Who I Am: A Memoir (12 page)

The Who were banned from Holiday Inns for life.

We stopped in Las Vegas on the way home. It was Herman’s nineteenth birthday. While trapped there in the searing heat I wrote a few lyrics and recorded three demos on a little Wollensack tape rig. These were ‘Tattoo’, ‘Boats Are Coming In’ and ‘Touring Inside US’ (directly quoting an early Beach Boys song, ‘Surfing USA’); ‘Tattoo’ was inspired by recent events on the road: were we men, or were we something else?

In Gold Star studios we finished ‘I Can See for Miles’, which we then played, along with ‘My Generation’, on
The Smothers Brothers’ Comedy Hour
. For televisual effect, Keith set off an oversized theatrical charge of gunpowder, blowing up the entire band in front of a panic-stricken Bette Davis and a sweetly concerned Mickey Rooney. My hair caught fire and my hearing was never the same. Keith was such a twat sometimes, even if he did make this TV show a significant moment in pop history.

I was looking forward to returning home to Karen, a new flat and a new studio back in London. But because the entire summer had been used up so profligately, we had to catch up, which meant The Who planned to go straight back into the studio. And because these sessions needed to be paid for, we’d have to play lots of British shows at the same time. We committed to a package tour with a bunch of current British pop groups with UK chart hits, as though we’d learned nothing at all touring with Herman’s Hermits. We topped a bill of artists who all believed they should be topping the bill: Traffic, The Herd, Marmalade and The Tremeloes, all of whom would have legions of female fans screaming for them outside in the street every night.

Would anyone scream for The Who?

How the blazes would I know? I was still deaf.

The day we got back in September, Chris Stamp asked me to meet him at the Track Records offices in Old Compton Street, where he presented me with the proposed track-list for the new album. I was taken aback. We had ‘I Can See for Miles’, ‘Rael’, ‘Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands’, ‘Our Love Was’, ‘I Can’t Reach You’, ‘Glittering Girl’, ‘Relax’ and a song by John called ‘Someone’s Coming’; ‘Summertime Blues’ could be put on the list as we had recorded it on tour. But there was little else of consequence, and only ‘I Can See for Miles’ seemed a potential chart song.

I had written very little on tour, having come to depend so much on writing in my home studio. I told Chris I didn’t feel we were ready to release; we needed more songs, and I needed more time away from Keith and Holiday Inns to write them. Chris was unusually adamant: this was what we would be releasing. Suddenly I saw that he was now running a record label with a schedule to fill, as well as managing a band. He had, in some sense, gone over to the other side.

I took a little time to consider our dilemma. I’d written a couple of songs that weren’t on Chris’s track-list. I’d demoed ‘Tattoo’ in my hotel room in Las Vegas during our three-day vacation, and a song called ‘Odorono’, named after a deodorant stick. ‘Odorono’ led us to the most perfect pop idea of all time: we would make our next record a vehicle for advertising. When we called Kit to explain, he was as excited as we were. I suggested we link the gaps between songs with jingles like those on commercial pirate radio.

John and Keith leapt on the idea, and, inspired by ‘Odorono’, began making up advertising jingles for all kinds of things, like Medac spot cream, Premier Drums and Heinz Baked Beans. But when the album was ready to be put together we were still short of tracks. John’s track didn’t feel right either, so he quickly produced a demo for another song called ‘Silas Stingy’, which, to be honest, was equally eccentric. But this was obviously going to be a very eccentric record.

Roger produced a demo for a good song called ‘Early Morning Cold Taxi’. He said he’d written it with our roadie Cy Langston. We recorded it and it was a real contender until Cy could restrain himself no longer and revealed that he had written it. When I heard this I took Roger aside, asking him to let it go. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why. There was no territory at stake. I was desperate for songs from anywhere at all. It was still not unusual, nor regarded as in any way unethical, to take writing or publishing credit because you were part of the process of helping a writer get a song placed and recorded. But I was concerned Roger would look bad if it came out that he had contributed little or nothing to the track, and Cy was famously loose-tongued.

I found it hard to see why Roger couldn’t write more songs. When I’d worked with him at my home studio on ‘See My Way’ for
A Quick One
he’d generated ideas quite freely. It may have been that he found studio technology too fussy. If Roger and I had managed to become closer, and had worked together in the demo studio, The Who’s run might have extended a little longer. But I also believe Roger has mostly enjoyed being an interpreter, a voice, an instrument. The skills required to be a Sinatra or Jack Nicholson are very different to those of a Cole Porter or Orson Welles. When Roger chooses the right script, he is a giant. That has to be enough for any man who wants to be acknowledged as a force in show business.

At the time, though, Roger was concerned about the direction the band was taking. This album worried us all.

When recording restarted we added ‘Armenia’, a song by my aide-de-camp Speedy Keen. This was the first time an outsider had contributed an original song to a Who album, and it never happened again. Kit persuaded me to rejig ‘Sunrise’, a jazzy ballad I’d written for Mum years before; when I first played it to her she said nothing at all – complimentary or dismissive. That’s Mum.

I ended up singing more than usual on this record. Keith and John were generating delightful studio chaos attempting to re-create
The Goon Show
with their jingles. At one point they came up with one for a car dealer they used in the hope they’d get a free Bentley out of him. He gave them some dirty photos instead; fearing they were dealing with the wrong kind of dealer, they dropped the jingle and stopped taking his phone calls.

Chris had taken the album concept to some advertising hotshots, David King and Roger Law (who later co-created
Spitting Image
). They came up with the inspired title
The Who Sell Out
, with an idea for the sleeve that we didn’t hear much about until we showed up at David Montgomery’s studio in Fulham for the photoshoot, but King, Law and Montgomery loved it, and were operating in that confident, serene way art directors do when they’re on to a surefire hit.

The sleeve was to be divided into four panels, each band member advertising a product. I had to take my shirt off for ‘Odorono’, and was worried I’d look skinny. Roger had to sit in a tin bathtub of almost frozen baked beans generously donated by Heinz. Keith dabbed on Medac; for once the spot he treated was a phoney (he was prone to massive break-outs on his face). John got the best gig, posing with a half-naked blonde model for a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. Having flown in genuine station identifications and jingles for Radio London, Kit cobbled together a sense of integrity for the record. After the final assembly and mix, we threw ourselves into radio and TV publicity in anticipation of a release.

Concert reviews of this period depict me in perpetually foul mood, often breaking guitars, of course, but also throwing spats of anger. Roger too seemed unhappy on stage. This may have happened because we’d become used to playing so quietly on the Hermits’ tour and were now back to our much louder British rigs, or because John had bought himself louder amplifiers. In any event I was happy to be back with Karen.

Years later I would discover that I really was struggling with some psychological anger that had always needed management, perhaps treatment. But the anger also seemed connected to something important: I often felt that as a performing artist I was undervalued, that my performances, angry though they appeared, were being misread. I wanted to be serious about what I did, and wanted my work – including smashing guitars in concert – to be regarded as part of a passionate commitment to an evolving stagecraft.

Perhaps I was taking myself and The Who far too seriously, but what was I to do? Turn everything into a joke, simply because the rest of the world regarded pop music and auto-destructive art as tosh? It’s possible that our audiences didn’t understand the significance of auto-destruction, but they certainly seemed to experience emotional release when we broke up our gear at the end of the show. Of course this did nothing to silence our detractors, critics with loud voices who looked no further than the end of their noses before decrying us as yobbos and hooligans.

‘I Can See for Miles’ wasn’t shooting up the charts as a single, which was a shock to me; I really had expected my masterwork to sweep us to eternal glory. A few weeks after its release Kit’s godfather, the English composer Sir William Walton, wrote me a note congratulating me on the ambitious harmonies. Kit had done a wonderful job of recording this time; the test we brought back from Gold Star studios in California sounded spectacular on the mono single release.

Yet it was being received in the UK with a lukewarm response, and climbing the charts slowly. I worried that Track weren’t pushing it properly; if that was the case, to whom could we complain? We all saw Track as our own record label at the time. The single did better in the US, but was still rather slow. The financial picture was bleak. As I’d guessed, the Hermits tour had actually cost us money, a common occurrence since the late Seventies for a developing artist but unheard of back then. And now we were spending money on recording.

At this stage in our development as a band, The Who were being described as the ‘loudest band on earth’, so much so that it had become part of our identity. Then we started hearing that Vanilla Fudge had eclipsed us: they had found a way of amplifying a Hammond organ up to rock guitar sound decibels; when they played, plaster fell from the ceilings of older buildings they performed in.

We were actually upset by this. I went into a silly little tizzy. We had a show lined up at Brian Epstein’s Saville Theatre with Vanilla Fudge in October, so I started making statements in the press that we had some special stunt up our sleeve. I can see now that I was afraid of another head-to-head-with-Jimi-Hendrix-Experience experience. In the event, The Who did behave like schoolchildren and Vanilla Fudge did indeed bring the ceiling down; the building was condemned soon after. Although they were great live, and I don’t think their organ volume on stage has since been surpassed, Vanilla Fudge were not Jimi Hendrix.

Poor Jimi. Someone must have told his managers that The Who had reached a huge audience by touring with Herman’s Hermits (wrong!), so they sent him out to support The Monkees. It’s easy to forget how huge they were by this time. Their album had been number one all summer, and their TV series – which even music business’s most serious intellectuals seemed to enjoy – was a massive success. Still, it’s not an easy combination to imagine.

The Who were also realising that we too needed something very special if we were ever to succeed in a major way. Personally, I was at a loss as to what that something could be, and no one else in our creative group seemed to have an answer either.

‘After wasting a lot of precious time,’ I wrote on 4 October 1967, soon after
The Who Sell Out
photo session, ‘I think it’s time for a real shake-up.’

We returned to the States for a brief tour to celebrate ‘I Can See for Miles’ reaching No. 9 in the charts, and in hopes of sending it higher. It had probably been our appearance on
the Smothers Brothers’ show
that had done the most good, but Monterey hadn’t hurt either. Maybe the Hermits’ tour had helped a little too – who knows. For a few shows we supported Eric Burdon and The Animals, and The Association. They had more pull at the gate, but once again I felt we were supporting artists who were inferior to us.

In New York I hung out one night with my friend Danny Fields at his flat. I was deeply tired but couldn’t sleep, so Danny gave me a pill, probably a Mandrax, a sedative-hypnotic drug. I woke in the night, still in a trance, with Danny’s hands all over my body, but I didn’t fight him off. I enjoyed what he did, though I didn’t let him actually fuck me.

When I left in the morning, walking down the streets full of workers – one of whom tipped his hat at me as I passed – I realised I’d made a mistake. I wanted to be someone who felt at ease with an unconventional sexual life, and I realised I was probably bisexual; there was nothing to be ashamed of in this – John Lennon had reputedly spoken to mutual friends of his own experiments – but I still felt uncomfortable and hypocritical: I wasn’t gay enough to feel at ease with my homoerotic feelings.

The record company had to wait until December to get clearances for the commercial brands mentioned on
The Who Sell Out
. Despite its ambition, some poor material – songs that lacked teeth – was included in the half-cooked package. Like The Beatles’
Magical Mystery Tour
our album seemed potentially brilliant but ultimately inconclusive. When it was finally released it was The Who’s slowest-selling record in the UK so far. We fretted that we had neglected our British fans.

Interestingly, we played a few university shows around this time – a new kind of gig that was going to change things for The Who in the near future. But as Christmas approached I felt distinctly gloomy. Chris got briefly excited when it seemed for a moment as though he might have arranged a black-comedy American movie featuring the band, but it fizzled. There was even talk of a Who comic book. Our ad-agency-style brainstorming was obviously still at work up at Track Records, but it was difficult for me to take much comfort in that.

Karen and I were settling in at Ebury Street, but there too I’d had a hiccup. We’d been struggling to find a cleaning lady – they all insisted on seeing a marriage certificate before committing to work for trendy young couples – so when I first met our very friendly neighbours and enlisted their help I’d told them we were married. I took Karen to one of our favourite local restaurants, where I confessed what I’d said. Did we need to get married to survive as members of polite society?