Between “I Can’t Explain” and Live At Leeds, I adored the Who as fervently as anyone’s ever adored any rock ’n’ roll act. It wasn’t only the way they sounded and moved I loved, but the amazing stuff they wore. Backstage at Winterland in San Francisco, I once had had a chance to pilfer the unguarded gold sequin jacket Pete Townshend wore over ruffly shirts through most of 1967. Half of me yearned to possess the jacket as implacably as the protagonists of The Robe, starring Victor Mature, yearned to possess that which Christ wore on the cross. On the other hand, the Who were my heroes, and it wasn’t in me to do anything that might cause them dismay, so I sighed a prodigious sigh, left his jacket where it was, and went back out front, where Keith Emerson of the Nice was jamming daggers between the keys of his organ. Much better, I thought, that he should jam them between the ribs of bass guitarist Lee Jackson. Anything to keep the boy from singing!

But I’m getting off the track. Little did I realize at the time that I may just as well have made off with The Jacket. Less than a year after I’d resisted the temptation to swipe it, Pete took the stage of Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium in jeans, an utterly ordinary blue T-shirt, and an unbecoming haircut. Roger Daltrey alone looked glamorous, and it seemed to me that it might be the beginning of the end of my adoration for the Who. (I was right.) Yet another year later, when I interviewed Pete for the first time—and the close, close personal friendship between us that thrives to this day was born—he explained that he’d left The Jacket in his closet in Soho just to confound fans who took for granted that he’d always wear something amazing. Which explanation didn’t satisfy me then and doesn’t satisfy me now.