EAST HAMPTON, NY (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — Chris Stamp, a former manager of The Who, who also launched Track Records and was instrumental in the early career of Jimi Hendrix has died of cancer. He was 70 at the time of his death.
Born in East London, Stamp's first job in the entertainment industry was as an assistant on Bryan Forbes's "The L-Shaped Room" where he met another assistant, Kit Lambert, with whom he would later co-manage The Who.
"Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were the fifth and sixth members of the Who: Kit, with his outrageous behaviour and ideas on how to manipulate the media, and Chris, the expert in cool, menace, and scams! Their contribution to the band should never be underestimated," band biographer Andrew Neill wrote about the pair in 2005.
Stamp and Lambert co-managed the band through their tempestuous early years, arranging their first U.S. tour and signing the band with legendary booking agent Frank Barsalona.
However, in 1972 after Roger Daltry called for an audit of the band's books, a large sum of money was found to have disappeared and Stamp and Lambert were eventually displaced as the band's managers by Peter Rudge and Bill Curbishley.
"They lived like rock stars," Who drummer Pete Townshend told Billboard magazine, "and they really stopped functioning as managers – or the type of managers they had been, and that we still needed."
Subsequently, both Stamp and Lambert moved to the U.S., to run the label they had co-founded, Track Records. While the label had a number of hits, including their first release, Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" in 1967 with albums by Hendrix, The Who and others, it eventually went bust in 1976.
Stamp and Lambert parted ways and Stamp eventually found his way into rehab in 1987. Stamp later became a therapist, specializing in addiction counseling with a practice in East Hampton, N.Y. He later made contact with the band and even joined the board of the John Entwistle Foundation, which was established following the 2002 death of the band's bassist in 2002.
Stamp is survived by his wife, two daughters, three brothers, two sisters and six grandchildren. – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
