Acclaimed music journalist Mat Snow takes a deep dive into the history and the music of The Who in his book The Who: Fifty Years of My Generation. Snow writes about how despite the intense and staggering personality differences, the bandmates were able produce music that resonated so deeply with fans spanning decades. His book promises to show and tell it like it is.
Here’s a snippet of what Snow writes about the band’s big break – the mod years in the early to mid 60s.
Mods!
By the spring of 1964, the mod army had gained mainstream notoriety for fighting at seaside resorts with rival gangs of would-be Marlon Brandos, or “rockers,” who remained loyally attached to the motorcycles, leather, and rock ’n’ roll of the ’50s.
Thanks to the Beatles, followed by the Stones, the Pretty Things, and others, long hair was coming in for young men; mods, however, wore theirs short but assiduously styled and attended to with a steel comb without which no mod would leave home. Mods were like peacocks, the male being far more attentive to ever-changing sartorial detail than his girlfriend, spending a fortune on sharp London tailoring in Italian, French, and American styles, which would often discreetly upstage that of his boss in the office, where he would work to earn the money to spend on clothes and weekendlong, amphetamine-sustained dance parties—to which he would travel on his nippy Italian scooter, customized with light-catching rearview mirrors, protected from the elements by a US Army–style surplus-store fishtail parka.
Musically, mods also favored the imported over the homegrown. They loved the latest American soul and R&B records, and Jamaican ska, and would check out live bands who played in those styles, notably Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames, resident at Soho’s Flamingo Club, a mod hub along with the Scene.
From Vespa to Lambretta, Fred Perry to Levi’s, Tamla Motown to Blue Beat, mods were label-obsessed consumers decades before the mainstream, and as well as being a subculture, they were also a market. Such was the insight of Peter Meaden, a twenty-two-year-old hustler who had cut his publicist teeth assisting another young hustler, Andrew Loog Oldham, image-maker and manager of the Rolling Stones. For £50 (around $140 at the time), this colorful Soho character promised the Who a complete makeover to corner the mod market. This seemingly well-connected and hotwired personality seemed to capture the moment, and both the band—especially pop art fan Pete, who was fascinated by the idea of blending creativity and commerce—and their manager, Helmut Gorden, bought into his vision and expertise. What they did not know was that Meaden was a pill-dealing guzzler of Drinamyls (amphetamines blended with barbiturates to take the edge off, given the street name “purple hearts”), who had a score to settle with Oldham, with the Who his intended vehicle to prove he could better his old boss in transforming an interesting new band into a headline-news hit act.
Haircuts came first, and then a fashion makeover, with singer Roger dressed in an Ivy League seersucker jacket while the instrumentalists looked boyish in boxing boots and skating jackets. More tellingly came yet another name change. The Who were now the High Numbers—“numbers” being just above “tickets” but below “faces” in the mod pecking order, and “high” a wink to their target market’s fondness for an array of “uppers” or “leapers” to fuel all-night dancing, and for pot and “downers” to return them to earth, ready for work on Monday. Though Pete was now a published songwriter, Meaden demanded control of the High Numbers’ first single, released on the Fontana label, which cloned the Dynamics’ “Misery” for its A-side, “Zoot Suit,” and Slim Harpo’s “I Got Love if You Want It” for its B-side, “I’m the Face.” Fontana was unimpressed, however, and failed to promote a pressing of only a thousand copies. The band’s hardcore following aside, most mods saw through the opportunism and were not buying it, while Fontana did not exercise its option for a follow-up. The High Numbers had flopped, and the four were shocked at just how badly Meaden’s persuasive master plan had failed.
At this critical moment when, disheartened, the band might have broken up and Pete returned to art school, the cavalry rode to their aid.
Enter Lambert and Stamp
With Beatlemania spearheading an explosion in pop music and teenage culture, mid-’60s London bristled with opportunists eager to shape and invest in young talent, in return to reap the rewards when mania came their way too. Kit Lambert, twentyeight, and Chris Stamp, just turning twenty-two, were two such opportunists, yet were so much more.
It is hard to imagine a less likely partnership. Kit (Christopher) was the upper-bracket son of the famed composer, ballet conductor, and music critic Constant Lambert, a bon viveur and swain of prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, whose vision of integrating jazz with classical music was snubbed by the British musical establishment, and who died frustrated. Gay and rudderless but immensely charming and resourceful, Kit was an ex-army officer and failed Amazon explorer with a score to settle with the establishment on his late father’s behalf.
Chris, meanwhile, was the no less good-looking brother of the fast-rising Cockney heartthrob actor Terence Stamp. A ladies’ man where Kit favored male “rough trade,” Chris was style-obsessed, and though he had connections with London’s East End underworld, he wanted to make it in the movies, and had talked himself into various jobs in Britain’s movie industry, itself then undergoing a minor creative and commercial boom. In 1963, on the set of The L-Shaped Room, he ran into Kit, who was also successfully hustling various jobs on the fringes of the movie industry, and the pair struck up a business partnership based on the shared idea of making a gritty, realistic movie about a real pop group that would clean up at the box office. It was a great idea, and the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night would do just that in summer ’64, just as the High Numbers were failing to capitalize on mod-mania.
Kit had been systematic in scouring London for the band he needed to fit the bill, and eventually he found them that July, playing in Harrow at the Railway Hotel pub, into which he’d been drawn by the swarm of scooters parked outside. Having introduced himself to comanager Meaden, Kit got the hard sell, which confirmed his belief based on what he saw onstage and the crowd’s reaction to it that this was the band he was looking for. Summoned from a location shoot in Ireland, Chris Stamp saw them too, and he agreed. Without giving up on the movie idea, the pair’s ambition expanded to taking over the band’s management—which, of course, required not only the band’s consent but also the removal of Helmut Gorden and Peter Meaden.
The Takeover
Getting the band’s consent was not automatic. They liked Meaden, but they had worked out that not only had he no money and quite a pill habit, his response to the failure of his mod makeover was to redouble his efforts in the same direction. Just as bold in their bluff and promises but much less twitchy, Lambert and Stamp not only offered to match the £20 weekly wage Gorden was paying each of the four musicians, but bet a further £120 that they could get the group a Top 20 hit.
Believing the posh Kit to be wealthy—in fact, he had to sell a family heirloom to bankroll the band’s wages—the four musicians decided to take the pair’s offer. The way was smoothed when it was found that Pete’s parents had cannily neglected to countersign the band’s management contract when he was legally underage, so rendering it invalid. Meaden, meanwhile, was paid off with £500 in cash.
The deal that Lambert and Stamp agreed with the band was a six-way earnings split, with the notable exception—at the insistence of his parents, who struck out that clause from the contract—of Pete’s songwriting publishing earnings. Though a mere detail in August 1964, this would become a huge issue over time, as Pete got into his stride as a songwriter: not only would he create most of the band’s material but, as a result, he would earn a great deal more money than the other three. Roger was the founder of the group and by far its most focused and determined member, but his leadership had to be continuously asserted in the face of his arty layabout guitarist’s creative talent.
Troublesome in a different way was that Roger was being pressured to live a lie: that he was not, in fact, married. Teenage girls drove record sales, and they liked their pop stars single and hypothetically available—the latter of which certainly applied to the relentlessly philandering Roger, but the former did not, since not only had he married Jacqueline Rickman the year before but they had just produced a baby, Simon. But just as Roger was hungry for the fringe benefits of being a pop singer, his determination to make the band succeed was unwavering.
Still calling themselves the High Numbers, the four continued to work on their live act, building their support and venturing beyond their west London stronghold. Kit and Chris had not forgotten their original idea to make a movie, so they shot footage of the band onstage in Harrow’s Railway Hotel, performing mod-friendly songs by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Howlin’ Wolf, and Jessie Hill. Pete is twitchy, angular, and strange, his moves almost from the school of minimalist modern dance, while Roger, short and dressed for August in summer clothes, has an air of menace behind his shades. Yet upstaging them both is Keith—manic and flailing, like no drummer before him. Word of mouth drew the curious as well as the committed over the course of the rest of the year, with Tuesday nights at the Railway Hotel being where the band felt most at home.
The band were working on flashing stage lights and other attention-grabbers when they played big halls, as they did just a week after that filmed Railway Hotel show on a bill at Blackpool’s Opera House, below the Kinks and untouchable headliners the Beatles. A bit older than the High Numbers, the Beatles needed no light show nor even to perform audibly, drowned out as they were by their screaming, pants-wetting fans. As for the Kinks— four-piece rock rivals from north London—they were ahead of the west Londoners, too: streaking up the charts to No. 1, their song “You Really Got Me” delivered precisely the forceful, moody menace on record that Roger, Pete, John, and Keith were honing on stage. The four realized how far they had to go.
When the breakthrough came, it was literal. Overnight, it became the band’s gimmick, what made them stand out, and what came to define them—especially when art student Pete began weaving theory into practice . . . Auto-destruction!
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Explore 50 years of The Who with stories, photos, memorabilia, and more.
Famed music journalist Mat Snow celebrates fifty years of the Who’s debut album, My Generation, with this complete illustrated history of the legendary rock band. Loaded with photos, memorabilia, and stories of rock decadence like no other, this book is the ideal visual companion for Who fans all over the world.
The Who formed in 1964 with lead singer Roger Daltrey, guitarist Pete Townshend, bassist John Entwhistle, and drummer Keith Moon, and continued on to become one of the best-selling bands of all time.
With an in-depth look of the Who’s hit albums, including My Generation (1965), A Quick One (1966), The Who Sell Out (1967), Tommy (1969), Who’s Next (1971), Quadrophenia (1973), The Who By Numbers (1975), and more, The Who is a must-have addition to any music library.
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