The Who talk about THE WHO

KEITH: To some it’s Tommy, to others it’s Happy Jack, My Generation. To others it’s Who Sell Out, to others it’s a band that I like to go and see on stage but I wouldn’t buy their records. To some it’s I like their records but you know I think they’re just a load of big mouth show offs on stage. I think the band is many faceted, faseted, faticed, fat.

JOHN: Just before I left school I met Roger walking down the road and I was with my wife - who was my girlfriend then - and I had this home made bass guitar under my arm. I was walking along with this bass guitar and Roger came up and said "I hear you play the bass guitar". So I said yeah so he said "well d’you wanna join my group" y’know. So they arranged an audition and I’ll always remember his words from when we finished playing a couple of numbers, he said ah "d’you think we’re good enough". And you know we played a couple of gigs as the band was, and then the rhythm guitarist left and I got in Pete. Pete really didn’t want to join first but he saw that we had two Vox fifteen watt amplifiers so he figured oh this bands got a lot of equipment you know, I’ll join these.

KEITH: I was the last one to join the band, mainly because I’m the youngest. But we all used to play in the same sort of circuit, round Wembley, Shepherds Bush, Ealing, Putney and The Detours used to be one of the better paid bands,they used to get twelve quid. I used to play for a group called The Beach Combers and we used to get ten. It wasn’t just the money you know, the extra ten bob a gig that made me want to join The Detours. They were the most respected out of all of the bands y’know. I went to see them at that place called The Oldfield in Harrow and just got up on stage. Their own drummer had left, and the drummer that was sitting in with them I knew. Just said can I play so he said well I don’t know, can you, so I got up, bashed about and I you know just bashed about and I’ve been doing the same ever since. They just never asked me to leave. They dropped me off at my house and said pick you up same time tomorrow, we’ve got a gig at Putney and that was it, I was in.

JOHN: We were playing in Green for one night with the session drummer and this fellow walked up to us and said my mate can play better than your drummer, and so we said well lets hear him then, bring him up. So he brought up this little gingerbread man and it was Keith with dyed ginger hair and a brown shirt, brown tie, brown suit, brown shoes and he just looked like a little gingerbread man. And he got up on the kit and we said can you play Roadrunner because we actually hadn’t come across a drummer that could play Roadrunner with us, and he played Roadrunner and we thought oh well this is the fellow. You know he played it perfectly and fitted in really well.

JOHN: We decided to call ourselves The Who and we did the next concert and we said right from now - we announced to the audience at the end - from now on the band’s gonna be called The Who and everybody laughed, but everybody remembered and they all came back the next time.

PETE: We all used to live in the Acton area, you know, and used to play mainly in Acton, Shepherds Bush and ah it was later, I mean the reason that it became known that The Who came from Shepherds Bush was that our first really fanatically loyal audience actually came from a club called the Goldhawk Club which was near Shepherds Bush.

PETE: Originally we were an R&B band in the tradition of bands like The Stones and The Yardbirds and people like that. And it was only when Pete Meaden came along, he was one of our early, early influences. He was introduced by our very first manager as a publicity man mainly. It was only when Pete Meaden came along that we started to really realise the full depth of the mod movement. Me in particular I think, I was really sort of incredibly influenced by it, and in fact it became a very solid part of it you know. He figured that it was the greatest thing happening at the time. And from a group’s point of view I mean the main thing that was interesting about it is that it had such explosive musical links. I mean the mod movement at that time wasn’t just fashions and scooters and things like that, it also had very sort of ethnic taste in music, you know it used to like blubeat stuff and stuff like this that’s very very hard to get hold of. And er Tamla Motown which again it seems it’s practically a dirty word these days, to rock fans you know, intellectual rock fans. But in those days it was a sort of very in-crowd thing. Pete Meaden steered us in the direction of people like The Miracles. We used to do, one of the first Tamla Motown numbers we ever did was Dance To Keep From Crying. And then we later on did Baby Don’t You Do It, that Marvin Gaye song, and Heatwave, Dancing In The Street, numbers like this, and we were one of the first bands to do a large repertoire of Tamla Motown songs.

PETE: Initially we were moulded if you like, steered in the direction of the mod movement. But because it you know, I suppose one of the things was that it never occurred to us really to even try and look like, to be like our audiences, you know. We were just, the very fact of picking up a guitar in those days and being in a group was part of the gesture to try and get your head above the crowd, Mr. Average you know. And it was only later on when we realised how we were being swept along in the mod wave as it were, that we settled in and actually fully identified with it. I mean there’s no doubt about it, The Who were never real mods in the street as it were, because we were doing gigs. I mean there was no way that we could spend our time, you know, in archetypal mod manners, hanging about on street corners with our scooters and in our anoraks or whatever, because we were too busy working, on the road you know. But we were very affected by it all and I suppose the most important thing of all was is that we became like a barometer if you like... You could keep a close eye on the trend setters and then merely mimic them, and thus the majority of the audience because they were looking up on the stage would think that you were actually setting the trends. And then after a couple of months of doing that you could of course start to set trends anyway. You know you could invent a dance on the stage and everybody would say oh that’s The Who doing ah, what’s obviously going to be next weeks dance. And ah they start doing it y’know.

KEITH: 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.

KEITH: Well drums are the most physical and the most agressive. But it’s the way an instrument’s played, I mean Pete plays the most agressive chords and the most agressive guitar, with attack. I play the drums agressively and John plays sort of round all the agression. 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.

JOHN: Pete I think is mostly likely the person in the world I know that I’ve got the most in common with. He writes and I write and we both realise how difficult it is to write for a specific thing. Like The Who. I couldn’t possibly do it, I have no idea how he does it. Pete in the early part of the career I think thought at the back of his mind that the rest of the band weren’t really trying to actually do anything as far as writing was concerned. I know on the second album A Quick One While He’s Away I started writing and he seemed quite a bit relieved. I think Pete has mellowed. A lot over the years. He’s still got an instant temper but I don’t think anybody in the band takes that much notice of it. They know that it’s gonna completely subside any minute.

PETE: I’ve always, like, struggled. And I think The Who as a band, perhaps, less consciously maybe, have struggled to keep the real sort of strong roots with it’s audience. It gets more and more difficult, there’s no doubt about it. As the band gets involved in grandiose projects like Tommy films and you know, god knows what. I mean, it does tend to make one aloof from the public. Not by any want of our own, but it does tend to happen. The star making machine gets in process and it’s no way round, you can get around it. But I think the reason we’ve always done that is because we’ve never really ever bloody well known what we were doing, you know. We’ve never really known I mean. I mean if people really thought that, or think that we know what we’re doing all the time then we must come across as being incredibly calculating .

PETE: There’s a great distinction between the conscious things that we’ve done, and I’m sure that Who fans could tell what the conscious things were, like pop art for example. That was a very conscious press attitude that we took as a way of explaining or trying to give a sensational angle to what was really just a colourful way of dressing. Even perhaps a bit of a pretentious arty way of dressing. Auto destruction was another fancy name we gave to the fact that we liked to smash up our gear. But what I’m trying to say I think, is that anything that was outrageous about The Who was genuinely outrageous.

PETE: You can chronicle what’s happened in the last ten years by looking at Who material, only by paralleling it up to actual events. Quadrophenia as a piece of self-conscious, y’know work, actually does a better job of chronicling what happened, than say taking ten Who singles of the period. Because they’re not about anything in particular a lot of them. There are the obvious singles you know which come up again and again and again which people constantly refer to, like My Generation or Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, but a lot of songs, like I Can’t Explain for example, the first song I ever really wrote, songs like that a lot of people I see, you know Who fans and Who biographers breaking it down into what it really means. I mean when I wrote it, it was about a guy who couldn’t explain his love for his girlfriend. Y’know, and that was really what it was all about. It later on became a song about a guy who couldn’t explain what he meant cos he was pilled out of his brain y’know. It just so happened that I had that kind of one track mind. Substitute for example, well I suppose in a way it was a very clever piece of writing but it wasn’t conscious. It was a word game if you like.

JOHN: I think the whole band was so ambitious that they actually made The Who what it is, into a solid thing. We’ve always wanted to out do ourselves all the time, and to reach even like sort of greater sort of like musical heights I suppose you could call it.

JOHN: I think if any of us realised what the little spark of magic is that makes The Who The Who instead of four musicians, if I knew I could most likely create huge bands everywhere. None of us really know what makes the Who what it is. Well, y’know, none of us can really understand why people will like queue up in thousands to buy tickets to a concert, I mean we’ve got no idea of what that is. It’d be really nice to know what made The Who tick but I don’t think anybody could possibly say.

PETE: You know the more I talk about it, the more I, you know, the more I realise, that The Who are a band beyond analysing really, because you can come to kind of an amazing number of sort of decisions as to the reasons why we work when we’re together and why things click in the face of unbelievably bad odds. But even they seem to change from day to day, you might make one decision one day and another the other, you know. I think I once decided that the reason we all did work together was because we don’t get on well socially. But I think that’s probably artificial stance you know, what makes anything work as well as The Who do as a team if you like, I think rock bands are teams to a degree, must be something positive rather than anything negative. I think the positive thing is something perhaps that we can’t see. I’m not saying that it’s mystical or astrological or anything like that, but it is something that we haven’t really totally discovered yet. Ah, because I know that any one of us taken out of the environment of The Who appears to be far, far less talented. I know that much.

PETE: I think in a sense if you realise your ambitions the way we have done. Every single ambition that each one of us has ever had has actually come true. Then you think well why stop now, because I can just have another dream and maybe that will come true.

JOHN: Usually before we go into the studio we get played Pete’s demos. The demos are always semi-finished or completely finished, with everything that is going to go on it, on it. We try all of them, y’know, all of the demos. If something doesn’t particularly work then it’s scrapped but the majority of them usually sort of get through. While listening to the demo we work out the chord structures and Roger does an awful lot as far as the arranging, like verses, middle eights, choruses etc. Then I compose the bass part in my head or as we go along, and we just keep playing the backing track until we get the right feel. In a thing where it’s a concept thing then obviously we can’t pick and choose and throw things out. In something like Quadrophenia which has got an actual shape, you either change the shape or rewrite the entire number.

KEITH: I can’t remember recording some of ‘em. I mean some of them we were going through, I was either drunk, drunk in charge, and I don’t remember. I don’t remember playing Substitute at all, I was just too stoned. And when it came out I accused the other members of the group of getting another drummer in.