The Who's success was nearly cut short when one of them nearly killed another
band member in a drunken fight — and the instigator may not be who you'd expect.
Born in 1945, young Pete Townshend spent the first few years of his life in a West
London area hit hard by German bombing raids during World War II, which had ended just a few
months after he was born. Death permeated daily life. He told The Daily Telegraph,
"When I was four I lived in a house where 12 people had died.
We played in bomb sites, we'd find bits of bodies, skeletons, and watches every day."
When he was five, his parents split up and sent him to spend two years with
his maternal grandmother. Townshend told Rolling Stone that it was a nightmare.
"I would go to the shop with my grandmother and buy myself a toy
and she would take the toy and put it in a cupboard. Then when my mother came to see me,
my grandmother would make me get all the toys out as though I'd been playing with them. Then
when my mother had gone, I'd have to put them all away again. She was a complete head case."
Townshend said that the relationship with his grandmother is the one part
of his life he hadn't really come to terms with. And in "Pete Townshend:
Minstrel's Dilemma," he explained that he kind of didn't want to.
"If I was able to go into regressive hypnosis and either find some terrible
trauma or nothing at all, it would be equally damaging to me as an artist."
Like Pete Townshend, Who singer Roger Daltrey was also born in England toward
the end of World War II. According to the rock star's memoir "Thanks a Lot
Mr. Kibblewhite," he was a tough teenager prone to starting fights, making trouble,
and bugging teachers. On his 15th birthday, he was expelled from school. He wrote,
"It had probably been on the cards for a while. I'd been caught smoking. I'd been caught playing
truant. I was disruptive in class because I just wanted to be left alone by these teachers."
"It is all that frustration, you do feel that you're not understood,
you're not heard. I called it my Tommy period."
But the instigating incident that caused his headmaster to toss him out was when
he brought his air rifle to school. In the locker room after soccer practice, another
kid grabbed Daltrey's gun and fired it. The pellet ricocheted off a wall and into another kid's eye.
The student who actually fired the gun wasn't punished, while Daltrey,
as the owner of the gun, received six smacks to his rear end as well as expulsion.
The Who experienced its commercial breakthrough in 1965 when its singles "Anyway, Anyhow,
Anywhere" and "My Generation" hit the top 10 in the United Kingdom. The band was on
its way to fame and fortune, but it almost all came to an abrupt end.
During a difficult tour in 1966, Keith Moon's substance abuse problems grew worse,
and when Roger Daltrey discovered Moon's cache of intoxicating pills, he flushed them down a toilet.
Moon, wielding a tambourine, confronted Daltrey, but the singer quickly took care of the situation
by punching his drummer right in the nose. Daltrey said in "Roger Daltrey: The Biography,"
"It took about five people to hold me off him. It wasn't just because I hated him,
it was because I loved the band so much and thought it was being destroyed by those pills."
Pete Townshend and John Entwistle believed Daltrey had not behaved properly,
so they fired him. But after one show without him,
the band's management convinced them that they needed Daltrey, and he was welcomed back.
While getting ready to hit the road in support of "Quadrophenia" in 1973, MCA Records ordered
The Who to make a promotional film. That ate up time Roger Daltrey would've rather
spent on actual music-related tasks, and when he mentioned to Pete Townshend how annoyed he was,
the guitarist came unglued. Daltrey wrote in his memoir "Thanks a Lot Mr. Kibblewhite,"
"Pete, fueled by the best part of a bottle of brandy, went off like a firecracker. He
was up in my face, prodding me. 'You'll do what you're f—ing well told,' he sneered."
Sensing a fight, the band's roadies held Daltrey back from physically retaliating,
only for Townshend to prod them to release the singer. Daltrey wrote,
"'Let him go!' screamed Pete. 'I'll kill the little f—er.' They let me go."
But Townshend had seriously miscalculated. After he threw a guitar at Daltrey's head,
Daltrey leveled Townshend with an uppercut. Townshend
fell and cracked his head on the ground. Daltrey later recalled,
"I thought I'd killed him."
Feeling immediate and immense guilt, Daltrey rode with Townshend in the back
of the hospital-bound ambulance, holding his hand the whole time.
"I just loved to fight. Still do!"
One night in January 1970, Keith Moon, and a group that included his friend and driver Neil Boland,
attended the opening of a Hatfield, England, pub called the Red Lion. Also in the bar that night:
a group of what Rolling Stone called "jeering skinheads."
When things got too intense, Moon and his party tried to leave and made their
way to the drummer's waiting Bentley. But their escape attempt turned to tragedy.
The locals threw rocks at the car, then attempted to flip it as Boland tried to drive away. In the
chaos, Boland wound up outside of the vehicle and Moon took the wheel. As the fighting continued,
Boland became caught underneath the car and was dragged for some distance.
Boland was pronounced dead at a local hospital,
and Moon was initially charged with drunk driving, driving without a license,
and driving without insurance. He was cleared of everything, with a judge telling the drummer,
"You had no choice but to act the way you did and no moral culpability is attached to you."
Moon reportedly never shook the guilt of accidentally killing Boland. His
mistress Pamela Des Barres later told The Sun,
"One night when we were in bed he broke down and started to cry, calling himself a murderer. He
would wake up screaming. It was so sad because it was obviously an accident but he blamed himself."
Even in the world of '60s and '70s rock music where drinking hard and living it up were a matter
of course, Keith Moon was known for his wild behavior fueled by his prodigious appetite for
alcohol. For example, in 1973, Moon was so loaded up on tranquilizers and brandy that he passed
out behind his drum kit during a San Francisco concert. By 1978, Moon came to the conclusion
that his imbibing had gotten out of hand, telling "Good Morning America" that most days he was,
"Quite out of control. Amazingly drunk."
Moon attempted to quit drinking with the help of a doctor, who prescribed
him Heminevrin — a powerful sedative that helps alcoholics stop drinking by limiting withdrawal
symptoms. On the evening of September 7, 1978, Moon went out to a club and ingested
more than 30 of his pills. An overdose of Hemineverin can shut down the esophagus,
which prevents vomiting. Moon choked in his sleep and died. He was 32.
The Who was set to play Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum on December 3, 1979,
and the seating arrangement for the show was, like most rock concerts of the time,
largely "festival" style — unreserved, standing-room-only, general admission. About
14,000 people would have to battle each other to get as close to the stage as possible.
Fans started to gather for the evening show at about 1:30 p.m., and by 6:30 p.m. a crowd of
8,000 aggressively pushed against the doors. It was 36 degrees and windy and the crowd didn't
want to wait for the doors to open at 7:05. The pushing turned into a stampede — people
got knocked down, lifted up, and trampled as thousands rushed to get inside the doors,
of which only two out of 16 were fully open.
The concert proceeded normally, but just before the scheduled encore,
The Who's manager, Bill Curbishly, told the band to do that part of the show
quickly because something very bad had happened. At the conclusion of the show,
Curbishly told his clients that the pre-show stampede had proved fatal:
11 people died that night. A few weeks later, the Cincinnati City Council passed a law that banned
festival seating at concerts in the hopes of preventing another unspeakable tragedy.
Labeled "the loudest band on Earth," The Who once set a record for concert
noise. The band's concert on May 31, 1976, in London reached 126 decibels,
which is just slightly above the threshold for causing pain and injury to the ears.
Playing at or near those levels every night for decades left all three of the longest-surviving
members of The Who with serious to severe hearing problems. Pete Townshend's tinnitus got so bad
that the band canceled a spring 2010 tour, and he now reportedly wears hearing aids in both
ears. Townshend told the BBC that the late John Entwistle's hearing was so damaged that in 2000
he couldn't hear the rest of the band well enough to keep time with the music. And at a 2018 solo
show in Las Vegas, The Mirror reported that Roger Daltrey told the crowd he employs in-ear monitors
and lip-reading to be able to sing along to the music as he is, quote, "very, very deaf."
"People often come up and blame me for the fact that they're deaf."
The Who recorded into the '80s and, from the '90s on,
consistently toured. After a handful of dates in England, the band's 2002 tour came to the U.S.,
with the first concert scheduled to hit Las Vegas on June 28. That show didn't happen because the
night before, 57-year-old Who bassist John Entwistle died. According to The Guardian,
after spending the evening knocking back drinks with his bandmates, Entwistle entered his room
at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino at about 3 a.m. with an exotic dancer and self-proclaimed groupie.
When she awoke the next morning at about 10 a.m., she discovered Entwistle unresponsive
and his body cold. Her attempts to revive the bassist failed, as did those by paramedics.
An investigation by the Clark County medical examiner's office ruled that
he died from a heart attack triggered by cocaine consumed earlier in the evening.
Just four days after Entwistle's death, The Who continued as a duo; Daltrey and
Townshend were back on the road, working with hired musicians to round out the band.
For decades, Roger Daltrey was in possession of one of the richest,
and most powerful voices in rock. His singing style was one part rasp, one part throaty wail,
but singing that way night after night for years took a severe toll on his vocal
health. The Who took a lengthy break before recording the 1978 album "Who Are You" in
no small part because Daltrey had to recover from throat surgery following an infection.
In 2009, the singer played several Who concerts and found himself unable to hit the notes he
could usually hit. Six weeks before the band played the Super Bowl Halftime Show,
Daltrey elected to have surgery rather than risk losing his voice
entirely. He told CBS News that he sought out help at the Mass General Voice Center,
where he was diagnosed with pre-cancerous dysplasia and underwent an operation.
"I got depressed after surgery, during what I call the big silence,
that's when I realized what it would be like to not have a voice."
In 2003, the FBI led a global sting to reduce the distribution of obscene material featuring
children. The U.K. division, Operation Ore, ensnared 1,600 people — among them
Pete Townshend of The Who. Townshend told authorities that in 1999, he'd used his
credit card to access a website purportedly containing illicit materials because he was
attempting to reveal how the banking industry was connected to child abuse content. This was an
important cause for the rocker, who'd experienced childhood abuse himself. He told BBC Radio 4,
"What happened is that I did not enter the website,
I did make the transaction which I immediately canceled."
After a four month investigation by London's Metropolitan Police, Townshend was cleared of
all criminal charges. However, he was required to list himself on the U.K.'s sex offender
national registry for a period of five years because he'd accessed that illegal website.
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues,
help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).