Jim Pilcher witnessed The Who play the Wellington Town Hall on 31 January, 1968.
We used to get a lot of those package shows with three or so bands on the bill. Then the ads came out - The Who, the Small Faces and Paul Jones. At the time, they were the punk rockers, the mod rockers of the music scene.
The Small Faces were huge at the time, The Who were even bigger, and Paul Jones had just left Manfred Mann. The Who had this reputation of smashing up their gear - it'd cost a muso here a bloody lifetime's savings to buy a guitar, and here these guys were smashing it up! My friends and I all went out to the airport to see the plane come in. They were these little white skinny guys - they didn't have suntans like we did.
We found out somehow that they were staying at the Hotel Waterloo opposite the Wellington Railway Station. I saw Keith Moon standing outside the hotel - we'd heard stories that Moon was a real nutter and you couldn't get close to him. I just said, 'do you mind if I have a photo?' 'No problem at all.' We went up to their rooms where they were staying - it was pretty cruddy really. The Beatles stayed at the St. George which was the hotel in Wellington at the time.
We went down to the Town Hall where they were setting up the gear, and security was pretty lax. I walked into the auditorium, and there's all this Marshall gear onstage.
