I'm not trying to cause a big sensation
Talking 'bout my generation
Whatever happened that day
when Keith Moon joined John, Pete and myself on the stage,
something happened.
There are billions of people on this planet.
What the fuck put four total individuals
together on the stage in Greenford to make this music?
What the fuck did that?
Towards the end of the war, everything was secret.
You never knew whether you were winning or losing,
and most of the time they were saying you were winning
when you felt that you were losing.
I was born into that world.
I was born in the hour that Albert Speer was arrested.
He was Hitler's premier architect.
I don't mean war architect. He was an actual architect.
My father got these two messages.
One was, "Speer's been captured,"
and the other was, "It's a boy, Mr. Townshend."
When I think about my childhood in the late '40s, '50s,
it's almost like the world was black and white.
It is very weird.
Very Spartan living. We were still on food rationing.
No cars in the street.
After the war
there was like bombed-out buildings that had loads of bricks,
so we didn't need Lego. We had the real thing.
Practically everybody that I know that I grew up with,
if they were wild and crazy and weird, or in a band,
the chances were that they had some weird shit happen to them
when they were kids.
My parents were both working dance-band musicians,
and I grew up with the music of my father,
which was the Basie Band, the Ellington Band,
and great singers like Sarah Vaughan and Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.
And I felt I couldn't even begin to emulate or occupy their territory.
We were all interested in traditional jazz at the time.
To me, trad jazz was something that was already a rebellious threat
to the kind of serene dance-hall dance music that my father played.
The first connection between the four talents of The Who
came in 1959 at a West London boys' school.
I met John at Acton County Grammar School.
Big guy. Funny.
Very sharply dressed.
John and Pete didn't really get to know one another well
until they started at playing instruments together.
Right from the beginning and right the way through our life,
he was a great musical ally.
Right over here, you're... John.
You're John? John.
And you're from... London, too.
From London, too? Yeah.
He was calling himself John Allison
because his girlfriend was, of course, called Allison.
We thought "Entwistle" was a really strange name for a band member.
And we tried John Brown, and we thought, "Well, no."
"He's John Entwistle."
The Who wouldn't have been The Who without Entwistle.
He would fill the sound up with the bass.
If you actually listen to any Who record and you isolate the bass,
it's pretty astonishing what he's doing.
It's nothing to do with what a normal bass player would do.
I'm gonna raise a fuss
I'm gonna raise a holler
Entwistle stood still.
You had Pete swinging his arm around like a windmill,
you had Roger throwing his microphone around all over the place,
Keith smacking away at the drums,
and Dad stood away in the corner playing quietly.
My boss said
No dice, son, you gotta work late
Sometimes I wonder
I used to get cross
that they didn't show John so much on the television.
The cameras were always on Pete and Roge.
He was like the central point in the spinning world, you know.
I think a lot of people don't understand
is that what he was doing is he was playing like a Bach organ.
It was huge, massive, rich sound.
So I used to find my way inside that.
And I used to sit with John and sit inside,
and he would follow me and support me and we'd play together.
John had such facility as a player
and really very unique.
I don't think anyone had really gone into lead bass playing.
He wasn't actually a quiet guy.
He was just a very sardonic guy.
Very cynical. He was very funny,
but in that sort of laid-back way.
Entwistle was uncompromising
in leading his own life, you know.
Afraid John takes after me.
I like music, dancing, enjoying myself, drinking.
I love partying.
I never, ever felt
that John had any addictive problems at all, except one,
which began with an "H."
It's a big shop in London called Harrods.
That was his one addiction.
He could never buy one pair of shoes,
he always bought a dozen, in each color,
and the shirts and the trousers.
He was certainly well-dressed.
Don't know about that skeleton fucking leather thing, though,
that John Entwistle was... What's all that about?
He was very musical right from the age of three.
He knew all the pop songs that were in the charts.
And he'd sing for hours.
My first date with John
was to go to a Boys' Brigade thing at the Albert Hall.
He used to play the bugle.
He joined the school orchestra.
He wanted to play the trumpet, but they didn't have any left.
The only instrument left was the French horn.
He practiced in the loo. He became quite proficient.
John Entwistle was the only one of us
that kind of had any musical training at all.
He made his own first bass with his own hands, you know.
What he realized was that
he had the power to change the fucking instrument.
You know, you don't change the trumpet.
But the base guitar was relatively new.
He started to play it differently, hold it differently.
Being on stage with a guitar, with a big amplifier,
it became his voice.
I was walking down the road one day coming home from work,
I worked in a sheet-metalwork factory.
I noticed this guy coming towards me
who I recognized from being at school.
And across his shoulder he's got this strange-Iooking instrument.
So, I said to him, you know, stupidly, "What you got there?"
He said, "It's a bass!"
They all went to the same school.
Roger was at the same school, but he got expelled.
I think he was accused of setting fire to the school.
Roger was a bit of a tearaway.
It's been said that I was a bully
later on in my school career.
But I don't think I actually was.
I just loved to fight.
Still do.
When I first met Roger,
he was one of the most powerful, charismatic
and, literally, powerful men I'd ever come across.
You know, he was like Elvis Presley.
Elvis, to me, was the guy I wanted to be.
But realistically, the guy who showed me that I could...
Instead of just dreaming about this,
could actually go out there and do it,
was a guy called Lonnie Donegan.
Sweet 16 Goes to church just to see the boys
Lonnie Donegan was a big influence on a lot of people.
It was the rhythm, the beat, and the freshness of it.
He's only putting on the style, yeah
Putting on the agony
Putting on the style
It had that kind of rock and roll sort of pace to it.
Skiffle is really basically, early American folk songs.
It was so easy. Anyone could make a skiffle groove. You could do it with home objects.
For drums, we had an old washing board.
Tea-chest bass, which is basically a tea chest
with a piece of string and a broomstick.
It lifted the music from, like, big bands
into people's parlors.
You could do it yourself, like.
Every street in Shepherd's Bush
had its own skiffle group.
On Fielding Road, Roger Daltrey founded The Detours
with a guitar he made himself at the sheet-metal factory.
At the age of 17 or 18, you know, he was the king of the neighborhood.
So anyway, I'm walking home from work one night,
and immediately I kind of felt a bonding with this guy.
So I said, "You in a band?" And he said, "Yeah, I'm in a band."
I said, "Well, you know, have you got any work?"
He said, "No." I said, "Well, we have."
You know, I said, "Do you get paid when you work?"
He said, "No." I said, "We do."
I was lying.
And I said, "Well, you know, we're looking for a bass player.
"Would you like to join?"
Shortly after, Reg Bowen, on rhythm guitar, left the band,
John said, "Well, I know someone who's a good rhythm player."
So, we said, "Well, bring him along."
John was very important for me because he never let me go.
He could've done. A couple of the other guys did let me go.
John was very encouraging to me, and nurturing,
and he used to constantly say to me, "No, you're a good musician."
He was just vital to me in those days.
By 1962, The Detours were playing pubs as a five-piece.
John on bass, Doug Sandom on the drums,
Pete played rhythm guitar,
Colin Dawson singing, Roger playing lead guitar.
It was Roger's band. The Detours were Roger's band.
And Roger was the driving force.
And Roger supplied all the energy, and he drove the van,
and he picked people up and he arranged everything.
Someway, someday I'll find a way
To make you see my way
In '63, Roger gave up the guitar,
fired the singer, and took over as frontman.
When there was just the three of us as a band,
just two instruments, Pete and John,
the only thing with strings was Pete and John,
and I remember saying to him, "It sounds fucking great!"
You see my way
Oh, yeah
Everything gonna be all right this morning
All the other guys in the band were working for a living, you know,
and I was at art school. I was on a grant.
I was having an easy life.
I was smoking dope, listening to, you know, records.
I met Pete when we were in art school,
and I didn't even know he was in a band.
We'd got this flat
that had belonged to this American guy, Tom Wright.
Tom Wright, who had a huge blues
archive from the States...
Now, when I was a young boy
At the age of five
All that early blues stuff,
John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed...
All those young kids loved the blues,
because the working class was in a similar sociological position.
You know what I mean? To the blacks in America.
My father was in the war. His ship gets torpedoed.
My mother, who's pregnant, goes to the shipping office,
as she did every week, to get his salary.
And they say, "Oh, no, there's no salary this week, Mrs. Stamp.
"The ship's gone down."
Right? So that was the status of the working class, right?
Well, it's a shame, shame, shame
Shame, shame on you
We identified with American blues
and those early black American artists.
We started listening to that, and we thought, "Well this is great."
And we started playing the blues.
I played the harmonica.
Through that music
we became aware of the limitations of our drummer.
Doug Sandom was fired in April of 1964.
So we got a session drummer in
for a couple of gigs we had lined up.
And we were playing one night
at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford.
All I remember is I was standing on stage getting ready to take a break,
When a gingerbread man
appeared in the audience in front of me,
looking up at me with his great big puppy-dog brown eyes.
He wanted to be a Beach Boy
so he bought some hydrogen peroxide and bleached his hair
and it'd come out bright orange.
And he came up, and with all the arrogance in the world, you know,
"I hear you're looking for a drummer.
"Well, I'm much better than the one you've got."
He sat down.
Peter starts off with a pick screeching down the string.
And it gets into a very heavy rift.
All of a sudden it's like a jet engine
started up in the back of me.
It was like magic.
All of a sudden, everything worked.
We were just astonished. This kid was the missing link.
And it was obvious from the first minute of him playing with us.
The whole dance floor stopped and started looking. It was extraordinary.
You didn't watch drummers.
He was the only drummer I know that you'd watch.
Moon was a star.
He was a shooting star, that's what he was.
He was clearly an alcoholic, an addict, a sex addict.
Who are you?
Who, who? Who, who?
On the one hand, he was this lunatic
who, you know, couldn't wait to get on a drum kit and just explode with it.
Who are you?
And on the other hand, he was a very quiet, saddened person.
Who are you?
He clearly had tremendous esteem issue problems.
He was a complex little ball of difficulty.
Just leave and get drunk.
He wasn't like that as a boy. That's what I can't understand.
I mean, he always did as he was told.
He was very quiet and I had no problem with him at all.
He was good boy.
By the time he was 16,
Moon was playing American surf music
in a band called The Beachcombers.
The Beachcombers was the first band I remember him having at home
and setting up in the front room.
Keith liked the Beach Boys. I didn't like them.
"...fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-Bird away"
Woo, woo Woo, woo...
You know, and they would sing away.
Ba ba ba ba Barbara Ann Oh, Barbara Ann
Ba ba ba ba Barbara Ann
You got me rockin' and a-rollin'
Rockin' and a-reelin' Barbara Ann
He liked to do those backing vocals,
you know, the girlie backing vocals in a lot of the songs.
The other thing that's really important, of course,
is that Keith was a very lyrical drummer.
Keith was like an orchestra on the drums.
He wasn't a time drummer like...
It was, like, all around the kit.
Moon was doing things
that just made us all work 100% harder.
Not faster, not slower, 100% harder.
In late April, 1964,
he joined The Detours and started playing the blues.
Hey, fellas, have you heard the news?
When you've got a 12-bar sequence, can become monotonous.
Moonie had "a very short attention span when it came to boredom.
He started to double up the beat.
And that led to Pete doubling the guitar,
it led John to play more jazzy bits in between,
and from that, what we became famous for
evolved.
That's when The Who started to have its own identity.
We played the blues, but we'd put our own stamp on it.
We'd been The Detours for quite a while,
and we'd built up quite a following in West London
on the pub circuit.
John Entwistle, he'd heard about this band
who'd got a record out in America called The Detours.
So we sat around and had this think tank in Sunnyside Road,
where Barney and I had a flat.
And the band never came back there.
I don't think they'd ever been before.
Because Pete and I were art students smoking dope,
and they didn't approve.
And we were just jokingly throwing names around.
We were trying to be avant-garde or something.
Think of like, "The Nothing," or things with names like that.
I came up with "The Hair." That was the...
'Cause everything was about hair at the time.
And I said "The Who,"
'cause basically I was just thinking of it on posters.
You know, it's one of those very quick conversations.
"The Hair!" "The Who!"
And everybody was laughing at each one.
And for awhile, it was kind of a bit of a war.
I said, "Well, we could call it 'The Hair and The Who."'
It sounded like a pub.
But The Who was something we came back to.
It didn't take very long for us to carry our audience into the change.
Within two weeks, they'd forgotten about The Detours
and they knew that it was The Who.
I'm dressed right for a beach fight
But I just can't explain
We were the first teenagers after the war.
All we wanted to do was just liberate ourselves, really,
and have fun.
South Coast police have warned
that if the fights between rival gangs of Mods and Rockers continue...
We used to go Brighton, areas like that,
and it was traditional that you would end up clashing.
We were teenagers together. We were Mods.
It was all about pop-art gang culture.
We were called Mods 'cause we were modernist.
There was a type of, like, "Fuck you," rebellious sort of behavior
about the Mod kids.
It was very much, "Let's get out of this class system."
The original Mods were very smart.
Short, Italian jackets, tight trousers, Winkle Picker shoes.
Perfectly tailored sort of skintight sort of sharkskin suits,
with a little mascara on and a special haircut on Saturday nights.
We spent all of our money on clothes.
We were like little peacocks.
I'm the hippiest number in town
And I'll tell you why
I'm the snappiest dresser right down to my inch-wide tie
To my inch-wide tie
Along came this guy called Pete Meaden. He was a publicist.
And he transformed the band.
He certainly had a finger on the pulse
of this embryo of a fashion seed.
And Pete Meaden had this theory
that the Mods were like the new religion,
the new army, the new everything,
and projected that onto us as individuals.
He said, "Right, get out there, cut your hair,
"go out Carnaby Street, buy all the clever gear,"
and all of a sudden, we're a Mod band.
Pete Meaden also said, "You've got to change the name, The Who."
And in that sense, he was right in getting us to be Mods.
But he was wrong in changing the name The Who to The High Numbers.
We kept seeing these posters for The High Numbers, "The Who" in brackets.
They used to play in West Hampstead at the Railway Club.
And it was a little hall, tiny little shabby hall.
The Who came up as The High Numbers,
and we didn't know who they were. We just went up there.
And the drummer was absolutely mental.
Gather 'round, my friends, here
Help me forget my hurting tears
About the only girl I ever loved
The only one, baby
I gotta dance just to keep from crying
Gotta dance just to keep from crying
Whoa, do the flop
Do the flop
Do the twist Do the twist
Everybody, it goes like this
You gotta dance got me swaying got me, all right
Gotta dance got me swaying got me, all right
Do the bird Do the bird
Do the fly Do the fly
Come on, gang, you know By, by, by, oh, yeah
They were amazing. But it was nothing like the Beatles,
even the Stones, you know. It was nothing like that.
And they were playing music that you didn't hear very often,
Tamla Motown and blues.
They were a Mod band and I was a Mod.
Yeah, baby, so you know it's all right
When I met Kit,
we decided to start to come up with an idea to make a film.
We came up with a concept that we would find a group,
we would manage the group to success,
and we would all the time film it.
This was the idea.
Kit and I, we went up and down England looking for a group.
We couldn't find anyone to put in the film, basically,
until we saw The High Numbers.
Let me tell you 'bout ooh poo pah doo
They call me the most
Yeah, ooh poo pah doo
They call me the most
Lambert said immediately he knew that was the band he was looking for.
Yeah, and I won't stop trying
Till I create a disturbance
We met Lambert and Stamp,
and the first thing they wanted to do...
They'd loved everything else about us,
except the name.
And when we told them we used to be called The Who, they went, "Great!"
They were very individual.
They didn't really get along, you know, that personally.
I'd been in a gang in my adolescence. It wasn't that different.
They just came across...
Not antisocial, but they weren't there to try to please people.
They were there to do what they were gonna do,
and if you liked it, that's up to you.
Pete was using just very high-volume amplifiers.
He would, because of the power in the amplifier, create feedback.
He did this thing where he used to lift the guitar up like this.
We had a very low ceiling there.
I used to bang it to make it go boing, boing, boing, boing.
And the guitar neck went through the ceiling.
And when it broke, I thought, "Well, I may as well finish it off."
We just stood there and... "What is going on here? It's great."
I mean, nobody had ever smashed anything on a stage.
I saw Keith looking at me.
Next week I start banging my other guitar
and immediately the drums were over, sticks through.
Pete said afterwards,
"Once I knew that Moonie was with me, then I would do it again."
The guitar became, when it was electrified, in my case,
an instrument of control, aggression, latent violence.
People say to me, you know, "It's just stagecraft, isn't it?
"Just showing off, smashing your guitar."
You know, to me it was far, far, far more than that.
At art school,
Pete and Barnesy had attended lectures by Gustav Metzger,
a German artist who destroyed his creations
as a political protest against nuclear weapons.
Gustav Metzger came to my college to do lectures.
It was called the Destruction in Art Symposium.
Yoko Ono did that thing where she had her clothes cut up,
and he slashed his way through a canvas with a samurai sword,
and next thing I knew I'm breaking up guitars at gigs.
I thought it was a bit sort of airy-fairy, do you know what I mean?
It was a bit sort of like, "Why bother," you know?
"You're fucking angry, you're smashing your guitar up,
"it looks great," you know.
It does suggest the rage that we all feel.
It really did annoy me that the visual
kind of took over from what was really going on.
I'd even have the guys in the band going,
"What a lot of pompous, pretentious drivel."
And I'd go, "No, it's autodestructive art!"
Pete, even in those days, was in a class of his own.
It was this act, you know, smashing up the instruments,
feedback, Pete's windmilling arm.
He did this sort of thing that the kids called the Birdman.
Lambert and Stamp got us a gig at the Marquee in the west end of London.
And Kit had this poster made of Pete with a guitar and the bird-like...
Sideways, and the profile of his nose.
Fabulous. Absolutely classic.
You could not ignore that poster.
It was, like, "What is The Who?"
Within a month,
the queues would be all the way down Waldorf Street,
and they would be turning thousands of people away.
It was incredible.
I've got to admit that I felt that we were special.
Whenever she calls my name
Yeah, yeah, yeah I can't explain
I feel I feel
And I feel I feel
I feel this burning pain
It's to do with attitude.
It's like, you can hit your hand like that, that's a tempo.
Or you can hit it like this.
Now, it's two totally different attitudes.
The tempo hasn't changed at all.
And The Who always did it with that attitude of drive.
Oh, yeah Oh, yeah
Heatwave
Burning in my heart Heatwave
I remember that the one thing
that we were very much aware of
was that we were still copying other people's songs.
By 1964,
The Beatles were revolutionizing popular music
with their songwriting.
The Rolling Stones and the Kinks
joined the British invasion of America
by recording original material.
Girl, you really got me going
You got me so I don't know what I'm doing
We needed a songwriter in the group,
and Pete turned out to be one.
I listened to a couple of Kinks songs
and just produced this rhythm.
Got a feeling inside
Can't explain
It's a certain kind
Can't explain
I feel hot and cold
Can't explain
Yeah, down in my soul, yeah
Can't explain
Unlike The Kinks,
what, on the surface, appears to be a very frilly little pop song
is a much, much bigger statement from the vocal.
You know, "I've got a feeling inside I can't explain."
And you could see that Townshend as a writer had a huge potential.
'Cause he wasn't going the normal way that pop songs go.
It was going internal.
Can't explain
I think it's love
Try to say it to you when I feel blue
But I can't explain
But back in those early days, I thought, you know,
"I'm not gonna write songs forever," you know?
"This is boring." You know?
I really thought Can't Explain was quite childish.
Pete's home-recorded demo of the song would get them signed.
He was 19.
He had it on tape, which I played over the phone to Shel Talmy.
The demo I heard was about a minute and 10 seconds long.
Probably safe to say in about the first 30 to 45 seconds
I said, "Yes!"
I said, "I will get us a deal."
Kit told us this recording deal.
And I mean, I'm a Shepherd's Bush boy.
You know, I work the markets.
When Kit told us our percentage,
it had something like a couple of cents on the end of it.
When Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were managing the band,
they got a very bad deal then.
I went around to all the record shops,
gave them free copies, gave them posters.
And I helped push it that way.
But then, luckily, Radio Caroline played it.
Caroline, sign of the nation
Caroline!
12:00 midnight tonight.
Steve Young along until 3:00 a. M...
Got a feeling inside
Can't explain
Radio Caroline was the first of the pirate radio station.
'Cause radio was controlled in England by the BBC.
And suddenly these ships out of England jurisdictions
started to pump the music out into England
and took off like a rocket.
The truth is, without pirate radio,
the English invasion and all that pop scene would not have happened.
Can't explain
I think it's love
Try to say it to you when I feel blue
I can't explain
Released January 15, 1965,
I Can't Explain would climb to number eight
on the new Musical Express chart.
I was driving over Hammersmith Flyover
and heard Can't Explain on the radio,
and thought, "Wow!"
You know, "I've got a commission, I've got a patron,
"This is art."
Brunswick Records sold 104,000 copies of the single.
The boys made £250 each.
I said I can't explain
It was chaos, 'cause we were smashing up all this equipment,
and I had no money.
I used to take all Pete's guitars
and in between a show putting them together. It was all...
While one was being glued,
the other one would be all set from the day before.
And the main thing was "Keep the band working."
I can go any way
Way I choose
I can live anyhow
Win or lose
I can go anywhere
In those days, it wasn't uncommon for us
to do a show at 8:00 till 9:00,
travel 150 miles,
and then do another show at midnight till 1:00
We used to take amphetamines.
Only I discovered that taking amphetamines
didn't go with being a good singer.
Oh, see
C. C. Rider
Oh, see
What you have done now
And it build up like no tomorrow,
and their playing became just a noise.
The tempos went out the window,
volumes went out the window,
and everything we'd worked to be good at
suddenly disappeared out the window, due to amphetamines.
So it all came to a head at one show
where I just gave up onstage, left the stage,
went back to the dressing room,
got the bag of amphetamines
and made these guys flush them down the toilet.
Moon went up like a rocket and hit me with a tambourine.
I laid into Moonie, we ended up in a real good punch-up.
The roadies pulled us apart, of course,
but the damage had been done.
Basically, I was thrown out of the band.
At that moment, I didn't give a fuck,
'cause if that was gonna be the band,
as they had been on amphetamines,
wasn't worth being in anyway.
So sad about us
He had been this sort of tough guy, boss of the group.
Roger puts this band together,
and then finds the three dwarfs that he's brought in to support him
suddenly sort of leaving him behind.
Sad that the news is out now
It was the first time in my life that I realized
that I loved something else other than myself.
And I thought, "Well, if I'm being thrown out for being like I was,
"then I'll have to change,
"because the band is more important to me than anything."
After about four weeks, they came back and said,
"Look, you're back in the band but you're on probation.
"And one more outburst like that and you're out."
Where's Pete at?
I have absolutely no idea. Better go and find him.
Four weeks after the blow-up in Copenhagen,
The Who returned to the studio to record Pete's latest creation.
When you're a kid and you pick up a guitar for the first time,
you just wanna make that sound.
People try to put us down
Talking 'bout my generation
Just because we get around
Talking 'bout my generation
My Generation was the song
that I felt an immediate sort of thing for.
I hope I die before I get old
This had to be the essence of The Who.
My generation
This is my generation, baby
I can remember the My Generation session very clearly,
because it was so unusual.
The fact that he stuttered on it.
I mean, if, you know, I thought that was absolutely brilliant.
I'm not trying to cause a big sensation
Talking 'bout my generation
Roger's got a story about the stutter. And so does Chris Stamp.
They're both well out of order.
The stutter came from John Lee Hooker!
It was to do with the pilled-up Mod
and the old blues stutter and so.
And when I put it on at the first demo, it was partly there.
And Chris Stamp said, "What's that?"
And I said, "I'm stuttering."
And I think maybe he didn't realize that I meant to stutter.
I don't remember it being on the demo. It might have been.
My memory's not that good on it.
And does it really matter?
My generation
This is my generation, baby
I marveled at that bass line.
Very flashy, very effective, and completely original.
I don't know where it came from.
It was fantastic.
Amazing. The bass solo in My Generation.
If you could write that into words,
that's what you'd have on your gravestone, wouldn't it?
People try to put us down
Talking 'bout my generation
Just because we get around
Talking 'bout my generation
We're talking about very, very early days here.
I think back to those days, and I just...
I think it was really painful.
Talking 'bout my generation
My generation
We hadn't really respected the difficulties that Roger had, you know?
It's wrong for me to say this, but, you know,
Keith was a genius. John was a genius.
I was certainly, you know, on the edge of it.
You know, Roger was a singer.
That was it.
I just
decided within myself
that I would never let them, whatever they did to me,
whatever they did,
I would, wouldn't ever react like that again to them.
And I became a completely different guy as far as that's concerned.
But I struggled more than anything to find a voice,
a real voice for this band.
This is my generation
I don't mind
Other guys dancing with my girl
That's fine, I know them all pretty well
But I know sometimes I must get out in the light
Better leave her behind
With the kids, they're all right
The kids are all right
Now, ambitions in those days were very, very simple.
To be rich and famous. We made no excuses for it.
We just got out of having our ass hanging out of our trousers.
I don't make any apologies for wanting to be rich and famous.
Thank you very much.
I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
The north side of my town faced east
And the east was facing south
The Who played 60 shows through the first 90 days of 1966.
And we have got for you the most controversial group in England!
Ladies and gentlemen, The Who!
The Who!
- Les Who! - The Who.
The Who! The Who!
One girl was called Jean Marie
Another little girl was called Felicity
You know, it used to feel to me that the band was doomed.
You know, I'm going off with this fucking horrible band of yobbos.
You know, to Germany, and to Sweden, and to...
And with people with whom I had absolutely nothing in common,
whatsoever. Nothing.
They were at each other a lot.
The Who was built on competition.
The competition was horrendous, on and off the stage.
Then it got great
because it became wonderfully sort of on edge because of that.
I mean, you could be watching The Who in, like, '66, '67 period
when they were gigging.
And in the middle of a show,
suddenly Pete would, like, get the guitar and whack it around Roger's...
It was fantastic.
You see, everyone was really on edge
watching them all the time, you know.
I wanna play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the stream
Cut myself and see my blood
I wanna come home all covered in mud
I'm a boy, I'm a boy But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy I'm a boy
Roger talks now very romantically about those days,
like it was some kind of magic.
You know, I don't think there was a lot of magic.
What there was was a lot of, you know, brute force.
I'm a boy!
Nobody knew what they were doing.
Those bands were managed by kids. Do you know what I mean?
Who didn't have a fucking clue what they were doing either.
In March of '66, The Who and their management
broke their contract with producer Shel Talmy
and began making their own records.
Very early on, Kit and I realized
that if we weren't in control of the recording,
and how it went, and what happened,
it would just be hopeless.
We would lose this gigantic piece
of what the destiny of the group was.
And so we had to get out of that contract.
Now it's a legal matter, baby
Lambert and Stamp started their own company,
Track Records.
I was like the executive producer.
Kit was the overall sort of musical director.
Day to day, right? In the studio.
I used to wake up in the morning
I used to feel so bad
Kit Lambert, he had these great ideas,
but he wasn't really technically very good.
Kit was the ultimate Barnum and Bailey conman
in a lot of ways.
He would bluster his way through things, you know,
and he had a lot of front and courage in that way.
Big fucking pain in the ass, you know, in the studio.
But he made it funner.
Pictures of Lily...
You know, I can do it, if... You know, once I get used to sort of...
Just do it with confidence.
Just hit it, d'you know?
Keith, when you hit the very high note,
back off a bit because you're really piercing
because of the height of the thing.
So you keep jumping on John's...
John's usually louder than everyone else anyway. You know?
And if anyone needs backing up, it's sort of me, you know?
You cut through everything anyway, on that note.
Kit Lambert's father, Constant Lambert created the Royal Ballet.
Created the Royal Ballet.
Kit had gone into film
because he didn't want to be anything to do with music.
And suddenly, you know, life rips him back in
right in the middle of music, only a different type.
And I ask you, "Hey mister, have you ever seen
"Pictures of Lily?"
I would say to Kit, "No, I really want to write a fucking opera."
You know, "I don't wanna write rock songs all the time."
And he constantly encouraged me
on the basis of his background.
Her man's been gone
For nearly a year
He was due home yesterday
But he ain't here
It was called the mini-opera,
A Quick One While He's Away,
which is an English way of saying, you know,
you have a quick fuck while the husband's away, right?
Do you know what I mean? That was the story.
Down your street Your crying is a well-known sound
It was a big operatic piece
told in these sort of six or seven one-minute or two-minute pieces of song.
We have a remedy You'll appreciate
No need to be so sad
He's only late
Kit kept saying to me,
"You know, my father, Constant Lambert, would have loved The Who."
So he was very supportive, and that's how that grew.
Probably the most important relationship
that Kit and Pete had was each other.
You are forgiven
During the recording session for A Quick One,
Lambert introduced the band
to one of the first artists signed by the new Track Records.
He came to the studio before he became the legendary Jimi Hendrix.
And he was just a guitarist in a soul band.
You are forgiven
You're forgiven.
Run, run, run
We'd always been looking at the United States
because that was sort of like the home of the music that we loved.
They just wanted to crack America
and you just toured and toured and toured.
The Who were a band that represented Britishness
and everything that London stood for.
They wore it on their backs for their British invasion.
You better run, run, run
Run, run, run
We couldn't just come over here
and make a couple of hit tunes, like pop hits.
If they took The Who, they had to take the whole package.
In March of 1967,
they played a nine-day showcase in New York City.
Three months later, they went with their new label-mate
to Monterey, California.
If you're going to San Francisco
Monterey was a big one for us.
I mean, before we even got to Monterey,
Monterey was built up in my imagination as an enormous event.
The worst thing about Monterey
was we found out from one of our ex-roadies
that Hendrix was gonna steal our act.
Jimi was out of his brain on acid
and wouldn't discuss who would go on first.
It wasn't that we didn't want to follow him.
We just wanted to get our act, you know, done first.
We were kind of choked up because we were in debt
because we smashed our guitars,
and then suddenly someone was gonna come along from nowhere
and steal it in front of all those people.
I'd like to introduce you to an act
who have been passed by slightly in America,
but they won't be after this.
This is The Who, this one.
People try to put us down
Talking 'bout my generation
They played with kind of a sense of abandon
in a way that hadn't been done before.
I mean, the absolute abandon.
I hope I die before I get old
Talking 'bout my generation
It was a sort of exorcism.
The performances just went off
into a kind of emotional meltdown, in a sense,
which I don't think anyone had ever seen before.
The visual was a ritualistic slaughter of a guitar.
But the sound of that slaughter was fucking brilliant.
It was the best jazz, it was the best rock and roll.
It was something like no one had ever done before.
And I still love it to this day.
We made the house stand up and roar and scream and shout.
It's the first time they'd ever seen it.
They'd heard about it, but they'd never seen it happen.
And then Hendrix came on, played fairly well,
and set his guitar alight, slung it in the air and did it all again.
And this time the crowd got up with the same kind of roar,
but slightly mystified. "Now, what's going on here?" You know.
After Monterey Pop,
I became very disturbed about acid.
Coming back from Monterey, on the plane, he got a really bad trip,
and vowed he wouldn't take any more psychedelic drugs after that.
I just started to get really sickened
by LSD and acid, and by psychedelia.
But I'd also been inspired by it.
There was no question I'd been inspired.
So I was confused by it.
Within about two months of that, he was into Meher Baba.
I found him through a man called Mike McInnerney.
I was talking to Pete about it.
I think Pete, like every other rock and roll star,
was not having a good time sometimes.
And he gave me a book called The God-Man,
about this guy called Meher Baba.
He was a Persian born in India who took a vow of silence
and kept it for most of his life.
True believers called him an avatar, God on Earth.
The very, very simple thing
that Baba asked you to do was to love him.
There's a difficulty there, for a start,
when you're in rock and roll, and you're a performer,
and you're having to do all the stuff that Pete had to do.
And yet he chooses to try and make a spiritual journey
at the same time.
The year Pete wrote I Can't Explain,
Meher Baba warned against searching for God in a pill.
To the sincere seeker after truth,
experimentation with drugs may well open doors,
but continued use will lead to madness, death and insanity.
And, you know, from what I've seen,
there are very, very, very few exceptions.
We were booked on a tour, bottom of the bill, with Herman's Hermits.
You can imagine Herman's Hermits' audience, right,
with sort of thirteen-year-old middle-class girls.
They were introduced to their first piece of danger.
I want the Magic Bus
They just ran.
They just ran to the back of the hall until Herman came on.
Too much, the Magic Bus
In Georgia, Moonie discovered fireworks stands.
And in Michigan, he celebrated his 21st birthday.
I do remember a car did end up in the swimming pool.
I don't know whether it was a Lincoln Continental,
but a car did end up in the swimming pool
and there was a lot of carnage.
However much of that is true, you don't know.
I mean, I want it all to be true. You know, you want...
You wanna think that he drove his Rolls Royce into a swimming pool.
I mean, he's Keith Moon, for crying out loud.
The truth is, several cars were damaged
as well as several rooms in the hotel.
Moonie chipped a tooth running from the law,
and The Who was banned from Holiday Inns for life.
And over here, the guy who plays the sloppy drums.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road, yes.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road? What's your name?
Keith. Keith?
My friends call me Keith. You can call me John.
What's the next song you're gonna do?
My Generation.
Your generation? Yeah.
I can really identify with that
because I really identify with these guys. I dig them.
And this is a...
You know, you got sloppy stagehands around here.