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"A quick punch is always better than stewing about for months," Daltrey says, but by 1967, Moon and Entwistle were both fed up, and took a walk together. "I was always breaking up fights," Entwistle remembers, "pulling Roger off somebody, usually Pete. Keith and I were fed up with all the punching, and with Townshend's being so bigheaded, thinking he was a bleeding musical genius." Moon and Entwistle had eyes for a new group, and had even come up with a name and a rough design for an album cover. It was abandoned when Moon and Entwistle returned to The Who soon after the quarrel, but the idea was not entirely forgotten. The name of their projected group, along with similar artwork, appeared on an album by a new band called Led Zeppelin.
Daltrey played the first Tommy tour with a nose that had been broken "playfully" by Pete; Moon continued his spiritual dedication to rock-'n'-roll excess, working almost as much havoc on his own body as on the rooms he inhabited during tours. A hotel manager once appeared in Moon's room when he was playing a cassette at top volume and insisted he turn down "the noise." In a flash, Moon reduced the room to splinters, announcing, "This is noise. That was The Who."
Moon, who could also be wonderfully benign and sweet-tempered, a sort of rock-'n'-roll Shakespearean fool, commanded perhaps the greatest affection from the audience. He was also dosing himself for disaster, and he began to undermine the group. During an American tour in 1975, he failed to show up for a sold-out concert in Boston and, Daltrey says, "Pete never forgave him." Townshend and Daltrey had wrangled bitterly over Quadrophenia, and during the first half of the '70s each member of the band had spent as much time on his own solo projects as he had on band activities. Each put out at least one solo album. By 1976 the band had effectively stopped touring, and there were rumors that it had collapsed.
Torn like a page of parchment, Townshend brooded about all of this, decided that he was finally going to say, "Right, that's it: The Who becomes a business." He expected the others to turn him down. Instead, sensing that he was in a state of crisis, they supported him. The strongest backing, to Townshend's considerable surprise, came from Daltrey. "He said to me, 'I don't care whether we tour or make records or don't make records. I just always want to be able to work with you, always be able to sing your songs and, above everything else, I want you to be happy.' This was Roger Daltrey, right; the person I was seeing as a competitor. It was a revelation. Nobody has ever talked like that to me. Nobody. Not my mother, not my father, not my kids, not my wife. Nobody ever said things like that and meant them."