Monday, September 14th, 2020

I’m gonna start this off by saying it’s time!

Regarding the great band that was and is The Who, the path by which they got their start and became internationally iconic began with stories, rumors, scenarios and plots that have morphed from utter nonsense to the semi-sentient fever and druggy dreams that have floated in laughing gas bubbles throughout the music world, from pre-internet days (yes--there was a time when the Net didn’t exist!) through to all your current favorite social media sites.

As I was in the middle of all this activity, I will do my best to separate fact from fiction.

Apparently it all started with two guys with no music biz experience who wanted to make a biopic with a band, and they found one that fit the bill called The High Numbers.

The pair were Kit Lambert, son of composer and conductor Constance Lambert, and Chris Stamp, whose brother was the actor, Terence Stamp.

As the story goes, they then decided to scrap the film in favor of managing that band. They changed their name to The Who and started looking around for a record producer.

Lambert knew a young woman, Anya Wilson, who worked part time for me, and as I’d had hits with The Kinks, he thought I might be the right fit for the band, and so he got Anya to ask me if I’d come see them.

As I was always on the lookout for talent, of course I agreed, and that’s how I wound up at the church hall where they were rehearsing.

I’ve previously written about how impressed I was after listening to just a very few bars of Roger Daltrey singing the blues classic, ‘I’m a Man’, backed by the best rock band I’d heard in the UK up to that time. I told Lambert, “Yes, I’ll take them”!

I signed The Who to my production company, Orbit Universal Music, which meant I’d just taken on two heavy-duty obligations. The first was, to find a label with whom I could make a deal to distribute their records that would also guarantee to promote those records.

At that time in the 1960s, promotion meant the label employed promotion men or women to visit or call DJ’s, radio station managers and journalists that they knew with advance copies of a record, and cajole them into playing them on air, or writing favorably about them.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that “payola” was, shall I call it, a necessary evil! That is, in many instances, the label had to pay the DJ’s and anyone else who could get the records played.

My second obligation was funding the sessions I was to produce with The Who. Yes, I could afford to do this--barely--but in this still early phase of my career, there wasn’t a whole lot of wiggle room!

This is that same time frame in 1964 when Decca had already passed on the Manfred Mann and Georgie Fame bands that I’d brought to the company, so I had then taken The Kinks straight into Pye, and to all intents and purposes I’d severed all relations with Decca as an indie producer.

But out of courtesy, as I liked and respected the Decca people I knew, I told them about The Who and gave them a chance to say, “Yes we’d love to have them”. Surprise, that didn’t happen!

At this point, I decided to go back to the States, believing that The Who were more like an American band than any British artists that preceded me there, or any British acts that I’d produced. This, I reasoned, gave me a much better chance to find a label that would agree to the deal I sought.

I also knew that with the huge success of the Beatles, the British Invasion had been truly launched and that The Who and I were gonna do our darndest to be part of it.

I arrived in New York in the summer of 1964 and asked my New York attorney and several music biz friends who they thought I should approach with The Who.

About three-quarters of them suggested I try the Decca label, headquartered in New York and formerly part of the British company.

The recommendations for Decca as a likely label were because they had concentrated for years on Broadway musicals and the word on the street was that they were anxious to catch up and cash in on the very obvious excitement rock’n’roll was creating on the buying public.

LOL, well, that suited me but yes, here was Decca again when I thought I was done with them!

Time for a quick summary of why this was different.

In London in 1929, Ted Lewis, later to become the Sir Edward Lewis that I would deal with, was a stockbroker, and he helped the Decca Gramophone Company out, when it was successfully floated as a public company. They manufactured gramophones (record players), including the first portable model.

Lewis tried to convince them to also make the records their gramophones played, but they weren’t interested.

So Lewis formed a syndicate and bought the company along with a record factory, and started producing records.

His London rival was the giant EMI (Electrical Musical Industries), who believed themselves untouchable. But Lewis’s evident acumen saw Decca gaining an impressive share of the market.

He opened a subsidiary in America in the mid 1930’s, then acquired the American label, Brunswick, who had the internationally popular Bing Crosby and Al Jolson under contract.

When World War Two broke out in 1939, Lewis sold the American Decca subsidiary, who retained the name but were now independent, although they still maintained ties to the British company for distribution in Great Britain and Europe.

Back to me in New York--I’d had hits by The Kinks and Chad & Jeremy by this time, so the US music biz knew who I was, and it was easy for me to get an appointment at Decca.

To make this too-long story shorter, they liked what I told them about The Who, and I liked them, as they were gentlemen, and I came away with a production deal for The Who. The first release was scheduled for December 1964.

The irony of this was that, in Britain, any release from American Decca had to come out on Brunswick, UK Decca’s label for American-sourced masters. So ‘I Can’t Explain’ was issued in the UK in January 1965 and reached the top ten in the charts, on Brunswick, distributed by Decca.

As this was now the third time Decca had rejected artists that I’d brought to them who subsequently became hit acts, I’m pretty sure that when they were throwing darts at their favorite watering hole pub, there was a picture of me mounted in the bullseye!