Original subtitles

Corrected by mi0o

(SINGING) I'm not trying to cause a big sensation

Talking 'bout my generation

DALTREY: Whatever happened that day

when Keith Moon joined John, Pete and myself on the stage,

something happened.

There are billions of people on this planet.

What the fuck put four total individuals

together on the stage in Greenford to make this music?

What the fuck did that?

(WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN PLAYING)

(AIR RAID SIREN BLARING)

(BOMBS EXPLODING)

TOWNSHEND: Towards the end of the war, everything was secret.

You never knew whether you were winning or losing,

and most of the time they were saying you were winning

when you felt that you were losing.

I was born into that world.

I was born in the hour that Albert Speer was arrested.

He was Hitler's premier architect.

I don't mean war architect. He was an actual architect.

My father got these two messages.

One was, "Speer's been captured,"

and the other was, "It's a boy, Mr. Townshend."

DALTREY: When I think about my childhood in the late '40s, '50s,

it's almost like the world was black and white.

It is very weird.

Very Spartan living. We were still on food rationing.

No cars in the street.

ENTWISTLE: After the war

there was like bombed-out buildings that had loads of bricks,

so we didn't need Lego. We had the real thing.

TOWNSHEND: Practically everybody that I know that I grew up with,

if they were wild and crazy and weird, or in a band,

the chances were that they had some weird shit happen to them

when they were kids.

My parents were both working dance-band musicians,

and I grew up with the music of my father,

which was the Basie Band, the Ellington Band,

and great singers like Sarah Vaughan and Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.

And I felt I couldn't even begin to emulate or occupy their territory.

(JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING)

We were all interested in traditional jazz at the time.

To me, trad jazz was something that was already a rebellious threat

to the kind of serene dance-hall dance music that my father played.

NARRATOR: The first connection between the four talents of The Who

came in 1959 at a West London boys' school.

TOWNSHEND: I met John at Acton County Grammar School.

Big guy. Funny.

Very sharply dressed.

John and Pete didn't really get to know one another well

until they started at playing instruments together.

Right from the beginning and right the way through our life,

he was a great musical ally.

(BORIS THE SPIDER INSTRUMENTAL PLAYING)

Right over here, you're... John.

You're John? John.

And you're from... London, too.

From London, too? Yeah.

He was calling himself John Allison

because his girlfriend was, of course, called Allison.

We thought "Entwistle" was a really strange name for a band member.

And we tried John Brown, and we thought, "Well, no."

"He's John Entwistle."

The Who wouldn't have been The Who without Entwistle.

He would fill the sound up with the bass.

If you actually listen to any Who record and you isolate the bass,

it's pretty astonishing what he's doing.

It's nothing to do with what a normal bass player would do.

(SINGING) I'm gonna raise a fuss

I'm gonna raise a holler

Entwistle stood still.

CHRIS ENTWISTLE: You had Pete swinging his arm around like a windmill,

you had Roger throwing his microphone around all over the place,

Keith smacking away at the drums,

and Dad stood away in the corner playing quietly.

(SINGING) My boss said

No dice, son, you gotta work late

Sometimes I wonder

WISE: I used to get cross

that they didn't show John so much on the television.

The cameras were always on Pete and Roge.

He was like the central point in the spinning world, you know.

I think a lot of people don't understand

is that what he was doing is he was playing like a Bach organ.

It was huge, massive, rich sound.

So I used to find my way inside that.

And I used to sit with John and sit inside,

and he would follow me and support me and we'd play together.

EDGE: John had such facility as a player

and really very unique.

I don't think anyone had really gone into lead bass playing.

STAMP: He wasn't actually a quiet guy.

He was just a very sardonic guy.

Very cynical. He was very funny,

but in that sort of laid-back way.

CURBISHLEY: Entwistle was uncompromising

in leading his own life, you know.

JOHNS: Afraid John takes after me.

I like music, dancing, enjoying myself, drinking.

I love partying.

I never, ever felt

that John had any addictive problems at all, except one,

which began with an "H."

It's a big shop in London called Harrods.

That was his one addiction.

ALLISON: He could never buy one pair of shoes,

he always bought a dozen, in each color,

and the shirts and the trousers.

He was certainly well-dressed.

Don't know about that skeleton fucking leather thing, though,

that John Entwistle was... What's all that about?

JOHNS: He was very musical right from the age of three.

He knew all the pop songs that were in the charts.

And he'd sing for hours.

My first date with John

was to go to a Boys' Brigade thing at the Albert Hall.

He used to play the bugle.

He joined the school orchestra.

He wanted to play the trumpet, but they didn't have any left.

The only instrument left was the French horn.

He practiced in the loo. He became quite proficient.

DALTREY: John Entwistle was the only one of us

that kind of had any musical training at all.

TOWNSHEND: He made his own first bass with his own hands, you know.

What he realized was that

he had the power to change the fucking instrument.

You know, you don't change the trumpet.

But the base guitar was relatively new.

He started to play it differently, hold it differently.

Being on stage with a guitar, with a big amplifier,

it became his voice.

DALTREY: I was walking down the road one day coming home from work,

I worked in a sheet-metalwork factory.

I noticed this guy coming towards me

who I recognized from being at school.

And across his shoulder he's got this strange-Iooking instrument.

So, I said to him, you know, stupidly, "What you got there?"

He said, "It's a bass!"

They all went to the same school.

Roger was at the same school, but he got expelled.

ALLISON: I think he was accused of setting fire to the school.

Roger was a bit of a tearaway.

DALTREY: It's been said that I was a bully

later on in my school career.

But I don't think I actually was.

I just loved to fight.

Still do.

TOWNSHEND: When I first met Roger,

he was one of the most powerful, charismatic

and, literally, powerful men I'd ever come across.

You know, he was like Elvis Presley.

DALTREY: Elvis, to me, was the guy I wanted to be.

But realistically, the guy who showed me that I could...

Instead of just dreaming about this,

could actually go out there and do it,

was a guy called Lonnie Donegan.

(PLAYING PUTTING ON THE STYLE)

(SINGING) Sweet 16 Goes to church just to see the boys

Lonnie Donegan was a big influence on a lot of people.

It was the rhythm, the beat, and the freshness of it.

(SINGING) He's only putting on the style, yeah

Putting on the agony

Putting on the style

It had that kind of rock and roll sort of pace to it.

Skiffle is really basically, early American folk songs.

It was so easy. Anyone could make a skiffle groove. You could do it with home objects.

For drums, we had an old washing board.

Tea-chest bass, which is basically a tea chest

with a piece of string and a broomstick.

It lifted the music from, like, big bands

into people's parlors.

You could do it yourself, like.

DALTREY: Every street in Shepherd's Bush

had its own skiffle group.

NARRATOR: On Fielding Road, Roger Daltrey founded The Detours

with a guitar he made himself at the sheet-metal factory.

At the age of 17 or 18, you know, he was the king of the neighborhood.

So anyway, I'm walking home from work one night,

and immediately I kind of felt a bonding with this guy.

So I said, "You in a band?" And he said, "Yeah, I'm in a band."

I said, "Well, you know, have you got any work?"

He said, "No." I said, "Well, we have."

You know, I said, "Do you get paid when you work?"

He said, "No." I said, "We do."

I was lying.

And I said, "Well, you know, we're looking for a bass player.

"Would you like to join?"

Shortly after, Reg Bowen, on rhythm guitar, left the band,

John said, "Well, I know someone who's a good rhythm player."

So, we said, "Well, bring him along."

John was very important for me because he never let me go.

He could've done. A couple of the other guys did let me go.

John was very encouraging to me, and nurturing,

and he used to constantly say to me, "No, you're a good musician."

He was just vital to me in those days.

NARRATOR: By 1962, The Detours were playing pubs as a five-piece.

John on bass, Doug Sandom on the drums,

Pete played rhythm guitar,

Colin Dawson singing, Roger playing lead guitar.

It was Roger's band. The Detours were Roger's band.

And Roger was the driving force.

And Roger supplied all the energy, and he drove the van,

and he picked people up and he arranged everything.

(SINGING) Someway, someday I'll find a way

To make you see my way

NARRATOR: In '63, Roger gave up the guitar,

fired the singer, and took over as frontman.

When there was just the three of us as a band,

just two instruments, Pete and John,

the only thing with strings was Pete and John,

and I remember saying to him, "It sounds fucking great!"

(SINGING) You see my way

(MAN SINGING BLUES) Oh, yeah

Oh, yeah

Everything gonna be all right this morning

TOWNSHEND: All the other guys in the band were working for a living, you know,

and I was at art school. I was on a grant.

I was having an easy life.

I was smoking dope, listening to, you know, records.

BARNES: I met Pete when we were in art school,

and I didn't even know he was in a band.

We'd got this flat

that had belonged to this American guy, Tom Wright.

DALTREY: Tom Wright, who had a huge blues

archive from the States...

(SINGING) Now, when I was a young boy

At the age of five

All that early blues stuff,

John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed...

STAMP: All those young kids loved the blues,

because the working class was in a similar sociological position.

You know what I mean? To the blacks in America.

My father was in the war. His ship gets torpedoed.

My mother, who's pregnant, goes to the shipping office,

as she did every week, to get his salary.

And they say, "Oh, no, there's no salary this week, Mrs. Stamp.

"The ship's gone down."

Right? So that was the status of the working class, right?

(MAN SINGING) Well, it's a shame, shame, shame

Shame, shame on you

We identified with American blues

and those early black American artists.

We started listening to that, and we thought, "Well this is great."

And we started playing the blues.

I played the harmonica.

Through that music

we became aware of the limitations of our drummer.

NARRATOR: Doug Sandom was fired in April of 1964.

DALTREY: So we got a session drummer in

for a couple of gigs we had lined up.

And we were playing one night

at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford.

All I remember is I was standing on stage getting ready to take a break,

(STAMMERING) When a gingerbread man

appeared in the audience in front of me,

looking up at me with his great big puppy-dog brown eyes.

(CHUCKLING) He wanted to be a Beach Boy

so he bought some hydrogen peroxide and bleached his hair

and it'd come out bright orange.

And he came up, and with all the arrogance in the world, you know,

"I hear you're looking for a drummer.

"Well, I'm much better than the one you've got."

He sat down.

Peter starts off with a pick screeching down the string.

And it gets into a very heavy rift.

All of a sudden it's like a jet engine

started up in the back of me.

It was like magic.

All of a sudden, everything worked.

We were just astonished. This kid was the missing link.

And it was obvious from the first minute of him playing with us.

The whole dance floor stopped and started looking. It was extraordinary.

BARNES: You didn't watch drummers.

He was the only drummer I know that you'd watch.

Moon was a star.

He was a shooting star, that's what he was.

He was clearly an alcoholic, an addict, a sex addict.

(WHO ARE YOU PLAYING)

(SINGING) Who are you?

Who, who? Who, who?

GOLDSMITH: On the one hand, he was this lunatic

who, you know, couldn't wait to get on a drum kit and just explode with it.

(SINGING) Who are you?

And on the other hand, he was a very quiet, saddened person.

(SINGING) Who are you?

TOWNSHEND: He clearly had tremendous esteem issue problems.

He was a complex little ball of difficulty.

(INTERVIEWER SPEAKING)

Just leave and get drunk.

He wasn't like that as a boy. That's what I can't understand.

I mean, he always did as he was told.

He was very quiet and I had no problem with him at all.

He was good boy.

NARRATOR: By the time he was 16,

Moon was playing American surf music

in a band called The Beachcombers.

The Beachcombers was the first band I remember him having at home

and setting up in the front room.

Keith liked the Beach Boys. I didn't like them.

(SINGING MOCKINGLY) "...fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-Bird away"

Woo, woo Woo, woo...

You know, and they would sing away.

(SINGING) Ba ba ba ba Barbara Ann Oh, Barbara Ann

Ba ba ba ba Barbara Ann

You got me rockin' and a-rollin'

Rockin' and a-reelin' Barbara Ann

TOWNSHEND: He liked to do those backing vocals,

you know, the girlie backing vocals in a lot of the songs.

The other thing that's really important, of course,

is that Keith was a very lyrical drummer.

Keith was like an orchestra on the drums.

He wasn't a time drummer like...

(IMITATES SIMPLE RHYTHM)

It was, like, all around the kit.

DALTREY: Moon was doing things

that just made us all work 100% harder.

Not faster, not slower, 100% harder.

(LEAVING HERE PLAYING)

NARRATOR: In late April, 1964,

he joined The Detours and started playing the blues.

(SINGING) Hey, fellas, have you heard the news?

DALTREY: When you've got a 12-bar sequence, can become monotonous.

Moonie had "a very short attention span when it came to boredom.

He started to double up the beat.

And that led to Pete doubling the guitar,

it led John to play more jazzy bits in between,

and from that, what we became famous for

evolved.

That's when The Who started to have its own identity.

We played the blues, but we'd put our own stamp on it.

We'd been The Detours for quite a while,

and we'd built up quite a following in West London

on the pub circuit.

TOWNSHEND: John Entwistle, he'd heard about this band

who'd got a record out in America called The Detours.

So we sat around and had this think tank in Sunnyside Road,

where Barney and I had a flat.

And the band never came back there.

I don't think they'd ever been before.

Because Pete and I were art students smoking dope,

and they didn't approve.

And we were just jokingly throwing names around.

BARNES: We were trying to be avant-garde or something.

Think of like, "The Nothing," or things with names like that.

I came up with "The Hair." That was the...

'Cause everything was about hair at the time.

BARNES: And I said "The Who,"

'cause basically I was just thinking of it on posters.

You know, it's one of those very quick conversations.

"The Hair!" "The Who!"

And everybody was laughing at each one.

And for awhile, it was kind of a bit of a war.

I said, "Well, we could call it 'The Hair and The Who."'

It sounded like a pub.

DALTREY: But The Who was something we came back to.

It didn't take very long for us to carry our audience into the change.

Within two weeks, they'd forgotten about The Detours

and they knew that it was The Who.

(CUT MY HAIR PLAYING)

(SINGING) I'm dressed right for a beach fight

But I just can't explain

JONES: We were the first teenagers after the war.

All we wanted to do was just liberate ourselves, really,

and have fun.

REPORTER: South Coast police have warned

that if the fights between rival gangs of Mods and Rockers continue...

CURBISHLEY: We used to go Brighton, areas like that,

and it was traditional that you would end up clashing.

We were teenagers together. We were Mods.

It was all about pop-art gang culture.

STAMP: We were called Mods 'cause we were modernist.

There was a type of, like, "Fuck you," rebellious sort of behavior

about the Mod kids.

It was very much, "Let's get out of this class system."

SHAW: The original Mods were very smart.

Short, Italian jackets, tight trousers, Winkle Picker shoes.

STAMP: Perfectly tailored sort of skintight sort of sharkskin suits,

with a little mascara on and a special haircut on Saturday nights.

CURBISHLEY: We spent all of our money on clothes.

We were like little peacocks.

(SINGING) I'm the hippiest number in town

And I'll tell you why

And I'll tell you why

I'm the snappiest dresser right down to my inch-wide tie

To my inch-wide tie

Along came this guy called Pete Meaden. He was a publicist.

And he transformed the band.

DALTREY: He certainly had a finger on the pulse

of this embryo of a fashion seed.

And Pete Meaden had this theory

that the Mods were like the new religion,

the new army, the new everything,

and projected that onto us as individuals.

DALTREY: He said, "Right, get out there, cut your hair,

"go out Carnaby Street, buy all the clever gear,"

and all of a sudden, we're a Mod band.

Pete Meaden also said, "You've got to change the name, The Who."

And in that sense, he was right in getting us to be Mods.

But he was wrong in changing the name The Who to The High Numbers.

We kept seeing these posters for The High Numbers, "The Who" in brackets.

ALAN GARRISON: They used to play in West Hampstead at the Railway Club.

And it was a little hall, tiny little shabby hall.

The Who came up as The High Numbers,

and we didn't know who they were. We just went up there.

And the drummer was absolutely mental.

(PLAYING I GO TTA DANCE TO KEEP FROM CRYING)

(SINGING) Gather 'round, my friends, here

Help me forget my hurting tears

About the only girl I ever loved

The only one, baby

I gotta dance just to keep from crying

Gotta dance just to keep from crying

Whoa, do the flop

Do the flop

Do the twist Do the twist

Everybody, it goes like this

You gotta dance got me swaying got me, all right

Gotta dance got me swaying got me, all right

Do the bird Do the bird

Do the fly Do the fly

Come on, gang, you know By, by, by, oh, yeah

They were amazing. But it was nothing like the Beatles,

even the Stones, you know. It was nothing like that.

And they were playing music that you didn't hear very often,

Tamla Motown and blues.

They were a Mod band and I was a Mod.

(SINGING) Yeah, baby, so you know it's all right

STAMP: When I met Kit,

we decided to start to come up with an idea to make a film.

We came up with a concept that we would find a group,

we would manage the group to success,

and we would all the time film it.

This was the idea.

Kit and I, we went up and down England looking for a group.

We couldn't find anyone to put in the film, basically,

until we saw The High Numbers.

(SINGING) Let me tell you 'bout ooh poo pah doo

They call me the most

Yeah, ooh poo pah doo

They call me the most

Lambert said immediately he knew that was the band he was looking for.

(SINGING) Yeah, and I won't stop trying

Till I create a disturbance

DALTREY: We met Lambert and Stamp,

and the first thing they wanted to do...

They'd loved everything else about us,

except the name.

And when we told them we used to be called The Who, they went, "Great!"

STAMP: They were very individual.

They didn't really get along, you know, that personally.

I'd been in a gang in my adolescence. It wasn't that different.

SHAW: They just came across...

Not antisocial, but they weren't there to try to please people.

They were there to do what they were gonna do,

and if you liked it, that's up to you.

Pete was using just very high-volume amplifiers.

He would, because of the power in the amplifier, create feedback.

(FEEDBACK SCREECHING)

He did this thing where he used to lift the guitar up like this.

We had a very low ceiling there.

I used to bang it to make it go boing, boing, boing, boing.

BARNES: And the guitar neck went through the ceiling.

And when it broke, I thought, "Well, I may as well finish it off."

We just stood there and... "What is going on here? It's great."

(LAUGHING)

I mean, nobody had ever smashed anything on a stage.

I saw Keith looking at me.

Next week I start banging my other guitar

and immediately the drums were over, sticks through.

BARNES: Pete said afterwards,

"Once I knew that Moonie was with me, then I would do it again."

TOWNSHEND: The guitar became, when it was electrified, in my case,

an instrument of control, aggression, latent violence.

People say to me, you know, "It's just stagecraft, isn't it?

"Just showing off, smashing your guitar."

You know, to me it was far, far, far more than that.

NARRATOR: At art school,

Pete and Barnesy had attended lectures by Gustav Metzger,

a German artist who destroyed his creations

as a political protest against nuclear weapons.

TOWNSHEND: Gustav Metzger came to my college to do lectures.

It was called the Destruction in Art Symposium.

Yoko Ono did that thing where she had her clothes cut up,

and he slashed his way through a canvas with a samurai sword,

and next thing I knew I'm breaking up guitars at gigs.

STAMP: I thought it was a bit sort of airy-fairy, do you know what I mean?

It was a bit sort of like, "Why bother," you know?

"You're fucking angry, you're smashing your guitar up,

"it looks great," you know.

It does suggest the rage that we all feel.

DALTREY: It really did annoy me that the visual

kind of took over from what was really going on.

I'd even have the guys in the band going,

"What a lot of pompous, pretentious drivel."

And I'd go, "No, it's autodestructive art!"

Pete, even in those days, was in a class of his own.

It was this act, you know, smashing up the instruments,

feedback, Pete's windmilling arm.

He did this sort of thing that the kids called the Birdman.

DALTREY: Lambert and Stamp got us a gig at the Marquee in the west end of London.

And Kit had this poster made of Pete with a guitar and the bird-like...

Sideways, and the profile of his nose.

Fabulous. Absolutely classic.

You could not ignore that poster.

It was, like, "What is The Who?"

Within a month,

the queues would be all the way down Waldorf Street,

and they would be turning thousands of people away.

It was incredible.

I've got to admit that I felt that we were special.

(SINGING) Whenever she calls my name

Yeah, yeah, yeah I can't explain

I feel I feel

And I feel I feel

I feel this burning pain

DALTREY: It's to do with attitude.

It's like, you can hit your hand like that, that's a tempo.

Or you can hit it like this.

Now, it's two totally different attitudes.

The tempo hasn't changed at all.

And The Who always did it with that attitude of drive.

(SINGING) Oh, yeah Oh, yeah

Oh, yeah Oh, yeah

Heatwave

Burning in my heart Heatwave

DALTREY: I remember that the one thing

that we were very much aware of

was that we were still copying other people's songs.

NARRATOR: By 1964,

The Beatles were revolutionizing popular music

with their songwriting.

The Rolling Stones and the Kinks

joined the British invasion of America

by recording original material.

(SINGING) Girl, you really got me going

You got me so I don't know what I'm doing

We needed a songwriter in the group,

and Pete turned out to be one.

TOWNSHEND: I listened to a couple of Kinks songs

and just produced this rhythm.

(PLAYING I CAN'T EXPLAIN)

(SINGING) Got a feeling inside

Can't explain

It's a certain kind

Can't explain

I feel hot and cold

Can't explain

Yeah, down in my soul, yeah

Can't explain

DALTREY: Unlike The Kinks,

what, on the surface, appears to be a very frilly little pop song

is a much, much bigger statement from the vocal.

You know, "I've got a feeling inside I can't explain."

And you could see that Townshend as a writer had a huge potential.

'Cause he wasn't going the normal way that pop songs go.

It was going internal.

Can't explain

I think it's love

Try to say it to you when I feel blue

But I can't explain

But back in those early days, I thought, you know,

"I'm not gonna write songs forever," you know?

"This is boring." You know?

I really thought Can't Explain was quite childish.

NARRATOR: Pete's home-recorded demo of the song would get them signed.

He was 19.

He had it on tape, which I played over the phone to Shel Talmy.

The demo I heard was about a minute and 10 seconds long.

Probably safe to say in about the first 30 to 45 seconds

I said, "Yes!"

I said, "I will get us a deal."

DALTREY: Kit told us this recording deal.

And I mean, I'm a Shepherd's Bush boy.

You know, I work the markets.

When Kit told us our percentage,

it had something like a couple of cents on the end of it.

BARNES: When Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were managing the band,

they got a very bad deal then.

SHAW: I went around to all the record shops,

gave them free copies, gave them posters.

And I helped push it that way.

But then, luckily, Radio Caroline played it.

(WOMAN SINGING) Caroline, sign of the nation

Caroline!

(I CAN'T EXPLAIN PLAYING ON RADIO)

RADIO DJ: 12:00 midnight tonight.

Steve Young along until 3:00 a. M...

THE WHO ON RADIO: Got a feeling inside

Can't explain

Radio Caroline was the first of the pirate radio station.

'Cause radio was controlled in England by the BBC.

And suddenly these ships out of England jurisdictions

started to pump the music out into England

and took off like a rocket.

DALTREY: The truth is, without pirate radio,

the English invasion and all that pop scene would not have happened.

(SINGING) Can't explain

I think it's love

Try to say it to you when I feel blue

I can't explain

NARRATOR: Released January 15, 1965,

I Can't Explain would climb to number eight

on the new Musical Express chart.

TOWNSHEND: I was driving over Hammersmith Flyover

and heard Can't Explain on the radio,

and thought, "Wow!"

You know, "I've got a commission, I've got a patron,

"This is art."

NARRATOR: Brunswick Records sold 104,000 copies of the single.

The boys made �250 each.

(SINGING) I said I can't explain

(AUDIENCE CHEERING)

It was chaos, 'cause we were smashing up all this equipment,

and I had no money.

I used to take all Pete's guitars

and in between a show putting them together. It was all...

While one was being glued,

the other one would be all set from the day before.

And the main thing was "Keep the band working."

(AUDIENCE SCREAMING)

(SINGING) I can go any way

Way I choose

I can live anyhow

Win or lose

I can go anywhere

DALTREY: In those days, it wasn't uncommon for us

to do a show at 8:00 till 9:00,

travel 150 miles,

and then do another show at midnight till 1:00

We used to take amphetamines.

Only I discovered that taking amphetamines

didn't go with being a good singer.

(SINGING) Oh, see

C. C. Rider

Oh, see

What you have done now

DALTREY: And it build up like no tomorrow,

and their playing became just a noise.

The tempos went out the window,

volumes went out the window,

and everything we'd worked to be good at

suddenly disappeared out the window, due to amphetamines.

So it all came to a head at one show

where I just gave up onstage, left the stage,

went back to the dressing room,

got the bag of amphetamines

and made these guys flush them down the toilet.

Moon went up like a rocket and hit me with a tambourine.

I laid into Moonie, we ended up in a real good punch-up.

The roadies pulled us apart, of course,

but the damage had been done.

Basically, I was thrown out of the band.

At that moment, I didn't give a fuck,

'cause if that was gonna be the band,

as they had been on amphetamines,

wasn't worth being in anyway.

(SINGING) So sad about us

He had been this sort of tough guy, boss of the group.

Roger puts this band together,

and then finds the three dwarfs that he's brought in to support him

suddenly sort of leaving him behind.

(SINGING) Sad that the news is out now

DALTREY: It was the first time in my life that I realized

that I loved something else other than myself.

And I thought, "Well, if I'm being thrown out for being like I was,

"then I'll have to change,

"because the band is more important to me than anything."

After about four weeks, they came back and said,

"Look, you're back in the band but you're on probation.

"And one more outburst like that and you're out."

STAMP: Where's Pete at?

I have absolutely no idea. Better go and find him.

NARRATOR: Four weeks after the blow-up in Copenhagen,

The Who returned to the studio to record Pete's latest creation.

When you're a kid and you pick up a guitar for the first time,

you just wanna make that sound.

(PLAYING MY GENERATION)

(PLAYING MY GENERATION)

(SINGING) People try to put us down

Talking 'bout my generation

Just because we get around

Talking 'bout my generation

STAMP: My Generation was the song

that I felt an immediate sort of thing for.

(SINGING) I hope I die before I get old

This had to be the essence of The Who.

(SINGING) My generation

This is my generation, baby

JOHNS: I can remember the My Generation session very clearly,

because it was so unusual.

The fact that he stuttered on it.

I mean, if, you know, I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

(SINGING) I'm not trying to cause a big sensation

Talking 'bout my generation

TOWNSHEND: Roger's got a story about the stutter. And so does Chris Stamp.

They're both well out of order.

The stutter came from John Lee Hooker!

It was to do with the pilled-up Mod

and the old blues stutter and so.

And when I put it on at the first demo, it was partly there.

And Chris Stamp said, "What's that?"

And I said, "I'm stuttering."

And I think maybe he didn't realize that I meant to stutter.

I don't remember it being on the demo. It might have been.

My memory's not that good on it.

And does it really matter?

(SINGING) My generation

This is my generation, baby

(ENTWISTLE SOLOING)

STING: I marveled at that bass line.

(BASS RUMBLING)

Very flashy, very effective, and completely original.

I don't know where it came from.

(IMITATING BASS RIFF)

It was fantastic.

Amazing. The bass solo in My Generation.

If you could write that into words,

that's what you'd have on your gravestone, wouldn't it?

(SINGING) People try to put us down

Talking 'bout my generation

(STUTTERING) Just because we get around

Talking 'bout my generation

TOWNSHEND: We're talking about very, very early days here.

I think back to those days, and I just...

I think it was really painful.

(SINGING) Talking 'bout my generation

My generation

We hadn't really respected the difficulties that Roger had, you know?

It's wrong for me to say this, but, you know,

Keith was a genius. John was a genius.

I was certainly, you know, on the edge of it.

You know, Roger was a singer.

That was it.

I just

decided within myself

that I would never let them, whatever they did to me,

whatever they did,

I would, wouldn't ever react like that again to them.

And I became a completely different guy as far as that's concerned.

But I struggled more than anything to find a voice,

a real voice for this band.

(SINGING) This is my generation

(PLAYING THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT)

(SINGING) I don't mind

Other guys dancing with my girl

That's fine, I know them all pretty well

But I know sometimes I must get out in the light

Better leave her behind

With the kids, they're all right

The kids are all right

Now, ambitions in those days were very, very simple.

To be rich and famous. We made no excuses for it.

We just got out of having our ass hanging out of our trousers.

I don't make any apologies for wanting to be rich and famous.

Thank you very much.

(SINGING) I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth

The north side of my town faced east

And the east was facing south

NARRATOR: The Who played 60 shows through the first 90 days of 1966.

And we have got for you the most controversial group in England!

Ladies and gentlemen, The Who!

The Who! The Who!

WOMAN: (IN FRENCH) Les Who! MAN: The Who.

MAN: The Who! The Who!

(SINGING) One girl was called Jean Marie

Another little girl was called Felicity

TOWNSHEND: You know, it used to feel to me that the band was doomed.

You know, I'm going off with this fucking horrible band of yobbos.

You know, to Germany, and to Sweden, and to...

And with people with whom I had absolutely nothing in common,

whatsoever. Nothing.

They were at each other a lot.

DALTREY: The Who was built on competition.

The competition was horrendous, on and off the stage.

BARNES: Then it got great

because it became wonderfully sort of on edge because of that.

I mean, you could be watching The Who in, like, '66, '67 period

when they were gigging.

And in the middle of a show,

suddenly Pete would, like, get the guitar and whack it around Roger's...

It was fantastic.

You see, everyone was really on edge

watching them all the time, you know.

(SINGING) I wanna play cricket on the green

Ride my bike across the stream

Cut myself and see my blood

I wanna come home all covered in mud

I'm a boy, I'm a boy But my ma won't admit it

I'm a boy, I'm a boy I'm a boy

TOWNSHEND: Roger talks now very romantically about those days,

like it was some kind of magic.

You know, I don't think there was a lot of magic.

What there was was a lot of, you know, brute force.

(SINGING) I'm a boy!

GALLAGHER: Nobody knew what they were doing.

Those bands were managed by kids. Do you know what I mean?

Who didn't have a fucking clue what they were doing either.

NARRATOR: In March of '66, The Who and their management

broke their contract with producer Shel Talmy

and began making their own records.

STAMP: Very early on, Kit and I realized

that if we weren't in control of the recording,

and how it went, and what happened,

it would just be hopeless.

We would lose this gigantic piece

of what the destiny of the group was.

And so we had to get out of that contract.

(SINGING) Now it's a legal matter, baby

NARRATOR: Lambert and Stamp started their own company,

Track Records.

STAMP: I was like the executive producer.

Kit was the overall sort of musical director.

Day to day, right? In the studio.

(PICTURES OF LILY PLAYING)

(SINGING) I used to wake up in the morning

I used to feel so bad

Kit Lambert, he had these great ideas,

but he wasn't really technically very good.

CURBISHLEY: Kit was the ultimate Barnum and Bailey conman

in a lot of ways.

He would bluster his way through things, you know,

and he had a lot of front and courage in that way.

Big fucking pain in the ass, you know, in the studio.

But he made it funner.

(SINGING FALSETTO) Pictures of Lily...

You know, I can do it, if... You know, once I get used to sort of...

TOWNSHEND: Just do it with confidence.

Just hit it, d'you know?

KIT: Keith, when you hit the very high note,

back off a bit because you're really piercing

because of the height of the thing.

So you keep jumping on John's...

John's usually louder than everyone else anyway. You know?

And if anyone needs backing up, it's sort of me, you know?

KIT: You cut through everything anyway, on that note.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(ALL LAUGHING)

(MOON MOANING)

(PLAYING PICTURES OF LILY)

Kit Lambert's father, Constant Lambert created the Royal Ballet.

Created the Royal Ballet.

Kit had gone into film

because he didn't want to be anything to do with music.

And suddenly, you know, life rips him back in

right in the middle of music, only a different type.

(SINGING) And I ask you, "Hey mister, have you ever seen

"Pictures of Lily?"

I would say to Kit, "No, I really want to write a fucking opera."

You know, "I don't wanna write rock songs all the time."

And he constantly encouraged me

on the basis of his background.

(SINGING) Her man's been gone

For nearly a year

He was due home yesterday

But he ain't here

STAMP: It was called the mini-opera,

A Quick One While He's Away,

which is an English way of saying, you know,

you have a quick fuck while the husband's away, right?

Do you know what I mean? That was the story.

(SINGING) Down your street Your crying is a well-known sound

STAMP: It was a big operatic piece

told in these sort of six or seven one-minute or two-minute pieces of song.

(SINGING) We have a remedy You'll appreciate

No need to be so sad

He's only late

TOWNSHEND: Kit kept saying to me,

"You know, my father, Constant Lambert, would have loved The Who."

So he was very supportive, and that's how that grew.

STAMP: Probably the most important relationship

that Kit and Pete had was each other.

(SINGING) You are forgiven

NARRATOR: During the recording session for A Quick One,

Lambert introduced the band

to one of the first artists signed by the new Track Records.

He came to the studio before he became the legendary Jimi Hendrix.

And he was just a guitarist in a soul band.

(SINGING) You are forgiven

(SPOKEN) You're forgiven.

(RUN, RUN, RUN PLAYING)

(SINGING) Run, run, run

Run, run, run

STAMP: We'd always been looking at the United States

because that was sort of like the home of the music that we loved.

They just wanted to crack America

and you just toured and toured and toured.

GOLDSMITH: The Who were a band that represented Britishness

and everything that London stood for.

NARRATOR: They wore it on their backs for their British invasion.

(SINGING) You better run, run, run

Run, run, run

STAMP: We couldn't just come over here

and make a couple of hit tunes, like pop hits.

If they took The Who, they had to take the whole package.

NARRATOR: In March of 1967,

they played a nine-day showcase in New York City.

Three months later, they went with their new label-mate

to Monterey, California.

(SAN FRANCISCO PLAYING)

(SINGING) If you're going to San Francisco

DALTREY: Monterey was a big one for us.

I mean, before we even got to Monterey,

Monterey was built up in my imagination as an enormous event.

ENTWISTLE: The worst thing about Monterey

was we found out from one of our ex-roadies

that Hendrix was gonna steal our act.

TOWNSHEND: Jimi was out of his brain on acid

and wouldn't discuss who would go on first.

It wasn't that we didn't want to follow him.

We just wanted to get our act, you know, done first.

We were kind of choked up because we were in debt

because we smashed our guitars,

and then suddenly someone was gonna come along from nowhere

and steal it in front of all those people.

EMCEE: I'd like to introduce you to an act

who have been passed by slightly in America,

but they won't be after this.

This is The Who, this one.

(PEOPLE CHEERING)

(PLAYING MY GENERATION)

(SINGING) People try to put us down

Talking 'bout my generation

They played with kind of a sense of abandon

in a way that hadn't been done before.

I mean, the absolute abandon.

(SINGING) I hope I die before I get old

Talking 'bout my generation

EDGE: It was a sort of exorcism.

The performances just went off

into a kind of emotional meltdown, in a sense,

which I don't think anyone had ever seen before.

DALTREY: The visual was a ritualistic slaughter of a guitar.

But the sound of that slaughter was fucking brilliant.

It was the best jazz, it was the best rock and roll.

It was something like no one had ever done before.

And I still love it to this day.

(AUDIENCE ROARING)

TOWNSHEND: We made the house stand up and roar and scream and shout.

It's the first time they'd ever seen it.

They'd heard about it, but they'd never seen it happen.

And then Hendrix came on, played fairly well,

and set his guitar alight, slung it in the air and did it all again.

And this time the crowd got up with the same kind of roar,

but slightly mystified. "Now, what's going on here?" You know.

(FEEDBACK SCREECHING)

TOWNSHEND: After Monterey Pop,

I became very disturbed about acid.

Coming back from Monterey, on the plane, he got a really bad trip,

and vowed he wouldn't take any more psychedelic drugs after that.

TOWNSHEND: I just started to get really sickened

by LSD and acid, and by psychedelia.

But I'd also been inspired by it.

There was no question I'd been inspired.

So I was confused by it.

Within about two months of that, he was into Meher Baba.

I found him through a man called Mike McInnerney.

I was talking to Pete about it.

I think Pete, like every other rock and roll star,

was not having a good time sometimes.

TOWNSHEND: And he gave me a book called The God-Man,

about this guy called Meher Baba.

NARRATOR: He was a Persian born in India who took a vow of silence

and kept it for most of his life.

True believers called him an avatar, God on Earth.

McINNERNEY: The very, very simple thing

that Baba asked you to do was to love him.

There's a difficulty there, for a start,

when you're in rock and roll, and you're a performer,

and you're having to do all the stuff that Pete had to do.

And yet he chooses to try and make a spiritual journey

at the same time.

NARRATOR: The year Pete wrote I Can't Explain,

Meher Baba warned against searching for God in a pill.

TOWNSHEND: To the sincere seeker after truth,

experimentation with drugs may well open doors,

but continued use will lead to madness, death and insanity.

And, you know, from what I've seen,

there are very, very, very few exceptions.

We were booked on a tour, bottom of the bill, with Herman's Hermits.

You can imagine Herman's Hermits' audience, right,

with sort of thirteen-year-old middle-class girls.

They were introduced to their first piece of danger.

(SINGING) I want the Magic Bus

I want the Magic Bus

They just ran.

(CHUCKLES) They just ran to the back of the hall until Herman came on.

(SINGING) Too much, the Magic Bus

NARRATOR: In Georgia, Moonie discovered fireworks stands.

And in Michigan, he celebrated his 21st birthday.

BOB PRIDDEN: I do remember a car did end up in the swimming pool.

I don't know whether it was a Lincoln Continental,

but a car did end up in the swimming pool

and there was a lot of carnage.

However much of that is true, you don't know.

I mean, I want it all to be true. You know, you want...

You wanna think that he drove his Rolls Royce into a swimming pool.

I mean, he's Keith Moon, for crying out loud.

NARRATOR: The truth is, several cars were damaged

as well as several rooms in the hotel.

Moonie chipped a tooth running from the law,

and The Who was banned from Holiday Inns for life.

And over here, the guy who plays the sloppy drums.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road, yes.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road? What's your name?

Keith. Keith?

My friends call me Keith. You can call me John.

(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)

What's the next song you're gonna do?

(STUTTERING) My Generation.

Your generation? Yeah.

I can really identify with that

because I really identify with these guys. I dig them.

(BICYCLE HORN HONKS) And this is a...

You know, you got sloppy stagehands around here.

(PLAYING MY GENERATION)

NARRATOR: On the last gig of the trip, they smashed up their gear

for the first time on American television.

Keith bribed that sloppy stagehand to overstuff his drum

with a dangerous amount of explosives.

ENTWISTLE: Moon managed to fulfill the outrageous part of the band

and we just let him get on with it and he was outrageous.

(KEITH MOCK CRYING)

(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)

(CYMBALS CRASHING)

Good, guys.

(HAPPY JACK PLAYING)

(SINGING) Happy Jack wasn't old, but he was a man

BARNES: I think obviously Pete wanted a bigger challenge

than just a three-minute single, you know.

And he wanted to write something much more complex and detailed and layered.

(SINGING) The kids couldn't hurt Jack...

NARRATOR: In four years, The Who had released eight singles in the UK,

all of them top-10 hits.

Singles drove the market. Once the single happened,

you immediately went to an album.

As much as we loved the three-minute single,

the value was more than just a three-minute single.

And it could add up to a lot more.

NARRATOR: In December, 1967, The Who produced a piece of pop art.

TOWNSHEND: The only time that I'd even approached my art-school training

was in Who Sell Out.

Doing commercials, writing songs about products,

and all of that kind of stuff.

(SINGING) Coca-Cola Things go better with Coke

Tell us a little about it, because it's a very unusual concept.

We want the album to run very smoothly

and perhaps have the atmosphere of a pirate radio station,

so we've done a commercial for Jaguar cars, Heinz baked beans.

And each one, funnily enough, has opened up

a fairly unique opportunity musically,

which we wouldn't have got just through our normal numbers.

Keith, play what we did yesterday. Oh, you done, then?

PEEL: Could you do that? It'd be very bold of you.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Pete realized he was onto something.

We knew the album was gonna be the new art form.

NARRATOR: Rock music changed the business in 1968.

That year, for the first time, people bought more albums than singles.

BARNES: I used to say the '60s was like a renaissance, almost.

But the one art form or means of communication

that was more important than all the others was popular music.

RADIO JINGLE: More music, more music, more music, more music...

(I CAN SEE FOR MILES PLAYING)

NARRATOR: The Who toured the UK, Europe, Australia,

they went coast-to-coast across North America twice.

(SINGING) I know you've deceived me

Now here's a surprise

I know that you have

'Cause there's magic in my eyes

I can see for miles and miles

And miles and miles

And miles

Oh, yeah

We put out I Can See For Miles,

and it quite clearly wasn't gonna change the world,

and it was the best possible thing I could ever write.

So, I just thought, "Well, what do we do now? We're fucked."

(SINGING) Here's a poke at you You're gonna choke on it, too

You're gonna lose that smile

Because all the while

I can see for miles and miles

I can see for miles and miles

TOWNSHEND: I went away and I thought, "I have to save this band.

"I have to do it.

"Kit can't do it. Keith can't do it. Roger can't do it.

"I have to do it."

STAMP: Pete comes up with this idea

of this deaf, dumb and blind boy.

The only way he connects with life

is he feels the vibes, right?

The vibes are music, right?

That was it. That was like...

You know the screenplay written on the back of a cigarette packet?

That's what Pete's idea was.

Well, it's a bit like an opera, but in actual fact, it's a rock opera.

It's modern music as such.

It's the story of Tommy, the deaf, dumb and blind boy,

and his journey through to extreme high levels of consciousness,

despite the fact that he's deaf, dumb and blind.

(PLAYING I'M FREE)

(SINGING) I'm free

I'm free

And freedom tastes of reality

It's all part of reincarnation and levels of consciousness and stuff like this.

Meher Baba stuff.

Baba might have provided spiritual glue

which made sense of the travails

this character was going through,

and the symbolism, if you like.

If you think about the wound of all the working-class war kids, right,

it's that we didn't have a voice.

You know, we couldn't see.

We all had exactly the same experience.

You know, when you went to Grandad and you said,

"What do you think made the fucking Germans do that?"

He'd go, "I don't want to talk about it!

"I don't want to fucking talk about it!"

You know, kind of, "Fuck off!"

(1921 PLAYING)

(SINGING) You didn't hear it You didn't see it

You won't say nothing to no one ever in your life

You never heard it

Oh, how absurd it All seems without any proof

TOWNSHEND: We had all these fucking lies we grew up with.

Tommy was so much rooted in my childhood story.

NARRATOR: Recording began in the fall of '68

and lasted six months.

Pete, at the time, was writing a song a week, and literally...

Or even a song the same evening

as we'd been in the studio in the afternoon.

And he'd come in the next day and say, "Here's the next one, and here's the next one."

TOWNSHEND: That was when the ideas from the other guys in the band

started to come in.

(SINGING) I'm your wicked Uncle Ernie

I'm glad you can't see or hear me

As I fiddle about

Fiddle about Fiddle about

John Entwistle came up with two really very, very powerful songs

about abuse and bullying that I couldn't write myself

because of my own childhood tenderness on the subject.

(SINGING) Down with the bedclothes Up with your nightshirt

Fiddle about Fiddle about Fiddle about

DALTREY: His input shouldn't be underestimated.

I mean, the antagonists,

like Uncle Ernie, or initially he is, and Cousin Kevin,

are just as important as the hero.

It gave the whole thing a balance.

Good morning, campers!

(SINGING) I'm your Uncle Ernie

And I'll welcome you to Tommy's Holiday Camp

TOWNSHEND: Keith Moon came up with the idea

that the temple, the bizarre church that I created,

should actually be a British holiday camp.

(SINGING) The holiday's forever

Ha, ha!

In that moment, all of the elements of it come together.

And instead of talking about the trouble

that we'd created a couple of years ago,

we were talking about the project,

we were talking about what we could do with it.

(SINGING) You don't answer my call

With even a nod or a wink

But you gaze at your own reflection, all right

You don't seem to see me

But I think you can see yourself

How can the mirror affect you?

INTERVIEWER: Can you explain, in any kind of way,

what satisfaction you get from it?

Yeah. Sexual.

I've always loved balls.

And to see big, shiny silver balls

running around a playground like this,

I can get a certain amount of satisfaction

building up a score that's gonna knock everybody else into oblivion,

which, you know, which I do often.

(PLAYING PINBALL WIZARD)

They came up with this idea of introducing pinball

into this bizarre, strange story.

It was going all over the place.

(SINGING) Ever since I was a young boy

I've played the silver ball

From Soho down to Brighton

I must have played them all

But I ain't seen nothing like him

In any amusement hall

That deaf, dumb and blind kid

Sure plays a mean pinball

BARNES: Pete said, "I thought it was rubbish."

He said, "I didn't know whether I should bother finishing it."

And he played it and everyone went quiet

until someone said, "That's the number one."

And he went (GROANS). You know.

He couldn't see that it was good.

(SINGING) He's a pinball wizard

There has to be a twist

A pinball wizard

He's got such a supple wrist

TOWNSHEND: Roger suddenly decided that he would be Tommy.

I was supposed to sing Tommy.

He said, "Can I be Tommy?"

And I remember thinking,

"Yeah!"

(SINGING) See me

Feel me

Touch me

Heal me

It was only really, though, when we got onstage with Tommy as a complete piece of music

that I really found my feet and found The Who voice.

(SINGING) Touch me

Feel me

TOWNSHEND: Roger suddenly became this different kind of singer.

(SINGING) Feel me

He'd never had that quality that he now has,

which is of going up to the audience and engaging them

and opening his body to them, you know, and that kind of nakedness,

instead of being a really tight little kind of, "I'm a vicious mug,

"don't get in my way" kind of thing.

(SINGING) Listening to you

I get the music

Gazing at you

I get the heat

Following you

I climb the mountain

I get excitement at your feet

It was a role. He actually lived each song as it went through.

(SINGING) I've got a feeling 21 is gonna be a good year

Especially if you and me See it in together

So you think 21 is gonna be a good year

STAMP: Rock 'n' roll was still being seen on a very bad level.

The sound systems weren't good. You couldn't hear it properly.

So we thought, "Well, let's use opera houses."

(SINGING) I had no reason to be over-optimistic

STAMP: The group played Tommy truly as an opera,

and it was, like, fantastic

'cause you had these ancient, beautiful acoustical places, right?

And this audience hearing their music

played this way for the first time.

NARRATOR: After 18 months of touring,

The Who played one final opera house in New York City,

the Metropolitan.

(PLAYING I'M FREE)

STAMP: They really didn't want us to go in there.

They really didn't want to put rock 'n' roll

in the Metropolitan Opera House, right?

The worst snobs turned out to be Americans, right?

We got in.

And when we got in, Decca Universal re-released Tommy.

It just sold again like five times what it had sold the first time.

It became like one of those huge albums.

That was the printing-money era.

(SINGING) Can you Can you hear me?

How can he be saved?

CURBISHLEY: Tommy was huge, and did take the band along on its coattails.

Tommy, in its own way, became as big as The Who.

(SINGING) Waking up on Christmas morning

Hours before the winter sun's ignited

They believe in dreams and all they mean

Including Heaven's generosity.

Peeping 'round the door to see What parcels are for free in curiosity

BARNES: They were developing this high-powered sound for live gigs.

And it's absolutely incredible

that you could get that fantastic, full, rich rock sound

out of just a guitar, a bass guitar and a drum.

(SINGING) Listening to you

I get the music

Gazing at you

I get the heat

Following you

I climb the mountain

I get excitement at your feet

Come on!

I started to feel accepted again in the band during Tommy.

TOWNSHEND: Roger became Tommy, became this figure, then it equalized.

And then we were unbelievably potent, because we were balanced.

It was a marriage, but it was a good marriage.

Those were glorious years.

(SINGING) Right behind you

I see the millions

On you

I see the glory

From you

I get opinions

From you

I get the story

(BEHIND BLUE EYES PLAYING)

(SINGING) No one knows what it's like to be the bad man

To be the sad man

Behind blue eyes

I think that Pete has always felt the pressure

of being the guy who came up with the ideas.

It was such a special gift that he had.

(SINGING) No one knows what it's like to be hated

To be fated

To telling only lies

DALTREY: I went through terrible periods

where I would want to be getting closer to him

but I had to push myself away because he was in a creative thing,

and you kind of felt that if you left him alone, it would be better.

But it must have been, for Pete, incredibly Ionely.

It must have felt, sometimes, that we didn't give a fuck about him.

(SINGING) I have hours, only Ionely

My love is vengeance

That's never free

It took a terrible toll on him. After Tommy,

they said, "Now what are you going to do next," you know?

NARRATOR: In 1971, Pete conceived the first interactive rock show.

He imagined fans connected to the band, the music, the art.

The futuristic performance was to be filmed for a movie and called Lifehouse.

The trouble is, with Lifehouse,

no one I've ever met, apart from Pete, ever understood it.

At the time, people just thought I was nuts.

NARRATOR: Including his mentor.

Behind my back, Kit Lambert was telling everybody that I was insane,

and that what we were really doing was making a movie of Tommy,

and he was directing it.

Pete said, "I've had enough of that.

"I mean, we're gonna be known just for Tommy. It's bigger than the band."

That was the point at which Kit just exploded the relationship.

(SINGING) No one knows what it's like to be the bad man

To be the sad man

Behind blue eyes

NARRATOR: In the spring of '71, Lifehouse was abandoned.

(PLAYING BABA O'RILEY)

The songs for Lifehouse became the basis

of The Who's most successful album, Who's Next.

The opening track was an anthem

named in part for Pete's spiritual guide, Meher Baba.

TOWNSHEND: The nerve of having something open

with that huge, long synthesizer intro, which...

Everyone in rock at the time said, "You can't have an intro like that

"'cause the radio won't play it," you know.

He claims, Pete says, that those riffs are...

That he put Meher Baba's birth into the computer, and this is what came out.

I'd, "Yeah, yeah, I know you, Pete, you're... Right."

You know, "Like hell."

(SINGING) Out here in the fields

I fight for my meals

TOWNSHEND: One of the first messages that I received directly from Meher Baba

was that he recognized me,

that I was one of his, as it were.

And he died two years later, so I never met him.

(SINGING) Don't cry

Don't raise your eye

It's only teenage wasteland

Sally, take my hand

Travel south 'cross land

Put out the fire

And don't look past my shoulder

NARRATOR: Following the tour for Who's Next,

Pete went to India to visit the tomb of his spiritual guide.

Beloved Baba sends his love to you.

He is always with you, in you and near you,

and he says, "Be happy and not to worry."

In a sense, I was engaged in some kind of sabotage, you know.

I was inside this very, very macho group that smashed its guitars

and had a reputation for being quite rebellious,

trying to spread this message of love and peace.

(THE REAL ME PLAYING)

(SINGING) I went back to the doctor

To get another shrink

I sit and tell him about my weekend

But he never betrays what he thinks

Can you see the real me, Doctor?

Doctor?

Can you see the real me, Doctor?

Oh, Doctor!

NARRATOR: In 1973, Pete crafted a second rock opera.

Quadrophenia was set against the rumble of the Mods and Rockers.

(SINGING) She said, "I know how it feels, son

"'Cause it runs in the family"

TOWNSHEND: I wanted Kit to be a part of Quadrophenia,

even though it was done and dusted.

Chris Stamp said, "Well, he's in New York,

"and he's got a bit of a problem. He's become a heroin addict."

DALTREY: After Tommy, the drugs changed.

We lost a bit of our vision.

The dynamic of wealth introduced into this family was what changed it.

Kit and Chris were fighting on a daily basis.

They began to fall apart as partners

and they began to fall apart as people.

It was quite obvious that Kit was now into quite heavy substances.

And money was going missing.

It wasn't a matter of they were trying to screw us.

They were just completely of control.

We became the problem, right?

So if we were to go, the problem would resolve itself.

Now, I've never understood that.

Because, although we may have been fucked up,

we could still utter one decent idea once a week from our stupor, you know?

So, I don't know. It ended.

NARRATOR: The band turned to Bill Curbishley to take over management.

I looked at the past contracts and what they were achieving as live performers,

and I felt that could be dramatically changed.

(SINGING) Bell boy!

I've got to get running now

Bell boy!

NARRATOR: Having set their affairs in order,

he urged them to tour Quadrophenia.

(SINGING) Carry the bloody baggage out

Bell boy!

Always running at someone's heel

NARRATOR: But Pete's new opera was much more demanding live than Tommy had been.

TOWNSHEND: What happened on Quadrophenia was is that I had absolute control,

and everybody involved in it was like my puppet.

And I think by the very, very end of it, Roger just got sick of it.

Roger and Pete had a fight in rehearsals.

DALTREY: Pete just got really angry with me.

Takes his guitar and hits me over the shoulder with it.

So the road crew, they jump on me.

I was holding Pete back and the roadies were holding Roger back.

And I hadn't done anything!

Pete turned around and said, "Yeah! Let me go! Let me go!"

So, I thought, fine. I let him go.

And he just came at me. He was so drunk.

And he walked up to Roger and...

I just managed to catch him with a very lucky punch.

Whack.

Completely knocked him spark out.

His feet left the ground and he hit his head on the stage.

And he was unconscious and I thought, "Fuck."

We were all exhausted.

It's a magnificent piece of work, you know, absolutely magnificent.

It's our towering triumph, Quadrophenia.

So, in a sense, you know, a little bit of blood spilt on the way is nothing.

NARRATOR: As boys, they played dance halls and pubs.

ANNOUNCER: Here they are, The Who!

NARRATOR: Less than a decade later, they were headlining stadiums.

As The Who developed, so had the business.

CURBISHLEY: Just think about the feeling to walk onto a stage,

and you've got 60,000 people out there to see you.

Adulation from masses of people is power.

And it distorts.

The adrenaline that you get from stage, it's incredibly good

when it's used.

But if you can't use it, it's incredibly destructive.

TOWNSHEND: Keith and John together were a dangerous double act.

I was very naive. I didn't realize how much coke they were doing,

as well as drinking. And Keith was doing everything else.

TOWNSHEND: Mandrakes to go to sleep. He'd...

Elephant tranquilizer.

Anything anybody gave him, he would do it.

DALTREY: Who knows what was going on in his brain?

I sometimes feel that he started to believe that he was invincible.

"I can take anything. I'm Keith Moon of The Who."

He was falling down with drug overdoses

on the stage during the shows!

I thought if we kept doing what we were doing, you know,

Keith was gonna die!

NARRATOR: After the Quadrophenia tour,

The Who did not take the stage again for 16 months.

DALTREY: We were off the road for long periods of time.

And that in itself was destructive to Keith.

Keith just used to go out on benders

because he didn't have nothing else to do.

BUTLER: He loved dressing up.

But the trouble is, he'd end up in a nightclub

with him dressed up as a tart or a cavalier.

And then 3:00 in the morning, you're going home,

and he's still that person.

(GIBBERING)

BUTLER: We would just book a hotel in London,

and he'd pull all the Swedish models out of Tramps for four nights

and, excuse my French, shag ourselves to death.

I used to drive him home, and he was like that in the car.

And I'd just get him outside by the gates,

"Oh, dear boy, what a brilliant four days.

"Let's do that again next week."

And, "Yeah, okay."

STAMP: Dougal, he was always there for Keith.

You know, he was a good roadie. He was a good driver.

He was a good... He was a good corner man.

NARRATOR: Moon's previous corner man was killed on the job.

In 1970, his childhood friend, Neil Boland,

was accidentally run over by Keith

during an alcohol-fueled scuffle outside a nightclub.

Nobody's really clear on what happened that night,

but Keith's journey of experience with alcohol and drugs

basically gathered speed.

NARRATOR: In 1974, Moon moved to Malibu,

home of the Southern California surfer music he loved so much.

(SINGING) Here by the sea and sand

Nothing ever goes as planned

I just couldn't face going home

It was just a drag on my own

BUTLER: He wanted to get into movies.

You know, people say, "I make a great movie star."

At the end it became too much.

I made a phone call to Bill Curbishley,

and I said, "Look, I'm leaving 'cause I can't do it anymore."

But I did say to Bill, "Get him home as soon as possible

"'cause the way he's carrying on, he's not gonna be here much longer."

(SINGING) Nothing is planned By the sea and the sand

NARRATOR: In 1975, Tommy was immortalized on film.

But not by Kit Lambert.

Director Ken Russell wrote a new script for the rock opera.

GALLAGHER: The film is appalling, right? It's dreadful.

And everybody in it really should question their fucking judgment,

particularly Eric Clapton.

Bit pants. Little bit pants.

TOWNSHEND: I've always been a fan of Ken's,

both as a person and as a visionary,

and I love it.

I just love it.

NARRATOR: Tommy spent 14 weeks atop the British box office,

and garnered three Academy Award nominations.

As his most popular creation took another lap around the world,

Pete went to work on a new album.

TOWNSHEND: I would think, "I can't go through that again."

"I just can't go through it again.

"I can't come up with some great idea

"and push it through. I don't have the arrogance, I don't have the...

"I don't have the balls to do it again."

(SINGING) It's clear to all my friends that I habitually lie

I just bring them down

TOWNSHEND: Where we saw our future was in movies.

We'd already done Tommy,

we'd managed to get a foothold in Shepperton Studios,

we thought that we were gonna be about movies.

NARRATOR: Manager Bill Curbishley would strike a deal

to produce the film of Quadrophenia.

As they pursued the new popular art form,

a new generation began taking over music.

GOLDSMITH: Punk, I hated it.

And I couldn't see the point of spitting and all that crap.

It was the revolution of the uglies.

NARRATOR: And the uglies loved The Who.

(SINGING) You think that we look pretty good together

You know, they come under that category a little bit

as big stars that weren't approachable.

(SINGING) A substitute for another guy

TOWNSHEND: We were frightened. It was like the French Revolution.

It could have ended up with, you know, The Beatles, the Stones and The Who

being beheaded in public.

(SINGING) I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth

Me and Cookie went down to Speakeasy,

which was an after-hours place in London.

And Townshend was in there, already drunk.

TOWNSHEND: Went screaming after Jones and Cook

and kind of going, you know, "If you wanna take over, fucking take over.

"Just fucking get on with it!"

You know, "Good fucking luck!"

STEVE JONES: I think we might've been all a bit tipsy, but he was hammered.

And he was going up to people saying, "Who are you? Who are you?"

To everyone.

NARRATOR: In 1977, Keith returned to England.

Pete had been writing new material.

(SINGING) Who are you?

Who, who? Who, who?

Who are you?

Who the fuck are you?

NARRATOR: That December, they filmed a performance

for the band's latest project,

a documentary film.

(SINGING) Who are you?

Tell me who are you? Who are you?

NARRATOR: It was their first time back onstage in more than a year.

(SINGING) Oh, tell me who are you?

Who are you?

I woke up in a Soho doorway A policeman knew my name

He goes, "You can go home tonight

"If you can get up and walk away"

I staggered back to the Underground

And the breeze blew back my hair

I remember throwing punches around

And preaching from my chair

Who are you?

TOWNSHEND: Unfortunately, the band didn't play as well,

but we all, I think all of us, had such a good time together.

But we were all wrecks by then, you know, so it's kind of like...

(SINGING) Who are you?

Who, who? Who, who?

I really want to know

Who are you?

Who, who? Who, who?

Oh, who the fuck are you?

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1978,

they went back into the studio for the first time in three years.

That summer, Moon began taking prescription medicine to try to curb his drinking.

TOWNSHEND: Keith did that thing...

I said, "Now come on, come on. Give it a real go."

And he'd start to try and play and, "I can't, I can't."

I'd say, "Come on, try again," and he'd...

(IMITATES MOON SIGHING)

And in the end he threw down his sticks, and he went,

"I'm still...

"Having a bad day,

"but I'm still the best fucking

"Keith Moon type

"drummer in the world!"

(SINGING) Who are you?

Who, who? Who, who?

I really want to know

NARRATOR: Who Are You was released August 18, 1978.

(SINGING) I really want to know

Who are you?

Who?

I really want to know

I really want to know

Come on, tell me Who are you, you, you?

Who are you?

NEWSCASTER: He was found unconscious in a London flat this morning.

NEWSCASTER 2: A doctor was called, who pronounced Moon dead.

NEWSCASTER 3: He was found dead by his girlfriend early today. He was 32.

It was a silly mistake that made him take a handful of Heminevrin

and it disables the esophagus and, you know, he couldn't throw up, and...

He just always took pills in handfuls. It was just a habit that he had.

CURBISHLEY: He was never gonna grow old gracefully.

I don't think he was destined to make old bones.

I suppose he was designed in such a way to be remembered as he was.

It is the end of an era.

We're gonna try and go on,

but the one thing that everyone must understand,

it will never, ever be the same. That died.

But it was very strange 'cause there's something underneath

determined not to let the one thing that we'd all created,

including Keith,

die.

The music, not to let it die.

(SINGING) Long live rock!

I need it every night

Long live rock!

Come on and join the line

Long live rock!

Be it dead or alive

NARRATOR: Less than eight months after Moonie's death,

The Who returned to the stage with keyboard player Rabbit Bundrick

and drummer Kenney Jones.

Kenney Jones was a good mate from The Small Faces.

And we'd always admired him as a drummer, and we liked him as a guy.

Anything can change, especially, you know, with Pete.

So, you just go with it and you got to know when to go with it.

STAMP: I went to see The Who for the first time without Keith.

And I'm standing at the side of the stage

and Pete goes off onto some sort of freestyle sort of riff,

you know, on his guitar.

And he turns to Keith.

Because he's gone as far as he can go.

So he turns to Keith to take over.

TOWNSHEND: Those moments, like on the stage when I...

I'm taken aback,

because I look and expect him to be there.

This is because it is like a marriage.

(SINGING) Long live rock!

Come on and join the line

A real sense of connection

and of life wanting to kind of go on like a wheel,

and thinking, "Well, everything that goes comes back again."

And the thing is is that with people, it doesn't work like that.

They don't come back again.

Let's have the biggest hand of the night

for Mr. Kenney Jones, our new drummer.

Hey!

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)

Didn't know what I was letting myself in for, really,

to be honest. But there you go.

What happened to me was I started to drift into substances, you know.

Pete's addiction in 1979 was perhaps a reflection of, I think, the guilt that both,

I'm sure Pete felt, and I, 'cause I know I did.

That we I hadn't done enough to save Keith.

You know, even I started to do things I'd never done before.

You know, I felt very miserable for a long time.

JONES: Roger obviously was missing Moonie.

Not just onstage, but in many other ways.

And I think it really got to him a bit.

I didn't bank on the emotional elements, you know.

NARRATOR: During Kenney's first tour,

The Who played through the deadliest rock concert in US history.

Cincinnati was an emotionally devastating situation.

The band were like 20 minutes into their show.

The co-promoter came to me and he said,

"We got a problem up on the plaza level."

What happened is there was only one door to get through, and a staircase to go down.

So they all rushed.

CURBISHLEY: And those kids that fell

got trampled on.

The band were unaware of what was happening until they finished the show.

We had to go back to America a couple of months later and be grilled by the lawyers.

"Do you feel responsible for the people that died?" You know.

It still haunts me to this day.

I can't tell you how I felt about the parents of those kids.

Their kids have gone off to a concert, and they don't come home.

We all bear scars.

But you don't live

without having that map of life somewhere on your face.

(PLAYING EMINENCE FRONT)

NARRATOR: They released two albums in two years,

Face Dances in '81 and It's Hard in '82,

only to be savaged by some fans and critics.

TOWNSHEND: When you read the newspapers and the reviews, it's like,

"This album is the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of rock and roll."

You know, "Townsend has gone mad and is masturbating in public."

You know. "They may as well crawl away and die."

(SINGING) Sun shines

People forget

The spray flies as the speedboat glides

People forget

NARRATOR: The man who encouraged Pete to write works of art

died of a brain hemorrhage in 1981.

Kit Lambert was 45.

I didn't have an answer.

I couldn't work out what to do that would return the band to its halcyon years.

(SINGING) ...as the skier tracks

People forget

They forget they're hiding

It's an eminence front

DALTREY: What makes The Who special is that it's not even what's written.

It's the bits that you don't know are going to happen. And they come of thin air.

Some nights it makes it, some nights it doesn't.

But the nights that it makes it,

they were... That was the trouble with Kenney.

Those nights became fewer and fewer.

CURBISHLEY: It was Roger who pushed to get him of the band.

He didn't think he was right for The Who.

There is no right drummer for The Who.

There will be never be the right drummer for The Who.

It will only be Keith.

But there you go.

(SINGING) Eminence front

Yeah! Just an eminence front

It's a put-on

NARRATOR: In 1983, Pete officially dissolved the band,

just months before Tommy was reissued on a new format, the compact disc.

(SINGING) Bullshit! Bullshit

Yeah, yeah, yeah

We've just reached the end, you know?

That's the way I feel about it. I don't know why.

Bye-bye!

I can't wait to get out.

(SINGING) Got to dress to kill

Dress yourself to kill

DALTREY: You've been traveling on this thing

that's going a million miles an hour,

and all of a sudden it comes to a complete, dead stop.

And it's incredibly difficult to adjust,

because we haven't lived normal lives.

It's as though the world stops.

TOWNSHEND: At the time I was fairly convinced that I would do better as a solo artist.

I did a few songs. It was a pragmatic decision.

Whether it was the right or the wrong decision, I had to do something.

I think if we'd have continued to work, I think I would've been a casualty.

I blamed rock and roll.

And of course, after three or four years being out of front-line rock and roll,

I realized I was just as sick, just as mad

and, you know, just as overworked. You know, so...

It was me that was the problem.

NARRATOR: The Who returned to the stage on only two occasions

over the next 13 years:

A 20-minute set at Live Aid,

and an all-star tour for the twentieth anniversary of Tommy.

That's the weird thing, it's like soldiers that used to go out to war

and come back and just couldn't identify with, like, normal life anymore.

When you come home, it's like, I can't take this, like, normal existence.

BOB PRIDDEN: John lived for gigging.

He went out with his solo bands, and...

And it cost him!

He financed it. He didn't make any money. Just to be out there.

John was deeply in debt. I don't think it's any secret that he was.

Those years when The Who weren't working,

he continued to spend and live the lifestyle.

And I went to Pete and said, you know, "This is the only way he's gonna

"ever get a chance to dig himself out of the hole

"is to get... If you would get The Who back together."

(SINGING) Why should I care?

Why should I care?

I would never hesitate to consider, at least,

you know, that it might be something to do, because I would just think,

"Well, without him, I wouldn't even be here."

NARRATOR: Pete agreed to tour Quadrophenia in 1996.

The band brought in Ringo Starr's son, Zak Starkey, on drums.

As soon as we played those songs, Moonie was alive again.

(SINGING) Girls of 15

Sexually knowing

The ushers are sniffing

Eau-de-cologning

At the end, John was handed checks of well over two, three million dollars

and they were gone overnight.

NARRATOR: With John in financial trouble,

they agreed to yet another reunion in 1999 with just their basic lineup.

(SINGING) I've got a feeling inside

Can't explain

It's a certain kind

Can't explain

TOWNSHEND: John never seemed to go into depression.

As long as there was a nice big wardrobe with 15 pairs of shoes in it

and the obligatory serially monogamous girlfriend along, he was happy.

NARRATOR: Under the continued leadership of manager Bill Curbishley,

the band agreed to a series of live shows.

(SINGING) I can't explain

I think it's love

Try to say it to you

When I feel blue

But I can't explain

Something happened then. Pete became inspired again.

It was like the wheel was back on the barrow.

TOWNSHEND: We were just celebrating the old music.

I'd felt like we should just accept that, you know, that we had these great songs

and that, personally, I was never gonna be able to surpass them.

(SINGING) I said, I can't explain

DALTREY: Thank you very much.

We are honored to be here.

VEDDER: Music is an art form.

That art form includes rhythm, meaning and communication.

I've met people from different walks of life, and they've all been touched

in such a unique and pure way.

They really feel this deep connection.

So now you've got, for me, the greatest art form that ever existed.

(PLAYING WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN)

(SINGING) We'll be fighting in the streets

With our children at our feet

And the morals that they worship will be gone

And the men who spurred us on

CURBISHLEY: When we got that call about the concert for New York,

America meant so much to The Who, we had to go.

(SINGING) I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around

Pick up my guitar and I'll play

CURBISHLEY: I was standing just off the stage...

I mean, you know, for me, over all those years of watching The Who,

man, I've never seen anything like that.

(SINGING) We don't get fooled again

No, no!

EDGE: I was sitting with Bono.

We just... The two of us could not believe it.

Just the way they just owned that event, you know?

Over the TV.

(SINGING) There's nothing in the streets

Looks any different to me

And the slogans are replaced by the by

Just so much more powerful live than anyone else that was on the bill that night.

That show in New York, that could be one of the best illustrations

of the power of music.

Yeah!

(SINGING) Don't you get fooled

Don't you get fooled again

Never! No, no, no, no!

The sentiments to those songs, if I could explain it to you,

right, it would be too easy to explain it to you.

It's magic how those songs came from Shepherd's Bush, you know,

and mean as much to people 40 years later than they did when they were written.

You know, that's phenomenal. And that something you can't put into words.

It's just magic, man.

CURBISHLEY: They were back, in a big, big way.

Back as a four-piece. Back on the road.

It was like a rebirth again.

We had to go back and play there. We had a contract to play Las Vegas.

I flew out to Las Vegas. The next morning, got a call from my tour manager

saying they couldn't wake John up.

BUTLER: Let's put something into a little bit of perspective.

John was one of the best bass players in the world.

John died at the age of nearly 60,

with a woman in bed, after snorting cocaine.

Now, you think, "Hold on, John.

"You should have done this in the '70s. Not now."

The coroner's report of the situation in Las Vegas is quite clear.

He shouldn't have been there. He shouldn't have been doing what he was doing,

and it was crazy. It's kind of what he chose to do.

That's just how he was.

I did have a chuckle. I mean, if he was gonna go,

he couldn't have gone in a better way, really.

On tour, doing all the things he...

And being around the things that he loved best, you know.

I think all of us want to die onstage.

I mean, none of us wanna be just written off.

GALLAGHER: It gets more difficult as you get older.

How do I say this?

Let's say for argument's sake,

you're a 58-year-old guy who's been in a band from the '60s, right?

It's fucking frowned upon in this country.

It's like, "God, you fucking idiot.

"What are you doing, silly old man?"

We have this tendency to kind of take the piss out of lads like that.

I don't know why it is, you know?

We should keep going until it's over. We shouldn't stop.

(SINGING) They made my dream come true

They made my dream come true

Pete rang me back and said "I want to continue with this tour."

If we'd have split up and gone our own ways the next day,

I think we would have probably found it very difficult

to get back together on a stage.

NARRATOR: The Who performed four days later

at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

Pino Palladino was the band's first choice to fill in on bass.

Listen, we know this...

For some of the fans that have followed us for many years,

this is gonna be very difficult.

And we understand. We're not pretending that nothing's happened,

as Roger said earlier on. And it is difficult.

I can tell you with my hand on my heart,

that when I did look over there and he wasn't there,

I wanted to die. I just wanted to die.

(SINGING) This song is over

I'm left with only tears

I must remember

Even if it takes a million years

CURBISHLEY: If Moon was predictable, then John was unnecessary.

A great, great loss. Great loss, John.

I miss him so much, I can't tell you.

TOWNSHEND: What's actually now happened,

a further gift that John's death has given me,

is to enjoy an acutely emphatic relationship with Roger.

You know, we experienced John's death.

He saw me get arrested for, you know, a child pornography allegation...

(SINGING) How dare you wear a robe to preside?

How dare you cover your head to hide

Your face from God?

He was vilified. He was dragged across the fucking national papers

in a scurrilous way, you know.

And after months of investigation,

they established that there was nothing that he could be charged with.

In the end, nobody, much, is gonna listen to me.

But Roger Daltrey, his partner, he went to bat for him

and he was under a lot of pressure, Roger.

(SINGING) How dare you? Do you think I'll quietly go?

You are much braver than you know

For I can't die

Roger is the voice of The Who. And when you're growing up,

you just think that he wrote all those things

and he's singing them from his heart, and...

And then you realize it was coming from this guy, Pete.

That's when I started to realize there was something deeper going on here.

They're two incredibly strong forces

and they've relied on each other for years.

Since John died, we're probably musically more together.

I'm sure spiritually we are.

(SINGING) Will you have some tea

At the theater with me?

We did it all

Didn't we?

Jumped every wall

TOWNSHEND: I think Roger is the best, you know, interpreter of my work

that I could have ever hoped for.

(SINGING) Unraveled codes

Ingeniously

What's very interesting about what Roger and I are left with

is that we have a very pure relationship.

(SINGING) So seamlessly

We made it work

DALTREY: I recognize his genius and I love him dearly.

He's like a brother. You know, that's love.

Even though on the outside, and when you read things about what we did in the past

and how many fights we used to have,

you think, "These guys used to hate each other.

"Did we fuck?" You know?

Well, I didn't, anyway. I loved him.

(SINGING) A great dream derailed

TOWNSHEND: He's my friend, I love him,

and I'm standing by him, and he stands by me.

We can say what we like about each other now.

You know, it's not easy for either of us,

because we're so unbelievably unalike.

But, you know, we're kind of all we've got now.

(SINGING) One of us me

All of us sad

It is really not important whether I am, at the time,

getting on with Pete or he's getting on with me.

It doesn't matter. All that matters is what we create on the stage.

That two hours of music, that night,

and as long as that is still moving people

and sending people out with a buzz,

then we're succeeding.

(SINGING) Will you have some tea

At the theater with me?

(CROWD CHEERING LOUDLY)

One, two, one, two, three...

(PLAYING MY GENERATION)

(SINGING) People try to put us down

Talking 'bout my generation

Just because we get around

Talking 'bout my generation

Things they do look awful cold

Talking 'bout my generation

I hope I die before I get old

Talking 'bout my generation

This is my generation This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all...

...fade away?

Talking 'bout my generation

And don't try to dig what we all say

Talking 'bout my generation

I'm not trying to cause a big sensation

Talking 'bout my generation

I'm just talking about my generation

Talking 'bout my generation

Talking 'bout my generation

Why don't you all fade away?

Talking 'bout my generation

And don't try to dig what we all say

Talking 'bout my generation

I'm not trying to cause a plenty big sensation

Talking 'bout my...

Talking 'bout my generation

Talk, talk about it

That really would suck

If you lose her

Keith Moon on the drums here. In that corner, the Ox!

...for Mr. Kenney Jones!

Pino Palladino on bass!

Simon Townshend, guitar and vocals.

Zak Starkey on the drums!

John "Rabbit" Bundrick on keyboards.

But most of all, you!

(CROWD CHEERING)

TOWNSHEND: We will be back!

Corrected by mi0o