenic drug in a failed attempt to restore his senses. He told Rolling Stone that the song was all also about ‘how you get it laid on you that you haven’t lived if you haven’t fucked forty birds, taken sixty trips, drunk fourteen pints of beer – or whatever’. Again, it was partly a flashback to his childhood; to the social pressures Townshend felt as an adolescent, watching his schoolfriend trying to have sex with a girl in Hyde Park, and, failing to pick up on obvious sexual signals from women at art college.
Townshend also told the magazine that there was something ‘sinister, feline, sexual … inherently female’ about LSD. Interviewed in 2013, Townshend explained that the female in the song could have been a prostitute, but according to the lyrics she was also a gypsy, which was another allusion to his grandmother. ‘My mother’s mother was born of a gypsy girl,’ he revealed. ‘Her dad had left his wife to pursue this gypsy girl. My grandmother would do magic stuff. She would put curses on people …’
As Tommy progressed, the album became more and more of a melting pot for Townshend’s pet theories and obsessions: identity, spirituality, family, sex, drugs and gurus. There was a line to be drawn between Tommy’s sensory deprivation and the occasion Townshend wheeled himself around art college in a trolley and communicated by using an invented alphabet. Meanwhile, Tommy experiencing the world only through touch linked to another of Townshend’s art school infatuations: the philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his study of the power of the senses.
When Tommy becomes a guru and attracts a cult following, however, Townshend was clearly drawing on his current experience as a pop star. The incident with Jim Morrison and the injured girl had made an impression. So too had the 1967 cinema verité film, Privilege. ‘It was a film about a charismatic young man who was a pop star and started a cult,’ said Townshend. ‘It was part of the vernacular of the time to look at the responsibility you had if you put yourself on a pedestal and start preaching.’
Privilege starred The Who’s touring partner Paul Jones and Terence Stamp’s ex-girlfriend Jean Shrimpton. Jones played Steven Shorter, a pop star with such power that he’s pimped out by his managers to help promote religion and patriotism for the government. Privilege, like Jim Morrison, encouraged Townshend’s fascination with the way a charismatic pop star could manipulate his followers, but end up morally bankrupt.
While Tommy was Townshend’s brainchild, the rest of The Who were pivotal to its creation. Initially, Townshend wanted to perform the role of Tommy’s inner voice and act as the album’s narrator, with Daltrey playing Tommy later on in the story. As the tale evolved, the roles became harder to define.
The most poignant moment on the finished album was the closing section of ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It!’, later known as ‘See Me, Feel Me’. Daltrey had already tried and struggled to master the song. Townshend was convinced that The Who’s alpha-male frontman couldn’t possibly do it justice. One afternoon, Townshend arrived late to the studio and heard Daltrey delivering the vocal in a perfect fragile falsetto. It was a revelation: ‘I realised then that Roger had occupied Tommy.’
‘Everybody has a longing in them to be understood to be loved, and that was what I tried to do,’ said Daltrey. The insecurity that had plagued him for most of 1966 and 1967 had been officially dispelled: ‘“I Can See for Miles” was when it came back for me vocally. And Tommy was the beginning of the next climb.’
Pete Townshend was provided with another reminder of the pitfalls of being a pop star when The Who broke off from recording Tommy to appear in the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. On 10 December, The Who joined the Stones, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithfull, Jethro Tull and others, in a cavernous TV studio in Stonebridge Park, near Wembley.
Like The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, the Rock and Roll Circus was the Rolling Stones’ brave attempt to break out of the conventional format of theatre gigs. With the help of former Ready Steady Go! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, they’d turned the studio into a Victorian circus, complete with half a big-top tent, a circus ring, fire-eaters, clowns, dwarves and trapeze artists. The show would be filmed for a possible TV programme, but if the circus format worked the Stones wanted to take it on the road.
The Who were the first group Mick Jagger approached. When Townshend turned up for a preliminary meeting with the Stones, he was shocked by Keith Richards’ appearance. The guitarist’s drug habits had recently progressed beyond pills, dope and cocaine, and now included heroin: ‘He was, literally, yellow, like he had hepatitis. I remember thinking, this isn’t going to happen.’
Richards managed to stay alive, but when The Who arrived at the TV studio the following day they found Brian Jones and Richards’ girlfriend, the Italian model and actress Anita Pallenberg, similarly the worse for wear. Jones was swigging vodka and kept breaking down in tears, and ‘Anita looked as if she was withdrawing from something’. Jones, the Stones’ founder member and once its driving force, would be fired from the Stones a few months later.
Over the next two days, the Stones’ drug habits and labyrinthine sex lives added to an already tense shoot. Jones had been Pallenberg’s boyfriend before Richards. But Anita had just appeared in the film Performance, an art-imitating-life drama about an East End gangster and a psychologically damaged pop star played by Mick Jagger. Rumours of a sexual dalliance between Mick and Anita on set were rife, which did little to help the fragile state of mind of Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. When a couple of policemen showed up in the Stones’ dressing room, Marianne was convinced they were all going to be busted for drugs, again, and became hysterical. She only calmed down when the cops explained they were just looking for the canteen as they fancied a cup of tea.
Come showtime, the seats around the circus ring were filled with friends, roadies, critics – including regular Who watcher Keith Altham – and lucky New Musical Express readers, all of whom had been given garishly coloured ponchos and floppy hats to wear. The circus began with a loud fanfare and the Stones, The Who and the rest of the cast were ushered into the ring by clowns, acrobats and a cowboy on horseback. But the entrance scene had to be re-shot several times due to technical problems. The words ‘Can we shoot one more?’ would be heard again and again over the next eighteen hours.
With the show underway, Jethro Tull arrived and played their fidgety art-school blues, before Marianne Faithfull sang the ballad ‘Something Better’ while looking winsome in a floor-length gown. Later, a supergroup made up of John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell, appeared and launched into ‘Yer Blues’ from The Beatles’ recently released White Album. Towards the end of their set, Yoko Ono emerged, unannounced, from a sack in which she’d been hiding and began shrieking into a microphone. ‘I remember feeling,’ said Townshend, ‘that you couldn’t put a band of more impenetrable beings on the stage.’
Townshend was arguably all the more sensitive to their impenetrability because of the themes he was exploring in Tommy. ‘Every talented person spends most of his time hiding his talent – or freakiness,’ he later said. ‘The reason is the remoteness it creates – the more remote they become, the more powerful they are as star figures.’ Despite being pop stars themselves, The Who were still plagued by insecurity. ‘I speak to Mick Jagger on the telephone all the time,’ Townshend admitted, ‘and I still can’t be normal with him.’
Perhaps it was The Who’s insecurity that made their performance that day so astonishing. Keith Richards, looking sinister in a top hat and eye-patch but no longer quite so yellow, introduced the group with a mumbled, ‘And now ladies and gentlemen, dig The Who.’ The band performed ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’. Moon drummed with such intensity he almost toppled off his stool; Townshend thrashed his guitar so hard you feared he might impale his hand on its tremolo arm, and Entwistle played spidery fingered bass while looking, with his dyed black hair and leather T-shirt, as if he’d just stepped off the set of a Joe Orton play. Meanwhile, with his suede tasselled shirt and newly long curly hair, Daltrey’s metamorphosis from 1960s mod to 1970s rock star was visibly under way. The Who had to play the piece three times but their energy never flagged. During the final take, as Townshend repeatedly yelled ‘You are forgiven!’ they looked as if they might combust.
That The Who were a hard act to follow became increasingly obvious as the hours passed with no sign of the Rolling Stones. In fact, the Stones didn’t appear until the small hours of the morning, by which time many of the audience had handed back their hats and ponchos, and drifted off to catch the last bus out of Wembley.
When they finally appeared, Mick Jagger was primed and ready to go, but the rest of the band took a while to catch up. As they did, the sound or the camera angles needed adjusting, so they had to do everything all over again.
At 5 a.m., the Stones began playing ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, an eerie samba taken from their latest album, Beggars Banquet. The unconvincing cod-psychedelia of ‘We Love You’ was long gone. This new song cast Jagger as Lucifer recalling his exploits through history. As it built to a climax, the singer stripped off to reveal a painted devil’s head covering his skinny torso. ‘This resulted in the total collapse of a young lady near the stage,’ recalled Keith Altham. It was pure showbiz. But even so, there was in Jagger’s performance something of the ultimate ‘powerful, remote star figure’ that so fascinated Townshend.
Yet the Rock and Roll Circus was far from the triumph Mick had hoped for. According to one of the Stones’ confidantes, the singer watched the footage a few days later, to be told by Allen Klein, ‘The Who blew you off your own stage.’ Klein secured the rights to the recording, and the Rock and Roll Circus remained unseen until the mid-1990s. ‘The Who stole the show,’ says Keith Altham now, ‘which is half the reason Jagger never put it out. The Stones are good in it, but The Who are better.’
Nevertheless, come the middle of December, The Who had taken so long to complete their rock opera that another of London’s crotchety R&B bands had beaten them to it. No sooner had the Rock and Roll Circus left town than the Pretty Things released their album, S.F. Sorrow. It told the unhappy tale of Sebastian F. Sorrow, an ordinary boy who drifts through a regular childhood, a mundane factory job and his first sexual experience before becoming engaged to a local girl. Sorrow is drafted into the army and survives the First World War, only to see his fiancée die in an airship crash. As part of his quest for self-discovery, he takes a hallucinatory trip into the underworld, is shown events from his childhood in a room full of mirrors, and ends his life broken and alone.
EMI fumbled the launch of S.F. Sorrow with a low-key advertising campaign. A problem with the Pretty Things’ US label meant the album wasn’t released in America until three months after Tommy in the summer of 1969. As a result, the band members would spend the next five decades insisting they got there first.
Rumours about S.F. Sorrow’s influence on Tommy have circulated forever. ‘We were at Abbey Road making the album, and Pete phoned up to speak to [Pretty Things frontman] Phil May,’ recalls former Pretty Things drummer John ‘Twink’ Alder. ‘He’d heard about what we were doing through the grapevine, and told him that The Who were working on something similar.’ However, Townshend has always gone to great lengths to insist that S.F. Sorrow had no bearing on Tommy. ‘I actually heard S.F. Sorrow after hearing Tommy,’ he insisted.
In reality, the Pretty Things and The Who were both trying to break out of the conventional pop format at the same time. With songs about fumbled adolescent sex, the war and the search for answers, there were parallels between the two albums. Though according to Phil May, the biggest clue can be heard in the S.F. Sorrow song, ‘Old Man Going’. ‘You’ve got the opening of “Pinball Wizard” completely there,’ May told the New York Times.
The opening bars of both songs do sound similar, but there the comparison ends. ‘Pinball Wizard’, a crucial piece in the Tommy puzzle, was written late in the day after Townshend invited Nik Cohn to listen to the album so far. Cohn was now writing about pop music for the New York Times. He listened and then confirmed Townshend’s worst fears: ‘He said, “It’s a bit po-faced, all this spiritualism. You need something to make it more fun.”’
At the time, Cohn was an obsessive pinball player. So much so that Townshend would often join him at the Lots O’ Fun Arcade on Charing Cross Road, near the Track Records office. On one of these trips, Nik introduced him to a fifteen-year-old girl whose pinball skills put theirs to shame. Cohn was now working on a novel inspired by this young prodigy entitled Arfur: Teenage Pinball Queen. When Townshend mockingly asked Cohn if he’d give the album a good review in the New York Times if there was something about pinball in the story, Nik told him he probably would.
That night Townshend went home and wrote ‘Pinball Wizard’. Rather than the Pretty Things, Townshend later said that the song’s main theme was inspired by Johann Strauss’ ‘The Blue Danube’, which had just been used in the recent sci-fi movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. He then dashed off a set of lyrics in which his deaf, dumb and blind hero became a gifted pinball player: ‘I thought, “My God, this is awful … Oh my God, I’m embarrassed …”’
Townshend returned to IBC the following day, expecting his bandmates to reject the song. Instead, everyone, including Kit Lambert, told him it was a potential hit. Only Townshend couldn’t see it. In fact, Townshend had written a song that would define The Who for the rest of their career. Its effect on Tommy was immediate. ‘It made the whole story lighter,’ Townshend admitted, ‘but it also made it more accessible.’
Turning the hero into a pinball player put a different slant on the rest of the story, though. Townshend started to worry that when Tommy regained his senses and is feted as a spiritual leader, the theme would become ‘too establishment, too churchy’. He shared his concerns with his bandmates one night, and ‘Keith said, “Well, I’ve been thinking that it would be a good idea to set the whole thing in a holiday camp.”’
As a child, Townshend had joined The Squadronaires at Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey, near Scarborough. He knew that world. With The Beatles not long back from the Maharishi’s ashram, there was something wonderfully cynical about The Who’s guru addressing his disciples in a place used for amateur beauty contests and knobbly knees competitions. It also gave the story a much-needed shot of self-deprecating humour. ‘Tommy got sillier because of The Who,’ said Townshend. ‘If it was just me, it would have been more serious, but probably wouldn’t have been as successful.’
What the band needed now was to see the story written down, to help focus their minds. Chris Stamp recalled Kit Lambert producing a film-style script, entitled ‘Tommy Walker 1914–1984’, in one nocturnal, drug-fuelled writing session. ‘The original story was a few words on the back of a Player’s cigarette packet,’ claimed Stamp. ‘The script was a way to ground everybody, to remind us all that we were on the same side.’
Stamp suggested that Lambert should write the script early in the making of Tommy. Townshend remembers it being written after the album was completed, and that it was partly motivated by Kit’s ambition to make a film of Tommy, something Townshend was unaware of at the time.
Lambert’s other great contribution was to reassure Pete Townshend that his story wasn’t a load of pretentious old tosh: ‘He would just say, “Fuck them! Fuck them all!”’ recalled Townshend. ‘“What does anybody know about opera?”’ The story of Tommy was convoluted and, in parts, incomprehensible. But Lambert pointed out that many traditional operas were also convoluted and incomprehensible. Staying true to form, Kit urged Townshend to go further still; to start Tommy with an instrumental overture, which would quote the piece’s main musical themes and make it seem even more like a traditional opera. Townshend did as he suggested. It was the final piece of the Tommy puzzle.
Director Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young music journalist, William Miller, and his rite of passage on tour with a 1970s rock band. Early on in the film, Miller’s older sister passes her record collection on to him. After Pet Sounds and Axis: Bold as Love, Miller comes across Tommy. Inside is a note left by his sister that reads, ‘Listen to Tommy with a candle burning and you will see your entire future.’ It’s difficult to imagine the scene working as well if The Who’s album didn’t have an LP sleeve as intriguing as the story itself.
Tommy was now a double LP, and while Lambert and The Who had been labouring over the music, Mike McInnerney had spent three months creating the artwork. ‘Pete told me I was free to come up with whatever I wanted,’ he says now. ‘Kit met me and immediately said, “Great! The artist in the garret.” That idea appealed to him, so he left me alone as well. It was a wonderful commission.’
McInnerney had copies of Townshend’s poem, essay and tapes of his demos to refer to. He designed a globe floating in space, covered with geometric holes, like windows into another dimension. Surrealist art, spirituality and Meher Baba were all among the influences. But the geometric patterns also referenced optical art designs of the kind found on the set of Ready Steady Go! and on Keith Moon’s Bridget Riley T-shirt in 1966.
As Tommy grew, so did the artwork until it became a triptych. The front cover, with its planet, clouds, flying birds and outstretched fist, suggested ‘breaking out into freedom’, says McInnerney. The grid surrounding the planet was the gateway through which the listener passed to reach the music. The inside triptych showed a hand reaching towards birds, trees and a light in the darkness, and represented Tommy’s enclosed world. Mcinnerney also produced illustrations for a printed libretto that would be included with the LP. Printing the lyrics inside an LP cover would become standard practice for progressive rock groups in the 1970s, but was still unusual in 1969.
On 1 February 1969, Delia De Leon telephoned Pete Townshend to tell him that Meher Baba had ‘dropped his physical body’ the day before. Townshend and McInnerney agreed that the words ‘Avatar: Meher Baba’ (from a Hindu phrase meaning ‘a manifestation of a deity’) would be included in the final Tommy LP credits.
As the album neared completion, though, Townshend couldn’t shake the feeling that its spiritual message had been diluted: ‘Instead of having the guts to take what Baba said, “Don’t worry, be happy. Leave the results to God …” I decided that people weren’t capable of hearing that directly. They’ve got to have it served up in this soppy entertainment package.’
Other aspects of Tommy would niggle Townshend and his bandmates for the next five decades. The album had been Kit Lambert’s baby, which made his decision to go to Cairo instead of overseeing the final mix especially odd. No one can remember why Lambert decamped to Egypt, only that he turned up at IBC, told The Who he had a plane to catch, and left the studio wearing what appeared to be a dressing gown. (‘It wasn’t unusual for people to turn up to work at Track still wearing their dressing gowns,’ points out Arthur Brown.) Instead, Lambert left the final mix to Damon Lyon-Shaw. ‘I interpreted many of Kit’s excitable instructions during the sessions, many on the back of a cigarette packet,’ Lyon-Shaw told Richard Barnes. One of these instructions was to make Pete Townshend’s acoustic guitar ‘sound like the colours of a rainbow’.
Although Roger Daltrey appreciated what he called ‘Kit’s quirky, cranky production’ on The Who’s early records, the band wanted something different for Tommy. Brian Carroll had cut several Who records at IBC with the volume control indicator’s needle in the red: ‘It distorted the sound, but that was what Kit wanted.’ But Tommy had to be different.
The finished album was warmer, subtler and less distorted, but, as Keith Moon said, ‘It was very un-Who-like.’ Townshend defended Lambert’s production; Entwistle grumbled that it wasn’t powerful enough, and that Kit should have given them more time for overdubs. After working on the album for eight months, Daltrey said he felt like ‘a tiger trapped in a cage’ and nobody was sure what sounded good anymore.
The public had its first taste of The Who’s rock opera with the single ‘Pinball Wizard’ in March 1969. Former pirate DJ turned BBC Radio 1 employee Tony Blackburn decried the song as ‘sick’. But that was the point. ‘It was meant to be teenage-like and slightly sleazy,’ said Townshend. ‘Something a schoolteacher would disapprove of.’
Furthermore, the song Townshend had initially denounced as ‘embarrassing’ caught the public’s imagination. Townshend might have been writing about sensory deprivation and childhood abuse, but The Who gamely promoted ‘Pinball Wizard’ with appearances on BBC’s Top of the Pops and ATV’s family-friendly This is Tom Jones. The exposure worked. Kit Lambert had predicted a hit, and ‘Pinball Wizard’ reached Number 4, the highest entry for a Who single since ‘Pictures of Lily’. ‘It was the song that saved us,’ admitted Daltrey.
The Who planned to follow their renewed success with the launch of Tommy at Ronnie Scott’s Soho jazz club. On 1 May, The Who took over the venue’s cramped stage in front of an audience of what Record Mirror described as ‘journalists, publicists and assorted ravers’, many of whom quickly polished off the free drink Track Records had supplied. Townshend offered them an unflinching explanation of The Who’s rock opera: ‘It’s a story about a boy who is born normal, just like you and me … Then he witnesses a murder and becomes deaf, dumb and blind. He is later raped by his uncle and gets turned onto LSD … It’s not sick contrary to what one hears on Aunty [the BBC] …’
Record Mirror recalled The Who being greeted by good-natured taunts of ‘Fuck off’. Later, talking to Who pundit Dave Marsh for Mojo magazine, Townshend remembered ‘an audience of baying critics going “You fucking perverted asshole!” because it was about a deaf, dumb and blind boy.’ The band ignored the heckling, turned their amps up even louder, and thundered through the whole of Tommy: ‘By the end of the show they’d all had a lot of alcohol and we’d deafened them. Then it was kind of, “Well, this could be a hit.” But the damage for me was done.’
Journalists who had previously worried that the story was distasteful were now cautiously supportive. However, the album’s release was put back until the end of May, due to a problem with printing the elaborate sleeve. When it did arrive, New Musical Express damned Tommy with faint praise: ‘Pretentious is too strong a word … Maybe, over-ambitious.’ Melody Maker suggested that the story was ‘disturbing, faintly vicious but generally compassionate’, and the Observer’s Tony Palmer feared that The Who’s greatest hurdle would turn out to be musical snobbery: ‘For all we know [Townshend] could have written the greatest music of the twentieth century, but because he has to do it with pop music what he does write doesn’t stand a chance of a fair hearing.’
Over the coming months, Townshend would talk himself hoarse discussing his new creation. Today, some of his comments about Tommy’s sexual abuse would attract widespread condemnation. ‘Tommy’s awareness of the world is completely un-jaded,’ he said in July 1969. ‘He gets everything in a very pure, filtered, unadulterated, un-fucked-up manner. Like when his uncle rapes him – he is incredibly elated, not disgusted, at being homosexually raped. He takes it as a move of total affection … In Tommy’s mind everything is incredible, meaningless beauty.’
In January 2003, Townshend was arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children. From the outset, Townshend admitted trying to access a website containing indecent images but denied ever actually entering the website. He also made clear that this was over his concerns as to the shocking material readily available on the Internet and as part of his research towards a campaign he had been putting together to counter damage done by Internet pornography. When the police later established that he was not in possession of any downloaded child abuse images, he was cleared of the charge. In a statement at the time, Townshend insisted that the police had ‘unconditionally accepted’ that he was trying to look at the site as research for his campaign. Even so, Townshend’s comments around the time of Tommy’s release and others like them, would become grist to the mill for journalists after his arrest.
However, as Roger Daltrey bluntly explained, in the 1960s, ‘Nothing was off limits for The Who. There was no subject we wouldn’t write about.’ Since being arrested and subsequently cleared, Townshend has refused to back away from the uncomfortable aspects of the story, largely because it’s his story: ‘“See me, feel me, touch me …” Where did that come from? It came from that little four-and-a-half-year-old boy in a fucking unlocked bedroom in a house with a madwoman. That’s where it came from.’
What Tommy shares with S.F. Sorrow is an unhappy ending, if it has an ending at all. Just as The Who had challenged the prevailing ethos of peace and love in 1967, so they rejected the idea of a beatific Tommy guiding his disciples to spiritual salvation. Instead, Tommy gathers his followers together at the holiday camp, brusquely disregards his loyal fan Sally Simpson, and tells his apostles to reject a life of hedonism, plug up their eyes, ears and mouths and play pinball instead. After which he returns to his inner, fantasy world. Listeners were left scratching their heads and wondering what had happened.
Townshend usually directed those who wanted to know what it all meant to Meher Baba’s instruction: find the answer yourself. The rest of The Who toed this party line. ‘The ambiguity of Tommy allowed it to answer many things for many different people,’ said Daltrey. ‘But in fact it didn’t really answer anything. That was the beauty of it.’
However, as the years passed and Tommy became a movie in 1975, and a stage musical in the mid-1990s and 2013, Townshend would try to explain the message. Naturally, it kept changing. In 1994 he told Playboy that ‘Tommy has become a metaphor for post-war children … and the ordinary person, whose life, in its simplicity, is crying out for more.’ In 2013, Tommy’s sensory deprivation was ‘a metaphor for how you feel as a teenager’, while Tommy recovering his senses represents ‘us breaking away from things we clung on to in childhood and assuming our powers as men’.
Not that this ambiguity was detrimental to sales, even at the time. By June, Tommy had reached Number 2 in the UK album charts. Like its titular character’s real and illusory worlds, the record worked on two levels. Sometimes the lyrics didn’t fit the music, and some of the music – and the story – came up wanting. But Tommy was big and ambitious and sounded like it meant something. That said, strip away the mysticism, and the listener was still left with some extraordinary three-minute pop songs, ‘The Acid Queen’, ‘Pinball Wizard’, ‘I’m Free’ and ‘See Me, Feel Me’.
Every member of the group, especially Moon and Daltrey, had given an outstanding performance. But, at times, during the classically inclined instrumentals, The Who sounded as if they were reaching for something beyond their grasp. At their core, The Who were still the same ramshackle R&B band that used to play the Railway. What’s astonishing, even now, is the way Townshend had taken the music they used to play and completely distorted it. Only The Who could have served up this strange brew of Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Eyesight to the Blind’, Henry Purcell, old-English music hall, black humour and sexual perversion, and called it an opera.
Townshend believed that ‘the pretention, the audacity and cheek’ of Tommy was necessary to get The Who the attention they needed. Chris Stamp said that he’d satisfied his anti-establishment tendencies: ‘It was the world we were trying to pull down, all those associations of conservatism.’ Meanwhile, it gave Kit Lambert a stick with which to beat the critics that had mocked his father for daring to mix European classical music with American jazz.
‘I once had a long conversation with Kit about a conversation I’d had with Igor Stravinsky,’ says Tony Palmer. ‘I’d asked Stravinsky, “Do you worry about the impact popular music might have on classical music?” And Stravinsky said, “No, absolutely not. There are only three kinds of music – good music, bad music and non-music.” In other words, I don’t give a toss if it’s a concerto or a song by Lennon and McCartney.’
‘Kit thought in a similar way,’ he continues. ‘Coming from his background, it didn’t matter what you called it – rock ’n’ roll, blues, jazz or show music – it didn’t matter. Kit grasped that as a principle. He didn’t think of rock ’n’ roll as up here and classical music as down there – and he was thinking like that long before Tommy.’
Tommy was a hit, but was it a hit with the same dislocated boys and girls whose response made ‘I Can’t Explain’ a hit? ‘Only the mods would’ve lost the thread of The Who once we got passed at least 1967 and 1968,’ offers ‘Irish’ Jack. ‘I don’t think too many mods, of those few that were left, had an idea of what the hell ‘Dogs’ or ‘Magic Bus’ were about. Yet this was all part of the evolution. Townshend could have written a grand opera about the women’s union at the Ford Dagenham car-assembly plant, as long as the music was fresh and exciting I’d have been up for it.’
Others weren’t so sure. For June Clark, who had once helped run The Who’s fan club, Tommy was the end: ‘I know it told a story and it was unique and new. But I remember writing about this in my diary at the time. I didn’t like The Who’s music anymore and Tommy bored me to tears. To this day I can’t stand it.’
What neither The Who nor their audience realised was that Tommy was both the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. By the time the album was released in Britain on 23 May, The Who were already in the United States. They flew to Michigan a week after playing Ronnie Scott’s, with Townshend convinced that London had disowned them. Perversely, for an album so steeped in post-war British culture, it was in America that The Who’s deaf, dumb and blind hero would truly come to life.
Keith Moon, in a rare moment of lucidity, once said, ‘it wasn’t until Tommy, when people started regarding us as a musical group in addition to a stage act’. The Who were reminded of how much they were defined by their stage act on 16 May, when they arrived in New York to play the first of three nights at the Fillmore East. They were nearing the end of their set when the more coherent members of the audience noticed smoke drifting through the venue. Understandably, they presumed it was all part of the act.
In fact, the smoke was coming from a supermarket next door. The shop’s owners had refused to pay protection money to a local gang, and a Molotov cocktail had just been thrown through their front window. Wiggy Wolff was counting the night’s takings in Bill Graham’s office when he heard about it: ‘My first thought was “Fire? Pay Me!”’
Mingling with the audience were several undercover policemen. After hearing about the fire, one of them jumped onstage and, without explanation, seized Daltrey’s microphone. Daltrey threw a punch, and Townshend kicked the policeman in the groin.
It was only when promoter Bill Graham took the microphone and calmly told the audience they had to evacuate the building, that many realised it wasn’t all part of the act. After all, The Who beating a man up onstage was the next logical step after destroying their guitars and amps.
Ironically, The Who had wanted to tone down the onstage violence for this latest trip and now there was a warrant out for their arrest. The band’s agent Frank Barsalona pleaded their case, and told the police they hadn’t realised the stage invader was a cop. Daltrey and Townshend handed themselves in the following morning. Barsalona posted bail and the tour was allowed to continue. The threat of cancelled visas and a year in jail, hung over The Who for the next two months.
By the end of May, though, ‘Pinball Wizard’ was in the American top twenty and Tommy had received Nik Cohn’s promised glowing review in the New York Times: ‘Tommy is just possibly the most important work that anyone has yet done in rock,’ he wrote. ‘We really went from the ridiculous to the sublime,’ admitted Townshend, ‘being told we were musical geniuses when really we were a bunch of scumbags.’
While rehearsing Tommy for its launch at Ronnie Scott’s, the band had been struck by the music’s extraordinary, building energy. This only increased as the US tour progressed. The tipping point came halfway through a show at Chicago’s Kinetic Playground when the audience stood up as one and remained standing for the rest of the performance. ‘It took Tommy to do what several hit singles and countless tours hadn’t been able to do,’ suggested Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn, ‘give the ordinary American rock fan a handle with which he could get a good grip on The Who.’
Yet Tommy also spoke to the ‘extraordinary’ fan, as Townshend discovered when he received a letter after one of the Chicago gigs: ‘[He] said, “Hey, Mr Townshend, I’ve got to tell you what happened when I first heard Tommy … I became Tommy and ever since I’ve been in this spiritual trance.”’ Townshend could relate to this, and later said that while performing the album, he experienced a natural high that transcended anything he’d had with illegal drugs: ‘The finale of Tommy never failed to mesmerise me along with the rest of the audience.’
Performing Tommy would have a quite different effect on Roger Daltrey. In 1964, Kit Lambert had proudly described The Who as ‘the ugliest [group] in London’. His description of Daltrey on Brighton beach was especially wounding: ‘Roger, with his barrel chest and skinny legs and ribs showing, a real short arse …’ Yet just as Daltrey had inhabited the role of Tommy in the studio, he now inhabited the role onstage. ‘Tommy gave Roger a part to play,’ said Townshend. ‘It made him an icon. It made him a rock god.’ Certainly Daltrey sang Tommy with complete conviction. But there was more to it than that; Daltrey had turned the character into a sex symbol.
At some point in 1968, Daltrey had stopped lacquering his hair and let it grow out naturally. ‘It was my wife’s idea,’ he said. ‘I woke up one morning and she said, “Your hair, your hair …”’ Daltrey’s first panicked thought was that it had fallen out overnight. In fact, he’d simply gone to bed with his hair un-straightened. ‘What she said was, “Your hair, your hair, it’s beautiful.” After that I stopped straightening it and let it grow.’
Daltrey dumped the gel and lacquer he’d been using since 1964 and was soon accessorising his new lion’s mane with a selection of chi-chi neck scarves and fringed buckskin jackets cut away to reveal a lithe torso. The transformation reflected his growing confidence within The Who, and only served to bring Daltrey even more attention. ‘Roger grew his hair, took his shirt off, and started to sit in the sun,’ said Townshend, ‘and instead of getting laid every couple of days he got laid every fifteen seconds.’
When The Who played Columbia, Maryland, their support act was Led Zeppelin, whose name had been gifted to them by Moon and Entwistle during a drinking session. At first glance Zeppelin’s blonde, long-haired vocalist Robert Plant resembled a five-foot, eleven-inch version of The Who’s lead singer. ‘Robert was a bit Daltrey Mark II,’ conceded Roger. ‘But I was always more jealous of the fact that he was so fucking tall.’
The Who had their first taste of Zeppelin’s imperious attitude at the Columbia gig when they played for so long that Wiggy Wolff pulled the plug on them. Zeppelin and The Who would trail each other around the US stadium circuit for most of the 1970s. Zeppelin’s tumultuous heavy rock would make them millionaires and give birth to dozens of inferior imitators, but Pete Townshend would never become a fan. ‘I like them all as people,’ he said later. ‘But I haven’t liked a single thing Led Zeppelin have done.’
Unlike Daltrey and Robert Plant, though, Townshend was now dressing like an anti-rock star. In 1967, he’d been the dandy in ruffled shirts and a beautiful pearly king jacket. A year on, and he was arriving onstage wearing a boiler suit and work boots, like a plumber who’d come to fix a leaky backstage toilet. ‘I used to go on wearing a boiler suit and Dr Martens in defiance of fashion,’ he explained.
By the end of the tour, Tommy had become The Who’s first US top-five album, but Daltrey and Townshend were still facing criminal charges. The pair flew back to New York for an appearance at Manhattan’s Supreme Court. To their surprise, the charges against Daltrey were dismissed and Townshend was let off with a $75 fine, a small price to pay for kicking a policeman in the balls. Townshend told anyone who would listen that he never wanted to go back to America again. Yet by the following morning he’d agreed to play Woodstock.
The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair was being sold to groups and their managers as ‘three days of peace and music’. The idea for the festival came about after two entrepreneurs, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, placed ads in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times declaring themselves, ‘Young men with unlimited capital, looking for interesting, legitimate, investment opportunities and business propositions.’ They ended up investing in what would become the biggest music event of all time. Vast sums of money would be made, but also lost. As Brian Jones said of Monterey, ‘It is not free and it is not love.’ For The Who, Woodstock would be the proof of that.
The festival was to be held over three days between 15 and 17 August 1969 on 600 acres of farmland near the small town of Bethel in upstate New York. But the organisers needed a big act to headline the show. The Beatles had stopped playing live in 1966 and the Stones were out of action as Mick Jagger was shooting another film. Woodstock’s production co-coordinator was John Morris, Bill Graham’s right-hand man at the Fillmore East. Morris told Frank Barsalona he wanted The Who.
Townshend agreed to have dinner with Morris in Barsalona’s New York apartment. ‘Frank was dying for us to do it,’ says Wiggy Wolff, who was also present. ‘There was a buzz and the feeling that this could be a big thing. But it was seen as a bit dodgy – out there in this big field – which is why a lot of acts wouldn’t commit.’
Townshend, exhausted after weeks of touring and the stress of his court appearance, just wanted to go home to see his wife and baby. Morris and Barsalona tried to wear him down by keeping him awake all night. According to Townshend’s autobiography, the persistent agent went so far as to lock them in his apartment and toss the keys into the street below, telling Townshend he couldn’t leave until he agreed to play.
Wolff was also reluctant to commit to Woodstock, as The Who were already contracted to play Bill Graham’s Tanglewood festival in Massachusetts a couple of days before. At the time Woodstock wasn’t going to be a free festival, and Graham was paying The Who $12,500. Never one to take his eye off ‘the count’ Wiggy told John Morris that the band couldn’t possibly play Woodstock without their freighting costs being covered.
Morris agreed to provide a helicopter to transport The Who between the two festival sites. But when Townshend asked for a fee of $15,000, Morris told him they only had $11,000 left in the budget. After further haggling, an exhausted Townshend finally gave in. ‘Pete had agreed to do it but didn’t really want to do it,’ says Wolff now. If Townshend harboured any thoughts of reneging on the deal, they were quashed when Chris Stamp signed the contract a few days later. The Who were playing Woodstock, whether they liked it or not.
Asked about his plans for Track Records in 1967, Kit Lambert told journalists that Pete Townshend would be ‘heading up a mysterious department called “Jazz and New Sounds”’. Despite his punishing workload with The Who, Townshend fulfilled his duties as an A&R man. After bringing the label the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, he signed Andy Newman, the jazz pianist who’d so intrigued him with his performance at Ealing art school, six years earlier.
Townshend was also trying to find a musical project for his friend, ‘Armenia City in the Sky’ composer John ‘Speedy’ Keen, and his latest discovery, a fifteen-year-old Scottish guitarist named Jimmy McCullough. Lambert had pointed out that he didn’t have time to look after all of them, so Townshend decided to form a group for all three. It was another example of what Mike McInnerney describes as ‘arranging people like pieces of Lego’ to see what worked. But not all the pieces fitted. ‘Pete Townshend jammed the three of us together,’ says Andy Newman, who still sounds baffled by the arrangement, even now. ‘We were a manufactured band. Like The Monkees.’
The disparity between the three men soon became obvious. Keen and McCullough had the long hair and general demeanour of late-1960s rock stars. But with his professorial spectacles and beard, the twenty-six-year-old Andy Newman resembled a schoolmaster. Andy was a talented Dixieland jazz pianist, not a rock ’n’ roller. ‘The Who were diametric to my ideas of music at the time,’ he admits. In an attempt to stimulate Newman’s creativity, Townshend invited him to his home studio, placed photographs of different objects, including a picture of a crocodile, on the piano, and asked him to play whatever came into his head. It was an idea that could have come straight out of Ealing art school: ‘Pete suggested I play along to these pictures, though I can’t say whether it made a lot of difference.’
The incongruous trio recorded their debut album, Hollywood Dream, in fits and starts throughout 1969. Speedy Keen wrote the songs, sang and played drums. Townshend produced and played bass under the pseudonym Bijou Drains. After casting around for a band name, Townshend borrowed Andy’s nickname, Thunderclap Newman, a moniker he’d been given by his schoolfriends after his heavy-handed style of piano playing.
Newman had spent the past ten years working as a GPO engineer, and was wary of giving up a steady income. Nevertheless, he agreed to do so, in exchange for what he called, ‘Track Records’ meagre retainer’. But when The Who returned from America in July, Thunderclap Newman’s first single, ‘Something in the Air’, was on its way to Number 1.
In June 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon; ‘Something in the Air’ captured the spirit of change and revolution in what was the final summer of the 1960s. ‘It was the right moment for that particular song,’ says Newman.
Unfortunately, the group’s next single, ‘Accidents’, failed to reach even the top thirty, and their live shows proved to be a disappointment. Speedy Keen and Jimmy McCullouch fell out badly – the fact that the three band members had been, as Newman says ‘jammed together’ didn’t help, but nor did the fact that Lambert, Stamp and Townshend were busy with The Who.
‘I later realised that the problem with Kit Lambert was that he was just like his opposite number in Liverpool, Brian Epstein,’ says Newman. ‘He was a one-group manager. I have always suspected Kit Lambert wanted us to have a big crash and sell no records so he could turn round and say “You’re finished.” We had the hit, but they still didn’t follow it up. They were dedicated to The Who, and our career was put on the back burner.’
Further evidence of Lambert’s managerial shortcomings came when Townshend’s other signing, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, were on tour in America in July. Their follow-up singles had failed to match the million-selling ‘Fire’, and the band suddenly found themselves stranded in a New York hotel without any money.
‘It was a sign of things starting to go wrong at Track,’ says Brown. ‘We were left in this hotel without a penny and with one hamburger to eat between the five of us.’ Brown complained that Lambert and Stamp were ‘off taking drugs somewhere’. This may have been true, but, by his own admission, Brown was also ‘stoned off my crust’. It was the blind leading the blind.
Promoter Bill Graham took pity on the band and gave them money for food. Soon after, Brown was approached by a New York businessman who was looking to break into pop management. He’d concocted a deal with CBS and offered Brown a huge advance to make a soul album. After hearing about the offer, Lambert and Stamp suddenly arrived at the hotel and pleaded with Brown not to leave Track. ‘They said, “Please, we were the guys who put you at the top, don’t you think you have a moral duty to us to stay on the label?”’
Brown gave in, turned down the CBS offer and flew home to England: ‘After that, Kit missed five successive business meetings with me in a row, at which point I thought, this has gone too far.’ The Crazy World of Arthur Brown split up, but the legal and financial fallout from their contract with Track would drag on well into the twenty-first century.
While hardly drug-free himself at the time, Brown maintains that the decline of Track Records can be pinpointed to an increase in Chris Stamp and, especially, Kit Lambert’s drug use. Simon Napier-Bell offered an unflinching description of Kit’s average day in You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: ‘He’d arrive at his office at eleven in the morning, having woken up with a good sniff of coke to brighten the day … As soon as he got to his desk, he’d light a joint. Then he’d take two dishes of pills out of a drawer and leave them sitting on the desk like cocktail snacks on a bar …’
‘Unfortunately, by the late sixties, the white stuff [cocaine] had come in, and Kit, Chris and all of us were seriously supporting the Colombian economy,’ admits John Fenton. ‘But Kit was a gentleman and one of the few guys in rock ’n’ roll with an intellect. Even when he was off his box, you’d put up with it because he was so entertaining and such a great raconteur.’
The culture of excess was escalating and now impacting on the business. Track’s office was close to an Algerian coffee shop. ‘I used to go into the entrance and you were always overwhelmed by the beautiful smell of roasting coffee,’ recalls Andy Newman. ‘As you went up the stairs, the smell of coffee faded and was replaced by the smell of cannabis. I eventually gauged that if the smell of cannabis was overpowering the smell of coffee at the bottom of the stairs, then you had no chance of doing any serious business.’
Lambert and Stamp would add to their roster in 1969 by signing Keith Moon’s favourite comedian, wisecracking American Murray Roman, and singer Marsha Hunt, the star of the hippie musical Hair. But these acts struggled to sell records in the way The Who, Hendrix, Arthur Brown or Thunderclap Newman had. In the meantime, any money made continued to leave the office faster than it was coming in.
‘There were a lot of people at Track haemorrhaging money, not just Kit and Chris,’ states John Fenton. ‘I can remember going back to the office at Old Compton Street at four in the morning with a group of Track employees, where we played poker until nine o’clock. When they ran out of money, they just opened the safe and helped themselves to more. I went home and woke up at my flat in Knightsbridge, and I was covered in £20 notes. The last thing I remembered was that safe being opened.’
This culture of excess would soon claim its first victim. On 3 July, Brian Jones drowned in the swimming pool of his Sussex farmhouse. Pete Townshend was backstage at Top of the Pops with Thunderclap Newman when he heard the news. The pair had spent many nights swanning around the Speakeasy and the Ad-Lib together, before their respective workloads and Jones’ drug habits pulled them apart. ‘Brian died a drunken muddle with no one trying too hard to look after him,’ said Marianne Faithfull. ‘A little bit of love might have sorted him out,’ ventured Townshend. But it was too little, too late.
There was no time to grieve, for the Rolling Stones or The Who. Their lives were moving too fast. Three days after Jones’ death, the Stones went ahead with a planned free concert in London’s Hyde Park. A large photograph of their ex-guitarist was positioned at the side of the stage. They delivered a so-so performance that included Jagger reading Shelley’s poem ‘Adonaïs’ and releasing white butterflies over the crowd as a tribute to their former bandmate.
When the gig was finished, many of those who had been backstage at Hyde Park drifted over to the Royal Albert Hall where The Who were playing the inaugural Pop Proms. Also on the bill was Chuck Berry. ‘The Who loved Chuck Berry, we all loved Chuck Berry,’ says compére Jeff Dexter. ‘Unfortunately Chuck was a cunt to everybody else.’
The problems had begun during rehearsals in the early afternoon, when Berry berated his group for not playing his songs ‘the way Chuck plays ’em’. Berry’s next target was The Who. Berry had opened for the band in New York a few weeks earlier, and was reluctant to do so again. A compromise was reached: Chuck would close the first set in the afternoon and The Who would close the second in the evening. But The Who hadn’t reckoned on their past life as a mod group coming back to haunt them.
In 1964, Townshend and Barney had gone to see Chuck Berry at the Hammersmith Odeon. That night, mods and rockers alike had paid homage to one of rock ’n’ roll’s founding fathers. But when The Who arrived to play their matinee set at the Albert Hall, they faced a group of die-hard rockers and Teddy Boys with long memories. ‘Chuck was still attracting the leftovers who considered The Who a mod band,’ says Dexter.
Within seconds of The Who’s arrival, the Teds were trying to block the stage. The irony was that Daltrey, with his enormous hair and tasselled suede outfit, couldn’t have looked less like a mod if he’d tried. When the rockers started throwing sharpened pennies at the band, one of The Who’s roadies took the drastic step of firing a mace gun into the front row. It was a formidable display of power. But when a flying penny cut Daltrey above his eye, the singer waded in. ‘The guy who did it was wedged up against the stage,’ he recalled. ‘By then I could swing the mic so accurately I could take a cigarette out of someone’s mouth.’ Daltrey swung his mic like a lariat and struck his assailant full in the face.
When Jeff Dexter’s female assistant was knocked unconscious, the DJ dashed to the front of the stage to try to calm the situation: ‘I started trying to preach peace and love. “Hey, we all love Chuck Berry … and we all love The Who …”.’
The police managed to round up most of the culprits, frogmarching them out of the venue, and the show carried on. To pacify the remaining rockers, The Who played Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ ‘Shakin’ All Over’, like parents trying to soothe an infant with its favourite lullabies. Standing by the side of the stage watching it all was Townshend’s favourite painter, Peter Blake. The Who’s past world of mods, rockers, Teddy Boys and pop art had converged in one afternoon.
The Who played their second set that evening to a peaceful audience, including Mick Jagger, resplendent in the same white frock, borrowed from Marianne Faithfull, that he’d worn onstage at Hyde Park. ‘The Who were on brilliant form,’ says Jeff Dexter, ‘because they were playing to their peers. They were the best rock ’n’ roll group we had. The Stones had become satellites of each other, whereas The Who were constantly on the road. They played and lived and shagged together. They were unified.’
The four disparate individuals who had failed to impress Dexter at Greenwich Town Hall four years earlier had changed. Nevertheless, The Who’s lingering reputation for violence made the Pop Proms’ organisers uncomfortable. Promoter Roy Guest didn’t want to see smashed guitars and amps on the Royal Albert Hall stage, and came up with a diversion.
‘Roy suggested we give them bunches of flowers, just like they do at the classical proms,’ says Dexter. ‘My assistant gave Daltrey a bunch and I gave another to Moonie. He was so taken aback he forgot about smashing his kit. I don’t think anyone had ever given The Who flowers before.’
Pete Townshend climbed into the limousine taking The Who from their hotel in Liberty, New York, to the Woodstock festival site and had his first inkling that something was wrong. According to his chauffeur, all helicopters in and out of the site had been grounded, as the charter company hadn’t been paid.
The organisers, Woodstock Ventures, had sold 186,000 tickets for the three-day festival, and had expected an additional 30,000 people to turn up over the course of the weekend; but by the second day there was somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 people on-site. The company didn’t have the manpower to disperse that many or charge them entry. Woodstock had become a free festival, and Woodstock Ventures were in no hurry to pay the bands, which now included Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Santana and Jefferson Airplane. The event was also being filmed and recorded for a documentary and live album, for which Woodstock Ventures would be paid an advance in excess of $1 million.
Unfortunately, nobody involved with the festival had considered the problems that would arise from having half a million people squatting for three days on a farm. By Saturday, when The Who arrived, food and water were in scant supply, the Port-O-San toilets had proved woefully inadequate and persistent rain had turned much of the farmland into a quagmire. The road leading to the site was inches deep with mud, leading to twenty-five-mile tailbacks and scores of abandoned vehicles. ‘We got as far as the car could go,’ said Townshend. ‘Then it became the hundred and ninety-fifth limo to get stuck.’
‘It was a morass, mud up to the knees,’ recalls Wiggy Wolff. ‘Pete was pissed off as he’d brought over his missus and his young kid, and that was why he had agreed to do the gig in the first place.’ After reaching the backstage area, and surveying the chaos, Karen wisely opted to take their baby daughter Emma back to the hotel, where they remained for the rest of the weekend. Townshend, meanwhile, wondered what he’d let himself in for. At which point he glanced up to see a poster of Meher Baba’s face pinned to the top of a telegraph pole.
‘It was a wonderful symbol,’ he said. ‘Then this young man, blonde-haired, Germanic looking, in his underpants, obviously on a trip, ran across and shinned up this pole like an athlete and touched the picture. At this point I was like, “Wow cool, man!” I was still in hippieland. And he touched this picture and went “Aaargh!” as though his hands had been burnt.’ The Baba disciple had touched a live power line and been electrocuted. He fell backwards and landed on an ambulance stuck in the mud below. ‘His head was moving, but his body was completely static,’ recalled Townshend. ‘He had broken his neck. I don’t know if he survived.’
In just a few seconds, any good vibes Townshend felt had been extinguished. To add to his unease, he realised that the coffee he was drinking had been made with water spiked with LSD, albeit heavily diluted LSD. John Entwistle had taken the precaution of bringing his own bottle of bourbon, but mistakenly let someone fill his glass with ice cubes from the backstage area. His response was to guzzle as much bourbon as he could to stave off the effects of the acid. Moon, meanwhile, was on LSD under his own volition. Once again, the no-nonsense Daltrey was at odds with the world around him. ‘Everything was spiked,’ he grumbled. ‘You were scared to take a drink.’
Now trapped on-site, The Who discovered that they weren’t due to play for another fourteen hours. The view from the stage was breathtaking: a sea of bodies that stretched as far as the horizon. To keep such a vast crowd happy, the organisers had decided that music should start in the early evening and carry on through the night. Food and drink might have been in short supply but drugs weren’t. The medical tent was soon full of disorientated young people in the throes of bad acid trips, with one area reserved for those LSD users who’d scorched their retinas from staring at the sun for too long while under the influence.
Most of the musicians were in a similarly heightened state. The Grateful Dead’s guitarist Jerry Garcia later discovered that the ball of light rolling in front of him on the stage was electricity and not a hallucination brought on by acid. Garcia was electrocuted and blown several feet back into his amp. When Jefferson Airplane finished their set, guitarist Paul Kantner found that he was unable to move. Kantner was tripping on LSD, and convinced that his legs had turned into tree trunks and had taken root in the stage.
The backstage enclosure seemed to be populated solely by people who were high, whether by accident or design. Everywhere Townshend looked, they lurched into view, grinning inanely or spouting gibberish, before ducking back into the shadows. ‘As a cynical English arsehole, I wandered through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them,’ he said.
The day got worse as it wore on. At some point in the afternoon John Morris sheepishly told Wiggy Wolff that he didn’t have The Who’s money. ‘Because of the flower-power people, all you ever heard at this time was, “Free, man”,’ says Wolff, dismissively. ‘Free love, free music, free concerts, and it was getting out of hand.’
Wolff reminded Morris of their agreement: that The Who wouldn’t set foot onstage until he’d received their fee in cash: ‘He said, “You can’t do that, there are almost a million people here and there will be riots.” I said, “Yeah, there will be riots. But you will remember I said, we need to get paid or we wouldn’t have come.”’
Morris argued that it was a Saturday, the banks were closed, and it was impossible to raise the cash. When Wolff refused to back down, other bands’ managers tried to appease him. ‘They were all like, “Come on, man.” But I didn’t care. They kept saying, “We can’t get the money out of the bank because it’s Saturday and the safe has a time lock on.” I said, “Well, get the bank manager up. He can override it.” I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was completely bullshitting. But in the end, they did.’
Joel Rosenman telephoned the manager at the White Lake branch of Sullivan County National Bank. When the manager informed him that the roads were too blocked with cars for him to get to the bank and to the site, he was told to wait in his back garden and a helicopter would pick him up. ‘They got him to the bank,’ says Wolff, ‘got him to override the time lock on the safe and got me my money.’
News that The Who had been paid spread through the backstage area. Suddenly the same managers who had been telling Wolff to stop being a capitalist pig were queuing up behind him trying to get cash for their own groups. ‘Creedence Clearwater Revival’s manager tried to ask for the same,’ says Wolff, ‘and they pummelled him, because he was an American. The organisers pointed at me and said, “He’s a Limey, they’re all horrible, but you …” My name was shit but I didn’t care.’
Wolff now had the unenviable task of keeping more than $10,000 safe and stopping his weary, drug-addled band from falling asleep on him. The Who had been due on at 10 p.m., but as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning ‘they kept sticking more bands on ahead of us’. The Grateful Dead were followed by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, and, finally, Sly and the Family Stone.
By 3 a.m. Sly Stone’s exuberant soul music had blasted the crowd out of their torpor, but, having done so, the band refused to stop. A one-hour set had become a two-hour set. ‘I realised that if they carried on any longer, The Who wouldn’t be able to perform,’ says Wolff. ‘I actually said to the organisers, “We’re too tired. We’re not playing. Here’s your money back.”’ Again, Wolff’s bullishness paid off. ‘They cut Sly Stone’s set short,’ he says. ‘Not by that much – I can’t take all the credit – but they did cut it short.’
It was close to 4 a.m. when The Who finally climbed the steps on to the darkened stage. ‘Once again, providence went our way,’ says Wiggy ‘because Sly and the Family Stone were a horrible band to follow, but at least they’d woken the audience up.’ Despite the shivery after-effects of the LSD and the crushing boredom of the past fourteen hours, The Who exuded an almost super-human energy. Sly Stone’s limbous funk suddenly gave way to some twisted English blues. Townshend, in a boiler suit and boots, grinned, gurned, scowled and windmilled his guitar, while Daltrey, an explosion of blonde curls, suede fringes and bare flesh, lassoed his mic lead around his head.
When film-maker Michael Wadleigh appeared holding a camera, Townshend pushed him into the press pit without a second thought. However disgusted he claimed to be by the aloof behaviour of his rock-star contemporaries, Townshend was guilty of the same. Later, his extreme reaction to another stage invader anticipated Time magazine’s description of The Who at Woodstock as ‘slicing through the flower power like a chainsaw in a daisy garden’.
Among those backstage and high on acid was Abbie Hoffman, a strident anti-Vietnam War protestor and one of the founders of the vociferous Youth International Party. His fellow activist and leader of the White Panthers, John Sinclair, had just been sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of two marijuana joints. Hoffman watched The Who from the wings and in his already heightened state began brooding over Sinclair’s plight. Without warning, he dashed on to the stage to protest in the middle of Tommy and barked into the microphone: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’
‘Fuck off! Fuck off my fucking stage!’ Townshend replied in a braying cockney accent. According to Who mythology and several eyewitnesses, he then struck Hoffman with his guitar, knocking him into the press pit. ‘If I’d hit him with a guitar he’d be dead. I used the guitar neck to sweep him off the stage,’ Townshend later insisted. The cameraman was changing film at the time and missed the altercation. After dealing with Hoffman, Townshend delivered a personal promise to the crowd: ‘The next fucking person that walks across the stage is gonna get fucking killed, all right?’
Townshend later felt guilty. He knew who Abbie Hoffman was and wasn’t unsympathetic to John Sinclair’s plight. But he was also obsessively territorial about The Who’s stage. The incident was still on Townshend’s mind when he wrote about Meher Baba in Rolling Stone, two years later: ‘I see me writing columns like this, then going and kicking Abbie Hoffman’s little ass in a proud rage … I am my own worst enemy.’
Despite Townshend’s violent outburst, The Who’s Woodstock performance was a victory. As they reached the grand finale of Tommy, Mother Nature chose to smile on the band, giving them a crucial advantage over all the acts that had come before. ‘During “See Me, Feel Me”, the sun started to come up fast,’ says Wiggy Wolff. ‘You could not have asked for anything better. Some guy actually came up to me and said, “How the fuck did you do that?” And I said, “I had God’s help.”’
Almost twenty-four hours after they’d left, the exhausted band returned to their hotel in Liberty. By then, the state governor had arranged for military helicopters to bring emergency food and medical supplies to the festival site. Jimi Hendrix was supposed to play on Sunday night. By the time The Who’s nemesis arrived onstage, it was Monday morning, and the farmland was strewn with abandoned tents, clothes, blankets and the bodies of those too exhausted or stoned to move.
Despite the drugs and the disorganisation, the music press declared Woodstock a triumph. ‘The largest groupings of Americans in history has to be taken as a political event,’ wrote Danny Goldberg in Billboard. ‘Political, without the fear, clichés, and martyrdom of other political events. Its candidate was music and peace.’
By Monday morning, even the mainstream media were forced to report that half a million people had managed to co-exist peacefully for three days. There had been fewer than a hundred arrests for drug-related offences and a single accidental death, caused by a tractor crushing a youth asleep in a field. As a reporter for CBS News noted: ‘These long-haired mostly white kids in their blue jeans and sandals were no wild-eyed anarchists.’
After the backstage squabbles over money, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman had run up an overdraft that threatened to consume almost all of their ‘unlimited capital’. The advances they received for the film and album rights would save them from bankruptcy, but Woodstock Ventures would spend the next eleven years paying off their debts.
The whole experience, however, had left The Who cold. ‘Woodstock was the end of that era,’ said Pete Townshend. ‘The whole of the rock community divided into three camps. There was the John Sinclair/Abbie Hoffman camp – the revolutionary politicos. There were the hippies, which is, “Oh man, oh man, you gotta try this and then throw yourself out of a tree.” Then there were the Brits – people like us. We came here to work, and then go home and rest and write. Somehow we felt eminently boring at the time. Maybe that was why I had the conflict with Abbie Hoffman. He had something to say, he had something to do, something to be passionate about, and I just felt like a workman in a lunatic asylum, come to fix the plumbing.’
Townshend thought The Who didn’t deserve their victory at Woodstock, and Daltrey declared it ‘the worst gig we ever played’. But the subsequent documentary movie would preserve their performance forever, and elevate their standing around the world. The Who were on the verge of rock stardom.
After the communal madness of Woodstock, the Isle of Wight festival at the end of August was a quaintly sedate affair. Bob Dylan was booked to close the festival, with The Who headlining above Joe Cocker, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Track labelmate Marsha Hunt.
The Who’s choice of transport to the festival site was a reminder of their now elevated status. There would be no hiking through the mud this time. The Who came by helicopter instead. Unfortunately, their grand entrance didn’t quite go to plan. As their craft descended backstage, one of the wooden boards comprising a makeshift landing pad flipped up and smashed into its rotor blades. The helicopter landed with a loud bump before disgorging four laughing band members. Nobody cared about the damage. Track’s financial profligacy was such that a new, bigger helicopter arrived to replace the broken one, and Peter Rudge was soon offering backstage guests a ride back to London for £25 a head.
Meanwhile, The Who’s 2,500-watt PA was so large it came with a warning notice to the audience not to venture within fifteen feet of it. Unlike at Woodstock, The Who were able to avoid any peripheral distractions backstage. ‘We didn’t spend time getting into the vibrations,’ said Townshend dismissively. Instead, they performed Tommy, with brutal efficiency, before flying home in time for Moon to catch last orders at The Speakeasy.
The following day, festival compére Jeff Dexter was shocked to see Bob Dylan and his manager, Albert Grossman, on their knees in a backstage cabin, counting piles of crumpled ten-bob notes and towers of coins. Like The Who at Woodstock, Dylan wasn’t setting foot on the stage until he’d had his fee – in cash. ‘There I was, feeling spiritual, and there was Dylan counting money,’ says Dexter. ‘But it was at that moment that hard commerce slipped into the trip.’
The dissenting voices that had greeted Tommy’s release had now been silenced. Before long, Melody Maker was loftily declaring The Who to be ‘the band against which the rest of rock must be judged’. The Who received similarly glowing notices when they returned to America in October, and played a six-night stand at the Fillmore East in New York.
Waiting for them backstage after one of the shows was Leonard Bernstein. The West Side Story composer had heaped praise on Tommy after first hearing it. ‘He shook me and said, “Do you know what you’ve done?” said Townshend. ‘Of course, what he was talking about was that I was going the next step in what he had done with West Side Story, which was creating a popular song cycle, a musical that was really rooted in street culture.’
Townshend could afford to bask in the praise. For Kit Lambert, though, the final blow to the musical establishment was yet to come.
The Who began 1970 with a punishing workload and a terrible accident. Pete Townshend woke up in Twickenham on New Year’s Day to find a Melody Maker reporter waiting downstairs to do an interview. Four days later, after a heavy drinking session, Keith Moon accidentally killed his chauffeur.
Moon had recently bought a mock-Tudor pile in Winchmore Hill, a place of moneyed stockbrokers and manicured golf courses deep in suburban north London. Moon couldn’t afford it, but believed he was due a sizeable royalty cheque for composing the song ‘Tommy’s Holiday Camp’. His marriage was in turmoil, but, if nothing else, he was determined to keep up appearances. Dougal Butler was currently driving John Entwistle, so Moon hired a new chauffeur, Neil Boland, to shepherd him around town in the trusty Bentley.
On 4 January, Moon was invited to open a discotheque in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Neil Boland drove the drummer and his entourage to the club, where Keith gave a speech and proceeded to get roaringly drunk. Despite being hassled by a gang of skinheads, Moon insisted on staying at the venue and carrying on drinking. At closing time, the same gang followed the party into the car park and were soon screaming abuse and banging on the roof of the Bentley.
Boland climbed out to remonstrate with them, but was knocked to the ground. In a panic, Moon clambered into the driver’s seat and started the vehicle. The car was several hundred yards away before Keith realised that his chauffeur was trapped underneath. Boland died in hospital shortly after. Eight youths would later be charged with causing an affray, and Moon for driving without a licence and insurance while under the influence of alcohol. Thanks to his persuasive and, presumably, very expensive lawyer, Keith was let off with an absolute discharge due to ‘mitigating circumstances’. Boland’s family never forgave him, and, according to many, Moon was tortured with guilt for the rest of his life.
Moon’s response to the accident was to blot out the pain with yet more drink and drugs. But the mischievousness and charm that had allowed Keith to get away with so much in the 1960s wouldn’t be enough to sustain him in the new decade. Soon it would become hard for even close friends to identify who the real Keith Moon was. ‘The only time he was himself was when he shut himself off at home and relaxed with Kim,’ says Dougal Butler. ‘You could actually talk to him then, because he wasn’t in the music scene. But as soon as he opened that front door and went into town he turned into “Keith Moon”.’
John Schollar had stayed in touch with Moon since their time together in The Beachcombers. The Who’s touring schedule made meeting up difficult. But when they did, Moon was the same as ever, as long as they were on their own. ‘He came round especially to see my parents when he found out they were moving house,’ says Schollar. ‘This would have been in the late sixties, and they were so pleased to see him.’ Schollar’s mother couldn’t help noticing that Keith’s dilapidated fur coat was being held together with a safety pin. ‘Yes,’ said Moon, proudly. ‘But it’s a silver safety pin.’ During these visits, Schollar would sometimes take Moon to the same pubs and bowling alleys they used to frequent in the early 1960s: ‘And it would be fine to start with. But then after about ten minutes, he’d be buying all the lads drink and showing off. Keith couldn’t have a quiet life.’
In some ways, it’s easy to see why Moon struggled with fame. Gushing praise from the likes of Leonard Bernstein meant that in America, especially, The Who were now being feted as serious musicians; a group that had bridged the gap between rock ’n’ roll and opera. Moon recalled the change in perception in an interview with Rolling Stone: ‘Before, if we were sitting backstage, people would just barge in and help themselves to a drink. Now, they knock at the door, and when they come in, we’re sitting with champagne on ice that’s been provided by the management … People would treat us slightly differently,’ he added. ‘They talked in whispers.’
Rock music was now being regarded in some quarters as ‘art’ and Tommy was partly to blame. Just as Sgt. Pepper had encouraged lesser bands to start writing about imaginary LSD trips, The Who’s rock opera ushered in the era of the concept album: a story set to music, regardless of the quality of the story or the music.
In November 1969, a new British group King Crimson released their debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King. Their often-brutal jazz-rock prompted one Melody Maker critic to accuse them of creating ‘an almost overpowering atmosphere of power and evil’. King Crimson played at the Stones’ Hyde Park concert. During their set, the six-foot-high picture of Brian Jones at the side of the stage fell over hitting lead vocalist Greg Lake on the head. It was as if the dead Rolling Stone was wreaking posthumous revenge on these art-rockers with their howling saxophones and crooked time signatures.
King Crimson supported The Who a few weeks later at the Plumpton National Jazz and Blues festival. Pete Townshend thought they were wonderful, and wrote a critique of In the Court of the Crimson King to be used in press ads for the LP. ‘An uncanny masterpiece,’ he wrote. ‘A friend listening to the album from a room below says, “Is that a new Who album?” Deeply, I’m ashamed that it isn’t, but I’m also glad somehow …’ Townshend compared the album with Mahler’s ‘Eighth Symphony’, but also wondered whether it should even be described as rock music.
But the idea of what rock music was or wasn’t was changing, yet again. By 1970, it could be The Who thrashing away at ‘My Generation’ or King Crimson scaring the critics with what Townshend described as ‘a million bloody Mellotrons that whine and soar like sirens down a canyon’. In 1968 Tony Palmer was pilloried by large swathes of the Observer’s readership and some of his fellow critics for comparing The Beatles’ White Album to the great works of Schubert. Had he made the same comparison after Tommy, the reaction might have been different. The term ‘progressive rock’ was now being used by the press to describe King Crimson, Pink Floyd and new groups, including Family and Yes, that pulled influences from jazz and classical as well as pop music, and all of whom would make concept albums in one form or another.
By the new year, though, The Who were growing sick of Tommy. In America, the album had become bigger than the band. Roger Daltrey was now so closely identified with the character that many of the fans, waitresses and airhostesses he met in his everyday life called him ‘Tommy’. The album had made Daltrey a star and seen Townshend acclaimed as a serious composer. But their bandmates were less enamoured of its effect on the group. ‘John Entwistle got so sick of playing Tommy and talking about Tommy that he started to resent it,’ admitted Townshend.
There was also a polarity between the grandness of Tommy and the modest venues The Who were still playing in the UK. After performing to half a million people at Woodstock, The Who’s next gig was in front of a few hundred at a theatre in Shrewsbury. But they’d turn this to their advantage. In fact, it was all part of Lambert and Townshend’s plan to subvert the grandeur of Tommy and bring The Who back to earth.
The group had arranged for many of their recent US dates to be recorded for a possible live album. When sound engineer Bob Pridden told Townshend that he had no idea which of the shows was the best, a petulant Townshend ordered him to burn the tapes and announced that The Who would record their live LP in England instead. Two shows were earmarked, at Leeds University on 14 February and the day after at Hull City Hall. It was a decision that would affect the The Who’s future in more ways than they could possibly have imagined.
Kit Lambert once told Tony Palmer that he believed pop would usurp classical music and that The Beatles would stage an opera one day. Instead it was The Who. Lambert had dreamed of launching Tommy with performances at the world’s most famous opera houses, starting with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet government was reluctant to sanction a visit from a decadent western rock group, even one that had written an opera. But Lambert was stung when Sir Rudolph Bing, director of the New York Metropolitan Opera House, turned him down as well. However, Kit wasn’t so easily put off.
The English National Opera had recently moved from Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where the teenage Chris Stamp had once talked his way into a job, to the London Coliseum in Covent Garden’s St Martin’s Lane. Lambert persuaded the management to let The Who play at the ENO’s new home. On 14 December, The Who walked out onstage in the same venue that had recently hosted productions of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Townshend bashfully told the 2,500-strong audience that it felt a bit odd being there, before finding his usual confidence, and announcing, ‘Now we’re going to take over!’
The London Coliseum was just the start. Lambert, with the help of Cambridge graduate Peter Rudge, had soon sweet-talked the managers of some of Europe and Scandinavia’s greatest opera houses into letting The Who perform. Before long The Who were booked to play Tommy in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, the Stadt Opernhaus in Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin, and at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw throughout January 1970.
The Théâtre des Champs Elysées was the home of the Paris Opera and the venue in which Igor Stravinsky had first staged his controversial ballet The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913. The audience were so shocked by its experimental rhythms and choreography that a riot broke out during which the orchestra was pelted with vegetables. There was something fitting then about The Who being the first pop group ever allowed to play there.
For Kit Lambert, it had all been leading up to this. ‘Kit wanted to create change and revolution in the establishment,’ said Chris Stamp. ‘That’s what we all wanted. So we came up with the idea of raiding the opera houses, the thrones of the bourgeoisie, with our people – the scruffy, long-haired fucks.’
For The Who, though, it was a bittersweet victory. Instead of their die-hard audience of ‘scruffy, long-haired fucks’, Townshend found himself peering at rows of record-company bigwigs, minor royals, bored classical music critics with their fingers in their ears and, in Cologne, the West German president Gustav Heinemann. Instead of beads, denim and a stoned grin, The Who’s audience were now wearing bow ties, dinner jackets and a look of confusion, even hostility, at what they were hearing.
The Who took Lambert and Stamp’s cultural revolution in their stride, but regarded it with both cautious pride and outright disdain. ‘I see The Who as a sophisticated circus act,’ offered Townshend. ‘We take our failings very seriously and our successes ecstatically.’ When challenged about the authenticity of their rock opera, Townshend made no attempt to justify it. ‘I can remember playing it in Hamburg or somewhere like that that, and opera critics came backstage after and said, “Mr Townshend. This is a very impressive evening, but this isn’t actually an opera is it?”’ he recalled. ‘And I’d say, “Yes it fucking is, mate” – or whatever rock stars were supposed to say in those days. And they’d say, “No, no, no, it’s a cantata. More like a song-cycle … Do you mind if I say it is a rock cantata?” They missed the irony. That whatever we call it, it is. I’d say, “Rock cantata? It’s a rock banana, mate, OK!”’
Having conquered Europe, Kit Lambert sent Peter Rudge to New York to talk to Sir Rudolph Bing again. His opinion of Tommy had softened since the previous summer. ‘I didn’t understand a thing about Tommy myself,’ Bing said. ‘But I didn’t understand everything about Don Giovanni either.’ He finally agreed to let The Who play.
On 7 June 1970, The Who became the first rock group to play the New York Metropolitan Opera House. They had always thrived on incongruity, and there was certainly something incongruous about the sight of Keith Moon’s battered drum kit and the paraphernalia of a touring rock ’n’ roll band alongside the regal gold and velvet furnishings of this prestigious theatre.
The clash of cultures was everywhere. Co-promoter Bill Graham had drafted in staff from the Fillmore East to help the venue’s regular ushers with problems they wouldn’t have experienced during the Met’s recent staging of Tosca. By showtime, thick clouds of marijuana smoke had shrouded the ornate chandeliers, and Graham had already marched a ticketless fan out of the theatre and been denounced as a ‘fucking capitalist’ for his troubles.
In 1965, Kit Lambert instructed Pete Townshend never to walk on to the stage, only to run. Townshend was arguably the first musician to ever run on to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, and certainly the first to do so wearing a boiler suit. Townshend informed the audience that this would be the last time The Who performed Tommy in its entirety. It wouldn’t be. But he wished it was.
The Who then blasted through their rock ‘cantata’ before reaching the emotionally charged finale of ‘See Me, Feel Me’. The Met’s shell-shocked ushers cowered from the noise, and 4,000 fans cheered through a fug of dope smoke. After the two-and-a-half-hour matinee show, The Who did it all over again in the evening. When the gold stage curtain came down after the second performance, the audience stood up and applauded for fifteen minutes. The Who didn’t play encores but Bill Graham persuaded an exhausted Townshend to go back and talk to the crowd.
‘I went to speak,’ he said, ‘and someone threw a can of Coke at me.’ When Townshend explained that the show was over, some of the audience began booing. Townshend threw his microphone into the orchestra pit and stalked off. The Who could have been back at The Goldhawk or The Oldfield, squaring up to the truculent drunks slopping beer and itching for a fight. Everything – and nothing – had changed.
Keith Moon later described the performance as like ‘playing to an oil painting’. For Roger Daltrey, it was just another gig: ‘A hole with a stage. It had chandeliers, so what?’ Meanwhile, Townshend railed against the Met and said that it was ‘full of dead ideas, dead people and too much fucking reverence.’ But even he was forced to admit that ‘a snotty pop group playing opera houses’ was something of a coup d’état.
Soon after, Life magazine declared that The Who’s performance at the Met had ‘installed rock as a maturely rounded art in the shrine of the great European classics … Best of all, it afforded The Who the opportunity to do brilliantly what no other rock group ever dreamed of doing.’ The Who’s rock opera, rock ‘cantata’, rock banana, even, had paid off. Pete Townshend and his ‘bunch of scumbags’ were being hailed as musical geniuses.
Kit Lambert had achieved what he’d set out to do ever since stumbling across the High Numbers at the Railway Hotel in summer 1964. In a little over five years, he and Chris Stamp had helped transform a jobbing pub band into a top-ten singles and albums act, and turned their art school student leader into a songwriter to rival Lennon and McCartney. Now, to top it all, they’d taken that group and its composer’s angry commentary on sex, drugs and violence into the last remaining bastion of the classical music establishment.
‘Can you imagine that?’ says Tony Palmer. ‘Kit Lambert, the son of Constant Lambert, the founder of the Royal Ballet, had presented an opera at the New York Metropolitan Opera House.’ For the working-class would-be revolutionary Chris Stamp it was a kick in the balls to the bourgeoisie; for Kit Lambert, it was a vengeful act against the naysayers who’d hounded his father in the last months of his life.
Three weeks before their performance in New York, however, The Who had released the concert album, Live at Leeds. Whereas Tommy had arrived in a grandiose sleeve, this one came in a brown paper bag. The music on Live at Leeds included pumped-up versions of ‘Summertime Blues’ and ‘Shakin’ All Over’, the same songs The Who used to pacify the Teds and rockers at the Royal Albert Hall. The energy they imbued in these songs and versions of their own hits was a stark reminder of their power as a live act. Live at Leeds cued up the next stage in The Who’s career, one that would see them become one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll bands in the world, capable of casting a spell over a stadium full of people.
For the three men who’d met as boys at school over ten years earlier, it would always be an uncomfortable alliance. What had started as Roger Daltrey’s group had long since slipped out of his control. But by 1970, Daltrey recognised the importance of his role as a mouthpiece for Townshend’s songs; as Townshend’s voice even. After years of struggle, Daltrey ended the 1960s knowing who he was and where he fitted in.
Tommy, meanwhile, would mark the beginning of Pete Townshend’s rapid ascendance as a pop songwriter. The insecure art student recruited to join an older, feared schoolboy’s band had taken over. Townshend’s ideas would become more ambitious and far-reaching as the 1970s progressed. But he would have to fight ever harder to get his bandmates and the managers who’d nurtured his talent to understand those ideas.
John Entwistle’s role in The Who had been set in stone long before 1970. It never changed. Entwistle was the Who’s engine room, its unsung hero and certainly its unsung songwriter. Beneath the stoic exterior, there was a frustrated rock star trying to get out. By the time The Who made Tommy, Entwistle had reconciled himself to his position, but that didn’t stop him wanting more.
Despite the best efforts of his bandmates, his wife and his friends, Keith Moon’s demise already seemed inevitable. The hopeless schoolboy with the uncanny powers of mimicry had become an idiot savant: a gifted drummer, an extraordinary comic and arguably the most famous member of The Who. But Moon had been acting for so long, he was now more confused than ever about who the real Keith Moon was.
And if 1970 was the beginning of a new chapter for The Who, then it marked the beginning of the end for Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. Their time as The Who’s mentors was drawing to a close, even if nobody involved yet knew it. Lambert once said, ‘Just to succeed in life is banal to the point of failure. The purpose of success is to have something substantial to wreck, and the ultimate triumph is to create a magnificent disaster.’
The Who’s raid on the world’s opera houses would turn out to be their management’s last great victory. ‘I should have resigned then,’ said Kit Lambert, after Tommy. ‘I knew I couldn’t do anything better than that.’ The Who would go from strength to strength in the 1970s, but the two men who’d put them on course would end almost wrecking what they’d worked so hard to create. For Lambert and Stamp, the war was over. The challenge now was how to survive in peacetime.