Who I Am: A Memoir (14 page)

Rick smoked little Indian cigarettes called beedies, which I used for many years as a substitute for pot. They were foul-smelling and tasted almost as bad, but the nicotine hit was enormous. The Who stayed in North America until April, hitting Canada for the first time, meeting real Mods on scooters in Edmonton and finding authentic English beer in Toronto.

I was already bored with bus-tour life despite someone in the band bringing on an extremely good-looking, effervescently crazy girl. Keith stripped her naked, tied her to a seat with loose ribbons and pretended to rape her. When I worriedly intervened, she was the one who told me to ‘fuck off’.

After she’d romped around the bus naked for seven hours between Toronto and Edmonton, I was feeling pretty stirred up, and when we arrived at our hotel, and she knocked on my room door, my vanity got the better of me. In fact, Keith and John, who thought I was stuck up around groupies, had paid her $100 if she would share her gonorrhea with me.

She was gorgeous. We had great sex. I caught the clap, and took the injection. I couldn’t afford to be angry – this was rock ’n’ roll ‘hi-jinks’ and in a way I was pleased to be included.

Karen Astley and I got married on 20 May, the day after my birthday. The party was held at Karen’s parents’ country house, where Richard Stanley jumped in the pool with his clothes on, but Keith Moon was well behaved. Mum wore a perfect hat. Linda and Lesley, two young Mod fans, were the only gatecrashers.

The chauffeur of the old Rolls I hired for the wedding turned out to be Great Uncle Pat Dennis, Granddad Maurice’s youngest brother. I had never met him before until we got under way, when he turned and shouted an introduction through the glass. He got extremely drunk at the party, and at the end of the night I drove him home in the Rolls.

I cut down my drinking, and had stopped smoking grass. I was certainly changing. Kit was terribly sniffy about my Meher Baba interest, and began to make jokes about Karen and me setting up home together in our new Georgian house in Twickenham, calling us Lord and Lady Townshend. He claimed he’d been standing in the rain one day trying to hail a taxi, and we’d sailed right past him in my Lincoln Continental as he waved his arms to catch our attention.

In June, on Karen’s birthday, I bought her a spaniel puppy called Towser. We all know what the acquisition of a puppy signifies for a young couple – and sure enough, shortly afterwards she became pregnant. A life with children was not Kit’s idea of a well-laid plan. He thought it would spell the end of my career with The Who. In retrospect, I should at least have expected the chaos that was to ensue.

One of the important documents I referred to while writing
Tommy
was a diagram I had sketched of the beginning and end of seven journeys involving rebirth. I was attempting two ambitious stunts at once: to describe the disciple/master relationship and, in a Hermann Hesse-style saga of reincarnation, to connect the last seven lives of that disciple in an operatic drama that ended in spiritual perfection. In ‘Deaf, Dumb and Blind Boy’ I borrowed from Meher Baba’s teachings to underpin ideas I’d been playing with during the previous year of psychedelia.
*

Each time the child/disciple Tommy is reborn, he returns with new inner wisdom, but still his life is full of struggle. Since the boy’s ignorance of his spiritual growth is a kind of disability, I decided my deaf, dumb and blind hero could be autistic. This way, when I wanted to demonstrate the glorious moment of his God-realisation, I could simply restore to my hero the use of his senses. It was a good plan; the boy’s sensory deprivation would work as a symbol of our own everyday spiritual isolation.

At the very moment I began to gather what I needed to make sense of my story, The Who set off on a gruelling tour of the States, and in the process I lost valuable time. I had talked about rock opera to everyone who would listen, and, though I’m sure that, as with guitar feedback, many others had the same idea around the same time, I hoped we’d be the first rock band with a major thematic work. But as we began the tour I knew that wouldn’t happen.

Some photos of the tour show me jumping up four feet in the air holding a Les Paul guitar and wearing high-top Doc Marten work boots. I was astonishingly fit, and it was a good thing, too, for in the years to come my cast-iron constitution and athletic body, honed purely on the stage with The Who, would be my only protection from the rigours of alcohol abuse and extreme overwork. Keith, equally fit from stage work, had moved into using complex cocktails of drugs and alcohol. However, one of the great consolations of being on a boring tour was that he was so funny most of the time, as was Wiggy, our production manager who had been promoted from John and Keith’s chauffeur.

Poor Wiggy. His worst moment was pulling us off a plane from Calgary to Saskatoon in Canada because the baggage handlers couldn’t get our stage equipment into the hold. We then spent the entire day without food or drink waiting for an old cargo charter plane to take us to the show with our gear. When we got there the audience, kept waiting for four hours by a promoter unwilling to return their ticket money, watched us troop gloomily onto the stage to rush off a thirty-minute show that, ironically, we played with someone else’s gear. For years after that, Wiggy could make us laugh simply by comparing a venue with Saskatoon – a bit unfairly, really, given how patient and forgiving the audience had been.

‘Magic Bus’ was released in late July in the States. It didn’t do very well at first, but would later become the most requested song at our live shows, along with John’s ‘Boris the Spider’. In Detroit I met up again with my old art-school buddy Tom Wright, who now managed the Grande Ballroom there. He lived in the old skating rink, washed his grey sweatshirts in the toilet sink, ate tuna out of the can and lent us roller skates so we could zoom around the ballroom floor.

We played several shows with The Troggs, whose hit single ‘Wild Thing’ had been borrowed by Jimi Hendrix. A show with The Doors marked the first time I’d met Jim Morrison, who was respectful, but very drunk. During The Doors’ show a girl ran on stage and tried to touch Jim’s face. He was startled and turned suddenly; two bouncers misinterpreted his action and threw the girl into the barrier, cutting her face quite badly. Jim hauled her back out again and she was brought backstage, where I was among those who comforted her. The incident became the inspiration for my song for
Tommy
called ‘Sally Simpson’.

In California I met a whole group of Meher Baba lovers from the Bay area through my friend Rick Chapman. I was stunned at how many there were. They weren’t brainwashed, nor obviously religious in any way. They’d lived hard, done drugs, had lots of sex and decided to hunker down to follow Meher Baba. They were a mixed bunch, often eccentric (which I regarded as a positive), and also very real. The more of his adherents I met, and the more I learned about Meher Baba, the more convinced I became that I’d found a genuine master.

In San Francisco I hung out with Jann Wenner one evening at the home of Jack Casady from Jefferson Airplane. Jack and his friends were doing cocaine, while Jann was there with his friend Boz Scaggs. I shared my thoughts about
Tommy
, using the opportunity to work it through in my own mind.

‘It’s a story about a kid that’s born deaf, dumb and blind, and what happens to him throughout his life. The boy is played by The Who. He’s represented musically by a theme that we play, which starts off the opera itself, followed by a song describing the boy. But what it’s really all about is the fact that the boy exists in a world of vibrations. This allows the listener to become profoundly aware of the boy and what he is all about, because he’s being created by the vibrations of The Who’s music as we play.
†

‘It’s a very complex thing,’ I said, ‘and I don’t know if I’m getting it across.’

Jann assured me I was. We talked long into the night. Jann recorded what I said and published it a month later, spread over two issues of
Rolling Stone
, San Francisco’s newest magazine.

By September 1968 Karen and I were ensconced in our new Twickenham home. For the first months we lived there we fell in love with it over and over again. The house had been built around 1745. The layout was delightful and traditional. Above a narrow kitchen extension a small anteroom had been turned into my new studio. The house was small, and I kept all my clutter in the cellar. I had to get used to working in my studio in cramped conditions with limited resources, but Karen and I were happy.

In winter 1968 we experienced our first serious flood. Heavy rain had swollen the Thames, and when it reached the tiny windows to the cellar it started to rush in. In the street, cars were being submerged, some being carried off down the river. People were panicking, trying to save their cars or rescue what was inside them, in some shocking instances their kids or pets. I was home at the time, and had been partly prepared for the deluge, but it got dark during the worst of the flooding and water kept pouring in.

The situation made it impossible to keep up my normal studio work, or to even store my instruments where I needed them. This generated an almost apocalyptic mood in me for a number of weeks – more high tides were predicted and one did fill the basement again, this time harmlessly because we’d emptied it of valuables. The rather upbeat tone of my first sketches of
Tommy
, with its hero seeking to find a way through the spiritual planes, and gathering affectionate followers around him as he went, was replaced with a rather less benign view that was harder, closer to Hesse’s hero Siddhartha’s tough lessons at the feet of the ferryman.

It was asking a lot of this small house to expect it to provide a home as well as a working recording studio. My recording kit was now squeezed into one end of the tiny anteroom I had made my control room. At the opposite end my Bechstein upright piano – rented from Harrods – barely fit across the back wall. I had the same sound system at home as I did on the road: Sound Dimension speaker cabinets originally intended to be used with organs, capable of adding glorious reverb effects, as well as a mysterious quality to acoustic guitar. Sometimes the entire house would vibrate with sound when I was recording. My neighbours opposite were destined to spend the next four years listening to my demos and experimental recordings, but they were paragons, and never once complained.

A year had passed since I had come up with the idea of writing a cohesive, self-contained song-cycle with a spiritual theme. Even though I was working quickly and effectively producing songs in my new studio, I felt bullied by Kit. As soon as a recording session was set up, we had a sound and we’d gained some momentum, we had to go back out on the road.

By this time we should no longer have been broke. Our managers often claimed they were paying for our equipment wrecking. They weren’t. In any case, a guitar smashed every few days would merely add a few hundred pounds to the bill. Not only was the financial cost of our stage finale greatly exaggerated, but I paid for my own guitars out of my own money, and Keith got most of his drums almost free from the manufacturer, an English company called Premier.

Our managers also blamed Keith for high overheads; he did draw large amounts of cash whenever he could, but he always had to ask permission. Kit was equally profligate and impulsive. The financial chaos around The Who suited everyone working around us and behind us. It just wasn’t great for the members of the band.

Kit and Chris had arranged a Bahamian account for our offshore earnings. My father-in-law, the composer Edwin Astley, was a partner in one of the first offshore tax shelters called Constellation. It was this arrangement that had allowed Edwin Astley to pick and choose what television work he took on, and to live in such great comfort when taxes in Britain were the highest in the world. Our own scheme was an update of Constellation, making us employees of a service company that booked us out on tours. The profit after a foreign tour could be disbursed so we could get the best tax rate at home. Unfortunately, at this time there was never any profit left to tax.

If there had been, our aim was not to cheat the government. We only wanted any windfall earnings from our labours abroad to be taxed as income over time. As I say, this had all been academic, but as we started recording
Tommy
– and it quickly took such promising shape – I began to get a feeling that one day soon I would be needing all the financial advice I could get.

Many music celebrities simply chose to leave Britain, and it wasn’t all about tax: America was the main global market for music, and, after all, the country where rock ’n’ roll began. I had considered moving to America myself, but I didn’t want to leave home. Everything I am and have done for myself, all my artistic work, was rooted in the British way of life, the two world wars and the hidden damage they had done to four generations. I knew I’d never leave Britain. My roots were too deep.

Ronnie Lane and I visited Mick Jagger while he was recording at Olympic Studios, to develop an idea we had talked about. I wanted to embark on a grand rock tour with all my friends. This was the fantasy I had illustrated as a child: tour-buses with cinemas, swimming pools and recreation rooms. Ronnie dreamed of something more military: tents, mud and roughhouse camaraderie. Mick had always dreamed of travelling in a circus, with animals, trapeze artists and massive spectacle. After an hour of brainstorming it became obvious that what we were talking about would only be possible with an extraordinary amount of gear and the most incredible organisation. It just might not be feasible.

When The Who later played the Shrine in LA in June, we had a fairly long break before our tour kicked off again in the second week of July. Mick was there with Chip Monck, who was designing a big stage rig for the Stones’ next tour, and the three of us met to discuss the idea further. Mick had told Chip what he wanted, and Chip mentioned that several major American circuses were in the process of going bust, and all their equipment was for sale. There were hospitals, schoolrooms, cinemas, kitchens, jacuzzis, cages for tigers – all in luxurious railway carriages, my childhood fantasy made real. Chip’s trump card was that several film companies were incredibly excited by the idea of filming such a tour, and would be prepared to invest. Mick and I were inspired.