Thanks a Lot Mr. Kibblewhite
My story
Roger Daltrey
Having read it
★★★★☆
A good read with quite a few ups and downs that help give better context (and a bit of humour!) to many of the rock ’n’ roll moments that have occurred bringing The Who’s music to life (and his own solo and (brief) acting careers), along with his own views and approaches to being Roger Daltrey.
A good passage
The more I think about it, the more I realise our parents’ generation was amazing. They never really wanted for much. They wanted to live in peaceful times and they wanted, on occasion, to enjoy themselves.
A knees-up with a few bottles of brown ale felt like the party of the century. It was so simple but they knew how to have a good time with nothing. It’s the opposite today. We’ve got so much and everything is instant. I find it very difficult to know where it’s all heading. I’m sure if you’re young and that’s all you know, you just go with the flow. Maybe you can explain it to me some time.
A second good passage
We’d been the Detours until February 1963 when it became clear that we were getting confused with another band called the American Detours. I can’t remember exactly who came up with ‘The Who’ in the first place. We were round at Pete’s mate Barney’s flat chucking around all sorts of silly names. The Group. No One. The Hair. Pete liked that one. I think someone made a suggestion that Barney didn’t hear.
He said, ‘The Who?’ Someone else said, ‘That’s good. The Who.’ And that was that. Or it was for the next year or so. Then, for four months in 1964, we were the High Numbers. Then Kit [Lambert, manager] arrived and said, ‘No, we’re going back to The Who. It’s a much better name. Much more graphic. You can do much more with three letters than you can with God knows how many there are in the High Numbers’
A third good passage
We used to go to a Chinese restaurant called the Lotus House on Edgware Road. Kit went in there with no money, we’d all eat and drink lavishly, and at the end of the night he’d sign the tablecloth. In those days that was acceptable tender, and he got away with it. Most people could manage that trick once or twice. Kit did it for most of the sixties. He did it with cheques and he did it with contracts. After seeing an up-and-coming guitarist play one night in 1966, he took his manager to dinner at the Lotus. The manager was Chas Chandler, the guitarist was Jimi Hendrix and, by the end of the night, Jimi was contracted, by tablecloth, to Kit.