The Who Eight Hours Behind Bars

Rock group jailed after hotel fracas

By Bill Mann

Of The Gazette

The four members of the British rock group The Who left Montreal yesterday three hours behind schedule, $6,000 poorer and with memories of eight hours in the police jail.

Lead guitarist Peter Townshend, bass guitarist John Entwistle, drummer Keith Moon and singer Roger Daltry as well as 14 members of the group’s entourage were jailed yesterday morning for damages to their 12-room Hotel Bonaventure suite.

An all-night party at the hotel followed Sunday night’s concert attended by 20,000 which grossed $50,000 for the group.

Hotel employees, who went to The Who’s suite to investigate complaints from other guests of noise and glass-breaking, found the rooms in shambles and called the police.

All those arrested were released at 1.15 p.m. yesterday when promoter Donald K. Donald arrived at the police station with $5,995.34 in cash damages claimed by the hotel.

“The hotel is not bringing charges against them and neither are we,” a Montreal Urban Community police spokesman said yesterday.

SUITE WRECKED

“When our people got up there, the entire suite was wrecked from top to bottom,” hotel general manager Fernand Roberge said.

“Everything was in a shambles and there was about $6,000 in damage.”

Donald said the money paid to get the group and the others out of jail included the hotel bills for rental of the suite.

“There was about $3,500 damage to the suite which was rented by a record company for a post-concert party,” he said.

The Who who missed an earlier scheduled flight for Boston left at 4 p.m. for another sold out concert at Boston Gardens.

“They woke up everybody at 5 a.m., the police did,” said a record company executive who was not arrested.

“They asked me when I left the party, I said 2 a.m. They left me be.”

GOING STRONG

This writer also left the party at 2 a.m., and it was still going strong then.

The Who gained international fame when, in the mid-60s, Townshend destroyed his guitar after every performance by stomping on it.

The Track Records spokesman said yesterday that Townshend has recently taken up the practice again, breaking up a guitar and amplifier on stage last month.

Moon is known as somewhat of a hotel-room demolition expert. He has been expelled from numerous Holiday Inns, where he has wielded everything from fire axe to fire hose to pick rooms apart.

He told rock journal Rolling Stone in recent interview that he had personally destoyred 32 hotel rooms. In one unusually bizarre episode, Moon once drove a brand new Cadillac into a motel swimming pool and sat in the car for 10 minutes before he realized no one knew he was submerged.

RICH BANDS

Several hotels in North America — Los Angeles’ Regency Hyatt House, for example — cater to rich rock bands, but the Bonaventure isn’t one of them.

“I didn’t press charges,” said Roberge. “But I did ask them to come pick up their luggage and not stick around.”

Room 1308 will be in livable condition, the hotel manager said, in a week or so. Workmen were busy caulking in new windows yesterday afternoon and replacing part of a wall. The room was registered to the band’s publicist.

Other rock bands have specialized in the wanton destruction of property.

The J. Geils Band, for instance, has a policy that no one throws a color television set out of the window unless two conditions are met: There’s no one on the street below and that it is turned on all the way down: A long extension cord is often necessary to achieve the desired effect.