The Final Time the Who's Roger Daltrey Got Wasted With Jim Morrison
- by Joe Taysom
The Isle of Wight Festival was a steep cultural landmark, an event that bookended an era and was the last hurrah before the swinging sixties’ days became a thing of the past. It wouldn’t only close the counter-culture movement, but it would also be the final time that The Who's Roger Daltrey got to see Jim Morrison, and they put the world to rights.
The influential festival, which welcomed over 600,000 revellers to the shores of a sleepy seaside resort, also brought together the glittering gold of the rock world at the time. It meant performances from Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, The Doors and The Who would become some of the most celebrated sets of all time. The few days on a quaint island situated off the south coast would carve itself into British folklore forever and remains an occasion that lives long in the memory of The Who’s Roger Daltrey, who witnessed the tide turn in more ways than one following the end of the weekend.
The third consecutive event for the festival since 1968 meant the organisers were quietly confident they could sell out their allocation of 150,000 tickets, and they did so way before the event was intended to take place. Like Woodstock and Glen Watkins before it, the event gave non-tickets holders time to assemble and plan their attack. The gatecrashers made sure it smashed the previous Woodstock record of 400,000 and made sure that it was the most astonishing event in British festival history.
