Chapter 2

Despite the failure of their single, The High Numbers continued to look wide-eyed into the future. “Meaden maintained his unflagging energy,” Melody Maker writer Chris Charlesworth wrote in 1984. “Helmut Gordon was persuaded to put the group on contract and pay them a weekly wage of twenty pounds each.” With the new steady income, Pete approached an art school instructor about the possibility of leaving college early [1] . “When he told the tutor of his intentions, the tutor was astonished to learn that Pete could make twenty pounds a week playing guitar,” Charlesworth wrote. “He advised Pete to become a professional musician right away.”

The High Numbers (although they were still being billed as The Who almost a month after the name change) enjoyed many successful live shows as the figurehead band of the Mod movement. The Railway Hotel gigs in June and July (one of which featured Pete’s inaugural Rickenbacker smashing incident), as well as those at Mod strongholds the Goldhawk Social Club and the Trade Union Hall in Watford also occurred during this period. The High Numbers’ live act was now the talk of the town. Although whittling the Detours lineup down from a five- to a four-piece group had allowed the various members the freedom to settle into their respective roles, it was not until the arrival of Keith Moon that The High Numbers had a distinctly unified stage attack. Pete’s intensity on stage had found a match in Moon, who constantly wowed audiences with the speed and power of his drumming. Furthermore, Moon was not averse to kicking over his kit at the end of a show to complement Townshend’s guitar smashing. Now the band had a presence on stage which was second to none, even when they refrained from destroying their instruments. They were incredibly loud, violent and energetic and played with an abandon that constantly kept audiences on edge. Their shows always possessed an undercurrent of danger, and rumors of offstage infighting between band members only added to their overall mystique.

“I drifted into using bigger and bigger amps,” Pete recalled in 2000. “…Bigger, more powerful, more distorted, more potent.” Roger Daltrey added, “Smashing up the guitar was just one element of it: the other was the noise. The sound was just terrifying. It was a total cacophony. Before Pete wrecked his guitar he would jam it in the speaker cone. The noise was unbelievable! Even when the guitar was in a million pieces, it would still be letting out this unearthly, squealing, primeval howl.”

It was at this point (July, 1964) in the life of Pete Townshend that Kit Lambert (or, as Richard Barnes referred to him, “…a man who confessed to having been the worst officer in the British Army”) happened upon The High Numbers. The band was playing to a packed house at the Railway Hotel when in walked Kit, surveying the scene like a building inspector rather than someone who had come to enjoy the show. “Kit turned up at the Railway Hotel in Harrow Wealdstone, where I was promoting The High Numbers,” Barnes told Mojo in 2000. “I was shit scared of him, because he looked so straight. He was around 30 years old and was wearing a really expensive Savile Row suit. He looked trouble.” Roger Daltrey was equally taken with Lambert: “He seemed completely out of place, really flamboyant. He had this upper-class accent that was so out of kilter with everyone else’s.” When Kit said that he was a director looking for a band for his next film, Barnes breathed a sigh of relief and pointed out Peter Meaden.

Following a conversation with Meaden and a typically blistering High Numbers performance which he would later describe as having “a satanic quality,” Lambert telephoned his business partner, Chris Stamp, about his discovery of the band. Stamp was in Dublin, Ireland, working as an assistant director on Young Cassidy, a film based on the early life of Irish writer Sean O’Casey.

Christopher “Kit” Lambert and Chris Stamp were an interesting pair. Lambert, 26, was the son of noted British composer and conductor Constant Lambert. His accent, dress and mannerisms were strictly upper class. He was also a true eccentric. Described as “an outrageous gay…arrogant, definitely, and very annoying” by producer Shel Talmy, Kit had attended upper-class Oxford University, and served for a short time as an officer in the British army, stationed in Hong Kong. In keeping with his keen sense of adventure, Lambert took part in an expedition to Brazil in 1961 to chart the course of the longest unexplored river in the world, the Iriri. After nearly seven months, the trip came to a horrific end when Lambert personally discovered his close friend and traveling companion Richard Mason had been ambushed, murdered and partially decapitated by an Indian hunting party.

With this harrowing experience fresh in his memory, Lambert spent six months studying cinematography at the University of Paris, then took a position as a director’s assistant at Shepperton Film studios [2] , which was where he met Chris Stamp. Chris, five years younger than Kit, had a working class background, as his father worked as a tugboatman on the Thames. He had managed to acquire an assistant director’s position by pursuing his brother, actor Terence Stamp, into the world of show business. Lambert and Stamp had worked together on several films (including I Could Go On Singing starring Judy Garland, Richard Attenborough’s The L-Shaped Room, and a 1964 remake of the 1934 film Of Human Bondage) before deciding to make their own film about popular music. The two, who shared an apartment just west of Baker Street in west London, were described by music writer Nik Cohn as incongruent a combination as Laurel and Hardy.

“…they were…are…as incongruous a team as [The Who] are,” Keith Moon recalled in a 1972 Rolling Stone interview:

You got Chris on one hand [goes into unintelligible East London cockney]: “Oh well, fuck it, jus, jus whack ‘im in-a ‘ead, ‘it ‘im in ee balls an’ all.” And Kit says [slipping into a proper Oxonian]: “Well, I don’t agree, Chris; the thing is…the whole thing needs to be thought out in damned fine detail.” These people were perfect for us, because there’s me, bouncing about, full of pills, full of everything I could get me ‘ands on…and there’s Pete, very serious, never laughed, always cool, a grass ‘ead. I was working at about ten times the speed Pete was. And Kit and Chris were like the epitome of what we were.

Chris Stamp flew back to London for the August Bank Holiday and joined Kit Lambert on Saturday, August 1 in time to catch the last fifteen minutes of The High Numbers’ show at the Watford Trade Union Hall. The band had started a series of shows at this Mod stronghold the previous month, opening for Chris Farlowe & The Thunderbirds, but since much of the crowd left after The High Numbers’ set, Farlowe was eventually dropped altogether, leaving The High Numbers the sole attraction at a hall with a capacity of over 1,000. “I shall always remember that night we first saw them together,” Stamp told George Tremlett.

I had never seen anything like it. The Who have a hypnotic effect on an audience. I realized that the first time I saw them. It was like a black mass. Even then Pete Townshend was doing all that electronic feedback stuff. Keith Moon was going wild on the drums. The effect on the audience was tremendous. It was as if they were in a trance. They just sat there watching or shuffled around the dance floor, awestruck.

Stamp was obviously as impressed with the band as Lambert, since over the following month the pair ousted Peter Meaden and Helmut Gorden, becoming managing partners of The High Numbers [3] . Pete and the band had mixed emotions about the change. Over the past few months, they had experienced several problems with Gorden’s increasingly authoritarian management style, and the band was ready to go their own way. In contrast, the departure of Meaden was not something that The High Numbers desired. Meaden had given the band an identity during the short time he was with them [4] , and the band members felt a distinct affinity toward him. However, his intense personality did not lend itself well to teaming up with the imposing pair taking over the band, so it was eventually accepted among the band that Meaden would have to go.

Ironically, just prior to departing from their respective positions, Pete Meaden and Helmut Gorden’s work was beginning to pay off. As publicist for The High Numbers, Meaden had arranged a five-week residency for the band at one of London’s hottest Mod clubs, The Scene. This Soho club featured DJ Guy Stevens, whose stateside musical contacts enabled him to acquire many obscure, small-label recordings by black R&B, blues, and soul artists who the Mods adored. Pete and Richard Barnes used to visit Stevens’ apartment and sift through his vast record collection, listening for songs to add to The High Numbers’ repertoire [5] .

Also around the time of the change in management, Meaden had landed The High Numbers an audition with Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham at The New Carlton Irish Club. “Andrew was very excited by what he saw as we played R&B songs by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, and a few Tamla Motown songs like Dance To Keep From Crying, and Motoring,” Pete wrote on www.eelpie.com in July, 2001. (ADD QUADROPHENIA HEADS FOR THEATRELAND 16 JUL 01 ) TO REFERENCES “He predicted we would be successful… It was a magic day to have the manager of my favorite band tell us we were headed for great things.” Despite his enthusiasm, Oldham, aware that Lambert and Stamp were maneuvering to manage the band, decided to defer to them.

Meanwhile, Arthur Howes’ agency booked The High Numbers on a series of five consecutive Sunday shows in resort towns Brighton and Blackpool, opening for major acts such as Gerry and The Pacemakers, The Kinks (who had just released You Really Got Me), and a two-show stint in support of The Beatles. The residency at the Scene and the Arthur Howes bookings (which came about as a result of the Stork Club shows back in the spring), particularly the shows with The Beatles [6] , played a major role in getting The High Numbers noticed.

Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp’s first order of business as co-managers of The High Numbers was to get the band members signed under a legal contract. Lambert had a music-savvy lawyer draw up an appropriate document, and the band members signed. Since the entire band consisted of minors, their parents also had to sign the document. This time, Pete’s parents consented to the deal, after Cliff reportedly lined out a clause which would have given Kit and Chris a percentage of any writing royalties due his son. The new document marked a significant improvement over the band’s last contract, reportedly guaranteeing the band members £1,000 each per year. Lambert would consume his savings and a significant inheritance in very short order keeping this promise.

For the time being, at least, Kit and Chris shelved their ideas for a pop music film in the interest of promoting The High Numbers. The main focus at first was on the band’s stage show, naturally, as both Lambert and Stamp were used to working more with visual ideas than auditory ones. The pair compensated for their glaring lack of any knowledge of the popular music scene in London with sheer intestinal fortitude. Many of their first dealings with professionals in the music business involved Lambert and Stamp concocting fictional scenarios in order to glean the necessary information. Mike Shaw, a friend of Chris Stamp who was named the band’s production manager, explained to Richard Barnes in 1982 some of the lengths to which they had to go in order to obtain the necessary knowledge of the music business:

I had to pretend that I was a manager of a group that was playing in Essex or Somerset or somewhere. We made up a name, the Ramrods, I think it was, and I went to the Arthur Howes agency and asked them what we should do. You know, we had to find out. How did we get a contract – what did we do? What was the normal sort of deal we could get? How did one get gigs? How did you get an agent? Then I reported back to Chris and Kit. We needed some idea of how much to ask for and so on.

During the five-week Arthur Howes tour Kit insisted that The High Numbers be able to control their own stage lighting, which was largely unheard of in those days, especially at the bigger venues. “We were the first group to have a Production Manager,” Pete said in 1987. “Mike ran a small light rig for us – just a couple of towers – but it made a hell of a difference. People were used to a single spot, or a naked bulb.” At the Beatles shows in Blackpool on August 16 (at which even The Beatles did not do their own lighting), management of the Opera House refused to let the band handle their own lights. Lambert’s bullish character won out. “Well, Kit just forced his way and shouted the man down,” Mike Shaw recalled in 1982. “He couldn’t stop us. We had every right to do our own lighting… We wanted to put on a show rather than just be another band following on from everybody else. It was meant to be a show in itself.”

It was this approach that led Kit, Chris and Mike to shoot a 16mm promotional film of the band, an unusual idea at this time. They shot footage (on rented equipment) at one of the autumn 1964 Railway Hotel shows, complete with a mono soundtrack, as well as filming Mods hanging around and dancing at the Scene club in Soho. In addition to its use as a promotional tool, Lambert and Stamp would often air this film prior to the band taking the stage at the beginning of a show [7] . Other Lambert/Stamp-inspired ideas involved sending the band to Max Factor on Bond Street for supplies and lessons on how to apply stage makeup, and a trip to Carnaby Street for enough Mod clothing for the band to be able to maintain their image on and off stage. And, since the Bob Druce and Arthur Howes bookings had waned, the new management duo began the search for new venues for their band. Work also began on the hunt for a recording contract as Kit and Chris proceeded to arrange for auditions for the group.

The nucleus of the Lambert/Stamp empire, which had recently been named New Action Limited, was housed in Kit and Chris’ apartment on Ivor Court, near Baker Street. The pair had lived there since late 1963. In Maximum R&B, Richard Barnes recalled the appearance of “The Who’s headquarters” at the time:

Kit had papers all over the place, maps pinned on the wall and over the floor. I had posters drying on every available surface, as well as a couple of washing lines strung across the main room, which had about fifty shiny wet posters pegged to them to dry. Mike Shaw and Kit would be coming and going constantly on various errands. Kit, when in the flat, would always be planning things. He would never relax. He was always worrying about everything.

“Kit had this Shell map of London on the wall, and he had it covered all over with drawing pins and red and blue circles where the Who was going to play in different clubs,” ‘Irish’ Jack Lyons told Dave Marsh. “The place looked more like Churchill’s bloody war room.”

New Action’s Ivor Court environs were quite cramped, according to Anya Forbes-Adam, Kit’s longtime assistant. “Chris slept on a bed in the hall,” she told Andrew Motion in his excellent biography The Lamberts, published in 1987. “I was on the sofa, and Kit was in the main bedroom. I got £8 a week, but Kit always borrowed it back. Theoretically I was doing publicity, but in fact I was cooking, sewing on Daltrey’s symbols, and consoling Moon for not being in The Beach boys. We were a shambles, but we were a happy family.”

Lambert and Stamp never seemed to rest – Stamp careening all over London looking for new venues for the band, while Kit thought up the next grandiose plan in the chaos of his office. Kit, especially, was an eccentric, “thriving on sheer nerve,” according to Barnes, and “…profligate and flamboyant in both his personal and business behavior,” as Dave Marsh put it. But Marsh also pointed out that while his management style may have seemed haphazard or ill-conceived, Lambert was not playing around. “Irrational as much of his behavior undoubtedly was, it would be a mistake not to see Lambert as dead serious. He wanted and needed to make a giant pop success – and a small fortune – to prove himself to his father’s memory and for his own satisfaction.”

In September, 1964, The High Numbers visited EMI Studios on Abbey Road for an audition. “That was an amazing session,” Pete recalled in 1973. “We recorded it in the same room that The Beatles did their first album in. We were overawed by it and incredibly nervous. We did a tape which was bloody dynamite.” Unfortunately, EMI’s John Burgess did not agree, as Kit received a letter dated October 22 effectively declining to offer the band a contract. An audition with Pye Records around this time yielded similar results.

Meanwhile, Chris Stamp’s search of the east end turned up a series of shows at the Town Hall in Greenwich and, a few weeks later, at the Red Lion in Leytonstone. The High Numbers had gone relatively unnoticed on this side of London, and their efforts to break the market at both of these venues failed in short order due to poor attendance.

In his search for a venue a little closer to home after the failure of the attempts in the east end, Chris Stamp managed to obtain his band a weekly slot at the Marquee, a jazz and R&B club located on Wardour Street in Soho. This was a major coup – although the band had performed at the Scene and the 100 Club (both in Soho), both were known more for their DJ’s rather than live acts – records were the featured attraction, not bands. The Marquee, although it had recently moved from Oxford Street to Wardour Street, was a well-known, established venue for live R&B and jazz acts. If The High Numbers could hold their Tuesday night slot there, the press would take notice, and the band’s reputation would spread like wildfire.

Just after The High Numbers played their last show in Greenwich Town Hall in late October, 1964, Kit Lambert decided to change the band’s name back to The Who. “The Who was easy to remember, made good conversation fuel, provided ready-made gags for the disc jockeys,” Lambert said in an interview. “It was so corny it had to be good.”

It also looked good on posters. When Kit and Chris sent The High Numbers to try their luck performing in the east end, they had enlisted Richard Barnes to develop and print posters to attract an audience. They employed the same method for the new Marquee shows, this time using a logo designed by a graphic artist hired by Kit, which featured the words ‘The Who,’ one above the other with the ‘h’ in the two words joined together. An arrow was drawn coming out of the top of the ‘o’ in ‘Who’, like the medical symbol meaning ‘male’. A photograph of Pete windmilling his arm over a Rickenbacker guitar appeared in the upper left corner, while the words ‘Maximum R&B’ adorned the bottom of the poster. This has been a defining image of the band, used in various forms over the forty-plus years since its creation.

Although their first show at the Marquee on November 24, 1964, drew fewer than thirty hard-core fans from the Goldhawk Social Club, The Oldfield and The Railway, The Who reportedly played a fantastic set and the numbers were more encouraging the following week, with a turnout of almost 300. Soon the band was packing the club, going on to break attendance records set by Manfred Mann and the Yardbirds. The Marquee performances showcased The Who at a time when the band was blossoming into an incredible live act. The effect the band had on its’ fans was amazing. One fan, quoted in 1997’s The Who Concert File, remembers:

The first time I came out of my shell was when I saw The Who at the Marquee. I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t imagine that people could do such things. I went straight out and broke a window, I was that impressed. It broke down so many barriers for me, just that one evening of seeing The Who. The set was so fucking violent and the music so heady it hit you in the head as well as the guts, it did things to you. You’d never heard anything like it. ‘Maximum R&B’ said the poster…and fuck me, was it!

In 1994, New Musical Express writer Keith Altham remembered his first encounter with The Who, which occurred at the Marquee:

I arrived late and heard what sounded like someone sawing through an aluminum dustbin with a chainsaw to the accompaniment of a drummer who was obviously in time with another group on another planet and the most deafening bass guitar in the world. The vocalist was virtually inaudible amidst the cacophony. I turned on my heel to leave but Kit [Lambert] came up behind me with a brandy, promising in his beautifully fruity public school accent that, “this will be a moment you will remember all your life.” He pulled me into the sweaty, smelly confines of the Marquee where a large number of Mods in their vented jackets and Fred Perry shirts leapt about in delight.

I was astonished. The long lanky guitarist with the big hooter was doing a passing impression of a malfunctioning windmill, all the while extracting a tortuous scream from his guitar which sounded as though several Siamese cats were being electrocuted inside his speaker cabinet. This, I was reliably informed, was ‘feedback.’ Then the surly looking blond thug up front screaming ‘I’m A Man’ threw his microphone at the drummer who retaliated by hurling sticks at his head and thrashing around his kit like a whirling dervish. The bass player’s hair was dyed jet black (his tribute to Elvis) and in his black clothes on a very dark stage was almost invisible. He made up for this by turning his volume control up so high he could be heard in the next world.

Finally the apocalypse arrived on cue when the guitarist raised his guitar above his head and smashed it to splinters on the stage while the drummer kicked his drums in the general direction of the vocalist who made a determined effort to hit him over the head with one of his cymbals.

The shows, featuring songs such as Young Man Blues, You Really Got Me, Smokestack Lightning, Green Onions (by Booker T. and the MG’s: Pete told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in 1968 that MG’s guitarist Steve Cropper “…really turned me on to aggressive guitar playing.”) Here ‘Tis, and Pretty Thing, often also included an extended R&B jam (Can’t Sit Down) with sparse vocals which featured Pete’s overdriven guitar. Townshend, already adorning hundreds of Who posters around London, was beginning to become the driving force behind The Who.

In late 1964, Pete played Kit the demo tape of It Was You that the Detours had recorded the previous year. Kit was sufficiently impressed that he went out and bought Pete two mono tape recorders for his use in composing. Back in the Confederates/Aristocrats/Scorpions days, a friend of Pete’s had sparked an interest in tape recording. “The guy had a tape recorder and we used to have such fun with it, doing spoof radio shows and stuff like that, and I set my heart on getting one,” Pete told Guitarist in 1990. “My mum and dad had a junk shop, in which I worked, and inevitably a tape recorder came in – it was a Grundig or something. I couldn’t dub on it but I rapidly realized that all I needed was another tape machine and I’d be able to.”

Pete, still sharing the apartment on the top floor of his parents’ house with Richard Barnes, set about converting one of the seven spacious rooms into his first home recording studio. In 1982, Barnes remembered the logistics involved:

A friend of ours from Art School…undertook the task of laying down a 1-inch thick cement floor all over the existing floorboards of this room. It had a layer of chicken wire in to strengthen it. We bought some very expensive sheets of sound-proofing material. These were 8’ x 4’ sheets of about 3” thick compressed straw or something. Each sheet weighed about a ton. We had to get six volunteers from Art School to help lift each one.

Pete’s equipment at the time consisted of the two mono tape machines, a single microphone and a makeshift metronome he’d fashioned out of a variable speed turntable.

One of the first songs that Pete recorded using his new setup (in winter, 1964) was entitled Call Me Lightning. “One of the oldest demos I have,” Pete wrote in 1982 [8] . “Recorded with another song called You Don’t Have To Jerk at the flat my Art school pal Barney shared with me. The flat was on the floor above my parents’ home. It provided a very safe independence, a phony rebellion until I moved to Belgravia in 1965. The song is a very clear example of how difficult it was for me to reconcile what I took to be Roger’s need for macho, chauvinist lyrics and Keith Moon’s appetite for surf music and fantasy sports car love affairs.” The demo of this song (which was released on 1987’s Another Scoop) is interesting because it demonstrates both Pete’s abilities as a musician at the time and the remarkable quality of his demo tapes. Even this example, one of Pete’s earliest recordings, has a crisp, clean sound and features multi-tracked acoustic and electric guitar and harmony vocals. Pete remains impressed with the quality of these earliest examples of his demo recordings. “…although those demos are a little brittle-sounding,” he told Guitarist in 1990, they were the first things I ever did and they sound really good.” The Who would release Call Me Lightning as a single in 1968.

With the exposure and prominence of their now popular residency at the Marquee, The Who began to garner recognition in the form of reviews in national music publications. In one of The Who’s first appearances in the press on January 9, 1965, the British national music paper Melody Maker wrote:

…[the band] should be billed not only as ‘Maximum R&B’ but as ‘far-out R&B’…Heatwave – the Martha and the Vandellas hit number – is given typically fiery ‘Who’ treatment. Another of their outstanding numbers was an instrumental, Can’t Sit Down. This performance demonstrated the weird and effective techniques of guitarist Paul Townshend [sic], who expertly uses speaker feedback to accompany many of his solos. ‘The Who’, spurred by a most exhilarating drummer and a tireless vocalist, must surely be one of the trendsetting groups of 1965.

Despite efforts to land a recording contract during the previous autumn, the band still was unable to persuade record executives that they were good enough to produce a hit record. They had no original songs other than the two which they had recorded as The High Numbers, which rendered them merely a cover band with a great stage show. All this would change in 1965, as Pete, with the encouragement of Kit Lambert, was beginning to compose his own material. The year would see the release of My Generation, widely regarded as the single that permanently imprinted the band’s image on British pop culture, an anthem for a generation in need of a catalyst.

My Generation was preceded by two singles which stand as milestones in the writing development of Pete Townshend, as well as in the establishment of The Who as a bona fide chart band in the U.K. The first of these, I Can’t Explain, recorded and released in January 1965, was the band’s first hit. It reached number 8 in the British charts and established The Who’s national presence, something which had been bolstered almost daily for the past few years with the band’s busy gig itinerary.

With his budding composer armed with a small batch of demo tapes fresh from his new home recording studio, Kit Lambert managed to sign The Who with an American record producer named Shel Talmy who had recently produced The Kinks’ smash hit You Really Got Me. [9] The contract did not specify a particular record company, giving Talmy the authority to choose a label. The assumption was made that the popular Talmy’s name as producer would give the band enough leverage to garner acceptance from a record label. With Talmy being the established professional in the situation, he controlled the content of the contract, so it was no surprise that he would stand to make more money than all four members of The Who and their management team combined. However, the deal would get the band in the studio, something which they had been trying to do for months.

I Can’t Explain was recorded at Pye Studios, London, in early January 1965. The band’s first recording session with Talmy was by no means a pleasant experience. “Shel Talmy,” Pete recalled in 1971, “…was a great believer in making groups who were nothing into stars. He was also a great believer in pretending the group didn’t exist when they were in a recording studio. Despite the fact that… our first few records are among our best, they were the least fun to make… However, dear Shel got us our first single hits. So he was as close to being God for a week as any other unworthy soul has been.” Upon hearing I Can’t Explain, Talmy added a few choruses to extend the length of the song and rearranged a few lines. Talmy was not impressed with the band’s backing vocals and enlisted all-male backing group The Ivy League to do the job. Likewise, Townshend’s abilities as a lead guitarist were brought into question and local session whiz Jimmy Page, who went on to forge his own legendary career with Led Zeppelin, was brought in to lend a hand.

Pete was not impressed with this turn of events and insisted that he play lead on the song. He reportedly eventually won the battle since Page did not possess a 12-string Rickenbacker, considered key to the song’s sound, and Pete would not let Page use his. While reports vary as to whether Page ended up playing rhythm on the song, it’s generally accepted that he played on the B-side, Bald Headed Woman (a song Talmy wrote), which was recorded in about two hours.

Chris Charlesworth assessed I Can’t Explain as capturing the sentiments of youth: “…an explosive debut, a song about the frustration of being unable to express yourself, not just to the girl of your dreams but, in a broader sense, to the world as a whole.” Charlesworth touched here on the essence of the song, and on the essence of Pete’s writing: As in plenty of examples of Pete’s future writing, a tremendous amount of depth lay beneath what was immediately apparent in the lyrics. This phenomenon escaped even the writer himself. “I wrote I Can’t Explain about a kid who couldn’t explain to a girl that he loved her – that was all it was about,” Pete later said. “…A couple of months later it was on the charts, and I started to look at it closely… and I realized that the song was on the chart not because it was a little love song, but because it openly paraded a sort of weakness.”

Dave Marsh called it, “…A slight song with a lyric on the edge of moony adolescent cliché, but as a recorded performance, it remains one of the outstanding documents of rock and roll. The sound is sharper, percussive, electric as a live wire.”

“It can’t be beat for straightforward Kink copying,” Pete said in 1971. “It seems to be about the frustrations of a young person who is so incoherent and uneducated that he can’t state his case to the bourgeois intellectual blah blah blah. Or, of course, it might be about drugs.” Like The Kinks’ You Really Got Me, The Who’s new single was short, sweet and to the point. The timelessness and sheer staying power of I Can’t Explain is demonstrated by the fact that the song was used as the opener for the vast majority of The Who’s live shows over the next three decades.

Shel Talmy, wanting to make the single a hit in the U.S. (because, he said, “the big bread was in America, not England”), sold the single to Decca’s American subsidiary, who released the record in England on their Brunswick label [10] . I Can’t Explain was released within two weeks of the recording session, and was well received in England, although not a smash hit, starting out at number 33. Competition that month included The Kinks’ Tired of Waiting For You, Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual, and The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling. The single failed to make an impact in the U.S. (American Decca was known as not being particularly receptive to rock’n’roll recordings), reaching only number 93.

Shortly after the release of I Can’t Explain, while Chris Stamp was working in Norway on the Kirk Douglas movie The Heroes of Telemark, Kit Lambert put Pete up in rooms above his own flat, which doubled as their company’s new offices in upper class Eaton Place, Belgravia [11] . Lambert did not want his band’s songwriter living in Ealing anymore. “Kit had musical ideas and could guide and encourage Pete,” Roger Daltrey recalled in 2000. “He had that relationship with him where he could say, ‘That’s fucking rubbish, Peter! Absolute fucking rubbish!’” Lambert felt that Pete’s pot smoking habits stemmed from his art school days, and that the best way to get him to stop such behavior was to remove him from the situation. “Kit dragged me out of that environment because he thought it was decadent,” Pete told Richard Barnes. “He took me away from the decadence that was ours to the decadence that was his.”

Another factor led to Pete’s change of residence at this time: His parents, who were not particularly enamored with Pete’s attempts at remodeling and soundproofing one of the rooms of his upstairs flat in order to transform it into a recording studio. “They tried to soundproof it,” Pete’s younger brother Paul told Dave Marsh in 1983. “They had egg boxes everywhere on the walls, and they knocked a hole in one wall to put in a window. And they didn’t put the window in; they didn’t get round to that. Then the cement made the ceiling start to bow in downstairs. There was a blazing row, and my mom and dad kicked ‘em out.”

Life at Eaton Place saw Pete’s introduction to the ways of the upper class. “Kit’s grooming started with etiquette and showing Keith and me the right wines and so on,” Pete told Mojo in 2000. “Up to the last years of his life, Keith was still ordering the vintage of Dom Perignon that Kit said was the best.” Kit also introduced Pete to classical music, particularly Kit’s favorite, Baroque music. Pete would later credit the Baroque style suspensions in later Who compositions such as Pinball Wizard, The Kids Are Alright and I’m A Boy to the music of Henry Purcell, which Lambert sampled for him during this period. Lambert’s record collection also included “Sinatra, Ellington, a good deal of Italian opera, and a fair amount of baroque music including Purcell’s Gordian Knot Untied, which he played all the time,” Pete told Andrew Motion in 1987. “But not much pop.”

Life with Lambert, a homosexual, also meant that Pete witnessed firsthand London’s gay scene. “We used to eat at all the gay restaurants…and dine out with Quentin Crisp and all that,” Pete said in 1982. “I didn’t care.” Pete has been careful to point out that Lambert’s motives in inviting Townshend to live with him were purely professional. “…just for the record,” Pete told Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in 1982, “if Kit Lambert was gettin’ into rock music ‘cause he was looking for boys, there was certainly no approach made to any individual in the Who – ever, under any circumstances. Maybe we weren’t his type.” [12] Lambert biographer Andrew Motion pointed out that “…the truth is that Kit’s friendship with Townshend was charged less by sexual attraction than by the appeal of shaping and directing an as yet unrealized talent. …He regularly pointed out how remarkably unattractive the band were, and agreed with a friend who, on first seeing them, pronounced them ‘the ugliest in London’.”

On January 18, 1965, three days after I Can’t Explain was released in the U.K., The Who made their first TV appearance on The Beat Room, appropriately aired from the BBC’s Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, The Who’s home turf. Although it was only aired on BBC2 in the London region and the band was not billed in advance, their first appearance certainly gave them an opportunity to further promote their new single, which they performed here. Another more fruitful television appearance was forthcoming. Vicki Wyckham, producer of Ready Steady Go, attended one of the band’s January shows at the Marquee and was sufficiently impressed to book the band for her show, considered the hippest music program in England and an important trend-setter. The show boasted a viewership of nearly three million. “…It is a very popular programme, revolving around guest pop artists miming to their records; interviews – sometimes last-minute affairs with stars who drop in; film clips; records to demonstrate new dances; and more records just to be danced to,” wrote Melody Maker’s Chris Roberts in January, 1964. “It has developed, partly unconsciously… into something mysteriously “in”, with an avant-garde clannishness… If you have ever read about mods and rockers, and watch the show, you will know why. It is the TV stronghold of mods, the frighteningly clean, sharply dressed arbiters of tomorrow’s tastes.” Among bands whose first big TV break came on RSG were the Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Herman’s Hermits, Marianne Faithfull, Cilla Black, and Dusty Springfield.

The band appeared on RSG on January 29, 1965, a Friday night, and were accompanied by the ‘100 faces’, a large contingent of their most rabid mod fans whose attendance was orchestrated by Kit Lambert, who had also supplied them all with Who scarves. New Musical Express writer Roy Carr described Lambert’s accomplishments that evening:

As it transpired, Lambert discovered that the one person responsible for assembling the weekly studio audience was ill, and so Lambert kindly volunteered to supply a ready-made crowd of typical teens. What the RSG producers didn’t know was that Lambert had herded together the entire audience from The Goldhawk Social Club in Shepherds Bush and that each one was both bona fide Mod and die-hard Who fan. That night, the other acts on the show really didn’t stand a chance. But The Who and, in particular their audience, were sensational. In just under three action-packed minutes, the Mod movement had spread the word right across the British Isles, and the word was The Who.

The Who’s first national TV appearance was a huge success, with the 100 faces inserting appropriately thunderous vocal support during I Can’t Explain, which the band mimed.

Pete Townshend and The Who’s next big break occurred towards the end of the following month. The Who were asked to perform on Top of The Pops (the British equivalent of American Bandstand with an average viewership of around 5.5 million at the time) as the replacement for a band who had canceled at the last minute. They were slotted to appear on ‘Tip for the Top,’ a segment showcasing potential up-and-comers. “It was exciting,” Pete wrote in 1970. He continued:

You only got on the show, apart from the plug spot, if your record was in the charts, so it was instant status, and the doors of the studio were always surrounded by lots of pretty young fans who were always waiting for some other band, it seemed. In those days we had to mime to our record, thus, it was a cinch. No worries about throats or atmosphere, or getting in tune, just about what color pants to wear, or what silly outfit to put on to attract the camera’s attention.

April 27, 1965, marked the end of The Who’s twenty-three week residency at the Marquee Club. This booking had brought the band the reputation among fans and the press attention it needed to become a successful, nationally recognized act. While they still played regularly throughout the London area, The Who began to perform further afield as word of their live show spread across the country. The band ventured north through Leicester and Nottingham, on to Newcastle and finally to Scotland for the first time in May, 1965.

Their sound is vicious. This is no note-perfect ‘showbiz’ group, singing in harmony and playing clean guitar runs. The Who lay down a heavy beat…Moon thunders round the drums. Townshend swings full circles with his right arm. He bangs out morse code by switching the guitar pick-ups on and off. Notes bend and whine. He turns suddenly and rams the end of his guitar into the speaker. A chord shudders on the impact. The speaker rocks. Townshend strikes again on the rebound. He rips the canvas covering, tears into the speaker cone, and the distorted solo splutters from a demolished speaker. The crowds watch this violent display spellbound…it’s an exhausting act to watch. But also highly original and full of tremendous pace.

The Who began work on their debut album in March, 1965, at London’s IBC studios. The album was to contain mostly covers, with 8 or 9 staples from the band’s live set recorded at the first session: I’m A Man, Heatwave, I Don’t Mind, Lubie (Come Back Home), Please Please Please, Leaving Here, Motoring. Reportedly, only one Townshend composition was recorded , the aptly titled You’re Going To Know Me. The band held further recording sessions in March and April during which they continued work on the proposed album and their next single.

Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, the follow-up to I Can’t Explain, was an important single for The Who in that it was more Townshend than Talmy. The single reflected The Who’s biggest strength – their live firepower – effectively, complete with screeching feedback and Moon’s now standard anarchic percussion assault. With the advent of Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, Pete had pointed The Who firmly in the direction in which he wanted to travel. This was an important step forward in an era of producer dictatorships.

Roger told Alan Smith of the New Musical Express that Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere was written at 3am, the day before it was recorded, “when he and Pete were locked in a room to make them concentrate on songwriting,” according to Smith. Daltrey cowrote this song, which became the theme song for Ready, Steady, Go for a time. “I wrote the first verse and Roger helped with the rest,” Pete recalled. “I was inspired by listening to Charlie Parker, feeling that this was really a free spirit, and whatever he’d done with drugs and booze and everything else, that his playing released him and freed his spirit, and I wanted us to be like that, and I wanted to write a song about that, a spiritual song.”

“I was laying on my mattress on the floor listening to a Charlie Parker record when I thought up the title,” Pete wrote in Rolling Stone in 1971. “…I just felt the guy was so free when he was playing. He was a soul without a body, riding, flying, on music…The freedom suggested by the title became restricted by the aggression of our tightly defined image when I came to write the words. In fact, Roger was really a hard nut then, and he changed quite a few words himself to toughen the song up to suit his temperament. It is the most excitingly pigheaded of our songs.” The song also was one of the first to feature feedback; in fact, Decca records initially returned the master to Shel Talmy, believing it to be defective due to the various roaring and screeching noises.

In mid 1965, as Mod fever began to cool considerably in the London area (due in part to several violent riots involving Mods which had taken place in Britain over the past year), The Who decided that they did not want to go down with the ship. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere was described by the band as the ‘first pop-art single.’ Pete commented at the time that pop-art “is re-presenting something the public is familiar with in a different form. Like clothes. Union Jacks are supposed to be flown. We have a jacket made of one. Keith Moon, our drummer has a jersey with the RAF insignia on it. I have a white jacket, covered in medals.” [13] The band had begun to veer off the mod path. “We think the mod thing is dying,” Pete said. “We don’t plan to go down with it, which is why we’ve become individualists.”

Pete espoused the virtues of pop art to anyone who would listen, telling the Observer in March, “From valueless objects – a guitar, a microphone, a hackneyed pop tune, we extract a new value. We take objects with one function and give them another. And the auto-destructive element – the way we destroy our instruments – adds immediacy to it all.”

“We stand for pop-art clothes, pop-art music and pop-art behavior,” Pete told Melody Maker’s Nick Jones in July, 1965.

This is what everybody seems to forget – we don’t change off-stage. We live pop-art.

I bang my guitar on my speaker because of the visual effect. It is very artistic. One gets a tremendous sound, and the effect is great… If guitars exploded and went up in a puff of smoke, I’d be happy. The visual effect would be complete.

…Well, our next single is really pop-art. I wrote it with that intention. Not only is the number pop-art, the lyrics are ‘young and rebellious.’ It’s anti middle-class, anti boss-class, and anti young marrieds! I’ve nothing against these people really – just making a positive statement.

The ‘pop art’ idea was obviously the result of some prodding by Kit Lambert. 20 year-old Pete was often in over his head during interviews when he tried to describe pop art to the press. “Kit Lambert described Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere to reporters as, ‘A pop art record, containing pop art music,’” Pete later commented. “‘The sounds of war and chaos and frustration expressed musically without the use of sound effects.’ A bored and then cynical Nick Cohn – Christ he was even more cynical than me – said calmly, ‘That’s impressionism, not pop art.’ I repeated what Kit had briefed me to say, mumbling something about Peter Blake and Lichtenstein and went red. Completely out of order while your record is screaming in the background: I can go anyway, way I choose, I can live anyhow, win or lose, I can go anywhere, for something new, Anyway, anyhow, anywhere.” Anyway, which appeared five months after the release of I Can’t Explain, reached number 10 in the U.K. charts.

The Who’s first trip overseas, a two-show stint in Paris in early June, drove home the pathetic state of New Action’s finances. “When the time came to leave, Kit had not even got the money for the train fare home, and had to be bailed out by [Chris] Parmeinter,” wrote Andrew Motion in 1987. “…When they got back they found that the bailiffs had become so insistent that Kit was forced to shift the band’s offices from Eaton Place back to Ivor Court. His stay there was a brief one; in November he uprooted himself again, this time to an even posher address: Cavendish Square, just north of Oxford Circus. The move had commercial as well as domestic advantages: Robert Stigwood, the highly successful Australian booking agent, had a flat in the same building. He agreed – for £2,000 – to act for the band.”

The uprooting of New Action meant that Pete also had to relocate. He soon moved into his own apartment in Chesham Place, Belgravia. According to Dave Marsh, Pete “decorated the place with pages torn from a book on pop art which he’d swiped from the Ealing Art School library.” Pete equipped the spare room with his second home recording studio, including (eventually) a Vortexion CBL stereo tape machine, several microphones (as opposed to the single mike which graced his Ealing studio) and several guitars. Melody Maker reported that Pete possessed nine guitars during this period, all on hire-purchase, and that he was receiving an unemployment check at the time. In 1975, NME writer George Tremlett illustrated Pete’s lifestyle during this period:

Whereas in those days Roger, Keith and occasionally John were to be found late most evenings at the clubs that then mattered, the Ad Lib and the Cromwellian, Pete Townshend began living an almost reclusive life up in his Belgravia flat. At first he had just a mattress on the floor to sleep on, his clothes hung from coat hooks, and furniture consisted mainly of a loaded bookshelf, a pile of albums, a telephone, most of the group’s cast-off equipment (mended guitars, microphones, amplifiers, etc). There, once his day’s work with the group was done, Townshend would while away the night hours, writing, experimenting with sounds.

Kit Lambert had bought me two good quality tape decks and suggested I do this. It appealed to me as I had always attempted it using lesser machines and been encouraged by results… Anyway, ensconced in my Belgravia two-room tape recorder and hi-fi showroom, I proceeded to enjoy myself writing ditties with which I could later amuse myself over-dubbing, multitracking, and adding extra parts. It was the way I practiced. I learnt to play with myself. Masturbation comes to mind and, as a concept, making demos is not far off.

With the confidence in their composer that two original hit songs inevitably brings (and a simultaneous wariness brought on by an unfavorable review penned by John Emery in Beat Instrumental, who’d heard samples from the initial recording sessions), The Who announced in July, 1965, that more Townshend originals would be included on their debut album, delaying the release of the project. “The Who have delayed the release of their first LP due to a last minute musical policy change,” proclaimed the July 17 edition of Melody Maker.

This drastic move has resulted in the group re-recording nearly all of the LP tracks… Says Who manager Kit Lambert: ‘The Who are having serious doubts about the state of R&B. Now the LP material will consist of hard pop. They’ve finished with Smokestack Lightnin!’ The main contents of the album will now be originals written by guitarist Pete Townshend, and singer Roger Daltrey. The LP should be released in early September.

The inclusion of a larger chunk of Townshend originals on the album meant a power shift within the pecking order of the band. Townshend began supplanting Daltrey, a transfer of power which nearly destroyed the band. “I took the band over when they asked me to write for them…,” Pete told Andrew Motion in 1987, “and used them as a mouthpiece, hitting out at anyone who tried to have a say in what the group (mainly Roger) said and then grumbling when they didn’t appreciate my dictatorship.”

It was a long summer of endless TV shows and live appearances throughout England. Notably, the band appeared at the 5^th Richmond Jazz and Blues Festival on August 6. Sharing the bill with The Yardbirds and The Moody Blues, The Who played a five song set which included a new song entitled My Generation. The version performed here reportedly lacked the trademark stuttering vocals and thundering climax, which made the final product so memorable. Pete smashed a Rickenbacker into his Vox speakers at the end of Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, tossing it to the back of the stage. [14]

Although they had played overseas once before (two shows in Paris at the beginning of June), The Who’s first European tour began in late September. The tour consisted of two shows in the Netherlands, then on to four shows in two days in Denmark. After the second show in the Netherlands, Pete found himself with two days of free time prior to the beginning of the band’s stint in Denmark on September 25:

I got drinking with a crowd of blokes, and they invited me back to their flat for the night. But when I woke up next morning there was a policeman standing by the bed – and it was then that I discovered they’d all gone, and it wasn’t their place at all. It was somebody else’s house and that was why the police had been called. At first it was a bit sticky. But after I had shown them my passport and explained who I was and how I happened to be there, they let me off. But it was all still a bit of a shock.

On Sunday, September 26 in Aahus, Denmark, the various arguments between the individual members of The Who which had been simmering since the band’s inception reached boiling point. Everyone except Roger had been popping pills during the tour (Roger reportedly couldn’t partake since the pills affected his voice) and backstage in Denmark Roger dumped Moon’s supply of French Blues down the toilet. When Moon tried to retaliate, “Roger badly beat Keith up, knocking him out,” Richard Barnes wrote in 1982. “When Keith was revived, they had to go on and do their second show of the evening, which was understandably tense.” The band may have actually met their match for outright raucousness in the crowd present for the first show. “In Aahus, they got completely out of hand,” Pete told George Tremlett.

That’s a farming area, and the hall was packed with 4 to 5,000 young farmers, a rather rough audience… the group that went on stage before us had had bottles thrown at them, and we’d lost some of our equipment. When this other group came off, they told us we could use some of their equipment… but then we went out on stage, and the bottles started flying again, then the lads started to storm the stage, and this other group dashed back on to rescue their equipment… we had only been on stage for four minutes before the show was stopped, and of course things got worse after that. The fans stormed out of the hall and started to wreck the town… we heard afterwards that they had done £10,000-worth of damage, and that made the front page of all the Danish papers.

When the band returned from their trip, John, Pete and Keith demanded that Daltrey leave The Who after finishing their work promoting My Generation. “Originally the group was run by the iron glove of Roger,” Pete told Record World in 1975. “…he used to be very tough in getting his own way. If he didn’t he’d shout and scream and stamp and in the end he’d punch you in the mouth. We’d all got big egos in the group and none of us liked it. We all got together and politely asked Roger to leave.”

As the weather cooled towards the end of 1965, Pete Townshend’s future brightened and The Who’s collective pulse quickened. With the release of their third single, My Generation in November, 1965, The Who cemented their reputation as a hard-nosed band who reflected the feelings of thousands of pissed-off adolescents at the time. My Generation was the complete package: All of the commercial appeal of I Can’t Explain, combined with the aggressive feedback and live aura of Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere.

According to Pete, it was Chris Stamp who saw the potential in My Generation when Pete played him the demo tape. “He [Stamp] was convinced it could be the biggest Who record yet,” Pete recalled in 1971. “Bearing in mind the state of the demo, it shows an astuteness beyond the call. It sounded like (I still of course have it) Jimmy Reed at ten years old suffering from nervous indigestion. Kit made suggestion after suggestion to improve the song. He later said that it was because he was unsure of it. I went on to make two more demos…the first introduced the stutter. The second several key changes, pinched, again, from the Kinks.”

In an era of namby-pamby love songs, My Generation was an all-out kick in the pants for anyone who wasn’t happy with their lot in life. The bite of lyrics such as why don’t you all F-F-F-Fade away, with its threat of the harsher ‘F’ word, seemed to sum up the frustration of countless youths across the nation. The song simply dripped attitude.

“If My Generation was the only record The Who had ever recorded, they would still deserve an honorable mention in any history of rock,” wrote Chris Charlesworth in 1995. “[My Generation] is still the best known song in their entire catalogue. Pete Townshend has often regretted penning the memorable lines ‘Hope I die before I get old’ but My Generation remains the hardest hitting single released by any U.K. pop group in 1965. The Beatles and the Stones, remember, were still writing love songs at the time this was released.” My Generation reached number 2 in the U.K., selling around 300,000 copies despite the fact that it was at first banned by the BBC, who considered Daltrey’s stuttering an insult to those who suffered from the affliction. The song was described by the NME’s Derek Johnson as “…A storming, raving shake-beat, with crashing cymbals, raucous guitar, reverberating bass and hand-claps throughout – and that’s just the backing.”

I was very, very lost. The band was young then. It was believed that its career would be incredibly brief. The privilege that I had at the time was to be plucked out of bed-sitter land and put in a flat in the middle of Belgravia with two tape machines. It was private, and I could look out at these people who seemed to me to be from another planet.

I remember one of the things I bought when the Who first became successful was a 1963 Lincoln Continental. I was driving with the top down through London, and a woman in a car going in the other direction looked at me. She was wearing a string of pearls, blond hair, very beautiful, about thirty-five. She kind of looked at me as if admiring me in my car. Then her lip curled, and she said, “Driving Mummy’s car, are we?” That one incident, among a series of other key incidents, made me hate those people.

I really started to respond to that. “All right, you motherfuckers, I am going to have you. I am going to be bigger and richer, and I’m going to move into your neighborhood. I’m going to buy that house next to you, Lord So-and-So.” And I’ve done it. And I’m afraid I’ve done it out of a great sickness. I talk to people I really do respect from that way of life now, and I say to them, “Do you realize why it is I’m so driven to operate within the Establishment? It’s vengeance.” “Hope I die before I get old” is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.

Another incident which fueled Pete’s anger toward the establishment at the time involved a run-in with the Queen Mother. “Even though I was young and smashing guitars, I still loved the Queen Mother,” Pete told Q’s David Cavanagh in January, 2000. “Fucking stopped, though.”

It was in 1964 [15] . My manager Kit Lambert felt that I was unduly held down by my art school friends, so he moved me into Chesham Place, the road between Clarence House and Buckingham Palace. I had this Packard hearse parked outside my house. One day I came back and it was gone. It turned out that she’d had it moved, because her husband had been buried in a similar vehicle and it reminded her of him. When I went to collect it, they wanted two hundred and fifty quid. I’d only paid thirty for it in the first place.

Accompanying the release of My Generation, some rather belated rumors arose in the music press that The Who had fired Roger as a result of friction within the band. Although Roger’s altercation with Keith had taken place over two months ago, all had been quiet in the press until now. Following the release of the immensely popular My Generation, any news on The Who was suddenly catapulted to the front page. The November 20 edition of Melody Maker ran a front-page story entitled ‘The Who Split Mystery’. “Wild tales in London’s in-clubs flashed the news that 20-year-old singer Roger Daltrey would be leaving the group,” the article announced [16] . “It was said that young singer Boz, of the Boz People, would be Daltrey’s replacement [17] . It was also thought another drummer would be brought into the group so that Keith Moon could ‘explore other fields of percussion.’” Chris Stamp – who originally sided with Townshend, Moon and Entwistle in wanting Daltrey out – was quoted in the piece as saying:

This is absolute c-c-crap! Quite seriously I’ve never heard such a lot of rubbish. Does anybody in their right mind think the Who would split at a time like this? Everybody knows there is conflict within the group, and there have been some hefty rows lately, but this doesn’t mean that the group will bust up. They just argue about their ‘sound’ and talk about all the things they want to achieve sound-wise…We hear rumors that Roger is leaving everywhere we go…it’s just crap. The Who once and for all, are not ‘breaking up.’

Roger, indeed, was on his way out of the band just prior to the release of My Generation, but the success of the single threw a wrench in The Who’s plans. As the single shot up the charts, it became apparent that the band was quickly on its way to stardom – provided that they could stay together. “[Roger] was quickly reinstated when Generation leapt up the charts,” Chris Charlesworth later wrote, “and its success undoubtedly saved Roger from a life as a tearaway – and The Who from extinction.” Friction was not something new to Townshend and company: When Fabulous writer Nancy Lewis interviewed the band in early 1965, she predicted they’d split within six months. “They didn’t seem to like each other very much and they were such different people, I just could never see them lasting,” she told John Swenson. “Our personalities clash, but we argue and get it all out of our system,” Townshend told Melody Maker in June, 1965. “There’s a lot of friction, and offstage we’re not particularly matey. But it doesn’t matter. If we were not like this it would destroy our stage performance. We play how we feel.”

“We are all so different,” Roger said in a December 1965 interview. “…We still don’t go around with each other, but things aren’t as bad as they were. We find friction in the group helps anyway because we play emotional music.” After Lambert held a meeting and persuaded Stamp and the other three to let Roger stay, Roger promised that he would attempt to curb his anger. “It was an amazing sort of transformation he went through,” Pete told Richard Barnes. “…from being one of the most aggressive, violent people I knew, to being one of the most peaceful. He had to learn to live with a lot of things he didn’t like, and what I always admired about him was the fact that he managed to do it, because knowing the kind of power he had as a young man that he gave up in a sense, for the sake of the group, took a lot of guts.”

A song The Who would record six years later framed the event for Daltrey. “Behind Blue Eyes for me, really speaks volumes,” Daltrey said in 1999.

When my fist clenches, crack it open, it just all made sense. That’s the only way we used to deal with anything in the part of England where I grew up. Everything was solved with a fight, whoever won the fight, that’s the way you went, simple as that. But obviously it didn’t quite work that way in a band, and they slung me out for fighting, and the band was everything, it was my band, and it meant… it was my whole life, so I had two choices, give up the fighting or give up the band; there’s no choice whatsoever.

Altham NME Dec 65 Who admit they’re feuding “Constant criticism has been leveled at the group by newspapers and magazines, who declare that they are always late and frequently don’t turn up at all for interviews or photograph sessions.” Brian Jones to Altham: “They are the only young group doing something new both visually and musically. Originality usually means success.”

My Generation, released in late December 1965, reached number 5 in the U.K. charts. The album flopped in the U.S. upon its’ release four months later. Of the original sessions which took place in March, only three songs made it on to the final album, Please Please Please and I Don’t Mind, both written by James Brown, and Bo Diddley’s I’m A Man. Townshend penned the remaining tracks, the most notable being My Generation and The Kids Are Alright, which remain among Pete’s most memorable Who compositions [18] . Of the rest, Out In The Street (reportedly a renamed manifestation of You’re Going to Know Me) is a tight, heavy R&B song which suffers somewhat since the introductory guitar flourish is quite similar to that of Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere. Townshend’s guitar prowess is demonstrated on The Good’s Gone [19] , while La La La Lies and It’s Not True exhibit the characteristics of a prototypical Who song. The wacky lyrics of the latter provided a glimpse of Townshend’s penchant for weird, humor-tinged compositions which would eventually spawn such titles as I’m A Boy, Happy Jack and Little Billy.

A Legal Matter, a twangy, country-tinged number which featured Pete singing lead vocals for the first time, was “…about a guy on the run from a chick about to pin him down for breach of promise,” Pete told Rolling Stone in 1971. “What this song was screaming from behind lines like, “It’s a legal matter baby, marrying’s no fun, it’s a legal matter baby, you got me on the run,” was “I’m lonely, I’m hungry, and the bed needs making.” I wanted a maid I suppose. It’s terrible feeling like an eligible bachelor but with no women seeming to agree with you.”

The album was rounded out with a thunderous instrumental entitled The Ox, John’s nickname. “In the studio it was possible – with a bit of frigging around – to get the sound and energy we had on stage, and this is the first Who record where we really caught that,” Pete recalled. “Because this is an instrumental, what you get is The Band, the sound of this tremendous machine working almost by itself, that incredible chemistry we had in The Who, and that we kept right up until Keith Moon dropped dead.” The song, which features a great performance by Moon, who “…simply eclipses every surf drummer in history on a song that is nothing so much as an Anglo ‘wipe out,’” Dave Marsh wrote in 1983.

[1] His steady income also meant that he didn’t need any further part-time jobs – while in art school, he’d supplemented his income with gigs delivering milk and working for a butcher.

[2] Lambert worked on such films as From Russia With Love and The Guns of Navarone in this capacity.

[3] Lambert was informed by The Beatles’ attorney, David Jacobs, that the band’s contract with Gorden was legally invalid; Meaden, who had no legal claim to the band, received a buyout for relinquishing control to Lambert and Stamp. Meaden reportedly later boasted that Townshend sent him a thousand pounds every Christmas in a gesture of thanks for his early guidance of the band.

[4] “I was the fellow who saw the potential in modism, which is the greatest form of lifestyle you can imagine,” Meaden told the NME’s Steve Turner in 1978. “I got The Who together because I loved the life so much. I got them together and I dressed them in mod clothes, gave them all the jingoism and all the paraphernalia of modism. It was right on the button. The timing was just right. And timing is where it’s at.”

[5] Stevens went on to produce work by The Clash and Mott the Hoople.

[6] Beatles’ fans certainly noticed The High Numbers after an August 16 support stint. “After the Blackpool show, the Beatles made a safe escape, but the High Numbers, who still moved their own equipment, were in the act of loading their van when a horde of Beatlemaniacs approached, screaming, tearing their hair and rending their garments at the sight of a pop group,” Dave Marsh wrote in 1983. “Any pop group.” The band emerged from the fray with the collars of their jackets ripped off, and Daltrey lost a sleeve.

[7] The promotional film, which cost a reported £350 to make, was eventually sold to the television show That’s For Me – for £25.

[8] In 1996, Pete mentioned a song entitled Silver Stingray “and a couple of other mock-Jan and Dean things” as very early examples of his writings in his first demo studio.

[9] In a 2000 interview with Mojo, Ray Davies stated that Shel Talmy’s role in recording You Really Got Me was minimal. Talmy’s recording of the song was “swamped in echo. It was horrible,” Davies said. The Kinks rerecorded the song (at their own expense), “and we bashed it out with no echo.” Talmy “had to be there”, Davies said, but his input was minimal. “…he was happy to be named producer.”

[10] Brunswick, incidentally, was Bill Haley’s record label.

[11] The move to Belgravia was at least partly motivated by Lambert’s wish to project an impression that New Action was a thriving, profitable outfit. An additional ploy was his reported insistence on using hired Rolls-Royces as his preferred mode of travel. The company was actually at least £60,000 in debt at the time according to Andrew Motion. “At Eaton Place,” Lambert later said, “the bailiffs kept coming and going. I used to have a bust of my father’s head which I used to put down the loo and make Anya sit on top of it. She would have to sit there for ages. I used to say to her, “No. No. Make it look authentic. Take your knickers down.””

[12] While Townshend’s statement is crystal clear, Shel Talmy’s view after recording with The Who was that Lambert was “hot after Townshend,” according to Mojo magazine.

[13] “Kit came up with the idea for that jacket – he should be posthumously knighted for it,” Daltrey said in 2000. “Prior to that the Union Jack had only ever been flown on buildings as the national flag. When we walked into a Savile Row tailor and said, ‘Will you make a jacket out of this?’, they said, ‘No.’ They thought they’d go to jail.”

[14] The Who received a consignment of new amplifiers from Vox in early September. Realizing that the brand new equipment would attract unwanted attention, the band visited Battersea Dogs’ Home in search of a guard dog. Unfortunately, while they were inside the Dogs’ Home, their van, packed with their new equipment, was stolen.

[15] I contend that this event occurred during 1965.

[16] “There were actually periods when Roger left the group for several weeks and I was The Who’s singer,” Pete told Guitarist in 1990. “Robert Plant talks about the fact that when he first saw us I was the singer. He came to see us three nights in a row and offered himself for the job... as did Steve Gibbons when he came to see us and Roger wasn’t there. Obviously none of them thought I was any good!”

[17] Boz Burrell went on to stints with King Crimson and Bad Company.

[18] Both songs were reportedly recorded during the same session, an all-nighter on 13 October.

[19] Pete explained his early tendency to avoid guitar solos to Guitarist in 1990: “...I knew Jimmy Page – Led Zeppelin weren’t formed then but I’d seen him in various bands and if anything his playing slowed down as he got older! He was an extraordinary player, arrogant, flash... And Eric, with The Yardbirds, used to play absolutely beautifully and he’d only been playing a year! And Jeff Beck, who always had that quality of making the guitar sound like a voice... That was the kind of market-place I was in, and although I hadn’t been belted round the chops by Jimi Hendrix yet, I definitely didn’t want to be competing with those players... I was very embarrassed playing on The Who’s first album because I tried to play solos and I could hear the jazz creeping in. So I made a conscious effort to keep away from feature solos. And it did feel very much like a competitive area...”