27 Feb 2025

Pete’s Shoes & Keith’s Shirt: A Tale of Life on the Road

Did you ever see the faces of the children? They get so excited
Waking up on Christmas morning hours before the winter sun has ignited.

Unlike Tommy, I perfectly knew what day it was. The Christmas aura, with its innocence, its excitement and sense of surprise, tends to wear away a little every year. For this, nothing could prepare me for the most unexpected gift not even my teenage self could have ever hoped to receive. Tommy and Christmas – this is what this story is all about.

A bundle of garbage inside a beat-down carton box. That initial sight was enough to call it the most unenthusiastic Christmas gift ever. But it took me a closer and more careful look to realize what it in fact was. The astonishment took me back to another Christmas Day of almost twenty years ago: I’m 15, and in my hands, I’m holding a black t-shirt: white silhouette of Pete Townshend thrashing away his Rickenbacker, and the classic Who logo, “Maximum R’n’B.”

Fast-forward, Christmas 2024: “Another Who shirt,” I’m thinking. But this time is different. I feel my heart racing just like in that Christmas morning of long ago, but twice as fast this time.

“Quivers down my backbone, I got the shakes down my knee bone, tremors in my thigh bone – shakin’ all over.”

Yes, this is another Who shirt, except . . . it is Keith Moon’s shirt. I have seen it in many photos from 1969.

And what about this pair of shoes? Attached to them, a brownish piece of paper with dark blue handwriting confirmed the unexplainable, but unmistakable nature of the dustiest, mouldiest, smelliest pair of shoes I have ever had before me: “Pete Townshend shoes from US Tommy tour 1969.”

Also, camouflaging among the Styrofoam packing pieces, a Gibson SG guitar bridge. Two little stains of blood on its chrome plating… Windmilling too hard?

All of a sudden, I realized it took 20 years for the universe to get my efforts and hopes together and make something like this come my way. But it took a little less than that, literally one second, for me to realize where this gift had come from: before I became its keeper, this treasure trove was kept for 56 years by a roadie who worked some San Francisco Bay Area shows for The Who between 1967 and 1976. The short letter he left in the box was just as meaningful as the treasures he had just passed on to me:

“Edoardo, I’m giving you a surprise! Here’s all the Who memorabilia. I’m giving it all to you because, being 73 now, someday when I pass, my family will probably throw it all in the junk yard. You be the steward of it all now, of what I have been holding on to for some 55 years! I know you will appreciate it. It could be in no better hands. Pete didn’t want it . . . lol!”

I am assuming he was excited about the archival research I conduct on The Who, and especially the fact that he saw, for the first time in all these years, many photos of himself peeking from behind Keith’s drums at San Francisco shows in my book Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976.

Those shoes, shirt, and guitar bridge, come exactly from San Francisco, and particularly, from the night of Thursday, June 19, 1969, at Fillmore West, formerly the Carousel Ballroom.

Photo © Edoardo Genzolini

Photo © Edoardo Genzolini

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!”

The following photos show the lost and found shoes and shirt at the last show they were ever worn by Pete and Keith, at Fillmore West in San Francisco, June 19, 1969. These photos were kindly provided by photographer Don Groves (grovesphotography.com).

Photo of Pete leaping by Don Groves, grovesgallery.com

Fillmore West, San Francisco. June 18, 1969. Photos © Frank M. Stapleton

Story © 2025 Edoardo Genzolini