3.5/4 stars
Rated R
Directed by James D. Cooper
The Beatles gained their recording contract with the help of Brian Epstein, but no one credits their manager with inspiring their music. For The Who, however, managers Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert played an important role not only in promoting the band but also in shaping their sound. Epstein was never called the fifth Beatle, but Stamp and Lambert were the fifth and sixth Whos.
The story of those ’60s Svengalis is well told in the documentary Lambert & Stamp. Unlike many of today’s self-important documentarians, director James D. Cooper doesn’t inject himself into the narrative, but allows the key surviving protagonists—Stamp and The Who’s Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, along with a handful of eyewitnesses, including the manager’s brother, actor Terence Stamp—to recount how it all happened. The film is also a rich trove of period images, including television appearances by The Who and their handlers, concert footage and random shots of early ’60s London showing how a gray city that had been reduced to rubble during World War II was about to explode into a rainbow of color and a carnival of thrills.
Lambert and Stamp were an unlikely team. For starters, they had no apparent interest in rock music before setting out to find a rock band as material for the movie they planned to make. But as aspiring filmmakers, fueled on London’s jazz coffeehouses and the French New Wave, they were open to the pop culture rapidly developing around them. Lambert and Stamp were an odd couple, “chalk and cheese” as the Brits say. Stamp was the working-class son of a Thames tugboat captain and Lambert the Oxford-educated child of a prominent classical conductor. Stamp was straight and Lambert, gay. As one of the film’s interlocutors puts it, Lambert and Stamp could have been mismatched characters from a BBC-TV comedy. However, their combined patrician-streetwise savvy played well in the new social space opened by the pop culture of Swinging London. They never made their movie, but with The Who as their lever, they set the world on its ear.
Drawn by the long line of Vespas parked outside a London club, Lambert and Stamp discovered a raw band, The High Numbers, performing energetic blues and R&B covers and already playing with ear-shattering feedback. With Townshend’s art school background, they found a collaborator open to the idea of turning The Who, as they renamed the band, into performance Pop Art. They encouraged his songwriting and helped articulate his ideas. As originally conceived by Townshend, “My Generation” was a 16-bar blues in the Jimmy Reed mode. Lambert and Stamp encouraged The Who to amp it up and gave Daltrey the idea to stutter his way through the lyrics.
Townshend’s education continued under their mentors, especially Lambert, who widened his musical imagination by playing recordings of English composer Henry Purcell. Although initially skeptical of Townshend’s dream of writing a rock opera, he helped the songwriter shape a spiritual allegory into the narrative that became Tommy, the album that broke The Who in the U.S.
Lambert & Stamp captures the excitement of The Who in the time and place where their music began and allows some of the central characters to reminisce. It’s a must-see for fans of ’60s rock.
Now playing at the Oriental Theatre.
