Much like the world of competitive sport, just because you happen to exist at the same time as your contemporaries in music does not mean you are necessarily friendly with them. The 1960s may have seemed like an idyllic place to begin creating music, but the counterculture boom was not without its uncomfortable rivalries. The Who weren’t known to be the nicest or friendliest of the 1960s rock and roll bands.
Keith Moon was a madcap delight who often befriended most of his fellow musicians and pop stars, and on any given night, there was a decent possibility of seeing Pete Townshend or John Entwistle at the Bag O’ Nails club, socialising with the elite of the music business. But the members could turn surly and combative quickly, and their infighting was notorious among those same circles as Daltrey and Moon would often engage in pitch battles, and it occasionally spilt outside their ranks as well.
Still, when it came to helping out a fellow band in need, The Who had a notable instance of camaraderie. That was when The Rolling Stones – specifically Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – got busted at Richards’ Sussex home, Redlands, in February of 1967. Led by infamous police Sergeant Norman Pilcher, the raid uncovered trace amounts of drug use, but it was enough to get both Jagger and Richards arrested.
The story has gone down in history for apparently interrupting “an orgy of cunnilingus” with Marianne Faithfull arriving to the door wrapped in a fur coat. In truth, it was likely far more of a spaced-out affair. Described by some “as a scene of pure domesticity”, the group may have been in the house, but the likelihood is they were out of the minds. Jagger and the rest of the band had been taking acid during the day, which had led to Faithfull taking a bath and, after drying, wrapping herself in the sunrise pelt.
The Who and the Stones were friendly enough that the former group saw this as an attack on pop groups as a whole. And it’s hard not to agree. Pilcher was later seen as an orchestrator of a sting operation in conjunction with the British tabloids to gain some hefty column inches and make a few bob on the side. Townshend, Daltrey, Moon and Entwistle did not take kindly to this.
The Who had garnered a reputation for anti-establishment ethos, and indeed their next album would concern the restrictions of British radio broadcasting by parodying the pirate stations that played rock music at the time on The Who Sell Out. Sensing a need to help out their compatriots, the band sprung into action.
Their plan was simple: record two Stones songs, rush to release it as a single, and gain enough money to bail Jagger and Richards out. The band decided to take on ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Under My Thumb’, but there was a problem: Entwistle was on his honeymoon at the time. That meant that Townshend stepped in to overdub bass on the single. From the initial recording to the pressing of the single to the release, it only took a week to get The Who’s covers of ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Under My Thumb’ out to help their friends.
Turns out, though, that this was still too late. Both Richards and Jagger had their legal troubles resolved by the time The Who’s single hit the marketplace. Richards spent a single night in jail, while Jagger managed to avoid the big house completely. Both eventually had their sentences overturned. What was originally a noble cause to help their fellow rockers wound up just being a silly old-hat cover.
The single only wound up peaking at number 44 on the UK Singles Chart, and the group pretty much ignored its existence until ‘The Last Time’ appeared on the compilation album The Who Hits 50! in 2014.
Check out The Who’s version of ‘The Last Time’ down below.
