“I hope I die before I get old.”
That little snippet, from The Who's 1965 single My Generation, was written by a man who is now 69 years of age and sung by another now in his 71st year. And, despite the screaming irony, for many music fans around the world, it continues to perfectly capture the spirit of its namesake: an entire generation of people disenfranchised from a society still finding its feet after the end of a world war and angry at the perceived injustices of modern life.
Pete Townshend, the main lyricist and creative driving force behind The Who since the band’s inception in 1964, has since said that when he wrote “old”, he meant “very rich” – something else he has become over the years. Yet he’s still performing, still doing that windmill guitar thing with his right arm, and still touring. The Who, who are about to embark on a celebratory 50th-anniversary series of live shows, have just announced that the tour’s inaugural performance will be right here in the UAE on November 23, as the headline act at Yas Marina’s post-F1 concerts. But who exactly are The Who? And are the band, so deeply rooted in 1960s folklore, still relevant in the 21st century? Will a UAE audience actually “get it”?
The 1960s music scene, for many, is divvied up between The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and, for some, Motown. And while you might be unfamiliar with The Who’s back catalogue, as a band they were responsible for many of the outrageous tales of excess so missing from today’s music artists. When was the last time you heard about pop stars trashing hotel rooms or throwing television sets from their windows or destroying musical instruments during a concert? That was The Who – and their reputation for almost limitless hedonism is as much a part of their story as the music that occasionally gets daytime airplay on the world’s radio stations.
The Who could rightly be viewed as the godfathers of punk, such was the group's frenetic energy and anti-establishment anger – at least a decade ahead of their time. Keith Moon, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle – the accepted "original" line-up – is now whittled down to just Townshend and Daltrey thanks to persistent changes in personnel and untimely deaths as a result of the very excess the band personified. There is always a real danger that groups such as these, when they inevitably "come back", are little more than cover bands playing greatest-hit sets with just a tiny percentage of the original's creativity or energy. But even in this late stage of the game, The Who are writing and recording new original material. Indeed, the band recently released a new single to keep the party faithful satisfied, in the form of Be Lucky, which will be included on the forthcoming The Who Hits 50! compilation album, to be released at the end of this month.
Formed in London from the ashes of a band called The Detours, The Who were initially Daltrey’s project. After being expelled from school at 15, this misfit found work on a building site and, in 1959, started a band as a form of escapism, playing at weddings and corporate gigs despite having no formal musical training. Daltrey recruited the bassist Entwistle who, in 1961, suggested Townshend as an additional guitarist. The band quickly gained a reputation for hard work although the line-up changed frequently thanks to Daltrey’s domineering manner.
The early days saw Townshend rapidly develop his guitar-playing style and Entwistle’s bass becoming dominant in the band’s sound. After the departure of the vocalist Colin Dawson, Daltrey took over mic duties, with Townshend becoming the group’s sole guitarist. In February 1964, The Detours became aware of another group known as Johnny Devlin & The Detours, so a name change was required. After considering the ideas that Townshend presented to him, Daltrey settled on The Who – by which time they were getting regular gigs and had a manager who secured them demo time with the record company Fontana.
The initial sessions were dismissed by Fontana, whose boss remarked that the drum sound was a problem. Displaying the cut-throat approach he later became famous for, Townshend verbally threatened the drummer Doug Sandom, who immediately quit in disgust. The Who carried on gigging with stand-in drummers until Moon was recruited from a semi-professional group called The Beachcombers.
Still a covers band, The Who performed mainly blues music and quickly gained popularity in London’s Marquee Club, with rave reviews in the music press for their live shows. The Who were signed up by the American arm of Decca and, a year later, had written and recorded their first whole album, My Generation. Their fate was sealed – international fame, infamy and fortune were just around the corner.
Being a Who fan marked you out as different from a crowd that was becoming more divided over The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and the band found a hard-core fan base in the Mod movement that spread through 1960s Britain. But there was substance to The Who's music – their sound was like nothing else and the lyrics spoke to the country's youth. Recent releases of early demo recordings made by Townshend, though, prove that the group was about more than him. The songs that were eventually released were often completely different from those original versions, after the individual contributions of each member – something Daltrey spoke to Rolling Stone about recently.
Despite the group’s artistic endeavours, which gave the world such masterpieces as the rock opera Tommy, a concept album based on the experiences of a deaf, dumb and blind young boy, The Who’s huge excesses were what got the most column inches. In 1964, during a performance at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, Townshend accidentally broke his guitar. In frustration he smashed it up and the audience, believing it was an intentional display of “auto-destructive art”, went crazy. A week later, Moon demolished his drum kit “for solidarity” and it was expected of them from that time on – something Moon and Townshend seemingly had no problem with, although it’s said that the instruments were repaired rather than replaced. Between the two of them, they changed rock music forever.
Moon (who came to be known as "Moon the Loon") took most things to extremes in his short life. During The Who's debut on American television, he overloaded his drum kit with explosives and, at the end of My Generation, he detonated them. The resultant blast set fire to Townshend's hair and permanently damaged his hearing, caused fellow guest Bette Davis to faint and the shrapnel from his own cymbals to injure Moon's arms. He was obsessed with blowing stuff up and, in 1966 while The Who were staying at the Hilton in Berlin, Townshend claims Moon started destroying hotel rooms, mesmerised by the chaos caused by his own actions. A year before, he had begun exploding toilets, initially with "cherry bombs" before upgrading to fireworks and dynamite. The biographer Tony Fletcher once remarked that "no toilet in a hotel or changing room was safe" until he'd exhausted his supply of explosives. Townshend recalled that he walked into Moon's hotel room and saw that the toilet had disappeared, with only the S-bend in situ. "And from that moment on, we got thrown out of every hotel we ever stayed in," he recalls.
Moon’s literally destructive lifestyle undermined both his health and reliability and, during the 1973 Quadrophenia tour in Daly City, California, he ingested a mixture of alcohol and tranquillisers meant for animals. Mid-concert, he passed out on his drum kit not once, but twice, before being carried offstage. The rest continued without him for several songs before Townshend asked: “Can anyone play the drums? – I mean somebody good?” A drummer in the audience called Scot Halpin volunteered and played the rest of the show. By 1978, Moon was dead before he got old.
Despite all these shenanigans, the music does still stand up to scrutiny even now. Townshend has undoubtedly been the band’s engine, churning out hundreds of songs, and his guitar playing has been influential to countless artists, which isn’t bad when you consider he’s self-taught and, to this day, cannot read or write music. He can barely hear it, either. But that energy, that indescribable creative force that was captured by no other band in the 1960s or early 1970s, still marks out The Who as unique – a marked difference from today’s almost clinical artists who seem utterly controlled by the corporate PR machine.
While Townshend has been the band’s driving force, Daltrey has been the faithful handsome frontman – a role that has served him and The Who well over the decades. Yet he has also enjoyed varying degrees of success as a solo artist – something that has caused resentment and unfruitful friction from the Townshend corner. However, when the original line-up started shuffling off this mortal coil, he claims it caused him to stop and reassess his relationship with Daltrey, with the result that the two are now closer than ever. The egos appear to have taken a much-needed back seat.
Having mellowed to the point that hotel managers and guitar makers no longer consider them persona non grata, it’s unlikely that The Who will be ruffling many feathers when performing in Abu Dhabi. But that should not detract from the magic or, indeed, the manic energy these veterans will no doubt display. The band’s music may be an acquired taste, but their legacy will no doubt carry on for “generations” to come.
khackett@thenational.ae
