Roger daltrey poster12/14/2023 Daltrey had long suspected such misappropriation of funds, but Townshend wasn’t all that cheesed off until he “found out they’d been at his publishing money as well.” It would be a few more years before Roger and his mates became wise to the fact that much of the dough was subsidizing a mutual vice of Moon and manager Kit Lambert. Thankfully, the cash-strapped rocker and his wife were able to purchase a £39,500 house because a bank was willing to extend him credit on the assumption that he was a multimillionaire. (And their set was probably the longest.)ĭaltrey remembers that in 1971, when The Who scored back-to-back top 5 albums with Who’s Next and Live At Leeds, their accountant “was pleased to tell us that we were only six hundred thousand pounds in debt.” So we decided to stop.”Īs for Woodstock, “We needed the cash to get home and pay the bills, so we refused to go on until we were paid.” The $6,250 ( $42,000 and change today) that they received made them only the 10th-highest-paid of the festival’s 32 performers. It was obvious that the more we toured the more we owed. We were spending it faster than we could earn it. “By the end of 1969,” Daltrey recalls, “we were the biggest rock band in the world. a lovely old Mark 10 Jag.”Ĭool, so surely they were in the black now, as the following year saw the release of Tommy – The Who’s first album to reach the American top 10 – and the band’s paying gig at Woodstock. “I went home skint.”įortunately, or “miraculously” as he puts it, Daltrey came home from the 1968 US tour with a bit of scratch: “Just enough for the deposit on a house. “I had to borrow the money for my flight home,” Daltrey continues. And he said, yes, but do you know what Keith spent?ĭaltrey is referring, of course, to Keith Moon, The Who’s legendarily obstreperous drummer, who was known to leave hotels - not just their rooms - in less pristine condition than they were in when he arrived. ‘There aren’t any to share,’ he said, quite apologetically. our agent to ask him for my share of the profits. I wanted to come home with more than I’d gone out with so I’d limited myself to a strict diet of one hamburger a day and a few other tidbits. Here is how he remembers the end of The Who’s first American tour in 1967, which was also the year of their first US top 10 hit: Is this a recent phenomenon, engendered by decreased album and merch sales? This observation presumably applies to any point at which a band is about to hit the road, and the costs of doing so in 2019 are surely not fewer or lesser than they were in 2002.īut how can such a whopping pecuniary burden apply to The Who? This is a band that grossed more than $42 million from its 2012–2013 US/Europe tour and $26.5 million from the 28 dates of its 2016 North American trek. This passage appears at the point in the book at which Daltrey and Pete Townshend have decided to carry on after the sudden death of bassist John Entwistle on the eve of the band’s 2002 North American tour. nly in the last few shows of thirty or forty do you finally make it into the black. You’re as indebted as you ever want to be. You’re in the hole to the tune of a few million quid. There are managers, lawyers, accountants, drivers, roadies, and myriad other hardworking, underpaid laborers whom I have unfairly excluded from this list.Īs Daltrey describes it, “You have to understand what it’s like the day before you start a tour. It’s not like the band gets to divide the grosses equally among themselves. Of course, the amount of money generated from a tour by one of rock’s most popular and enduring bands guarantees a feeding frenzy. In documentaries, movies, etc., it is always depicted as the most lavish of all possible experiences. Let me say off the top that I will not claim for a single second to understand the economics of touring. If there is any theme that runs throughout the story of Daltrey’s life as he tells it, it’s that he has always needed more money to – as he so folksily puts it – “pay the bills.” Kibblewhite (Henry Holt and Co.), I cannot help but wonder: how can one of the greatest lead singers in the history of rock ‘n’ roll afford to do this? After reading Roger Daltrey’s 2018 memoir, Thanks A Lot Mr. The Who will be performing at Fenway Park on Friday. If there is any theme that runs throughout the story of Roger Daltrey’s life as he tells it, it’s that he has always needed more money to – as he so folksily puts it – “pay the bills.”
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