Pete and Keith had been wearing respectively those shoes and that shirt throughout the first leg of the US Tommy tour, which went from May 9th, at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, to that June 19th night.
In between those two historical nights, there had been many that saw The Who perform the earliest, still incomplete, live rendition of their new, long-anticipated album Tommy: after Detroit, came the Boston Tea Party.
Then two appearances (three nights in May and two in June) at the Fillmore East in New York; then the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, the Rockpile in Toronto, the Merryweather Post Pavillion in Columbia (MD) – when The Who and Led Zeppelin shared the same bill – the Kinetic Playground in Chicago, Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis (MO), Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (MN), the Hollywood Palladium, and finally Fillmore West, which is where Pete and Keith left part of their roadworn stage clothes, and which is where their San Francisco roadie retrieved it.
The band were probably in a hurry, having to catch the 11:30pm flight to New York, where Pete and Roger were due to appear in court on a charge of assaulting a month before, Mr. Daniel Mulhearn, a plainclothes cop who had rushed the Fillmore East stage, while The Who were playing, with the intent of evacuating the theater, which was filling with smoke from a fire at the grocery store next door.
This would be the first explanation as to why Pete and Keith left their stage clothes behind, but judging by their condition, it seems more likely that they were left lying in the dressing room of Bill Graham’s venue because, simply, they were in bad shape, and had become unusable: one of Pete’s shoes has a hole underneath, due to the heavy stretching and jumping it had undergone in its lifetime.
It even carries blood stains inside, probably from the stage abuse. Keith’s shirt had sweated through 25 shows, and it was completely soaked when it was retrieved, the roadie told me.
And what about the SG guitar bridge? The roadie told me that, for some reason, Pete replaced it with another one before the final Fillmore West show. It is not from a smashed guitar, he set the record straight; “Pete would always give me his guitar if I was around when they were done, to bring backstage . . . a skeleton crew back then!”
(This is an excerpt from the Who official site, to read the full story click here)
