1963 – The Detours play at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford
1964 – The Who play the Glenlyn Ballroom in Forest Hill
1965 – The Who play Burton’s Ballroom in Uxbridge, Middlesex
1966 – The Who were scheduled to perform at the Sheffield University Arts Festival. Pete flew into London from New York with jet lag that forces him to pull over to the side of the M1 and take a nap. Support group Tony Rivers and The Castaways played an extra set. Ticket holders were offered a refund.
1967 – Keith and Kim join protesters of “The News of The World” over their involvement in the Jagger/Richards arrests.
1967 – At 3am John receives a phone call aboard the HMS Queen Elizabeth. Hearing the call is from London, he expects dire news about his family. Instead it is someone from Kit Lambert’s office asking if The Who have his permission to record an emergency single without him. An angry John says The Who have his permission to put drugs in London’s water supply if they want to and hangs up.
1968 – Melody Maker carries a full page ad for Dogs as well as a feature on microphones which includes a piece by Pete titled “The Stuff We Wouldn’t Wreck!”
1968 – The Who play the second of two nights at the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles, California
1970 – The Who play the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland
1979 – The New York Times prints an interview with Pete where he admits he has reservations about touring but feels “fired up” about the new Who
Transcript:
The Pop Life
John Rockwell
The Who is back on the scene.
THE WHO is with us once again. Right now in the form of “The Kids Are Alright,” an affectionately imbalanced and fragmented documentary film, and its attendant, two-disc soundtrack on MCA. But in September the band will play a week at Madison Square Garden; then there will be a movie of the group’s “Quadrophenia”; also, a feature film starring Roger Daltrey, the lead singer; solo albums from Peter Townshend and John Entwistle, and, finally, by Christmas, a new Who album proper.
Of course, it won’t be an album by the Who as that band has been known since the 1960’s. Keith Moon, the group’s erratically brilliant, seemingly irrepressible drummer, is dead now, and the new album will include the new drummer, Kenny Jones (once of the Faces), plus a keyboard player, John (Rabbit) Bundrick, who Mr. Townshend for one hopes will stay in the band as a fifth permanent member.
“Kenny is a very positive player and a very positive human being,” said Mr. Townshend in his measured, controlled way the other day in a Navarone Hotel suite overlooking Central Park. “Very fit. Very strong. Very warm. Rabbit’s very very demanding, creative, fiery. I don’t think he wants to be in a band that’s celebrating its past for the rest of its life. But then again, neither do I.”
This represents something of a change in attitude on Mr. Townshend’s part. Before the mid-1970’s, for all his discontents and his solo projects, it was Mr. Townshend — the band’s chief composer, guitarist and real creative force — who seemed most happily burdened by the massive weight of the Who tradition. He seemed to see in the band the vessel of a whole generation’s aspirations, and to fear a cessation of its activities as a betrayal of that generation. And he always said he welcomed the limitations of rock and the band’s past as stimuli for creation.
But beginning in 1975, he reports now, things reached a crisis. He had some hearing loss and feared he’d go deaf from further touring. Mr. Moon was increasingly terrified that touring would kill him: “For years I kept saying, ‘I don’t want the Who to produce any human wreckage,’” Mr. Townshend recalled. “What’s distressing to me now is that after two years not on the road, Keith Moon died.”
But the real crisis that made Mr. Townshend refuse to tour for three years was more general, caught up with his inevitable self-reflections when confronted with Britain’s new-wave rock movement.
“I was just unhappy on the road with the Who,” he recalls. “I hated it. I mean, I loved it — doing it. I hated the effect that it had on me. I felt spiritually dirty, mentally humiliated and physically enervated. At about the same time, everybody else in the band decided they wanted a better life — bigger houses, better cars. It tainted things for me. I felt stifled, strangled, frustrated. It seemed pointless to get up on stage and go through the same routine again, because there was no way we were going to do those songs any better. But nobody in the band would accept the idea of taking a couple of years off in order to formulate something new for the band.”
For a long while, the Who’s members seemed able to express their ideas about the group’s future only through interviews, and those interviews would seem totally unacceptable to the others. It took Mr. Moon’s death for everyone to wipe clean their preconceptions and to come to some fresh conclusions about the group’s future.
“Once Roger and I had both abandoned our points of view, we had an open book,” says Mr. Townshend, although he adds that even now the other band members want to tour more than he does. Recently he’s been engaged in a variety of projects, from a musicians’ cooperative for younger bands to production work, setting up a music and book-publishing company and helping with various Who-related films and stage productions. “I’ve had three years off the road, and I’ve never been happier. I’ve been idyll[ic]ally happy.”
Now, however, he says — but with a curiously detached and flat-voiced gravity that makes a listener doubt him just a little — that he no longer cares about living up to his past or to people’s expectations, and that this freedom from care has liberated him.
“I can see more clearly now. I care more about the people up on stage with me, and I don’t have as many illusions about the fans. I used to think we couldn’t let our fans down, that we were an important part of their lives. Now I know that about 10 percent really do care about us as people, that 25 percent are just street rats, and the rest are music lovers — people who buy a lot of records and will keep buying them if we disappear.
“Right now, I feel very fired up and stimulated. I don’t know if what we’ll do next will be the greatest thing that’s ever happened to rock-and-roll; I don’t know if the Who ever were that. It’s either going to be good or bad; I don’t care now. I’m just doin’ me best.”
Caption:
Peter Townshend of the Who: “I can see more clearly now. I feel fired up and stimulated.”
Richard A. Aaron
1979 – The Kids Are Alright soundtrack is certified gold by the RIAA
1986 – Pete’s father Cliff Townshend dies of cancer at the age of 70
1989 – The Who play Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey
1996 – Billed under their separate names, Pete, Roger and John perform the entirety of Quadrophenia live at the Masters of Music festival at Hyde Park on the 29th. It is the first time the work has been played live in its entirety since the first night of The Who’s 1973 U.K. tour. Phil Daniels of the movie version narrates, Gary Glitter plays the Godfather, Ade Edmondson is the Bell Boy, Trevor McDonald reads the news and Stephen Fry is the hotel manager.
Pete plays only acoustic guitar and piano leaving the electric guitar parts to Dave Gilmour. Zak Starkey takes the drummer’s seat for the first time for the group that will soon revert to the name The Who. Roger wears a Mod eyepatch to cover his injury. Quadrophenia is preceded by performances by Alanis Morrisette and Bob Dylan and followed by Eric Clapton. Highlights from the show are later broadcast on HBO in the U.S. The entire event raises money for the Prince’s Trust charity. Before the show all the performers meet backstage with Prince Charles.
2000 – Pete writes another diary on his website talking about his problems writing new music for The Who, “that many musicians I admire don’t even like.”
2000 – The Who play the Post-Gazette Pavilion in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania
2001 – Roger was supposed to perform at a tribute honoring songwriters Leiber and Stoller at the Hammersmith Apollo but cancels
2001 – “A Walk Down Abbey Road: A Tribute To The Beatles.” featuring John play at the DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, Michigan
2004 – The DVD John Entwistle Band: Live, recorded Aug. 13, 1999, is released by Image Entertainment
2007 – The Who play Marley Park in Dublin
2009 – Roger, Sarah, the Duchess of York, and Kelly Jones, of the Stereophonics are at Cardiff’s University Hospital of Wales for the opening of the £3.3m specialist cancer unit for teenagers.
2012 – Roger is one of a host of stars that attend a party celebrating the 80th birthday of Sir Peter Blake. The British Pop Artist assembled The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover as well as The Who’s Face Dances.
2013 – Simon Townshend and Band perform at The Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath.