- Over here? - Yeah, there.
- Where do you want it? - Right there.
We want to make sure...
They look after us on this show.
You know, you guys are really too much,
and I want to introduce you to the guys individually in the Who
because you never get to know their names.
You know them as The Who. Everybody says "Who?"
And you say, you know. So what's your name?
Pete. Pete Townshend.
- And where are you from, Pete? - London.
- From London? - Yeah.
- London where? - London, England.
Where did you learn to play?
You know, that's a wild style of play.
Where did you learn to play the guitar like that?
That was bowling.
Bowling. Yeah, I could tell.
Now we move right along...
right over here.
- And you're... - John.
You're John? And you're from?
- London, too. - From London, too?
And you must be Roger.
I must be.
- Are you? - Yeah.
- You're Roger? - I'm Roger.
- And where you from? - Oz.
Here's Roger from Oz.
And over here, the guy that plays the sloppy drums.
Follow the yellow brick road.
- What's your name? - Keith.
- Keith? - My friends call me Keith.
- You can call me John. - Okay, John.
I'd just as soon call you Roger.
Roger from Oz, what's the next song you're going to play?
"My Generation."
- Your generation? - Yeah.
I can really identify with that
because I can really identify with these guys.
I dig them. And this is...
You got sloppy stage hands around here.
Okay, that's enough!
They're going to sing "My Generation."
This song really goes--
And you're going to be surprised what happens
because this is excitement. And hit it.
"My Generation."
"THE WHO"
"THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT"
"A FILM BY JEFF STEIN"
' Hey, Dick! ' Yes?
I'd like to borrow your bass for a minute.
And now here is your Shindig host...
Jimmy O'Neil.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
How are you all, Shindiggers?
Tonight is our very last Shindig, and were going out with a bang.
We got a bang-up cast for you,
starring Billy Jay Kramer and the Dakotas,
The Who,
Dave Berry, Ian Watkins, Sandy Shaw,
The Kinks, The Barren Knights, Twinkle,
and of course our own Blossoms and Wellingtons.
What do you say we get ready to live it up?
Because here we go with our kick-off tune tonight,
called "I Can't Explain."
Here to sing it are The Who.
Terribly sorry, Russell.
Does this stuff belong to you?
Have a seat, old love.
You sit down, then.
Drake, this is all over the upholstery.
Who does that machinery belong to? Does it belong to you or to us?
- I mean, who has to pay for it? - It's mortgaged.
It's all right.
- It looks all right. - Doesn't matter to them.
A lot of people like what were doing.
We've got 83...
- Stop interrupting! - ...deposed Pakistanis to visit.
Do go on.
It's no good. I've lost my nerve now.
All right, let me take over now.
Now, you have been together now as a group
for how many years? 10 years?
Yeah I'm leaving
Wait a minute, hold on, hold on.
Was it that long? Christ Almighty.
It's known as Decay of The Who.
- What's it, then? - The Decline of The Who
The Decade of The Who.
Oh, the decade.
Who decayed?
Everybody, you will be all right.
Sure, sure.
Everybody, focus. You'll be all right.
Yeah, yeah, we know.
You'll be all... yeah, you'll be all right.
Everybody, clap your hands!
I can't hear you!
It has to be loud!
Come on!
A little louder!
Shout!
That's good.
Let's bring our souls together.
You've been together for 10 years.
A decade. You haven't yet decayed.
Apart from the Rolling Stones,
You are the longest surviving together group, are you not?
Well, not together.
What strains that you have suffered together, if at all?
Seems it's just beginning.
It's such a long story. Should I start...
Start at the beginning.
We started off as...
I must admit that the fantastic thing about The Who
is that we are all incredibly nasty.
You are or were?
Were. I mean, we still were.
His feet are nasty as well.
Christ.
Don't mind me.
We were nasty...
God.
Carry on, Russell.
I don't want it.
You just carry on, Russell. Go on.
Be sure it's going to be worth seeing.
There's a thing here,
an account of one week exactly ten years ago,
when you had played in that week in the Social Club In Goldhawk Road
and the California Ballroom In Dunstable
And the Railway Arms Neasden.
And what you had made that week was £370.
And what you had spent was £1946.17.6,
and including £785
on replacement of guitars, drum kits, and microphones.
Who covered that gap in money,
that £400 gap
which left £1,300 to find every week?
It's hard to say.
I used to rush into Marshall's Music Shop
and steal guitars off the wall.
I'd say, "Just taking a guitar. Pay you Tuesday," and rush out.
"ENTERTAINMENT-- THE WHO-- RICHEST VANDALS IN THE WORLD!"
Kit Lampert, our manager... It frustrates me.
"Photographer from the Daily Mail in the audience.
Smash your guitar."
So I smashed the guitar around the stage.
He'd come back
"Pete, Pete. Sorry. He missed it.
Smash another one. I'll give you the money."
And as soon as I started...
"A BEAST INVADES THE HIGH SCHOOL HOP"
smashing something up, Keith, who is a great joiner-inner,
used to smash up his drum kit.
Well, I suppose all his friends have been on here
because, you know, I'm only one of several.
I've told you about all the mad things he's done in life,
such as, you know, breaking up rooms,
driving his car into swimming pools,
driving his car into foyers.
Well, I'm not going to tell you about any of that.
You know, I'm just here to tell you
about the Keith I know and love, you know?
Keith, what's your opinion of your public image?
I think it sort of varies with every record I put out.
I think sometimes...
Could you get on with it? Will you keep it together?
No, I think I'm very reliant on my management
and my public relations people.
This country is in a weird, feeble, grotesque state,
and it's about time it got out of it,
And the on... the reason it could get out of it is rock music.
And I think The Towns... and The Who, Roger Daltrey,
Entwistle, Moon,
could rise this country out of its decadent, ambient state
more than Wilson and those crappy people
could ever hope to achieve!
What about the little singer? What's your opinion of him?
Well, I think he does a damn good job out there.
Personally, I mean, I wouldn't go out there
up front with nothing to protect me but a small microphone,
but he manages to revolve it so fast
that when people do throw things,
he gets sort of desiccated eggs and sliced tomato.
I turn my cymbals up this way
So that at the end of the night I have a salad mixed.
I just sprinkle some salt
and some Italian seasoning on it,'
and that sort of ends up my evening here.
There are some elements in the story line...
the image in the mirror,
the pinball,
and the sensibility in general.
See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.
Which reflect in a certain sense
the phenomenon of youth subculture.
There is narcissism.
There is a kind of new sensibility
as a strong tendency for playing up things
and no more putting it into aggressive forms of counter-action.
- It's. .. - Yeah.
Thank you
Good.
Thank you.
Because that was the end of the '60s.
That seemed to sum up an awful lot about rock.
It was the time when you were a great star of Woodstock.
Woodstock itself was one of the biggest pop events in world terms
because of the film that masses and millions of people have seen.
And it was a marvelous thing in its way.
But just as a matter of interest, what do you think it changed?
What was different after it?
What did that generation, all those people,
given the same high by the same thing,
yourself in turn...
what did it change? I'm just interested to know.
Well, it changed me. I hated it.
Ladies and gentlemen...
The Who.
You have to resign yourself to the fact
that a large part of the audience ls sort of thick, you know,
and don't appreciate quality,
however much you try and put it over.
The fact is that our group isn't... hasn't got any quality.
It's just musical sensationalism.
You do something big on the stage,
and a thousand geezers sort of go "Ahh."
It's just basic Shepherd's Bush enjoyment.
Our sound appeals to mods
in the case for aggression.
For example, for a brief period, I stopped smashing guitars.
Kids started shouting out
"Smash your guitar, Pete. Smash your guitar"
and getting quite annoyed that I wasn't
because to a large percentage of geezers that come to see the group,
they paid their money to see me re-amplify with the guitar
or see a guitar break, you know?
A lot of girls come to see the group
because of various things which people in the group wear
such as John's jacket of medals
and my jacket made out of flags
and Keith who wears sort of fab gear,
pop art T-shirts
made out of targets and hearts and things like this
Because the group is a fairly simple form of pop art,
we get a lot of audience this way.
Off stage, the group get on terribly badly.
There's a lot of just spite and things which flash around.
The singer is a Shepherd's Bush geezer
who wants everything to be a big laugh,
and when it isn't, he thinks something is going wrong,
Terribly wrong
The drummer is a sort of completely different person
to anyone else other than me.
The bass player just doesn't seem to be
interested in anything, you know,
which makes it all very difficult.
You've been together 10 years.
You must have been subject
to a great deal of strain and inner tension.
I now cannot ask that...
- Actually... - We do try to ignore each other.
We've always been very close, you and I.
No.
Most of the thing is that I loathe Pete Townshend.
- Keith and I... - The group has had no history,
and I've hated him ever since we began.
Since I've been doing the bulk of the..
The thing is that he does no writing. I do most of it.
I end up doing most of the lyric work.
He keeps taking the tapes.
He thinks he does the lyrics.
What about musical quality, though?
You said that you don't think your group have got any.
Why don't you try and give it some?
If you don't... If you steer clear of quality,
you're all right, you know.
No, really. This is the truth, you know.
But wouldn't you say The Beatles and people like that
have a certain musical quality?
You know, that's a tough question.
I... actually this afternoon,
we, John and I were listening to a stereo of The Beatles
in which the voices come out of one side
And the backing track comes out of the other.
And when you actually hear the backing track to The Beatles
without their voices, They're flipping nails.
The first major American tour was by bus.
We traveled from coast to coast,
and from Miami we'd go up to Canada.
It was pretty awful.
We used New York as a springboard.
We used to play for Murray the K.
We used to do five shows a day there,
and we had three minutes to do our show.
First you'd have one and a half minutes of kind of explaining
and one and a half minutes Of "My Generation,"
smash your guitar, and run off, you know.
Five times a day, seven days a week.
In those days, your performances used to end up
with you smashing all your equipment.
There were stories about you smashing hotel rooms on every tour.
All lies. Not a word of truth.
Well, according to people at the time, it certainly was true.
Why was there all that violence surrounding you?
Well, this was only last week, wasn't it?
What made us first want to go to America and conquer it
was being English.
Not because we cared monkeys about the American Dream
or about the American drug situation
or about the dollars or anything.
It's because we were English kids, right?
And we wanted to go to America and beat it.
Pop music is crucial to today's art,
and it's crucial that it should remain art,
And it is crucial that is should progress as art.
I saw you.
Girls came to see you mainly to look at the clothes you wear.
Don't you think that most of them come for a certain sexual thrill
they get out of your performance?
Our group is probably one of the most unglamorous on the stage today.
I mean...
No, really, I mean, this is one of our big problems, you know,
and probably still is, you know,
is that the group didn't have enough glamour.
It was all these clothes and smashing things up
it was all mechanical things.
It was bricks and stones and things
and not enough of, sort of, normal group things, you know.
We made our second album, which he produced,
and it was during that album,
which, as I said, Kit Lampert produced,
that we really realized what making albums was all about.
You know, we had great fun, and it was very creative.
And Kit was learning about record production
and doing crazy things like recording the group
from a microphone down the corridor
and all these things which are very commonplace nowadays.
Using incredible amounts of compression
and squeezing the sound up,
squeezing cymbal sounds up
to make them sound like steam engines
and various, sort of, twiddling knobs
as the recording was going.
The engineers throwing their hands in the air.
"It... coated knobs, mate. You can't do that."
And all this was going on in the studio,
but unfortunately we had ten minutes on the album to fill
when we'd finished,
and so Kit turned around to me
and said "I think you should write something linear,
something with continuity,
perhaps a ten-minute song."
So I said, "You can't write a ten minute song."
I mean, rock songs are two minutes 50, by tradition.
It's one of the traditions, you know.
They only allowed you one modulation.
Four chords or five, you know.
Five chords, you might be up before the committee.
Ten minutes is ridiculous.
So he said "Well, listen, if you can't write a ten-minute song,
write a ten-minute story
made up of two-minutes-50 songs,"
which I did.
And that was the Mini Opera, it was called.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, dig The Who.
2, 3.
Here comes Ivor the dirty old city engine driver
to make you feel all right.
What we have to do is we have to--
we have to decide whether or not we are going to remain
this circus act, right?
Or whether we're going to, in other words,
doing what everybody knows we can do and what we know we can do.
Right? Until the band eventually turns into a cabaret act,
- which is inevitable. - No. That's ridiculous to say that.
I mean...
Well, let's just...
Okay, Keith, let's go.
Bragging and drums.
I've heard a lot about you and the rest of the group
taking drugs, Pete.
Does this mean you're usually blocked up
when you're actually on stage?
No, but it means we're blocked up all the time, you know.
Well, kid, we've heard you drink a lot, but that's beside the point.
If you could tell us, you know,
how did you happen to join The Who
and if in fact that's what they were called when you joined.
Well, I've just been sitting in for the past 15 years.
You know, they never actually told me that I was part of the band.
I knew it by instinct.
Keith Moon rolled up one day all ginger all over--
ginger shoes, ginger corduroy trousers, ginger jacket,
and his hair dyed ginger,
holding a glass of brown ale.
So this complete ginger sort of vision
came up and said, "I can play better than him."
And this horrible impudent with his hair down like this.
And... got up on the drummer's drum kit
and practically smashed it to pieces.
And we thought this is the man for us.
Hi. I'm Ralph Baines speaking to you for the Hewitt House Hotels,
the rock stars' home away from home.
Don't be alarmed I think I know what's going on.
Let's get some information across before the fun breaks loose again.
What were you before you kicked off with as a group
He was almost as interesting as...
Inland revenue income tax.
I thought you said land rover.
I guess it's some time in the back.
Inland revenue.
So what what did you do?
Me?
All sort of things.
Like what?
Be more specific. He wants...
I want one thing that you did before you joined as a group.
I mean, were you digging a garden or what?
He was born in a bunk.
I was a sheet metal worker
Sheet metal worker'?
Yeah, I was a rust repairer.
I was a rust repairer and full-time survivor.
I survived all the major earthquakes.
And the Titanic and several air crashes.
I think you'll have to give me a few lessons in survival
because if I'm gonna stay and survive this interview, I'll need a few lessons.
Well, there is more brandy-- I mean lemonade.
That's right.
And you were doing what?
Oh, we didn't work.
Arty-farty he was.
You leave me out of this.
We were talking about me. Hey, get out! Oh, no!
Oh, no, Keith.
It's a ripper.
That's what he was doing, developing his muscles.
Keith, leave me alone.
- Well, they have to ask you this. - I know.
You know, what do you think about Pete?
I love the man. He's one of my dearest friends.
But I couldn't say that about Ringo.
If Pete said "What do you think about Ringo?"
"You know, we have our moments, and when we get together,
there are certain times that you just...
Something happens, and I really don't know what it is."
- But there's that magic there. - It's probably we're drunk
It could be that.
Oh, not drunk, teeny-boppers.
No, absolutely not, you Don Henry fans.
Keith and Henry had a lot of medicine
- Absolutely. - You know, just a lot of medicine
We're getting on.
We're getting on now, and we need our medicine, so...
Let's see the age of this suit.
When I'm on the stage... Let me try and explain.
When I'm on the stage, I'm not in control of myself at all.
I don't even know who I am
You know, I'm not this rational person
that can sit here now and talk to you.
If you walked on the stage with a microphone
in the middle of a concert,
I'd probably come close to killing you.
I have come close to killing people who have walked on stage.
Abbie Hoffman walked on the stage at Woodstock,
and I nearly killed him with my guitar.
A cameraman walked on the stage.
A policeman came on when the bloody building
at the Fillmore In New York was burning down,
and I kicked him in the balls and sent him off
because I...you know, I'm just not there, really.
It's not like being possessed. It's just I do my job,
and I know I have to get into a certain state of mind to do it.
We'd realized the end of our tether.
We'd reached it. We'd come upon the point when the...
nose bleeds and all that were no good.
We can't go on doing that. It's no good.
It's beyond the beyond.
Bob. Barbara.
Barbara Ann?
Well, that's...
We did that bit, though. Does it come in twice?
Look what happened?
I mean, one main ambition now was to get back on the road
with the horrible Who,
the worst rock and roll group in the world.
- The worst? - Yes.
You couldn't pick four more horrible geezers
that make more, like, the worst noise that you've ever heard in your life.
You want one of the reasons
for having music and things fantastically loud
is because you get so many people that turn deaf ears to what you do.
You know what I mean? They just won't listen to what you do,
and it doesn't matter how good or bad it is.
In fact, The bigger it is, normally,
the more they'll close their ears to it.
And so the louder you got to work, you know.
Volume is fantastic thing.
Power and volume and power and volume.
When I went to get my ears tested,
I thought I was really encouraged,
apart from the fact you said I have terrible ears.
He said Bill said, "What advice would you give him?
Would you tell him to stop playing entirely and leave the group?"
Throw his career out the window.
Become a pauper, starve.
Would you tell him that?
"Well, actually, no, but I would advise him to learn to lip read."
It's true. That's what he said.
Get off.
Have all of you made enough money to stop work this afternoon, tonight?
Well, I'm certain you'd like that.
Yes, I have.
You have? Why don't you stop, then?
He's got to support me and the rest of the boys.
You mean you've made more money than they have?
Well, I write all the songs.
No, I write the songs.
So if you write songs, you get a bit on the side.
You see, the thing is, as songwriter, I do have something, you know...
- Going for you. - Going for me.
We go for him.
Scab.
Carry on, Russell.
I'm transfixed by John. I don't know why I'm here.
In "My Generation," you wrote "I hope I die before I get old."
- Do you in fact mean this? - Yes
Guitar up here, including big-mouthed little kid
who wants to come and fucking take it off me.
Rock and roll has got no future. It don't matter.
We became rich a lot later than I expected.
Now I'm too old to enjoy my money.
Excuse me. You know, we just shot a lot of film for the interview,
and talking about all that.
I was wondering now if you can really tell us the truth and stuff.
Oh, no.
It's... I mean, the truth as you want to hear it?
I can't do that.
You couldn't afford me.
But you're a very different person now
to the desperate young man of the early '60s, aren't you?
Yeah, I'm a desperate old fart now.
Not boring, though.
So there.
I've been saving that.
You've all been behaving this crazy way well all the time.
You're all married, aren't you?
No.
I wouldn't marry this lot.
That's a great sleeve, that is.
- If you touch my bleeding sleeve... - See?
He's getting stroppy now.
You leave his sleeves alone.
Personal, them.
Can't touch the interviewer, can we?
No, he's in command, isn't he?
He can make everybody else look a right twit,
as long as you don't have a go at him.
How long have you been happily married, then?
You really do have a lovely life line.
Have I a long life line?
- Here about the warts. - No, not too long.
I should say about half a fortnight.
Ladies and gentlemen, before my life line, according to him is two minutes long,
which means we've got to the end of the program.
We will be back, God willing, same time, same place, next week.
- See you then. Good night. - He's so smooth.
"RUSSELL HARTY PLUS"
This is where it all ends.
I can't think of anything to say.
Rock and roll's never ever stood
dissecting and inspecting it at close range.
It just doesn't stand up.
So shut up.
There is a place for us.
I am accused of letting the side down, as it were,
often by our fans, you know.
Like, for example,
you can't stop doing this.
You can't stop doing what you're doing
because you'd let down all these people.
It's not people just saying "Listen, you'll disappoint your fans
if you don't go on. The show must go on.
You must go on, otherwise all those people will be so upset."
It's "You've got to go on, man.
Otherwise, all those kids, they'll be finished.
They'll have nothing to live for.
That's rock and roll.
Thank you, Thank you.