“No choice whatsoever”: How a fight nearly ended The Who before they began
Any band can normally become legendary as long as they have the right camaraderie. They don’t necessarily have to be the greatest musicians in the world, but as long as they have a good rapport when working off each other, even some of the most amateur bands can turn in classics if they are all communicating properly with each other. But while The Who had all the tools to become a superband when they started out, that didn’t mean that every one of them had to like each other 24/7.
Because looking back on his life, Pete Townshend felt there was no point in them going on much further past their first few years on the charts. He was an art student before anything else, and while a life of stardom may have been tempting, he felt that the band would run their course and fade into obscurity like every other band before them until he started to twist the medium for themselves.
‘My Generation’ gave them the quirk of playing far louder than everybody else, but Tommy was the first time people started to see what they could do when telling a story with sound. Townshend may have been the mastermind behind everything, but without Keith Moon’s maniacal drumming and John Entwistle filling in the lead guitar slot on bass, they were as tight-knit a three-piece as they could have asked for before Roger Daltrey put his scream behind everything.
Although he never played an instrument, Townshend always needed someone with Daltrey’s power behind the microphone. He always equated The Who to a street gang, and since he was never comfortable with the spotlight, it was much better to have Daltrey sing tracks like ‘Reign O’er Me’ than having to juggle being the rhythm guitarist, main songwriter, and lead vocalist at the same time.
But any band has disagreements, and that normally leads to more than a little bit of tension in the room before anything starts. It would be easy to leave all of the hangups in the studio, but the minute that Daltrey decided to take a few swings at the rest of the band before they built any traction, he managed to put their entire career in jeopardy.
They only had a few songs to their name, but Daltrey remembered being given the riot act by the rest of the band to either change his ways or the band would be history, saying, “That’s how we used to deal with it. Everything was solved with a fight, but obviously it didn’t work that way in the band. The band was everything, so I had the choice of either give up the fighting or give up the band. That’s no choice whatsoever.”
Then again, it’s not like the band didn’t have the chops to pull off a few songs without Daltrey. Since Daltrey ended up having a scrap with Moon a few years down the road for hiding drugs, songs like ‘Going Mobile’ are a slight glimpse into where the band could have gone had they decided to continue on as a trio, complete with Townshend’s gritty voice leading the charge.
Would they have still been able to crack the singles charts? Probably, but there would always be something missing had Daltrey not been there from the beginning. Townshend was writing the songs that reflected everything an English kid was feeling at the time, but would it really have the same impact if ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ didn’t have that classic scream?
