The Who talk about RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN THE BAND

JOHN: We started off in our early career at each others throats. There were like huge fights, smashed beer bottles, a lot of animosity y’know. Gradually as we became more successful, the fights started to dwindle out. The fights still went on like verbally, and in a way they still do. As long as the arguments don’t get violent I think it’s healthy. It’s much better to bring things out in the open than bottle them up and break bands up. A lot of bands break up because they don’t shout at each other enough. Earlier on we knew the same people, we had the same interests. Now we have separate circles of friends, sperate cars, and we have drifted a weenie bit apart. The only time we really get together properly is when we’re on a tour, so we really stay out of each others ways I suppose in England. But when we’re over in the States or France it’s like it used to be.

KEITH: The stage fights were fairly common. One of us’d either turn up late, usually me, or would be sort of, well we just generally didn’t get on all that well and we used to take it out on stage. We used to avoid each other off stage, so the only time we ever really got together was on stage, and so all the sort of, all the pent up agression, would come out then. And sometimes you just used to get to a flashpoint where instead of it being directed as it is now - we direct it toward the audience and we use it - we used to turn it back on ourselves. So we used to beat each other up, on stage, and of course this used to make for very short shows, and infact some of the shows we did were only about six minutes long and everything used to get totalled. ‘Cause the average length of a show then was ah, about forty-five minutes, and sometimes we stayed the distance and sometimes we just used to walk on, smash up the equimpment and walk off, and that would be it you know, three minutes and that’s your lot. It wasn’t until we started using that kind of, erm, energy up in a positive direction that ah, the band started to pick up and come together socially and professionally. Before that a lot of it was just destruction just for the sake of it, just because we didn’t particularly like each other at that moment in time. And it was good to have a friend on stage in those days, ‘cause it could get pretty hairy. Later on in our career we just all came together a bit more and stopped beating the hell out of each other. Although sometimes we just sort of, I mean now it flares up which is only natural. We’re still a fairly volatile band to say the least.

KEITH: The agressiveness towards each other, the early agression, still comes through in the music when we’re on stage. It’s still every man for himself, and if you can’t take it, get out, because nobody is going to give way. And it doesn’t matter what instrument you’re playing, the drums certainly are the easiest to be agressive with because they’re the most physical, and you can feel fairly impotent if you’re a guitarist and the drummer sort of, if you just pull out your plug and you’re playing electric guitar, I mean it’s sort of like, that’s you, you know, up the creek without a paddle. It’s because each of us has got our own personality which is fairly strong, obviously sometimes if they clash nobody gives in until it comes to either a shouting match or physical. This, this as well, comes out in the music a lot. A lot of the agression that’s in our music comes from bouncing off each other. I think that if we had anybody in the band that was placid, that would let themselves get pushed around, they’d be flat by now, they’d just would’ve been squashed out of existance. You’re got to be fairly tough to stay in the ‘oo.

PETE: When John and I talk about music today and when we talk about the band we come together again, and when we don’t talk about the band we find out that we’re completely different.

JOHN: The group was usually breaking up about once every two weeks, or in between tours. It was always, like um, it was mainly I think maybe me and Keith that were always going to walk off, y’know. And after one American tour in the ‘States we found out that we were gonna go home with far less than we anticipated, and it had been I think about an eight week tour and really a lot of hard work. We were playing a lot of different places and we’d been travelling by bus and everything, you know, travelling by like private bus with beds in, which ended up really stinking and rotten. We’d been doing that for two months and when we found out that we’d be coming home with less money than we could have earned in England in a week, at that stage I thought it’s about time to like pack up. I didn’t ever think we were going to sort of make it in the States, and if we don’t make it in the States it’s not worth sort of really going on in England. And Keith and I decided to leave. We sat down in a club in New York and talked about, y’know, what we were going to call our new group that we were going to form, and I’d come up with the name Led Zeppelin, and the album cover and everything. And ah, that was it, we were going to leave. And then the next week we all got together again you know. It seems such a waste starting again, loosing everything we’d actually got.

PETE: What I’m trying to say I think, is that anything that was outrageous about The Who was genuinely outrageous. In other words if it was rough and tumble or aggressive or whatever. I mean there was publicity that we hated one another for example, and in those days we did. You know we did split up a couple of times, we did have outrageous rows. We still do, occasionally. I think we’re going back to childhood in some respects cos we seem to row quite a lot these days.

PETE: There was a grave danger of the band splitting up in ’64 / ’65 before it really started. And there’s a danger of it now because when things don’t really scoot along easily, if nobody’s treading on anybody’s toes it’s easy you know. But when people are being direct and hopefully “honest” then you know there’s more chance that two people are going to directly disagree. And so I suppose that if there’s a tricky period for the future of the who it’s like right now at this minute y’know, because we have all resolved that it’s about time that we at least agreed on what we were gonna do and that we didn’t y’know, and that we attempt to make our relationships I dunno, we have been going for ten years right. I don’t want to shove it down anybody’s throat because it’s often shoved down mine I know what it feels like. But when we think about it and then we think how childish our actual sort of relationships are, and we just realised it was about time we started to act like mature human beings. And it’s not really for any other reason than we’ve started to realise on a much broader level the kind of responsibility we have to our audience, and that more than ever before we want The Who to continue.