While playing in small clubs, one particular night involved Pete Townshend accidentally hitting his guitar into the club’s ceiling, leaving the neck in half when he brought it down. After getting a great reaction out of the crowd, Townshend made it a habit of tearing down as much of his gear as possible, with nearly every show culminating in him smashing his guitar,as Faroutmag reports.
All’s fair in love and rock and roll, but Moon mentioned the band being in debt when they were first starting. Speaking to Drum Magazine, Moon wasn’t shy about how much debt the band had in the old days, recalling, “I don’t think it was because of living too well, although Pete and I are spenders. We are extravagant, to say the least. The main things were the instruments. We’d do a show and get £100, but a guitar would be £150, and a drum set £100. The debt got up to £30,000 or £40,000, and probably a lot more. It was astronomical”.
Though Townshend could rely on songwriting royalties for his income, the rest of the band would be earning most of their keep on the road, which was more often than not going towards the damage they caused in the process. Despite the destruction they left in their wake, things started to turn around once the song ‘My Generation’ started to gain traction, blowing up in the US and becoming one of the group’s signature tunes throughout their career.
Even after becoming rock stars, Moon said that they still weren’t getting rich on the road by any means, later recalling, “Believe it or not, it’s only since Tommy that we have started to have a bit of profit. Before that, nothing, and we had to pay back everything we had borrowed. We did a tour of the States with Herman’s Hermits and lost money. We did a tour in a bus, which we thought was the cheapest way of doing it, but once again, the bus came to thousands of dollars”. One way of spreading the wealth around the band came with the release of A Quick One, which had a more balanced songwriting effort from each band member.
Keith Moon's isolated drums on The Who 'The Real Me' has been unearthed
Taken from the band’s 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia, the track was written by Pete Townshend, and without Moon’s dextrous ability, there was no way that his expansive creative vision for the song or album would have been fully realised.
Each of Jimmy’s four personalities (Jimmy is the main character of the film/opera) from Quadrophenia story is supposed to be associated with one of the four musicians in The Who. The liner notes illustrate this concept as follows: A tough guy, a helpless dancer. (Roger Daltrey) ,* A romantic, is it me for a moment? (John Entwistle) * A bloody lunatic, I’ll even carry your bags. (Keith Moon) * A beggar, a hypocrite, love reign o’er me. (Pete Townshend).
