News has come through that legendary Who photographer and tour manager Tom Wright has died in the US.
The Who have many reasons to be grateful to Tom. A contemporary of Pete Townshend at Ealing Art College in 1962, he introduced Pete to marijuana and a host of great American R&B and blues artists. When he skipped the country to avoid a drug charge he left behind a wondrous record collection that Pete snaffled and which became the impetus for The Who’s switch from pop and C&W to Maximum R&B.
Equally importantly, Tom would go on to become the group’s first American tour manager and unofficial photographer, and many of his photographs from The Who’s earliest US tours have been reproduced in countless books and magazines.
Among the most famous was of Keith Moon alongside the Holiday Inn sign at Flint, Michigan, the scene of his infamous 21st birthday party.
“Pete telegrammed me [in 1967] to say The Who were coming to the US to tour with the British pop band Herman’s Hermits,” said Tom. “They’d be in Florida in a week… and when I got there Pete suggested I come on tour with them and shoot photographs of the band. So here I was, 23-years-old, camera around my neck, passport in my back pocket, boarding a chartered plane because Herman’s Hermits were so big, they rated it.”
In 2022, with The Who esteemed as mighty legends of rock, pioneers in the art of performance and superstars both alive and dead, it seems absurd to recall that in the summer of 1967, on their first American tour, they were the support act for the far more popular Herman’s Hermits. With 11 top ten hits behind them when the tour started – The Who had only one – Herman and his boys were riding out the crest of the British Invasion wave, drawing predominantly female audiences for whom The Who were distinctly odd, especially when they closed their brief sets by inflicting serious damage to their guitars, drums and amplifiers.
Tom was on board for almost all of that first tour. It began on July 13 in Calgary, Canada, and closed on September 9 in Honolulu, a nine-week coast-to-coast jaunt on which they often played two shows in one day. It was a gruelling experience and probably not worth the effort. “It got us around America,” said Roger Daltrey, “but it did us no good at all.”
Tom was working as an underwater photographer when he joined The Who at St Petersburg in Florida. “The Who came to Florida and that was the end of my underwater photography career,” he says. “These young kids would be yelling, ‘Where’s Herman, we want Herman’ and then The Who would start playing before the curtain came up,” he told Who biographer Richard Barnes. “When the curtain came up, they would be really rocking and everybody was just moving about, like Roger would be running around and Pete would be swinging his arm and hammering the guitar and Moonie would be kicking ass. And people were in shock. The band didn’t stop between numbers... or they’d quit playing for just a couple a couple of seconds, but it would be just long enough and BOOM into the next number.”
This was the period in The Who’s career when wrecking their equipment at the end of a set was a regular occurrence. “It was spellbinding,” adds Tom. “A lot of times there was no clapping whatsoever, just dead silence. People in the front row were just sitting there with their mouths open, stunned.”
Tom would go on to tour manage The Who in America for two tours during 1968, photographing them along the way, on stage, in recording studios, in their coach and at hotels. He quit in late 1968 after accepting a position as manager of the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, one of the era’s most important rock venues.
The tours that Tom photographed laid the foundation for The Who’s eventual capture of an American tour circuit they helped create. This hardly existed during the first British Invasion of America, the one led by The Beatles and Rolling Stones, and it developed as pop became rock, with audiences beginning to listen seriously to groups whose music was no longer aimed predominantly at teenage girls. During Tom’s tenure as The Who’s tour manager the group pioneered a new concept of rock performance, with the music they played becoming more and more sophisticated as their shows became longer and more expressive. They also became more photogenic.
The following year The Who opened their first headlining US tour on February 21 in San Jose, California, and while in the Golden State made a madcap, stop-start promotional film for ‘Call Me Lightning’, a song released as a single in the US and completed at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles around this time. Tom was on hand to photograph the group in tin helmets and fooling around with an explosive detonator.
Just as they done in the UK, The Who blazed a trail across America through the potency of their live shows and Tom was on hand to watch it all happen. Unlike the British pop bands that preceded them, there was no run of chart-topping US singles or historic appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, and nor did they reduce teenage girls to screaming banshees as they flew from city to city. They didn’t so much crash down Uncle Sam’s gates as slide in through a gap after the doors had been left ajar by the others, but the hard work they put in ensured that in the fullness of time The Who would become a stadium-filling juggernaut in the seventies and beyond.
Tom Wright’s pictures of The Who in America captured a fascinating but often-overlooked period in the journey of one of the UK’s greatest ever rock bands.
Tom’s book Roadwork: Rock’n’Roll Turned Inside Out, published in the UK by Omnibus Press as Raising Hell On The Rock ‘N Roll Highway, features an intro by Pete which I posted on Just Backdated here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2015/03/raising-hell-petes-introduction-to-tom.html
7 comments:
A really great writeup and tribute to Tom! Thanks Chris!
RIP Tom Wright, undoubtably a big piece of The Who's history.
~Marc Starcke
God bless Tom
I’m sure it was a great ride
RIP my friend.
I met Tom in a dojo in Texas in the late 80s. I’d been taking classes alongside his son, Tim. I fell for him instantly. I was a nobody, a loner writer with a few years of Europe under my belt, like he, I later discovered. One look at him and I suspected a rarity, a pearl reposing in its private haunt, withdrawn in that quiet shell, sequestered far below the surface of superficiality, ruminating, and oh, so bothered by something big. He opened up about his art soon after I revealed I was a failing writer. He showed me an office space in a dark cul de sac which he’d only just rented, the tables piled high with thousands of recognizably famous photos. He told stories of drunken camaraderie, priceless moments with old friends he’d helped shape and shine to fame—private vignettes at the time untold, good times enjoyed in anonymity, stumbling contently in the dark along wharves and in seedy bars—one among many tales told of his glory days. Under harsh fluorescent lights, before me was an older man, pocked by life, wizened, and clearly most discontented. I began to see the demon that rode him. Tom was working to close his UT deal, and was tremendously let down that they so undervalued his work. He sold part of his collection there for, if I recall correctly, $240K. We drank a lot and had a interior, artsy relationship, which I hold quite dear. He took the time to read my writing and offered his razor insight.. A few years later, we drifted apart. He left me with an antique Corona portable typewriter and, I often thought, his trickster demon, which then rode me maniacally, as well. It stood on my neck and forced me to fight it and kept me pushing back harder with the writing. The more we tussled, the more honed became my skills. Over the years, I grasped hold the reigns and now ride that sonofabitch. I owed that to Tom. He has been my unwitting muse, even once he apparently regained his own saddle, tore off,
and yeps like a warrior, to this day, riding rough across infinity. An artist. He showed me rather than told me the importance of following my bliss.
P.S. NiagaraRats from Texas, Tommy, can you hear me?
I remember you . I am tim . Ashcraft,s dojo in San Antonio TX. Thank you for remembering my Dad.
I first met Tom Wright in the late '80s in San Antonio, when I was writing a cover story for a local magazine. He was sent to shoot the cover.
On the way to the gig, he told me he'd lost his glasses and wasn't sure he could operate the toaster-size camera he'd brought along. Talk about high anxiety. However, at the shoot, Tom was a consumate pro. (He'd been joking the whole time).
Back at his studio (mentioned above by 'Anonymous'), his story, and history, began to unfold. I began interviewing Tom for stories that were published in Austin Business Journal, San Antonio Current, and Modern Maturity, etc.
Tom even arranged an interview with Joe Walsh in San Antonio at the home of Mi Tierra Cafe owner, Jorge Cortez. Joe not only confirmed that Tom was the "Jack Kerouac of Rock 'n' Roll photography," but also talked about how his and Tom's friendship began at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit.
What I believe is Tom's little known secret is his love for the Mexican and Mexican-American community in San Antonio. His love for the intersection of cultures is what he left behind in his many photos and friendships.
I'm thankful to Tom Wright for his friendship and for the many interviews and stories he shared with me. By telling his stories, he taught me the importance of storytelling. Throughout the years, I not only continued to write articles but to teach college and to conduct writing and storytelling workshops. My most recent workshops are with military caregivers.
I mention these things because I believe in Blessers, people who contribute to our growth as human beings, but who might be unaware of their influence on us. As stated in my dissertation, they are part of our "...Hidden Alliance of Blessers."
I will always remember Tom Wright was being one of mine.
I send my belated condolences to Tim and his family.
Tom Porter, Ph.D.
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