Who I Am: A Memoir (18 page)

I walked alone on the edge of the main field where most of the audience gathered. Rumour had it that over a million people had come to Woodstock, and it looked like half that number were scattered on the hill. The light was fading fast as I entered an eerie woodland scene: naked fairies dancing between the trees, dealers carrying trays of readymade joints, tabs of acid, hash, grass and rolling papers.

As I broke through the woods I came across the open area where most of the campers were strewn about. Thousands sat listening to the music pulsating up the hill from the stage, as though in a natural amphitheatre. The sound system wasn’t bad, but neither was it designed to cover such a massive area. Occasionally someone would try to engage me, sometimes a loved-up soul on a trip, smiling and kind, sometimes another over-stoked boy like the one on the pole, demanding money or drugs, threatening violence, then laughing and running away at lightning speed like a woodland sprite.

The highlight that night had been Sly and the Family Stone, who had whipped the crowd into a muddy lather with ‘I Want to Take You Higher’. Instead of acid they must have been doing cocaine: the music was urgent, dark and powerful. By now, in the early morning hours, Janis Joplin was finishing her encore, ‘Ball and Chain’, which would cap the last set before ours. She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn’t at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she’d consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible.

As our turn on stage approached, I worried about losing the effect of the stage lights. I asked someone what time the sun was going to rise. As we set up our gear and began to play, some of the people in sleeping bags started rubbing their eyes and sitting up. As usual, I was pounding around like a frothing pony, fighting to keep my Gibson SG in tune, constantly fiddling with my amplifiers.

Whoever was doing the lights had chosen white lamps for Roger, so his long, curly hair looked like golden fire. He was mostly singing with his eyes firmly closed. Suddenly someone appeared at Roger’s feet holding a big film camera. Roger nearly tripped over him, so I pushed the invader back down into the press-pit in front of the stage. It turned out to be Michael Wadleigh, filming the documentary that would make Woodstock legendary.

Vulnerable now, Roger moved in ways that seemed to mean something deeper. His whirling microphone and mythical poses suggested frustration and pain, his sweat an angelic sheen that evoked an Old Master painting. By contrast, John and Keith were laid back. They had dropped acid and consorted with a couple of friendly fans, and it showed. Skilled musicians that they were, however, they were still able to follow my lead.

As we started to play ‘Acid Queen’ I put myself in character, imagining myself as the black-hearted gypsy who had promised to bring Tommy out of his autistic condition but was actually a sexual monster, using drugs to break him. As I walked to the mike stand, someone stepped in front of me, trying to stop the music. It was Abbie Hoffman. ‘This is a crock of shit,’ he shouted into the mike, waving his arms at the audience. ‘My friend [the Detroit poet] John Sinclair is in jail for one lousy joint and …’ He got no further.

Still playing the ‘Acid Queen’ intro, and still feeling malevolent, I knocked Abbie aside using the headstock of my guitar. A sharp end of one of my strings must have pierced his skin because he reacted as though stung, retreating to sit cross-legged at the side of the stage. He glowered at me, his neck bleeding.

I finished the song and looked over at him. ‘Sorry about that,’ I mouthed.

‘Fuck you,’ he mouthed back, and left the stage.

I was always absurdly territorial about our performance space. This may have been instilled in me as a little boy with my father’s band, the Squadronaires, but, for whatever reason, the stage was sacrosanct.

By the time we hit ‘I’m Free’ most of the audience was on its feet. Before I knew it, Roger was singing ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me’ to waves of young people who suddenly realised that
Tommy
was music unwittingly designed for precisely this kind of festival, for this particular moment, for
them
. At one point Keith shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake, Pete. No more!’ I went into a long, feedback-rich guitar solo as the sky behind the hillside began to pale with the first signs of dawn. Ebullient but weary, I struck my guitar on the floor a few times, tossed it into the audience and The Who went home to London.

It would be some time before we realised that our Woodstock performance, which might easily have never happened, would elevate us into American rock aristocracy, where we would remain year after year, even into the twenty-first century. It wasn’t just The Who; everyone who performed at Woodstock enjoyed mythic status once the film was released. Anyone who had been there on the field enjoyed their own special celebrity. Many who hadn’t been there genuinely felt they had. Woodstock – a crock of shit in the estimation of at least two grouchy folk who had taken the stage: Abbie Hoffman and me – came to represent a revolution for musicians and music lovers. Today there are over 450 music festivals every year in Britain alone. Woodstock became a model for what music gatherings could be. And it was Mike Wadleigh’s beautifully edited film that locked its legacy firmly into place. He even made the mud look good.

As the Sixties came to a close, the band members of The Who had worked out their respective modes of survival, on stage and backstage. We were happy, and rightly so. The usually acerbic Albert Goldman, music critic for the
New York Times
, wrote on 30 November 1969 of our shows at the Fillmore in New York that The Who were ‘standing now on the rock world’s stage, haloed in fame, glory and gold’.

After Woodstock, especially after the release of the movie, much was expected of our live performances. The film had turned Roger into a star. On stage a smashed guitar was always expected, although out of sheer recalcitrance I would sometimes put my guitar down quietly at the end of a show, enjoying the groans of disappointment. There was still a sense that The Who were rather a gimmicky band – Union Jack jackets and Pop Art T-shirts replaced by long hair and guitar smashing – and many musicians didn’t consider The Who anything close to a serious blues-inspired band like Cream.

There was a creative lull from me after
Tommy
, caused by the tumultuous flood of shows after its initial release, then Woodstock, and the mounting wave of enthusiasm triggered by the Woodstock movie. There was no time for me to form ideas for songs, and I had little energy left after our sets to sit around and play guitar. However, towards the end of every Who show I would play a few phrases finger-style, often down on one knee, with the audience silent, waiting for the explosion to come. On a single hearing, Keith and John chimed in powerfully, playing as though we’d been rehearsing the improvisation for a month. We were tight, coordinated and riffing in such a way that all Roger had to do was throw in a few moans and screams, pose gorgeously, and we were full on.

Anything worth repeating I used in subsequent shows; then, over a week or so, Roger or I would come up with proper lines to sing. In this way we were developing new songs on the stage – and also inventing a new form of rock, though we didn’t really understand this at the time. Led Zeppelin later used a similar formula; I don’t know if they were as freestyle as we were, but the effect was similar.

Our record company was demanding our cooperation in controlling bootleg recordings of our show. What they didn’t understand was that unlicensed recordings were being made by promoters as well as fans. Bill Graham recorded almost all of them, often using an on-site studio. Bob Pridden, our soundman, sometimes found pins inserted into stage cables leading off to makeshift recording bays. One such studio, in a box at Fillmore East in New York, hadn’t been sanctioned by Bill Graham, who was the promoter, so he hurled the bootleggers and their expensive recording gear down the fire escape. I don’t think any of us in the band knew, or cared, what might happen to all this music fifty years on. Graham knew it was important, though; he even discreetly filmed certain concerts.

I found out from a fan that Who bootlegs were being passed around widely: six songs performed at Monterey in 1967; the second night of our two-day stint in April 1968 at the Fillmore East (the night we got thrown out of our favourite hotel in New York, when Keith set off cherry-bombs in the elevator that contained the manager’s wife); a set in New York supporting The Doors; another in Central Park; ten shows of varying quality and interest from 1969, including our set at the Fillmore, when I kicked the off-duty policeman off stage; and Woodstock, where I did the same to Abbie Hoffman and Michael Wadleigh.

The
Tommy
demos had been partly recorded at my top-floor home studio in Ebury Street, in London, and completed at my new, cramped home studio in Twickenham. My home recordings may have been starting to sound as good as what we produced in the multi-track professional studio, but generally the equipment was still expensive, cumbersome and – worse – delicate. Two of the band’s stereo Vortexion tape recorders – good workhorse British machines, with military-grade components – were rugged enough so that I suggested to Bob Pridden that we carry one to record every show on the US tour. We would only have a stereo mix, but it could be refined throughout the tour, and we might get one really great show we could give to Decca, to beat the bootleggers to the punch.

Back in September 1968, before we had released
Tommy
, following rumours I had started myself that we planned to release a live album before starting a new studio album after
Tommy
, Decca had rushed out a strange collection of tracks called
Magic Bus: The Who on Tour
. It was a catch-all, intended to capitalise on the rumours, and contained not a single live track, merely a collection of singles, B-sides and a few random album tracks.

This time, in autumn 1969, I was convinced we’d have the album we wanted. Bob would record thirty shows in all. I couldn’t really fathom how he might get a good sound using a single tape machine, the PA mix and one or two additional microphones, but he did. The band was playing really well, and Bob’s recordings were superb. I listened to a few of Bob’s tracks myself in his hotel room. Together, with planning and enthusiasm, we had cracked it, technically speaking.

Shortly after Christmas 1969, with the intimidating prospect of a number of
Tommy
shows at the very posh opera houses of Europe hanging over us, I met up with Bob. He had been holed up in a studio listening studiously to each of the thirty performances he had recorded.

‘So what have we got?’

‘There’s definitely an album here,’ he said.

‘So which show do you rate as the best?’

‘They’re all amazing, Pete.’

‘But which one stands out?’

‘They all sort of stand out. They’re all fantastic.’

‘So we should just pick one at random?’ I was being my usual acerbic self. ‘Let’s have a look at your notes.’

Bob’s worried expression revealed the dilemma: he hadn’t taken any notes. After all, compiling albums wasn’t what he did for a living. I had asked him to listen and tell me what he thought, and that’s what he had done. Still, I was angry; there wasn’t enough time for us to wade through thirty shows again. Plus we now had an additional eight that Bob had recorded in England – including the most recent show at the London Coliseum. For me to listen to thirty-eight shows would take five days in a studio. Even with notes I would lose track. This live album was never going to happen if we didn’t do something, and fast.

‘After the opera houses, have we got any shows we could record here in the UK using a professional mobile rig?’

‘Leeds and Hull – Valentine’s Day weekend,’ replied Bob.

‘Hire an eight-track rig, record the two shows, I’ll mix them both at home on my new eight-track machine, and the best of the two nights will have to do.’ I had just further upgraded my home studio with a pro multi-track tape machine and new mixing desk.

Bob was looking anxious again. ‘What shall I do with the live tapes from the tour?’

Still irritated, I made one of the stupidest decisions of my life.

‘Destroy them,’ I snapped, and before leaving the room I uttered a warning. ‘And if I ever hear a bootleg of any of those tapes I will know where it came from.’

This was terribly unfair to Bob, the most loyal of all Who employees and friends. It was also a dumb decision commercially and historically. I have long been chief protector of The Who archive, and those 1969 summer concerts in the US would have made a fabulous set of collectable shows – especially online as a complete cycle. They included the seven shows recorded in our
Tommy
week at the Fillmore in New York, and two wonderful performances at the Boston Tea Party, as well as other great nights.

Bob faithfully destroyed them in a bonfire in his garden. During the process he phoned me to ask if he could preserve just one tape for posterity. Foolish and sarcastic to the end, I taunted him.

‘Ah! But which one are you going to preserve, Bob?’

When I arrived at Leeds University Refectory on Valentine’s Day, 1970, where the first of the two new live recordings was to be made, I was surprised not to see a mobile vehicle of some kind. I had hoped we’d be using the recently built Rolling Stones Mobile. Instead, a junior engineer from Pye studios had showed up in a van with a bunch of bits and pieces in military-grade boxes, and was wiring them together in a room backstage. It hardly seemed an improvement on the basic rig Bob and I had dreamed up for the US tour, and I hoped there wouldn’t be any problems.

The refectory (an eating place) wasn’t particularly large, and the packed crowd made the atmosphere intense and hot-house. University crowds were often irreverent and noisy, but at Leeds they respected the fact that we were recording, and behaved very well. The sound in the hall was good too. I played more carefully than usual and tried to avoid the careless bum notes that often occurred because I was trying to play and jump around at the same time. The next day we played a similar set in City Hall in Hull. This was another venue with a good acoustic for loud rock, but it felt less intense than the previous night.