Episode 964 - Roger Daltrey
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF, broadcasting from Midtown Manhattan in a hotel room with a living room.
Marc:I'm not saying it's nice, but it's a mid-sized suite, but I'm here for like two weeks.
Marc:So, you know, it's nice to have a little room sitting in a couch, on a couch that isn't mine.
Marc:That is the wrong fabric for a hotel room.
Marc:I don't like the fabric when it just... You know what?
Marc:Couches in hotel rooms are generally not great.
Marc:But I think many of you know my feelings on that.
Marc:That generally, if you're sitting on furniture in the hotel room, you should be wearing clothing, a robe, or perhaps put a towel down.
Marc:And I'm not a germaphobe.
Marc:It's just that I have to assume that if these couches could speak...
Marc:Oh, I'm not sure I'd want to know.
Marc:And how often do they clean the couch?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:This is an observation I think that was once put in my head years ago by a Todd Berry joke, to be honest with you, about bedspreads.
Marc:And yes, do not send me the pictures of what, you know, those special infrared cameras of hotel room couches and sheets.
Marc:I don't want them.
Marc:I'm here for a while.
Marc:I'm dug in, not afraid of germs.
Marc:I'm on a not need to know basis with what the,
Marc:bedding and the couches have been through i'm just taking proper precautions you know what some maybe i maybe i won't maybe i won't maybe i'll live on the edge and sit on a hotel room couch with my bare butt before i leave i might do that today on the show from a band called the who
Marc:Roger Daltrey is here.
Marc:I had a nice chat with Mr. Daltrey back at the garage.
Marc:I didn't know what to expect.
Marc:I don't know a lot of times from these older rock dudes, but when you really think about Daltrey, whether you're a who guy or you're not a who guy, you know a few who tunes, but you also have to realize that Roger Daltrey was a king among rock stars.
Marc:He was an archetypal rock singer.
Marc:He is one of the guys who created
Marc:Modern rock singing.
Marc:You think about a rock singer, you think about Daltrey, you think about Plant, that era.
Marc:You know what I'm saying.
Marc:It's the fucking who, man.
Marc:And I talked to Roger Daltrey about his book.
Marc:It's called Thanks a Lot, Mr. Kibblewhite, My Story.
Marc:And so just so you don't get let down, I didn't even think to fucking ask him who Mr. Kibblewhite is, but that's my style.
Marc:That's who I am.
Marc:I didn't even think to do it.
Marc:It's the title of the goddamn book.
Marc:I'm not beating myself up.
Marc:I didn't think to do it.
Marc:So another thing I want to address, if I could, while I sit here and after telling you that the other day that I was...
Marc:sort of isolated here by my own doing and trying to justify it as being okay because i'm working i want to thank the people who emailed me i do read them especially if i'm isolating in a hotel room in midtown manhattan i'll read the emails and
Marc:Thank you for the suggestions.
Marc:Thank you for inviting me places.
Marc:Thank you for telling me what to do, what I should do.
Marc:I appreciate that.
Marc:It was all done with a good-hearted concern and desire to get my head in the right place.
Marc:And who doesn't need that?
Marc:I hope I do that for all of you sometimes.
Marc:So the news has been rough.
Marc:The news has been bad.
Marc:But I feel okay today.
Marc:I'm processing grief, panic, pain, horror, skepticism, despair.
Marc:momentary elation.
Marc:There's some amazing stuff, though.
Marc:I read something today about that monster that shot out that synagogue, and when he was taken to the hospital, a couple of the people that took care of him at the hospital were Jewish, and they did their jobs, and they did them willfully, and I read that story, and I just started crying.
Marc:And there is decency and spiritually grounded people.
Marc:and uh people that are bigger than the garbage culture that uh it seems to be pervasive because of our pig of a president i think the horrible thing is is the pleasure that so many of them and i will isolate them and they know who they are the pleasure they get out of seeing other people in pain
Marc:of causing other people pain, of just reveling in the vulnerable's lack of defense against their psychological, emotional, and physical brutality.
Marc:They revel in it.
Marc:And they know who they are.
Marc:And somehow or another, they frame that or rationalize that, the ones that have the intellect to do so, as winning.
Marc:That's winning.
Marc:We're fighting a fight and we're winning.
Marc:And the people that don't have that rationalization, a lot of them just get pleasure out of seeing and causing other people pain and exploiting and diminishing and abusing other people's vulnerability.
Marc:That's how they get off.
Marc:That's what winning is to them.
Marc:that's horrifying and i think about that and it's just uh i don't know i don't know how you i don't know how you change that because you enter into that interaction and that's what they're setting out to do it's not about principle it's about using other people's pain as strength
Marc:And causing it.
Marc:And defending it.
Marc:And if you push too hard, they'll want to cause it in you somehow.
Marc:And they will laugh and laugh.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know what to do.
Marc:I hope the voting works.
Marc:Give us ease up something.
Marc:Just a little bit of hope.
Marc:But...
Marc:I went to the theater the other night, me and Brendan McDonald, my producer and partner in this event of WTF, went to see the Waverly Gallery.
Marc:That's Kenny Lonergan's play that's up now.
Marc:It's an older play of his.
Marc:And I thought it was great.
Marc:Elaine May was in it.
Marc:And she was amazing.
Marc:Elaine May was sort of pivotal in the early days of comedy with Mike Nichols, Nichols and May.
Marc:And then she went on to write movies.
Marc:She wrote The Heartbreak Kid, one of the great sort of tragic comedies of the 70s.
Marc:What a great movie.
Marc:I guess the point, whatever I'm trying to say here in coming off of what I just said is that you go to the theater and you are in the vulnerability of the human heart and it's a controlled environment and it's an uplifting environment and it really checks in.
Marc:It checks you in with your humanity in that way, in an art way.
Marc:And maybe tweak your lens a little bit out in the world as you go into the horrendous theater of cruelty, theater of the absurd every second of the day.
Marc:But I'll tell you, you know, in New York, though, I may have felt isolated for a minute.
Marc:And, you know, I got out in the world.
Marc:I did some stuff.
Marc:I always think, you know, people in New York, they may be...
Marc:Brash, but they're decent people.
Marc:A lot of them.
Marc:And I always, once I lock in, and thanks to you, get out of my head and get out in the world.
Marc:It's all right.
Marc:It's okay.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:I just had a guy walk up to me on the street.
Marc:He was thrilled.
Marc:He had his headset on.
Marc:He just was like, oh, my God, I never do this.
Marc:I live in New York.
Marc:I know you're not supposed to do this, but I listen to you every day.
Marc:I listen to you every day.
Marc:He's all excited.
Marc:He says, can I, you know, can I, I don't do this, but can I selfie, selfie?
Marc:And I'm like, yeah, man.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:What's your name?
Marc:He goes, Alex.
Marc:I'm like, sure, man.
Marc:He's like, oh, this is great.
Marc:And then he picks up his phone to turn on the camera and he's got his headset in and he's listening to Rogan's podcast.
Marc:And I said, I caught you.
Marc:He goes, no, no, Joe's a good guy.
Marc:I know you guys got your thing.
Marc:And I'm like, no, we don't.
Marc:We don't.
Marc:Do we?
Marc:I think we're okay now.
Marc:The things that people know about us.
Marc:No, Rogan and I are fine.
Marc:He's like, all right, good, good.
Marc:And then we take the selfie.
Marc:And he's like, I was so, he says, you know, I've been a year sober.
Marc:And, you know, you helped me.
Marc:I listened to your show.
Marc:And I'm like, that's great, man.
Marc:Thanks for saying that.
Marc:I appreciate it.
Marc:And that happens a lot to me in New York is people walk by me with their headset on and they see me and they go all bug eyed and then they point to their earbuds and they go, I'm listening to you right now.
Marc:It happens here.
Marc:That happens here.
Marc:So Roger Daltrey, I didn't know what to expect.
Marc:And I'm always surprised, as I said, with these guys who have been around a long time doing rock and roll.
Marc:But he is not only lucid, but very chatty.
Marc:And he's got a great story because there's so much I learned from people who grew up in England just after the war.
Marc:It's so outside of our experience to live in a country that was bombed.
Marc:entirely during a world war.
Marc:But that did happen.
Marc:And Daltrey is one of those kids that grew up in that.
Marc:And that's a whole world, a whole childhood that is completely unique to me.
Marc:And I always like talking about it.
Marc:And I've talked about it with several British guests of a certain age.
Marc:But he does have a new book out, Mr. Daltrey.
Marc:Thanks a lot, Mr. Kibblewhite, My Story.
Marc:That's now available wherever you get books.
Marc:And this is me talking to
Marc:the frontman singer of the who roger daltrey you want to wear the headphones yeah no no i don't like listening to myself you don't really no i talk
Guest:But when you're singing, you have to listen.
Guest:I hate the sound of my voice.
Guest:Really?
Guest:The talking voice?
Guest:The talking voice especially.
Marc:You know, I've grown to, I guess, appreciate it.
Marc:I don't know if I like it, but it helps me when I hear it.
Marc:I don't like to listen to it again.
Guest:that's the thing yeah again no while it's happening i'm okay the sound in my head is totally different than when i hear it played back to me and it's always been that way yeah always been always been but i know when i'm when i'm doing it right you know when i'm singing when you hit it when i hit it yeah more to do with a vibe yeah and if it's moving me right than the sound of it you know
Marc:Well, I mean, the whole process, I mean, I play music, but I'm an amateur.
Marc:And last night I actually played a show with, you know, Slash.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Isn't he great?
Marc:He's great.
Marc:Isn't he?
Marc:What a great guy.
Guest:Sweet guy.
Guest:He's a terrific guy.
Marc:I tell you, man, you know, as an amateur stepping into that world, I mean, you guys got to hit that fucking, you got to hit that place every night.
Marc:That's your job.
Marc:I don't know how the hell you do it.
Marc:My fingers hurt.
Marc:I'm exhausted.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:i know we were on the we just did a tour of south america uh last year with that with uh guns and roses oh you did yeah yeah you and pete yeah pete and i yeah yeah slash slash cable said we're gonna have to up our game
Guest:But he never has to up his game.
Guest:He's fantastic.
Marc:So you guys played South America, what, three years ago?
Marc:No, no, last year.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Those arenas have seen 50,000 people.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:Rock in Rio, God knows how many were there.
Guest:But we'd never been to South America, ever, in our whole career.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was it fun?
Guest:It was fun.
Guest:I mean, I loved the shows.
Guest:I always loved performing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't like going everywhere in a bomb-proof Land Rover and all that crap.
Guest:Oh, because... And the police escorts everywhere, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Scary.
Guest:Not uncomfortable.
Guest:No, not scary.
Guest:Just like...
Guest:Who needs this stuff?
Guest:You know, Brazilians are wonderful people.
Guest:But the divide between rich and poor is so huge.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But to me, the favelas look much more interesting than the middle.
Guest:You know, the poor areas.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, sure.
Guest:Look like real communities.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Whereas everything...
Guest:else in places like Sao Paulo and Rio, every house, middle-class house, had barbed wire fences around it.
Guest:I thought, who wants to live like this?
Guest:Right, like bunkers.
Guest:This is insane.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Give a bit of your money away and get, you know, so you haven't got this divide.
Marc:I don't get it.
Marc:Yeah, it seems to be an ongoing problem everywhere, the divide.
Marc:There's no middle and there's, you know, the haves and the have-nots.
Guest:Well, it's not too bad in England, but I mean, I don't think you're ever going to sort it.
Guest:No.
Guest:It's just human nature.
Guest:I mean, if you split it up overnight equally, by the end of the week, it will be just as unequal as it is now.
Marc:That's our nature.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Somebody will figure out an angle to get the money back.
Marc:It's all equal except for that one guy.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:How did he end up with that?
Marc:But you grew up, you didn't grow up, I mean, the class system, you guys at least in England talk about it.
Marc:We don't even mention the word class in America.
Marc:There's not even a word.
Marc:Well, you don't have class.
Marc:Excuse me?
Marc:Well, you don't really, do you?
Marc:No, you do.
Marc:You definitely do, but it's not talked about like that.
Marc:There's no lower class.
Marc:They're just people that haven't made it yet.
Guest:Yeah, you have money or you don't have money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or you're black.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's why the blues spoke to us working class in England, because we were the equivalent as the black community in America were in the 40s, 50s, 60s, where they were before civil rights.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But you weren't as isolated, were you?
Guest:No, but very hard to climb out of it.
Guest:You know, impossible to run out of it.
Guest:So we kind of understood that.
Marc:Just being hopelessly poor and stuck.
Guest:When you say poor... Yeah.
Guest:I kind of like to think about what we mean by poor because we didn't have much money.
Guest:I was born in a V1 raid where my mom came out of the shelters and both ends of our street had disappeared.
Guest:You were born in a shelter?
Guest:But no, I was born in a hospital.
Guest:I started to come on a railway station platform, you know, in the tube.
Guest:But anyway, but that was the world I grew up in.
Guest:And people say, oh, you were poor.
Guest:And I say, no, we weren't.
Guest:We were incredibly wealthy because we had...
Guest:The war brought together incredible community and family.
Guest:Enormous families we had.
Guest:And everybody had to share housing because housing was so short because so much had been destroyed.
Guest:Do you remember bombs dropping?
Guest:No.
Guest:No, I don't remember.
Guest:But I remember the bomb sites.
Marc:Right, because how long did that rubble stay around?
Marc:I've talked to a couple people.
Guest:It stayed around until the 60s.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, just mounds of rock.
Guest:I mean, my book cover, I fought and fought for that cover because it's so indicative of what our landscape was like when I was born.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the first sort of...
Guest:15 years of my life in London.
Guest:Smoking rubble.
Guest:Smoking rubble.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was slowly being cleaned up and new houses built.
Guest:And your father- And it's also indicative of Gustav Metzger, who was the guy who really pioneered auto-destructive art.
Guest:So I kind of put the thing together.
Guest:I thought, this really does sum up what the who we're all about, where we came from, and what we're all about.
Guest:So Gustav, what's his last name?
Guest:Metzger.
Guest:He was the pioneer that Pete got into at art school of auto-destructive art.
Guest:Oh, things that blew up on their own.
Marc:You have to destroy to create.
Marc:And that was at the core of Pete's creativity?
Guest:Well, that's what they were taught in art school.
Guest:He's always referred to.
Guest:That's where the kind of destructive element of the Who came from.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So your dad was in the war.
Guest:my dad was in the army yeah he was a gunner yeah or a bombardier as they called it in those days he he got wounded on uh on d-day yeah he could straight off the landing craft on the beaches and blown up by a mortar bomb uh and sent back wounded and he had the shrapnel in in him till he died you know they didn't get ever get it all out of everybody
Marc:And he wasn't even around when you were born initially, right?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:You didn't meet him until you were how old?
Guest:Well, I can't remember how old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it's kind of late 1945, so I would have been 18 months.
Guest:But there again, there was a lot of my family coming home from the war, but I'm sure it was my dad.
Guest:I distinctly remember, as I've written it in the book, the webbing on the boots.
Guest:When you're 18 months old and just starting to kind of toddle and stop crawling, boots are enormous.
Guest:And soldiers in those days used to have webbing on their leggings.
Guest:And I remember the tin helmet and the rucksack.
Guest:And I remember the family being around the room.
Guest:where we used to live in Shepard's Bush with all the chairs around the edges the whole family there everybody cheering as he came in and this stranger picking me up that ended up sleeping with my mum which you can imagine you know all of a sudden you've been with your mother through quite a lot because we were evacuated to Scotland
Guest:to stram ra we we we shared a house with two other families a four-bedroom house yeah and and the the the family that owned the house we're already sharing it with another family and they took us in and gave us a room my mother her sister and three kids that's unbelievable one room so that's that's the kind of
Guest:first 18 months of my life and that's and then all of a sudden this bloke turns up and sleeps with mom who are you who are you yeah this is my place in the bed but that's that community you're talking about that everybody really showed up for each other that's what i'm saying so
Guest:When you say poor, no, we were incredibly wealthy.
Guest:Did we have any money?
Guest:We had enough to live.
Guest:We had no luxuries.
Guest:Food was rationed.
Guest:1945 was the worst year of the whole year.
Guest:When the war ended, the food ration in England was cut to the worst it had ever been because we had to share what meagre rations we had, which incidentally, to give you an idea of what it was, one pound and a quarter of meat
Guest:would be for a family of four for a week.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So everybody was sort of thin.
Marc:Very thin.
Guest:Sticks.
Guest:Lean.
Guest:Extremely thin.
Guest:No such thing as obesity, that's for sure.
Guest:And then, of course, when the war finished...
Guest:What little food we had in Britain, we had to share with the German people who were even more devastated and worse.
Guest:They were worse off.
Marc:But there wasn't a feeling of tension or anger or resentment?
Guest:Oh, just a bit.
Guest:Are you kidding?
Guest:You couldn't mention a German name in my house?
Guest:probably until the kind of 70s 80s oh and and the japanese oh don't even go near the japanese i mean and quite understandably and i'm sure the japanese had the same thing about the americans and the germans had the same you sort of talk in the book about how once you realized that they were equally as devastated and that you know they were just people that there was some sort of
Guest:understanding at least oh yeah of course but yeah when you when i went to germany for the first time you meet the germans you know face to face and these people that have been kind of uh we've been told were horrors yeah and everything else and when you read the history it's it's kind of horrific yeah um you suddenly realize why were we ever fighting how did we get manipulated to be doing that
Marc:Yeah, that's what happens.
Guest:But human nature tends to keep repeating itself.
Marc:That's for sure.
Marc:So like your dad, he came back now, because in the book you talk a bit about how he lost his brother, right, in the war?
Yeah.
Guest:My dad lost his brother in Burma.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:His younger brother, Alf.
Guest:And I think he was on the River Kwai on that.
Guest:So who knows how he died?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was horrendous.
Guest:But then when you read the history of it, the Japanese was tough on their own.
Guest:They were conscripted at the age of 12 to die for the emperor.
Guest:And they were brutalized from that age.
Guest:So, yes, it was brutal.
Guest:And that's what happens when you train people to be brutal.
Marc:And you got the feeling that your father just never quite recovered mentally?
Guest:I don't think many people really, really did.
Guest:No, that generation... When I talk to all my peers of my age, I say, well, how do you really get on with your parents?
Guest:And they all talk about this kind of sense of distance.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And that was... You know, you can understand it, I suppose.
Guest:I mean, for instance, my mother, till the day she died, if there was ever a thunderstorm...
Guest:We would be thrown under the table and she'd be screaming like a banshee.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Because she was back in the bombing.
Guest:Yeah, I can't imagine it.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, it never went away.
Marc:And I only hear about it from guys of your generation, British guys.
Marc:I talked to Eric Idle, Roger Waters, I mean, guys who were born into it.
Marc:They all went through it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I can't even fathom it.
Marc:I don't think people really realize just how leveled London was and England.
Marc:It was just like bombed to shit.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Well, we held out.
Guest:We held out for all those years on our own.
Guest:Churchill was going to hold out.
Guest:Take the hit.
Guest:Yeah, you know, when the Brits get their back up, they can be a bloody nightmare.
Marc:So when did you start finding interest?
Marc:You have siblings, right?
Marc:I have, yeah.
Marc:How many are you?
Marc:Two sisters, yeah.
Marc:And when did you start sort of realizing that music was the thing?
Guest:That wasn't until... There was always music in those days.
Guest:And the great thing about that period is that if you wanted anything, you had to make it yourself.
Guest:You had to do it yourself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then, of course, to get through the war, people used to sing a lot.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You know, when the air raid started...
Guest:people used to start singing.
Guest:And the louder the bombing got, the more they used to sing.
Guest:What were they singing?
Guest:Oh, all kinds of, you know... Folk songs and stuff?
Guest:No, all kind of, a couple of songs, you know, Roll Out the Barrel, you know, any of those kind of... Yeah, just get your mind off it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Get it loud.
Guest:Hitler could never understand it.
Guest:The more he bombed us, the more we sang.
Marc:That was your big weapon.
Marc:Yeah, that was the weapon.
Guest:But you can understand, I suppose, you know, to drown out the bombing, and so...
Guest:Everywhere you went when I was young, people would be singing.
Guest:The postman would sing, the milkman would sing, the people on building sites would sing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I used to hear it all the time.
Guest:I mean, you probably did when you were growing up more than you do today.
Guest:I guess.
Marc:You never hear anyone singing today on the street.
Marc:No, they've got their headphones on.
Marc:If they're singing, they don't know that anyone's listening to them.
Guest:Now they're dead on the street.
Marc:It's a little bit.
Marc:Between the phones and the headphones, it's a little scary.
Guest:A little scary?
Guest:Are you kidding me?
Guest:Terrifying.
Guest:Life's not down.
Guest:It's looking up.
Guest:Yeah, it's true.
Guest:I've noticed that.
Guest:It's the biggest addiction.
Guest:It is.
Guest:I mean, the psychological ramifications of this lot are going to be horrendous to deal with.
Guest:Yeah, if we make it through, we'll see.
Marc:This might be the last lot.
Marc:No, I'm on the way out, mate.
Marc:Don't worry.
Marc:I know.
Marc:You made it under the wire.
Marc:But so everyone's singing.
Marc:Well, that's pleasant.
Guest:But when did you, like, what kind of... So anyway, then we got our first TV show.
Guest:which was a tiny little 12-inch screen.
Guest:Did you have musicians in your family or no?
Guest:No.
Guest:My mother's brother played drums in a little traditional jazz band.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You know, and again playing kind of trad jazz, like New Orleans-type jazz.
Guest:And he loved Hank Williams.
Guest:So I was...
Guest:attuned to music because on the radio all day they would have pro when i first got my first job in in a laundry when i was 12 to get some money to buy the bits to make my first guitar there was a there was music on the radio all day they used to have things like workers play time yeah where everybody in the factory would sing along to the radio oh my god it really was a lot of singing oh no it was unbelievable
Guest:But then we got our first TV, which was a 12-inch black and white set.
Guest:When you see a 12-inch set today, it's about as... It's a phone.
Guest:It's a phone now.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It's a phone.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's what it was.
Guest:But this thing was magical.
Guest:One day I saw this guy, and he was making a noise and singing, and he had this look, and it was Elvis Presley.
Guest:I thought, wow, that was...
Guest:interesting.
Marc:Elvis really knocked you guys out over there.
Guest:Yeah, he really knocked us out.
Guest:So we all rushed for the, we all thought, wow, we want to look like that.
Guest:No way could we get any grease or any brew cream to do our hair back.
Guest:So we all rushed to the bathroom and got the soap.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just wicked it up.
Guest:We did the same job.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we have very clean hair.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, and of course, all thought we looked like Elvis.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But equally, that just got us interested in this.
Guest:This is a new kind of music.
Guest:This got your foot tapping.
Guest:So this is like 57, 58?
Guest:Yeah, probably 56, 57.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, anyway, very soon after that, this other guy comes on the TV, who's not like Elvis at all, because Elvis was cool.
Guest:He had, like, collar turned up, and he had that kind of, what would you call that jacket he had on?
Guest:Sharkskin jacket?
Guest:Oh, that suit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Guest:Those baggy trousers, but with tight bottoms.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:With his leg waggling, you know.
Guest:But then this other guy came on the TV, and he's wearing a DJ, a dinner jacket,
Guest:A white shirt, crisp white shirt, and a Dickie bow tie.
Guest:You know, dressed up, you know, for a proper function.
Guest:Yeah, who was that?
Guest:It was a guy called Lonnie Donegan.
Guest:And he's playing an acoustic guitar, just like Elvis, but this guy's really seriously playing the thing.
Guest:Lonnie can.
Guest:And he's singing these kind of songs, which were early American folk songs.
Guest:Things like Midnight Special.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Bring a Little War of Sylvie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, Ham and Eggs.
Guest:They're all kind of... That was a chain gang song.
Marc:Like Lead Belly stuff and traditional stuff.
Guest:Yeah, Lead Belly stuff.
Guest:But it was the way he sang it.
Guest:And it was something...
Guest:in the way lonnie sang unlike elvis that was primal and i thought that's what i want to do and i can do that i already knew i could sing because i've been in the church choir around about seven years old yeah um not that i wanted to sing that that kind of stuff right but lonnie inspired me because it he threw his head back and he just let himself go and it there was a kind of freedom
Marc:Belt it out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that got me that primal quality.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:So it wasn't it wasn't the sort of kind of revolutionary vibe of rock and roll.
Marc:It was really the deeper sort of seemingly more honest.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, rock and roll then was Bill Haley.
Guest:That was it, Elvis.
Guest:Little Richard and Chuck Berry were in the background, but we hadn't heard them in Britain.
Guest:But it was the folk.
Guest:You know, you've got to remember, our music was very much controlled by the BBC in those years.
Guest:But you had to wait until someone brought the records over from America.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, we had to wait for that.
Guest:And fortunately for us, we had a lot of GIs in the country.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:And again, we had a lot of black GIs who brought us the blues over and all that stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when you first started out, the thing that moved you was folk music, and that's what you started to play?
Marc:What were you playing?
Guest:We played skiffle.
Guest:The thing about what Lonnie was playing, we could all...
Guest:have a go at it yeah what is skiffle exactly it's it's it's those early songs done in um but improvise you know um for a bass you had a tea chest which is a wooden box yeah of thin plywood about uh a cube about
Guest:two foot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the string and like a broomstick?
Guest:A string and a broomstick.
Guest:And you put your foot on it and you tighten up the string to get a high note and let it go for a low note.
Guest:Played well.
Guest:That can sound every bit as good as a proper bass.
Guest:And did you say you were building a guitar?
Guest:I had to build a guitar.
Guest:I couldn't afford to buy one.
Guest:Someone from my father's place of work lent me one to copy a Spanish guitar.
Guest:I kind of looked at it and thought, oh, yeah, I've got to do that.
Guest:I've got to do that.
Guest:You built a guitar?
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And got some plywood, cut it out and glued it all together in the way I'd seen that this thing was made.
Guest:Trimmed it all up with a pen knife around the edges because they were a bit rough where I joined the sides.
Guest:But then got some sandpaper and got it all looking quite good.
Guest:uh some button polish for a finish and it sounded okay uh it sounded i don't know what it probably sounded awful but to me it sounded like what i wanted was a guitar uh i didn't know anything about intonation i didn't know anything about the i copied this guitar that worked well
Guest:I didn't understand about the way you have to adjust the bridge and all that.
Guest:I could tune the thing in the same way as this other guitar could be tuned.
Guest:The action of it would have made a better cheese cutter than ever a guitar would have ever been.
Guest:But I could...
Guest:I could learn the three chords you needed to play most of the songs of the time.
Guest:The one, the four, and the five.
Guest:Yeah, which was E, A, and B7.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And if you could play those three chords, you could do most of the skiffle songs.
Guest:So immediately then you start a band.
Guest:Other people, someone gets a tea chest bass, and they start playing the bass.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then someone else goes and gets a washboard or with a hubcap for a cymbal.
Guest:And you...
Guest:you did it yeah you just make this noise people started singing you sing the harmonies and there were good skiffle bands there were bad skiffle bands but there were skiffle bands on every street so it was wonderful wonderful time
Marc:Yeah, it's sort of amazing that the part of the craft or the appeal of the music is that because whatever your economic standings were, you would go out and you'd find or create the instrument and you'd just get into it.
Guest:Well, when you're growing up in a society that's been leveled, you've got no choice but to build.
Marc:Yeah, and there's plenty of junk around to build things out of, I would imagine.
Guest:Well...
Guest:but the junk was pretty destroyed oh nothing i think that's highly imaginative yeah no hubcaps no well the hubcaps yeah i mean auto parts there's always going to be a hubcap yeah yeah yeah hubcaps and ball bearings yeah so so how long that now when you were were you working as well when you were in the band
Guest:no no this was my first guitar it was was around about the age of 12 between 11 and 12. you're working at the laundry i know uh that's what i worked at the laundry to get the money to buy the parts for it and that guitar lasted about six weeks and then and because the one thing i never run not being being being any kind of carpenter whatsoever never ever
Guest:done anything like this before in my life i had no idea how to join the neck of the guitar to the body of the guitar right and it and it folded up in in in six weeks it just went ding you know completely useless yeah
Guest:But I got lucky that my uncle was a proper skilled craftsman, carpenter.
Guest:And he watched me struggle in making this thing and let me get on with it.
Guest:But he was so impressed that I'd actually built something that worked and heard what I was doing with it.
Guest:He said, I'll help you do the next one.
Guest:So I made it to the next one with the help from my uncle.
Guest:And he showed me...
Guest:how to join the neck to the body.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We didn't know anything about truss rods through the neck to keep the neck straight.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Still didn't quite understand intonation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the second guitar was probably 500% better than the first one.
Guest:And it lasted for probably about 18 months.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:um i reckon i reckon that guitar lasted me it certainly lasted me till i was um into my 15th year maybe two years that guitar and you were what primarily playing on the street or where were you playing oh youth clubs yeah youth clubs we occasionally you know got invited to there were competitions always the best skiffle band in in hammersmith we won a competition once who was in the band with you how many people
Guest:There was myself, there was who became our first drummer, Harry Wilson on drums, my mate Reggie Chaplin on the T-Chess bass, Ian Moody was on the washboard because he looked great.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's hard to look great with a washboard.
Guest:Yeah, no, but we didn't care what he played because he looked cool.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Ian was one of those guys who had a coolness about him.
Guest:I tell you, man, if you can look cool with a washboard, you've really got something.
Guest:but anyway um so we used to play we occasionally got kind of asked would you come and play at our wedding yeah and then they give us a drink at the end of the night and they'll give us a few bob so that was good i can't it's so yeah it's so that whole sound and that whole setup it sounds so primitive but it was popular it was popular yeah and you've got to remember in those days
Guest:like i said getting back to the fact that music was everywhere every pub you went past there'd be someone on a piano yeah and sure enough usually most especially at the weekends from the friday night till the sunday night lunchtime you know friday evening to every saturday lunchtime saturday night sunday lunchtime sunday night
Guest:They'd be singing and the piano going out of most pubs in the area in those days.
Marc:It was important.
Guest:Singing all those old-fashioned Cockney songs.
Marc:It's important to the mental health of the culture.
Marc:Well, the booze was.
Marc:And the music, I guess.
Guest:Of course the music was.
Guest:There's something wonderful happens when you sing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When groups sing together.
Guest:I mean, we know now that when a choir sings together, their heartbeats go down to the same rhythm.
Guest:But when I watch, like if I... It's metaphysical, this stuff.
Guest:No, I think so.
Marc:When I go watch a musical, like I don't go see a lot of them, but even if it's happy, I'm crying.
Guest:because it's so it did the power of so many people singing is really emotional it's overwhelming to me that's what i that's what we brits don't quite understand you hopefully you will get it what because you've got soccer taking on quite big in this country which is great yeah it is the most beautiful you love it yeah
Guest:Yeah, and it knocks your football to a hi-hat.
Guest:But what you haven't got yet, but hopefully you will get, you haven't got the anthems and the singing because English crowds sing.
Guest:And when you sit in a crowd watching a soccer game in England and the crowd are singing, it's just wonderful.
Guest:That noise of 50,000 people singing
Guest:Not all singing the same song even, but it's just the noise of voices doing that.
Guest:It's extraordinary.
Marc:I bet.
Guest:Well, have you had that happen when the Who's been on stage?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Well, so we have.
Guest:I mean, we played Mexico City about four years ago.
Guest:First time again we'd ever been to Mexico.
Guest:And 19,000 people showed up.
Guest:We thought, we're never going to get anybody.
Guest:We've never been to Mexico.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:You thought that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But anyway, this 19,000 people, the place was sold out.
Guest:They sang almost louder than we were playing.
Guest:They knew every word.
Guest:It was extraordinary.
Marc:I bet.
Marc:I bet.
Marc:I can't even imagine it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when does rock and roll start filtering in?
Marc:And also, where you were, the thing I find fascinating about talking to you guys of this time in London and in England is that once rock and roll started to happen and the blues started to happen, you all kind of were around, right?
Marc:You saw each other a bit.
Marc:Yeah, that's much later on, though.
Guest:Yeah, so... There's a big kind of growth pattern there.
Guest:Then we heard... Then we started to hear, like, the Everly Brothers.
Guest:After Skiffle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then Buddy Holly.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Then those other people.
Guest:Roy Orbison.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dale Shannon.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So we became that kind of pop group, and anything that was in the charts, we were expected to play.
Marc:So you mean,
Guest:And I went from playing an acoustic Spanish guitar, had to make my first electric guitar.
Marc:You made it?
Marc:Yeah, I made it.
Marc:Another one.
Marc:You were just making guitars.
Guest:Well, yeah, you couldn't afford to buy one.
Guest:You could buy a house for the same price as a Fender guitar.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Insane prices.
Guest:So you made an electric guitar?
Guest:Yeah, I copied a Fender Stratocaster.
Guest:Because the first Fender Stratocaster came over in, I think, late 1962, I think.
Guest:And it was almost like something had landed from outer space.
Guest:We looked at this thing that Hank Marvin of the Shadows was playing, and it was making a sound that was so unusual.
Guest:And the same thing as Buddy Holly had one too.
Guest:And we thought, oh, what is this guitar?
Guest:Anyway, I've got to have one, got to have one, got to have one.
Guest:But like I say, you could have bought a house cheaper than the guitar.
Guest:So I went to, I thought, I'll make one.
Guest:Because I was now working in the metalwork factory.
Guest:And we had benches and saws and all kinds of stuff that I could do a lot more than I ever could at home.
Guest:And so I went up to London and looked at one in a shop window in Charro Cross Road and got some rough measurements through the window of this guitar, just ogling it.
Guest:I mean, drooling at the mouth.
Guest:And built this guitar out of mahogany.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it looked just like a Fender, and I had it sprayed bright pink, just like a pink Fender.
Guest:What did you use for pickups?
Guest:I had a friend who worked for an electric guitar company called Burns Guitars, who were just down the road from where I worked in Acton.
Guest:He got you a couple?
Guest:Yeah, you know, it was not one piece at a time out the door, you know, the Johnny Cash John, a bit like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:so the pickups that you meant we managed and i got the proper machine heads and i made this thing and it looked just like a friend fender guitar only there was a little kind of snag that my friend the guitar was just about um quite a lot bigger than the window had been magnified all the measurements and
Guest:And it weighed a ton.
Guest:Mahogany.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But it worked and it sounded okay.
Guest:And so we could then go on to playing some real proper rock music.
Guest:Pop songs, rock music.
Guest:And we had one amp.
Guest:Everything went through one amp.
Guest:No microphones.
Guest:You just sang loud.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's where we got our voices from.
Guest:And you're working, though.
Guest:You're doing shows.
Guest:Well, we're doing youth clubs and things.
Guest:But then...
Guest:As that progressed and I met John who made his first bass guitar.
Guest:John Entwistle.
Guest:John Entwistle.
Guest:He made his first bass too?
Guest:He made his first bass guitar.
Guest:I love this.
Marc:I never heard this whole element of that sort of post-war England experience.
Guest:Keith Richard made his first guitar.
Guest:Who did?
Guest:It's quite common.
Guest:Keith did?
Guest:Keith Richard.
Marc:I talked to him.
Marc:I didn't know he made it.
Guest:Yeah, he made his first guitar.
Guest:Quite a few of us did.
Guest:We were hungry to do what we dreamed of doing for the rest of our lives.
Marc:And the idea of getting a new one was just out of the question.
Marc:Couldn't afford it.
Guest:Oh, forget it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Unless you robbed a bank.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So where'd you meet him?
Guest:I met him on the street.
Guest:And I'd seen him at school because both him and Pete were at my same grammar school.
Guest:They were a year younger than me.
Guest:But you couldn't hide either of them in a crowd of thousand people.
Guest:Yeah, because they just had something about them Pete obviously from his from his nose when he was young because he kind of And we were so skinny.
Guest:Yeah, and John had this strange walk
Guest:He had this kind of John Wayne walk.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So he stood out too.
Guest:And I met him on the street and had a chat with him, had a look at his homemade guitar, which was much more rudimentary than my...
Guest:my ones yeah i said well you know do you want to are you in a band he said yeah i'm in a trad band we play trad jazz i play trump trumpet most of the time i'm just learning this this thing the bass yeah i said we're looking for a bass player do you want to be in my band and he said i don't know so then i said to him you know well you know are you getting paid your band he said no
Guest:I said, we are.
Guest:And that was that, huh?
Guest:But we weren't.
Guest:And that was that.
Guest:And I said, come along to rehearsal.
Guest:And he came along to rehearsal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was quite obviously, he was a talented guy.
Guest:And you're playing like, are you playing Buddy Holly?
Guest:We're playing Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers, anything that's in the charts, anything that we- And you're singing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm singing some of it.
Guest:We had a singer who wanted to be Cliff Richard.
Guest:Yeah, everybody wanted to be Cliff.
Guest:The English Elvis, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pathetic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you were primarily... Not that Cliff's a bad singer, because he's a good singer, but no way was he ever going to be Elvis.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you were mostly focused on playing at the time.
Guest:Yeah, mostly focused on playing.
Guest:But yeah, and we had this lead singer, and he would do most of the singing.
Guest:I'd do some of it.
Guest:So you pull Entwistle in.
Guest:And then Entwistle comes in, and the guy who was the rhythm player at that time, I used to play lead guitar, Entwistle was on bass, and the rhythm player was the guy who owned the amp.
Guest:But he wasn't very good, and after about six weeks, John said, look, you know,
Guest:We're not going to get anywhere with Reg on the rhythm, but I know a really good rhythm player.
Guest:Do you mind if we give him a try?
Guest:So I said, no, let's give him a try.
Guest:And along comes Pete.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:And to his credit, Reg was very gracious and bowed out, but still lent us the amp for a while.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:And...
Guest:immediately Pete came in it was quite obvious from his ability on that guitar did he have a real guitar or did he make he had no he had he had the neck I don't know how this happened what he had the neck of a guitar with a really crappy body yeah um uh
Guest:So I immediately made him a new body for a neck that was really quite a good guitar that he kept for quite a while.
Guest:But immediately it was very obvious that Pete's talent was extraordinary because he was playing chord shapes that we'd never seen the like of.
Guest:And his rhythm playing, because...
Guest:His part in the jazz band that John was in was as a banjo player, a five-string banjo player.
Guest:So all those things were in Pete.
Guest:Early on.
Guest:So very early on, it was quite obvious that this guy was something special.
Marc:Was he playing open tuning or was he playing standard tuning?
Guest:No, standard tuning in those days.
Marc:But he just had a feel for it that was unique.
Guest:He had a feel for it.
Guest:so we went we went on like that and we got we got some bigger equipment yeah we didn't get very good equipment but we made it look big yeah because it was all about image in those days and you're still playing covers and we're playing covers anything that people requested we got we managed to get
Guest:a job um in an american air force base yeah uh officers club in in bayswater in london every sunday afternoon yeah and of course the gis would always be requesting all music we'd never even heard of yeah so we were then expected the next week to figure it out yeah like what we might lose the job you know johnny cash um
Guest:You name it, Chuck Berry.
Guest:So you had to go find it?
Guest:Yeah, we had to go find it and learn it, yeah.
Guest:And then we'd do our versions of it, and I'd just appreciate that you tried for them.
Guest:That's nice.
Guest:And, of course...
Guest:Within a very short space of time, we progressed immensely.
Guest:We were then doing Roy Orbison.
Guest:I used to sing the Roy Orbison.
Guest:I used to sing the Dale Shannon.
Guest:I had incredible range.
Guest:I used to sing the Johnny Cash.
Guest:Colin couldn't do that stuff.
Guest:That's when I started to become a singer, a proper singer.
Marc:Well, those are good ones to learn from, huh?
Marc:Not bad, eh?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when did you start, like, because, I mean, weren't you guys focused initially on more R&B stuff?
Guest:No, the R&B, no, no, no, the R&B stuff didn't come until 1960, very early 63.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:The thing that was the big impact was,
Guest:and i still remember it the first time we all heard love me do by the beatles oh boy that was the key key in the ignition yeah of that creative period to write to start to start doing britain yeah what was that 62 that was in love me do was late 62 63 and then right on the on the uh
Guest:on the tail of that Pete met a friend called Tom Wright at art school who had all this Bob Dylan oh the guy with the records yeah the guy with the records and he had a lot of Jimmy Reed yeah only hooker yeah you know Alan Worf lightning Hopkins all that stuff yeah
Guest:And that's when we started to listen to it.
Guest:We didn't play much of it.
Guest:The kind of places we were playing, people wanted to dance and they wanted to have what was in the top 20.
Guest:That's what we were doing.
Guest:Pete immediately wanted to start playing this bluesy stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At the same time as that, we saw a guy called Johnny Kidd.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a guy called Johnny Kidd and the Pirates.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Johnny Kidd was...
Guest:Had a three-piece band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No rhythm guitar.
Guest:Just lead guitar, bass drums, and a singer.
Guest:And we thought, oh, this is interesting.
Guest:Trio.
Guest:Yeah, Trio.
Guest:Make more money.
Guest:We started to do a lot of Johnny Kidd covers, and they were...
Guest:they were kind of like halfway between the blues and pop and because you take the rhythm guitar away it was the perfect thing for a guitarist like of Pete's what was to become his ability you know his his him in full flow right was the perfect vehicle
Guest:because he could really kind of do that rhythm thing he could do the rhythm yeah and then he could go off and pick some kind of solo out yeah and expand on it yeah and so we then we started to do johnny kidd covers and we were a johnny kidd mimic band uh-huh but it used to go down great and i could sing the shit out of that stuff yeah and then slowly but surely we start introducing like howling wolf and then all these all these other things and you're living in london
Marc:At the time, where were you living?
Marc:Oh, living in London, yeah.
Marc:So at that time, were you seeing the Stones around?
Marc:Were you seeing any of them around?
Guest:The Stones had their first hit in late 63.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With Chuck Berry's song, Come On.
Guest:Come On, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they were playing just down the road from us.
Guest:They used to play the same clubs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, on quite a few occasions, we supported them as their support act.
Guest:And, of course, we saw them.
Guest:I was quite, you know, I used to be quite good friends with Brian Jones.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was he a good guy?
Guest:He was a really nice guy, Brian, yeah.
Guest:I got on great with Brian.
Guest:What about Terry Reid?
Guest:Do you know Terry?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:He was Scottish, wasn't he?
Guest:Oh, was he?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, but what a great singer.
Guest:Yeah, right?
Guest:I mean, you can still see, he's still got the chops.
Guest:Oh, yeah, man.
Guest:Oh, God, what a great singer.
Marc:Well, he's the one who taught me about this, that, you know, like in London at the time, there were the blues guys, there were the pop guys, but there was also this kind of white R&B trip going on that there were real soul singers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In Britain at the time.
Marc:I didn't know about that.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Stevie Wynwood came from that period.
Guest:There was a guy called Chris Farlow, a guy called Georgie Fame, Zoop Money.
Guest:Yeah, there was some really good stuff going on.
Guest:And of course, what happens by them doing that is that artists like Sonny Boy Williamson and Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker, Howling Wolf, they all used to come over to England and they couldn't believe it because they were treated like kings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yeah you know and they come from the south you know right well you know what we know what they were treated like down there yeah they couldn't believe they just loved did you go see him well they used to come up and jam with us really yeah yeah you know sonny roy williamson did quite a few shows with us at the marquee no kidding can i do a normal with you as if we were gonna say no
Guest:That must have been amazing.
Marc:Absolutely amazing.
Marc:So what started the shift into writing your own work, writing your own stuff?
Guest:Well, that was kind of becoming obvious when we...
Guest:um we got into 1964 yeah and we got a recording contract and we had a new manager a guy called peter meeden yeah who recognized the fact that that you know there were too many stones look-alike bands of which we were one yeah uh and he said you know it's all about image because the beatles have done their image and
Guest:The Stones have done their image, but there's this new thing going on, which I was very aware of because my younger sister, Carol, went out with what I consider to be one of the first mods I ever saw.
Guest:And he came from a place in London called Lewisham.
Guest:And he had a scooter.
Guest:And he used to wear these kind of herringbone tweed.
Guest:yeah very very tailored but very wide at the bottom kind of bell button yeah trousers PVC jackets unlike anybody on the street uh-huh and um that was the first mod I ever ever became aware of and Pete Meaden convinced us that we
Guest:We had the chance if we did things a little bit differently, especially our look, we could become the band for this.
Guest:For the mods.
Guest:For the mods.
Guest:When did you pick up Keith Moon?
Guest:Did I miss that?
Guest:Yeah, you did miss, but it doesn't matter.
Guest:He kind of flew in one night.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Where'd you find that guy?
Guest:Well, he just turned up at the front of the stage hearing that we'd... We were looking for a drummer.
Guest:We'd sacked our drummer and we were looking for someone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he played in a band that was doing Beach Boys songs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I can't imagine it.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I mean, you know, this is kind of...
Guest:Wembley in London in 1963, late 63.
Guest:Beach Boys, it's so juxtaposition.
Guest:Dingy, grey, wet.
Guest:And there they are doing sunny California.
Guest:But anyway, Moon just loved Beach Boy music.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he turned up in front of the stage...
Guest:and just said i can you know i hear you're looking for a drummer can i have a try because i can play better than the guy there yeah immediately though yeah cocky little sod yeah uh and he uh he he got on this guy's drum kit the guy can't kind kindly let him use it yeah and we played a version of bo diddley's roadrunner yeah and
Guest:And which kind of started and it was great and it was really good.
Guest:This kid could obviously play.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then halfway through, this was when Pete was starting to get into the early kind of feedback-y type solos.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And really stretching out.
Guest:And when Pete went into this in Roadrunner,
Guest:moon kind of doubled up the beat and it became it was just it was really like starting up a jet engine yeah all of a sudden our what would you call it our algorithm yeah that existed between the four of us
Guest:was found, and it was, we came together in a completely different way.
Guest:On that one tune?
Guest:Yeah, immediately.
Guest:And so, you know, at the end of the song, he'd broken the bass pedal.
Guest:immediately destructive yeah we should have known that but it should have been a warning to us what would you have done though but anyway so you know you come along to rehearsals he said he was never asked to join the band i think asking him to come along to rehearsals was pretty much asking him to join the band sure yeah yeah
Marc:But he just brought this whole other element, and him and Pete fed off of each other, and I guess John too.
Marc:I mean, all of you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And when you think back on that time, do you miss Keith?
Marc:Do I miss him?
Guest:Of course I do.
Guest:You know, he's the Pope of Catholic.
Guest:Of course I miss him.
Guest:He was the funniest man I've ever met in my life.
Guest:But he could also be a nightmare.
Guest:No, really?
Guest:Oh.
Guest:everything about keith was everything about his personality every side of it was was enormous yeah he could be the the most loving the most hateful the most spiteful the most caring the funniest the saddest oh yeah all of it he was a real box of chocolates yeah
Marc:So after you guys gel like that, you realize the possibilities, and I guess Pete was like, well, this is the window.
Marc:This is where I can work with all you guys, and we can all work together and take some chances, huh?
Guest:Well, yeah, and then we needed to get an original song to do, and we went to this guy's house who had a huge blues collection, and we tried to find a song that we thought would make a potential single.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we found...
Guest:I think it was a John Lee Hooker song, Got Love If You Want It.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Got love if you want it, baby.
Guest:Yeah, it's great.
Guest:And Pete Meadon... Wait, it's Slim Harpo.
Guest:Oh, was it Slim Harpo?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, that's right, yeah.
Guest:God, my... Got better memory than me, then.
Guest:It's going.
Guest:The dementia's on its way.
Guest:Comes to all who wait.
Guest:Slim Harpo, that's right.
Guest:Slim Harpo, that's right, yeah.
Guest:And Pete Meaden said, oh, we can't do those lyrics.
Guest:This has got to be a mud song.
Guest:So he basically plagiarised it.
Guest:He just took the melody and rewrote this song, I'm the Face, which was a mud term, you know.
Guest:Be a face, you're a snappy dresser.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's a style thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that became our first single as a group called The High Numbers, which he convinced.
Guest:Incidentally, as the pop band, we were The Who.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were The Detours.
Guest:That was the first one?
Guest:Yeah, it was the first name.
Guest:Then we were The Who.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Then Pete Meaden convinced us to become the high numbers.
Guest:The high numbers.
Guest:To be this mod band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:After the Who.
Guest:You had the Who before the high numbers?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we said, all right.
Guest:We became the high numbers.
Guest:And sure enough, what it did...
Guest:It started to attract this mod audience.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And this I'm a Face record.
Guest:Plus the fact by this time, Pete is into the full feedback.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Starting to get destructive.
Guest:Banging the speakers.
Guest:Not quite the destruction yet, but really...
Guest:getting some sounds that were very very unusual yeah the sounds that jimmy hendrix copied off of him that you know he became kind of more famous than pete he was first pete was first so what happened that do you were you at that show when hendrix showed up
Marc:What do you mean?
Marc:In London, the first time you went to London?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, Hendrix was signed to our... We were supposed to have 40% of track records.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not that we ever got anything.
Guest:But, I mean, I have a letter from Chris Stamp.
Guest:For the label?
Guest:Yeah, which was the label.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which Jimmy was signed to.
Guest:In England.
Guest:So, technically, we should have had 10% of track records.
Marc:yes record contract but we never saw a bloody penny anyway um but i heard that when he came like who was i talking to might have been terry reed about that the first performance that uh chas uh who was who was the guy from the animal yeah yeah yeah he did the first one at blazes club and we were everyone was there and we right it was just like stunning
Marc:He'd go to that place anyways, and he was at the back at the bar, and Hendrix was on stage, and Brian Jones came through the audience to the bar, and he walked up to Terry Reid, and he said, it's terrible up there, the flooding.
Marc:And Terry Reid's like, what are you talking about?
Marc:I was like, the water on the floor.
Marc:And Terry Reid said, what are you talking about?
Marc:I was like, all the guitar players are crying.
Marc:They're all crying.
Guest:That's Brian's.
Guest:It was a great, great dry sense.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:I mean, it was stunning.
Guest:I was glad I wasn't a guitar player that night.
Guest:No, he was stunning.
Guest:He was stunning.
Guest:Like Clapton was there and Page was there.
Guest:Yeah, they were all there.
Guest:Everybody was there.
Guest:Beck was there.
Guest:Pete was there.
Guest:Everyone was there.
Guest:What was Pete's reaction?
Guest:What was your reaction?
Guest:Well, I was just amazed that this guy, you know, he was so primal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was such a great showman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:And the band was so good.
Guest:He had Mitch Mitchell on the drums and Noel Redding on the bass.
Guest:And they don't get enough credit either because they were, again, how they managed to find that chemistry.
Guest:Because those guys, Jimmy could be incredibly unpredictable when he's playing.
Guest:He could be playing one thing one minute and he'd switch on the blink of an eyebrow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But those guys would stay with him every bit of the way.
Guest:That's telepathy.
Guest:But you guys had that too, right?
Guest:We do it too.
Guest:But those two guys kind of never got any credit at all.
Guest:They were incredible.
Guest:I bet.
Guest:Mitch Mitchell's drumming was phenomenal.
Guest:And Noel Redding's bass player.
Guest:You listen to him.
Guest:He sticks with Jimmy...
Guest:Every note of the way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Mitch, it seems like Keith is similar in terms of his momentum and how he played.
Guest:Mitch came up from the same area of us in London.
Guest:We knew all those guys growing up.
Guest:Ronnie Wood, all those guys.
Guest:I've known Ronnie Wood since he was 15 years old.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was he always the same?
Guest:Yeah, he's always the same.
Marc:He does love a party.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you knew the faces and all those guys.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But I imagine that when Hedricks came, that was a big kick in the ass to everybody on some level.
Marc:Did it have an impact?
Marc:Of course it had an impact.
Guest:It had an impact on everybody.
Guest:Equally, no way you were going to get near to what he was doing.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But Pete got quite angry because he had the feedback thing.
Guest:the feedback thing and the guitar on the you know up the all that stuff into the speakers Pete was doing that three years before and it was you can imagine it must have been a bit heart-wrenching for Pete Jimmy had obviously seen it somewhere or Chaz had told him about it
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:If you do this, you'll do it better than him.
Guest:And Jimmy could make it something much, you know, kind of much more flamboyant.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, Pete's pretty flamboyant.
Guest:Yeah, but it was kind of, there was something more sensual about it when Jimmy did it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We were more just destructive.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Pete's got that windmill.
Marc:That's his, right?
Yeah.
Marc:It's hardly sensual, is it?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, a windmill's a bit like, fuck you.
Marc:Well, maybe you were more about, fuck you, as opposed to, like, someone fuck us.
Marc:You or fuck you.
Marc:How about the Kinks?
Marc:Were they, they were, like, around?
Guest:Well, they were around.
Guest:And that, so then we get into 1964.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And we're now supporting people like the Stones.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We supported the Beatles.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yep where we supported the beatles at the blackpool opera house in august i think it was august uh 1964. you get along with them and the kinks yeah yeah they were just you know bunch of liverpool guys you know to us yeah and and the kinks were on the same show yeah um we did quite a few shows with the kinks they were great they were a great band good good showman ray davis yeah um
Guest:and of course they had uh uh you really got me and all day and all of the night those kind of singles and that's when pete wrote can't explain which was a basically a almost a kinks copy but with lyrics work that were kind of from a different space right right yeah a little more uh uh existential a little more yeah you know like questioning yeah
Guest:yeah yeah you had to think about it more wasn't quite so in your face right but it probably fit in with the with the sentiment it it fitted in with the mud thing because mud thing now was starting to get into kind of early drug scene right amphetamine yeah which was speed yeah you know i've got a feeling inside my head's about to pop up yeah yeah
Guest:yeah so anyway so it worked for that and then we had an American producer Cheryl Talmay who produced the Kinks do the record so it kind of although it did it was a hit and it was our first hit and I'm very grateful for it
Guest:It always felt that it was never quite the who as I liked it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He brought in a load of backing singers, you know, that kind of... They were called the Ivy League.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And put those backing vocals on it.
Guest:Jimmy Page played the lead guitar on it because in those days you had to record live.
Guest:And he didn't want Pete to do his kind of...
Guest:original far more original than anything Jimmy Page did on it yeah but you went along with it well we had to you know in those days anything to get a record made and have a chance at getting a record and Jimmy at that time was just a studio guy he was just a studio session musician yeah yeah very very young
Marc:Yeah, so that puts you on the map, though, right?
Marc:Can't explain.
Guest:But it puts us on the map.
Guest:We got our first Top of the Pops, and then we got on our first TV shows.
Guest:And then, of course, along came Any Way, Anyhow, Anywhere, which...
Guest:Again, had much more of what the who were all about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But then we had to kind of have some kind of link to the first record with the backing vocals, which we did ourselves.
Guest:But we had, you know, Goni Whale.
Guest:Where are you?
Guest:Had that kind of repeat thing.
Guest:But when you listen to the outro of that, the record company sent the first pressings of that record back because they thought it was a bad pressing.
Guest:They thought there's a fault on this record.
Guest:Why?
Guest:The feedback.
Guest:They didn't understand it.
Guest:They didn't get it at all.
Guest:That was the real sound of The Who in those days, which we'd never had on Can't Explain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because we'd had Jimmy Page's tidied up
Marc:yeah yeah solo yeah um so that would so that's your so that that song anytime that that one got you into your own sound yeah and then that led into my generation yeah and then we have substitute generation oh yeah that was all easy stuff when did the seeker come out what what i can't remember
Guest:Oh, that was 68.
Guest:I love that song.
Guest:Yeah, it was 68.
Guest:Seeker's a great song.
Marc:It's a great song, man.
Guest:It was 68.
Marc:That guitar and that song and you belting it up.
Guest:Yeah, good sentiment.
Guest:That's when Pete got into kind of Eastern religion and found Mayor Barber and all that stuff which later on inspired Tommy.
Guest:So that was a really good period.
Guest:In between my generation and that period, that was probably the darkest period for me in The Who.
Marc:For the sell-out and quick one?
Guest:No, no, no, no, no.
Guest:The I'm a Boy, the Happy Jack period.
Marc:Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
Guest:Pictures of Lily.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That was a tough time?
Guest:It was a tough time for me as a singer because, you know, I'd been thrown out of the band after my generation.
Marc:You know,
Marc:Well, that came to a head because of drugs, right?
Guest:Because of drugs.
Guest:Because we went on our first European tour.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I managed to get hold of a huge pile of amphetamine.
Marc:The other guys.
Marc:Or you did.
Guest:The other guys.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I couldn't do them.
Guest:I tried it.
Guest:Because we used to sometimes play two shows a night.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, one we'd finish at 11 p.m.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we'd start another one at 2 in the morning.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we'd finish at 5 in the morning.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:to stay awake I tried them but I couldn't sing so you have your throat yeah yeah dried you up and I just thought there's two ways this can go I can either do this and and stay awake and be a shit singer yeah or I'll just have to do my best and and be tired and be a good singer yeah so I couldn't do them and
Guest:But the other's good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You can take as many as you like if you're playing the drums or playing the guitar.
Marc:Change the rhythm a little bit.
Guest:That was the problem.
Guest:And when we did the first tour of Europe, they got a huge pile of amphetamine bottles.
Guest:And it slowly, progressively through the tour got worse and worse and worse.
Guest:And the music got faster and faster, louder and louder.
Guest:Was that mostly on Keith?
Guest:No, the whole band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The whole band.
Guest:And it was a cacophony.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It got so fast.
Guest:on the last show we did in denmark but i could hardly get the worst of the songs in so i while they were smashing the gear up i decided i was going to do something about it i came off the stage i found their stash and i flushed it all down the toilet uh-huh that's not great for people who like drugs
Guest:no so it needed to say three against one yeah uh and the one mostly was keith because i took it out of his suitcase and flushed them and immediately he came off the stage he went went to his suitcase and said you know where's moustache i said it's gone down the toilet and he he flew at me with a tambourine attacked me with a tambourine
Guest:which doesn't sound like very much yeah nice soft yeah pigskin instrument it's going to sound exciting the only thing is he was slashing at me with the bells oh yeah right which is a whole different thing because that he could have they got an edge to him he could have yeah he could have shredded me so needless to say didn't get very far yeah i was a good fight a good street fighter in those days and um and and uh put him on the floor and and the band threw me out for fighting
Marc:Was that the first fight in the band?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:We'd had lots of fisticuffs before, but this was a... No, I mean... Who was usually fighting?
Guest:The bells of the tambourine took it to another level.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:As a weapon.
Guest:I decided to give him a good pasting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But in the previous way, who was usually hitting each other?
Guest:It was usually Pete and I hitting each other.
Guest:Sometimes we hit Pete.
Guest:Very rarely Keith.
Guest:But, you know, it would just be a punch and thump.
Guest:About what?
Guest:ah just verbal yeah we were we were four alpha males yeah with testosterone kicking in yeah is it any wonder we had a few fights but was it musical usually musical about why you know you know well i can't you can't i can't remember specific details but you know it is when you're that age right did you never have fights with your friends
Guest:I was never a fist guy.
Guest:No?
Guest:No, I was- Well, you were a verbal guy.
Guest:Yeah, a verbal guy.
Guest:So you just had a lot of punches on the nose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For being too verbal.
Guest:You would have hit me, yeah.
Guest:You are a clever sod.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:You're a cocky cunt.
Marc:Yes, that's right.
Marc:But also very diplomatic, right, when it got ugly.
Marc:You need to be.
Marc:Yeah, you got to be diplomatic when it got ugly.
Marc:Maybe we can do this another day.
Marc:Maybe we can meet in the middle on this one.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's when I'd get it.
Marc:I managed not to get it hit.
Marc:We'll see if we make it through this.
Marc:So what happened?
Marc:So you got kicked out of the band, and that was that?
Guest:I got kicked out of the band, and I was fine about that.
Guest:I thought, oh, well, I started this band.
Yeah.
Guest:I'll start another one.
Guest:How old was I?
Guest:21 years old.
Guest:Plenty of time to start another one.
Guest:I knew by now I could sing.
Guest:I've hit records under my belt.
Guest:I thought I'll start another one.
Guest:I was going to do a soul band.
Guest:But then they went out and they did a few shows without me, which I gather didn't go down very well.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They got booed off, apparently.
Guest:And the management, sort of three or four weeks later, came and saw me.
Guest:They said, look, Roger, they said to the band, apparently they said to the band, look, you've got to take him back because it's not working.
Guest:And then they came to see me.
Guest:They said, look, you've got to go back.
Guest:It's not working.
Yeah.
Guest:And I said, well, you know, they throw me out.
Guest:I said, well, they have you back as long as you promise not to fight anymore.
Guest:I said, okay.
Guest:I said, I'll do that.
Guest:I said, but I'll only go back if they promise not to take drugs before they go on the stage anymore.
Guest:I said, I don't care what they do afterwards, none of my business.
Guest:But I can't be with a band who've got potentially so much talent
Guest:who throw it all out the window because they're popping stuff down their throats.
Guest:And they agreed, I agreed.
Guest:We didn't have another fight then for years.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did they slow down on the drugs?
Guest:To their credit, what they did after, I don't know what they did.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:You know.
Guest:Well, Pete certainly did.
Guest:Pete didn't do any drugs all the way through the 70s.
Guest:I mean, really, nothing.
Guest:It was only after Keith died that I think that was just the loss and the grief and everything else.
Guest:When he started drinking?
Guest:Yeah, when he started drinking.
Guest:Pete was really, really...
Guest:Super clean.
Marc:So what about the whole... Because, I mean, Keith Moon is sort of known for establishing the hotel room behavior.
Guest:Yeah, well, he was very good at that.
Guest:He was very good at that.
Guest:He was one of the originators.
Guest:He was a remodeler.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He just kept the show going.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Because I talked to Joe Walsh recently.
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:He was quite good at it, too.
Guest:I think he was one of Keith's apprentices, wasn't he?
Marc:He was in Destruction.
Marc:So then you entered the period where you did, what, Tommy and Who's Next and...
Guest:Yeah, Tommy was the big one that broke the store.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:That broke the back of the industry, so we became really well-known.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It just hit at the perfect time, and the genius of Tommy, a lot of that came from Kit Lambert, who always, his father was a composer in England, founded Sadler's World Ballet Company,
Guest:He always felt that the three-minute pop song could be much, much more.
Guest:And he said, we should do an opera.
Guest:Because he was into opera.
Guest:He was into all that.
Guest:His father did.
Guest:He said, you know, rock can be an opera.
Guest:We should do an opera.
Guest:So we did a mini opera on the record, a quick one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:um oh yeah that second time and then and then and then we then we started work on tommy which went on for about three months in the studio piecing bits together and out it came and it hit at a time when as you know america was in the vietnam war youngsters were getting conscripted yeah and that album just spiritually seemed to speak to them because they you know they felt deaf done and blind yeah they felt not seen or heard
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it also came out of your childhoods too, right?
Marc:In the war.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So, you know, it just resonated and worked.
Guest:And we did Woodstock and people kind of went, wow.
Guest:And then it just grew and grew and grew.
Marc:You had a tough spot at Woodstock too, right?
Guest:Everybody had a tough spot at Woodstock.
Guest:The stars of Woodstock were the audience.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:but it was like five in the morning or something five in the morning we went on but someone went on after us i don't know who that was i mean so they had it worse than us don't you worry about that and you did you throw abby hoffman off the stage too i didn't repeat it it was wonderful i know wonderful wonderful good old yeah he said anyone else gets up here i'll kill him and he meant peace love and rock and roll
Guest:what happened abby got on to give a little speech yeah he's giving a speech about uh john sinclair you know from mc5 right because he was in jail right you know but the trouble is he got on our stage right in front of pete yeah you know and we were british yeah fuck off
Marc:That was the end of that statement.
Marc:Do your speech later.
Marc:So that's where you blew up and everything changed.
Marc:And how many years after the album did you make the movie?
Guest:The movie didn't come till 19... We made the movie in 1974.
Guest:Oh, wait, yeah.
Guest:And it came out in 1975.
Guest:Yeah, way... So that was... It was the movie of Woodstock that really put us on the map.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:They, you know, The Who were just visually amazing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And put, you know, that really...
Guest:and then and then who's next that was another huge record yeah going so ahead of its time yeah didn't make number one you know that record no no no people didn't get it they thought it's funny noise it won't get fooled i mean that was huge
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We found out later that our record company will remain nameless, but you can look it up.
Guest:They were bootlegging us out the back door.
Guest:No shit.
Guest:We were being bootlegged by our own record company.
Guest:No wonder we didn't make number one.
Guest:It was impossible for us to.
Guest:Oh, that's crazy.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Marc:Happened to lots of people.
Marc:It did?
Marc:That was just the business?
Marc:Dirty business?
Marc:It's a shit business.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you survived.
Marc:You did all right.
Guest:Yeah, well, listen, I'm still here.
Guest:That's all I care about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pete had written... Pete was going through a very difficult period of writing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That kind of first... First kind of...
Guest:tremors of middle-aged angst creeping in.
Guest:I'm too old to be doing this.
Guest:It's all over.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:We were like 31.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:That's what's such genius about Townsend.
Guest:He had the ability to write about...
Guest:what's going on in him so deep down.
Guest:But then he just threw a load of songs at me.
Guest:He said, I don't know if any of this is any good.
Guest:Here's a load of songs.
Guest:You choose what the ones go on the album.
Guest:And he was totally surprised at what I chose.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Because I chose...
Guest:In some ways, the most vulnerable ones.
Guest:Those wonderful songs that give you a hint of the midlife crisis to come.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:At 33.
Guest:No, I think he was... This is 1975, so Pete would have been 30.
Guest:so he hadn't even hit 33 yet you know wow so that's what I found so intriguing about those songs and I chose them yeah and he would he's always said he said I was I was shocked by what Roger chose yeah you know um what's that one blue red and grey right which I just loved he said and and
Guest:Pete, I don't know whether he would do it now, but I used to say to him, please, Pete, play Blue, Red and Grey on stage.
Guest:You know, it's wonderful.
Guest:And the way you sing it is wonderful.
Guest:And he's saying, oh, I look fucking stupid playing a ukulele.
Guest:So I do it.
Guest:I do it on my own solo show, you know, because I love it so much.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Well, that's so nice that their relationship was like that, that he told you to pick him, you picked him, and he let you do it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And so that was that album.
Guest:And then, you know, it was a very, it was a tricky time in our career because he'd worked so hard on the Tommy album
Marc:On the movie?
Guest:The movie and the soundtrack, and he got nominated for an Oscar for the soundtrack.
Guest:That was the first time you acted, too, wasn't it?
Guest:Yeah, it was the first time I acted.
Guest:And then, of course, we had a bit of a break, and then when we came back to it, we did a tour in 1976, which turned out to be the last tour we'd ever do with Keith.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and um of course the band was bigger than ever then yeah yeah and then uh like and then once you lost keith how long did you have to like process that well that was hard but you get through it i mean
Guest:Peter and I, we... Did you see it coming?
Guest:Well, we saw it coming for too long.
Guest:That's what made it such a big shock.
Guest:Because you kind of think, well, he's got nine lives.
Guest:He had no fear.
Guest:I think in today's world, he would have been diagnosed as autistic.
Guest:And because he'd come through it so many times and not died, so many things where he should have died, and he didn't,
Guest:When it happened, it was kind of more of a shock.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Weird, weird.
Marc:Because you kind of started believing he was sort of immortal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anyway, Pete, John, and I, we said, you know, we can either stop or treasure what we really had between us, which is the music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is what we did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, Pete was the writer of this music.
Guest:I was a singer of it.
Guest:John was a bass player of it.
Guest:Keith was obviously irreplaceable with his character.
Guest:I've never met ever in my life anyone who comes anywhere close to being another Keith Moon.
Guest:But you can replace a drummer.
Guest:That became incredibly difficult.
Guest:and we rushed into getting a very good friend of ours kenny jones yeah band who's extremely good drummer who drummed with us on on he did some drumming on the tommy soundtrack yeah um so we thought he'd be good and it did but it didn't work out he his sense of timing wasn't quite like ours
Guest:And the only way I can explain it, because Kenny's, like I say, an excellent, excellent drummer.
Guest:Just as putting Keith Moon in the Faces would have been a disaster, putting Kenny in The Who didn't start out a disaster, but ended a disaster.
Guest:Like how?
Guest:Because he's just too straight a drummer.
Marc:But you did three albums with him, or four, right?
Marc:No, no, we did two.
Marc:Two.
Guest:Well, yeah, he couldn't fill like... No, it didn't fit, you know, it didn't sit right, you know?
Guest:Did it end acrimoniously?
Guest:No.
Guest:The fans kind of got the kind of, you know, they all take sides and they don't quite understand what you're talking about.
Guest:So it felt like there was acrimony there, but there was never any between Kenny and I. And I have never, ever said that he was a bad drummer.
Guest:He's a great drummer.
Guest:He was just the wrong drummer.
Marc:Who would have been the right drummer, though?
Guest:We don't know who would have been the right drummer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We should have left the door open.
Guest:You know, you take... You could have put Mitch Mitchell in there.
Guest:At the time, we could have done.
Guest:He would have been more of the right drummer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, well.
Guest:Yeah, oh, well, there you go.
Guest:You are correct.
Guest:He would have been far more of the right drummer.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when did that thing in Cincinnati happen, that horrible thing?
Guest:That was 1979.
Guest:So that was with Kenny.
Guest:December the 3rd.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What a fucking day.
Marc:Jesus.
Guest:What a day.
Guest:I remember that.
Marc:What a night.
Marc:It was like a global nightmare.
Marc:It was all that anyone talked about for weeks.
Guest:It was horrible.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And the horrible thing for us was that we didn't know it had happened, and we played the show.
Guest:We played a great show that night.
Guest:And the reason they let us play the show, and thank God they did, because the people since Cincinnati don't realize what a debt of gratitude they should have towards our manager.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Bill Kerbisley because the fire department and the police because the accident happened on the way in.
Marc:Oh yeah it was a stampede going into the stampede going in.
Guest:They only opened two doors or three doors out of 11.
Marc:General admission.
Guest:General admission and of course everyone tried to funnel into this tiny little space and people fell over and then they got trampled and 11 people died.
Guest:Um
Guest:the police and the fire department wanted to to stop the show yeah by this time every the crowd was in uh and and and bilk obviously our manager pleaded with them and almost said to him are you crazy you know if you do that you're gonna have people coming out
Guest:and you'll have a right on you.
Guest:This was an accident.
Guest:You don't need to be dealing with another situation.
Guest:Just shut this doorway off, screen it off, and deal with this issue and let the show go on.
Guest:So glad that he did.
Guest:But for us,
Guest:We just did a great show that night.
Guest:To come off stage after a great show and be told the news that 11 kids had died on the way in, I can't tell you.
Guest:It was like being hit with a sledgehammer.
Guest:I can't imagine.
Guest:It was like being hit in the heart with a sledgehammer.
Guest:But we stay in touch with the families.
Guest:You do?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, we do.
Guest:They have a memorial fund where they provide scholarships.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At one of the high schools.
Guest:This high school lost three students.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they provide three...
Guest:scholarships every year and we've helped you know we've been in touch with them for a long time yeah wonderful people yeah I visited them I went back and visited the high school in the summer yeah so you know because it's it's so hard for us and but it's not as hard for us as it was for them
Marc:It was a real sort of defining grief.
Guest:It was just, you know, to lose people that age is always horrendous.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, yeah, and you just never quite process it and you do the best you can.
Guest:We're doing the best we can.
Guest:You can't change the past.
Guest:You have to live with the future.
Guest:And we're doing the best we can with that.
Guest:And what is wonderful is the people from that community are wonderful.
Guest:Wonderful.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:And now, like, when you guys... Because a lot of things we didn't get to talk about is that, you know, I mean, you've done a lot of acting and a lot of movies and television.
Guest:Yeah, that's my other job, you know.
Guest:I didn't, you know, I fell in love with the process, but then I was already famous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Tommy was easy for me because it was just music.
Guest:But I didn't know anything really about acting.
Guest:But Ken Russell, that must have been nuts.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It was nuts.
Guest:I mean, that was completely nuts.
Guest:But what a genius director.
Marc:No kidding, man.
Guest:Oh.
Marc:And you were working with all those amazing musicians, too, like Tina Turner and Eric Clapton.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Guest:It was just wonderful.
Guest:But I was playing a character who was deaf, dumb, and blind.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was doing it method.
Guest:And so I went through that hardly speaking to anyone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:hardly seeing anything i mean i laid for a whole day under tina turner's skirt yeah and for the life of me i can't tell you one thing about the experience no and i find that i find it really strange well you're in it you're in it totally in it yeah
Guest:that space because i used to have to turn my eyes off because they used to throw things at me and i you couldn't have any kind of thing going on at all was ken on you for that pardon was ken on you for that did he make did he push you oh yeah no no i i just
Guest:did it but i mean uh he'd always he'd always do 10 takes of everything that was just ken always looking for something unusual to happen it's a trippy movie man but then but like i say some of the stuff that was going on and things flying past my head and the camera reads your eyes
Guest:more than anything yeah so they had to be completely glazed yeah yeah yeah so i just turned them off but with them wide open i mean i don't it's the weirdest time when i think back to that yeah i mean i hardly spoke to ann margaret who's the sweetest woman you could ever meet she but you know i just had to get my head around this is my mum yeah she's gorgeous
Marc:And that's where you got the bug, though, to do the acting?
Guest:I got the bug to do the acting, and I thought, well, I'm not going to give this up.
Guest:But I'm the kind of guy who had the balls to go out, and I took any acting job, but I had to make all my mistakes.
Guest:Because you liked it.
Guest:But I liked it.
Guest:And, of course, in full glare of being a really famous guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I didn't care.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:And in the end, I ended up doing Shakespeare and all kinds of stuff.
Guest:And I've got fabulous reviews.
Guest:So I learned the craft in the end.
Guest:And I'm proud of that.
Marc:And you did some musicals too, huh?
Guest:yeah yeah yeah i did the beggars opera yeah i did uh is that fun i did i did my fair lady at the hollywood bowl with john lithgow yeah just yeah we did a couple a couple of shows there for the city with a with the la philharmonic that was great yeah yeah great and uh i've got great notices for that yeah well i mean i mean the musical and acting i mean it's together i mean that you're made for that
Guest:Well, I suppose so, but I don't want to go into the theater, though.
Guest:I don't want to... To me, that would be like going back to the factory.
Guest:Going back to... Yeah, being like, you know, eight shows a week.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:The gypsy lives hard in me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so where are you and Pete at these days?
Marc:You talk a lot?
Guest:No, he wanted a year off, so I haven't spoken to him for a year.
Guest:Oh, that's how that...
Guest:that's how we are I respect that he needs that time away we love each other dear we're brothers yeah and we're dearest friends and that's all I can say and you know when we're not gone who haven't gone now we we were very I was very very determined
Guest:After saying it was our last tour in 1982, and I said that, that came off of my back.
Guest:The other guys in the band didn't know I was going to say that, but I knew at that time what a state Pete was in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:he'd had quite a run-in with heavy drugs.
Guest:And a lot had to do with pressure of the fact that we didn't have the right drummer, the band wasn't quite gelling, he was having trouble writing, and all that pressure was on him.
Guest:He needed a break, so I thought, well, this is going to be the last tour, because if we'd have carried on, it would have killed him.
Guest:And no way I'm going to let that happen.
Guest:I just announced that out of the blue.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Obviously, it was never going to be the last two, and I kind of knew that then.
Guest:But you both did solo stuff, too?
Guest:We did solo stuff, yeah.
Guest:Kind of a hobby for me, that was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:you know here we are now and when it came to us announcing our 50th year yeah and we're going to go on tour i said this is the beginning of the long goodbye yeah and we have to be realistic at our age i'm you know i'm 75 next year i can still i can still sing the out of this stuff yeah pete can still play it yeah so play it out yeah yeah yeah but it
Guest:All I can say is we don't know how long we'll go, and I don't think you ever retire from this business.
Guest:I think it retires you when you're a band like The Who.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because our music deserves and has to have a kind of energy within it that if ever we can't give it that...
Guest:Because we are a rock band.
Guest:We're not a good time rock and roll band.
Guest:We're not like Rod Stewart faces, Rolling Stones, you know, bar band.
Guest:Do you understand what I mean?
Guest:We're the opposite of that.
Guest:Power chords, baby.
Guest:Yeah, and it's on the one.
Guest:It's the slam.
Guest:It's not music to fuck to.
Guest:Ours is music to fight to.
Guest:And if it ever loses that...
Guest:fighting edge yeah which exists between pete and i still to this day will then i'll stop because then it will be cheating my audience and i've never wanted to cheat them ever because i i remember too well from my early years first ticket i ever bought to go and see anybody was to see cliff richard and the shadows yeah in 1962 at the chiswick empire
Guest:and you know what it took to get the money to buy those tickets and i thought that's what an artist owes it to an audience to be there for them right and deliver yeah and if you ever stop doing that you're taking a piss off out the business yeah
Marc:Those are great closing words.
Guest:Well, that's just how I feel about it.
Guest:No, I think it's right.
Marc:I think it's right.
Guest:People work too hard to come and see you.
Guest:You deserve to deliver it.
Marc:Yeah, you don't want to just sweep walk through.
Marc:You don't want to autopilot.
Marc:And I'll tell you another thing about the book.
Marc:You know what I love about your book is that you can hear your voice in it.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I hope so.
Marc:It's good, solid storytelling, and it's honest.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It's not embellished a lot.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It's very honest.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you do it all yourself?
No.
Guest:I worked with a guy.
Guest:I worked with a guy called Matt Rudd, who's a journalist.
Guest:I wrote my book in a different way than most people do their biography.
Guest:I didn't have a book deal.
Guest:I don't think you can write a biography on a book deal.
Guest:Autobiography.
Marc:No, autobiography.
Guest:What's the difference?
Marc:Well, one, if you were writing your biography, Roger Dahl should be another guy.
Marc:Maybe that's true.
Guest:Yeah, but... Oh, you don't know me, do you?
Guest:where's the real roger yeah but what i'm trying to say is um i didn't know whether i had one in me and if you do a publishing deal all of a sudden they got a hold on you all right you take a lot of money yeah and i don't believe any of this kind of art
Guest:or whatever, should ever be done initially for the money.
Guest:So I thought, I don't know whether I've got a book in me.
Guest:I'm going to get someone who I admired as a journalist to interview me.
Guest:Oh, okay, yeah.
Guest:And we went on for four years.
Guest:And I didn't care how long it went on.
Guest:I paid him.
Guest:And if it had taken 10 years, I wouldn't have cared.
Guest:I said, because all I want is a good book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I put it together and put it out there and publishers loved it.
Guest:And I got a book deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But now I'm there dancing to my drum.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You already had the book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, like the cover, for instance, I fought for that cover.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the reason I wanted that cover was for reasons I told you earlier.
Guest:Guess what they wanted?
Guest:What?
Guest:Just a face with a name.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:You know, just like every other biography cover.
Marc:No, that looks like the Roger Dollar Tree everybody knows.
Guest:But what would you notice on the shelf of biographies?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you see what I'm trying to say?
Guest:Right.
Guest:But they didn't get it at all.
Guest:But because I'd done it my way, I could insist that that's the cover.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a good cover.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:It's a good book.
Marc:And I really appreciate you coming by.
Marc:It's great talking to you.
Guest:I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Guest:I enjoyed it too.
Marc:I thought that was great.
Marc:He can still sing the shit out of things.
Marc:I love the way he said that.
Marc:I can sing the shit out of that.
Marc:Love it.
Marc:Just a reminder, folks, we'll have new WTF t-shirts designed by the great Aaron Draplin, available in the merch store at WTFPod.com later this month.
Marc:But if you're at my Beacon Theater show in New York City on November 10th, you'll be the first ones to get your hands on them.
Marc:All right?
Marc:All right.
Marc:Can't play.
Marc:Matt Sweeney gave me a guitar, but no amp.
Marc:I told him I didn't want the amp.
Marc:I appreciate him giving me the guitar so I can noodle around in my hotel room while I'm sitting on my hotel couch on a towel watching Rachel.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Marc:Boomer lives!
you