Who I Am: A Memoir (19 page)
Read Who I Am: A Memoir Online
Authors: Pete Townshend
I had a few weeks free from engagements to mix and edit the two new live tapes, but it only took me two days. The first reel I put up, from Hull, had no bass guitar track. If I had listened to the subsequent reels I would have discovered that this was only an intermittent problem, that more and more of John’s playing had been safely recorded as the show went on. But it seemed such a tricky problem to fix that I moved quickly on to Leeds. Here the problem was that the backing vocals hadn’t been correctly recorded. I arranged a session at Pye studios, played the show back, and John and I simply sang along. We covered the backing vocals in one take, preserving the immediacy of the live concert.
I didn’t discuss with anyone what we would put on the record. I’m not sure why I decided not to include any of
Tommy
. I fixed a few blips here and there before realising that the entire recording was blighted by loud clicks. Each one needed to be cut from the master reel, and there were about fifty such razor-blade edits. Many more minor clicks, and noises during quiet passages of music, I simply couldn’t fix. Chris added a note on the record label implying they had been left in deliberately. One questionable decision I made was not to try to pump up the audience’s applause. There had been no audience track recorded, so I just left it as it was, a flawed but accurate artefact.
None of us in the band was ready for the overwhelmingly positive response to
Live at Leeds
. We’d thought of it as an interim record, as padding designed to quiet Decca and appease our fans. But this album vaulted us to yet another level. There is little doubt that the heavy guitar-driven energy on the record (the mainly hard-rock songs I chose to include), combined with John, Roger and Keith’s thunderous bravura musicianship, inspired the heavy-metal revolution that soon followed. The improvised blitz-riffing featured towards the end of the record and in the soloing on ‘Young Man Blues’ launched a thousand electric guitar bands in which crude force would be the main component of the music.
Apart from ‘Amazing Journey’ there were no other songs from
Tommy
on the album, and the softer, more musical side of what we were doing at the time was set aside. Led Zeppelin were also working with a powerfully driving stage sound, but Jimmy Page was following the tradition of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. By comparison,
Live at Leeds
is more direct and spontaneous. Our intention was simply to blow you away.
Nik Cohn, whose conversation with me had helped make
Tommy
accessible and less po-faced, wrote in the
New York Times
: ‘
Tommy
is rock’s first formal masterpiece.
Live at Leeds
is the definitive hard-rock holocaust. It is the best live rock album ever made.’ This was a glorious review, but after the critical success of
Tommy
it set another sky-high mountain of a benchmark that I’d need to transcend with whatever The Who recorded next.
Could I do it? And if I could, what else would I then have to prove? Where else could my life go?
Focusing on nowhere
Investigating miles
I’m a seeker
I’m a really desperate man.
‘The Seeker’ (1970)
Inside outside. Leave me alone.
Inside outside. Nowhere is home.
‘5:15’ (1973)
We were rock stars. All of us – Keith, John, Roger and I – had reasons to be happy, yet each of us was soon to suffer some kind of difficulty dealing with our new-found celebrity. What had happened? We were successful, hugely so. That success changed everything for us, for the band and for Kit and Chris.
At the end of 1969 The Rolling Stones had suffered an awful, stigmatising tragedy when a fight broke out at their Altamont show near San Francisco, and a member of the Hell’s Angels, hired as security enforcers, was filmed stabbing a man to death. It seemed as though ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was coming back to haunt them. At the beginning of 1970 The Beatles split up. In contrast, The Who seemed to have the gods on our side.
Looking back to 1965, when I believed The Who would only last a few years, I was amazed at our change in fortune. For the first five years of our career The Who had been struggling to compete with bands like The Move, The Kinks, The Pretty Things, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Free and The Small Faces, and we weren’t in the same league as the Stones or Beatles.
Now, suddenly, we were on our own. This isn’t to say we were on top of any pile; but rather, we were out in open water when many of our equally serious peers seemed to be struggling to stay afloat in a sea of pop lightweights like Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, or The Herd. These bands were perfectly good, but they had no ambition to do anything adventurous. They just wanted hit singles. But by 1968 having a hit single seemed almost irrelevant – at best a dubious achievement – and before long some of the bigger rock bands would turn their backs on the singles charts completely.
Yet by spring 1970, in the wake of
Tommy
and
Live at Leeds
, without any other musical project for the time being, no immediate ideas for a new large-scale work, I was emotionally and spiritually unsettled. This had probably been the most intense, vigorous and successful period of The Who’s career, and now that everything was slowing down a bit all eyes were turning back to me, the composer.
The attention was challenging, and felt like an honour, and of course I was excited by the thought of creating some new, exciting project, but it was also disquieting and scary. From this point forward, my life was often fraught with the paradox of success and creativity. When I was brainstorming every day, searching deeply into myself – and the world around me, the past, the future, the band, its fans and music itself – for some kind of kick-start for inspiration, my actions sometimes seemed deranged and absurd.
This wasn’t clinical schizophrenia, though in some ways it produced big mood-swings and compulsive behaviour in me. I was still a young man, learning a new trade as I went along, and I didn’t really understand the pressures on me, or the damage and confusion I might cause to those around me, especially to Karen.
My spiritual longings, and continuing attachment to Meher Baba, were constantly under siege by all-too-worldly ambitions, undermined by residual scepticism and ambivalence, and challenged by my sexual yearnings. I didn’t know then that Meher Baba would have worried less about the sexual stuff than I did, as long as I was sincere about loving him and accepting him as my master.
Even the addictions that would plague me for years seemed to have no internal consistency, regularity or logic. I could be sober and responsible for days, weeks, months, even years. I could behave with dignity, and take on a range of ambitious commitments that would lead me into new, exalted circles, not only musically but intellectually. I could strive to achieve – and even pioneer – radical acts on behalf of social change. And I could also behave, frankly, like a complete arsehole.
In retrospect I can see that the desperate, chaotic and increasingly fragmentary nature of my life over the next twenty years was chillingly foretold in the lyrics of a song I was soon to write.
As spring 1970 wore on I neglected my dentist, rarely cut my hair and never saw my doctor. I was trying to keep the band recording, and at one point invited them to my home studio for a week of work. But we all had small ideas compared to
Tommy
. My best efforts were ‘The Seeker’ and ‘Naked Eye’.
I was writing songs purely for fun – we were all trying to have fun together too, as a band. Maybe that’s why it didn’t occur to me just how much the words of ‘The Seeker’ – a song about a man I could see in my mind’s eye as I wrote it, that wild-eyed Vietnam vet who grabbed Karen when we did our first tourist walk of Haight-Ashbury – reflected the impasse I was facing.
People tend to hate me
’Cause I never smile
As I ransack their homes
They want to shake my hand
Focusing on nowhere
Investigating miles
I’m a seeker
I’m a really desperate man
I learned how to raise my voice in anger
Yeah, but look at my face, ain’t this a smile?
I’m happy when life’s good
And when it’s bad I cry
I’ve got values but I don’t know how or why
I’m looking for me
You’re looking for you
We’re looking in at each other
And we don’t know what to do
My characteristic stance on stage – the leaping, windmilling and wrecking of guitars – was by now a purely physical display of macho swagger, yet at a psychic level the Angry Yobbo, or hooligan, had seared himself into my soul, and I was still no wiser about where all that energy came from.
That Angry Yobbo had also somehow penetrated the soul of The Who as a band, but here the effects were largely positive.
Live at Leeds
had made us realise just how potent we were as live musicians and performers. The Who were a unit, a machine, a force of nature. As a composer I was just beginning to understand how to harness the power of our stage sound, and balance it with light and shade when making an album. Ironically enough, the idea of variance of mood and tone on an album would soon be tossed away. Hugely successful bands like AC/DC would make album after album using precisely the same degree of intensity.
As the number of big rock groups multiplied, each claimed a stratum of the available sound-field for themselves and guarded it jealously. Any artist straying into the territory of another would appear guilty of a lack of conviction. There were now two expectations of The Who that I could readily identify in our audience but had no idea how to reconcile. One was that for our next album we would produce some audacious new idea, a new
Tommy
. The other was that the album would rock the way
Live at Leeds
had rocked.
If the band was playing as a unit, its internal machinery and its management seemed more at loggerheads than ever. If Roger and I (as well as Who fans) felt released by some of the raw power of
Live at Leeds
, Kit was still chasing the whale, as it were, of pop gimmicks. He was always egging Keith on to wilder publicity stunts, and me on to more arrogant statements to the press.
In June 1970 Bill Graham persuaded the director of the Metropolitan Opera to host
Tommy
. Our shows there weren’t much to my taste, although I was proud to be there and confident we belonged. At Fillmore East during our week of
Tommy
shows in 1969 a smiling, elegant Leonard Bernstein had held me by the shoulders, looked into my eyes and asked me if I understood the importance of what I’d achieved. That same week Bob Dylan came to watch us. He’d said very little, but he was there, which said enough.
At the Metropolitan Opera House we did our usual high-energy show, but we did it twice in one night. We also performed a short encore after the first set, which was quite unusual for us. After our even better second set we ended with a final burst of energy, like marathon runners crossing the finishing line. We had given it our all; we were physically, emotionally and creatively wrung out. But many people in the crowd had purchased tickets for both performances (the faces in the front ten rows hardly changed that night), and having enjoyed an encore in the first set they expected one in the second. They carried on shouting while we got out of our damp clothes and planned to unwind in our hotel.
But Bill Graham had other ideas. He decided after fifteen minutes of cheering and stamping that we should go back on stage. I asked him to tell the audience to go home; he refused, so I did it myself. When the crowd realised what I was saying they started to jeer. I threw my mike stand into the pit and stalked off. I knew we’d done a good day’s work. Passing Bill in the hallway I looked him in the eye. ‘It’s easy to bring us on, Bill,’ I said. ‘It’s much harder to get us off.’ I still had a chip on my shoulder about the fact that the Fillmore East staff had failed to let us know about the backstage fire back in 1969, when I had ended up in court for kicking that cop.
Bill Graham took a step towards me with steel in his eyes, but then he relaxed, shrugged and allowed me to win. It was good of him, because he was a very powerful man – and a pugilist who usually won his fights.
We were soon back in the bear pit, and it was a big one, as we went from the pre-eminent US opera house to a baseball stadium outside LA. The Beatles had played New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965, but this was still a rarity among rock bands. John Sebastian opened for us, and was perfect for the ‘bring blankets and sit on the grass’ atmosphere of the event. He was gregarious and talented, a fantastic harmonica player as well as a gifted songwriter.
Kit’s advice in our first year together had been to run onto the stage as though it was the place we most wanted to be in the world. He advised us to wear stage clothes, and to use exaggerated movements that would allow our energy on stage to be read by audience members at the very back of a large venue. I always favoured white or light blue, and often wore white trousers. Keith did the same for many years. Roger made himself seem bigger by wearing a lot of fringe that rhymed with his long flowing hair. John wore eccentric tailored outfits, suits made from the Union Jack flag and later a leather one with a white skeleton painted to scale.
But what really made us work at long distance, apart from how loud we were and the epic nature of some songs, was the athleticism displayed by Roger, Keith and myself: Keith throwing sticks high in the air and standing at the kit; Roger swinging his microphone and bashing it into cymbals; me leaping, jump-kicking and swinging my arm in a windmill. And through it all, as if to anchor the experience, John stood like an oak tree in the middle of a tornado.
Our next two shows were at the intimate Berkeley Community Theater, small, modern, with light wood-panelled walls and a sparkling acoustic. These shows were also produced by Bill Graham, who seemed determined to heal any rift between us. He not only laid on the most delicious steak and cheese fondue for us, but he solicitously cooked a selection for me himself.
On the first night, when Roger sang ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me’, the lights went down and a single, very tight spot illuminated his face. Then, as we launched into the slow-build finale, a curtain behind us went up and three massive Klieg lights, the kind used on Hollywood Boulevard for a film première, roamed the audience with their white-hot glare. For a moment the crowd didn’t know what to make of it, but one by one they stood up, acknowledging that the music belonged as much to them as it did to us, until every single soul was standing. It was a brilliant piece of lighting design.
The real surprise was yet to come. On the second night, after another successful show, Bill took me aside and told me that if we had space in our truck the lamps were ours. We hired a special truck to carry them away. Bill Graham had redeemed himself.
In LA we stayed at a motel with rooms arranged around a pool. John Sebastian, whom I had wrongly taken for a New Yorker (he was born there), showed up for a visit with his new girlfriend. Catherine was a stunning blonde with penetrating eyes and an amazing mouth, always smiling. She seemed too young for him, probably 18 or 19, but otherwise a perfect foil for the charismatic Sebastian. It turned out that they had bought a little house in Tarzana; their shared obsession was tie-dye. John, egged on by Catherine, asked me for one of my white boiler-suits so they could tie-dye it for me.
John also wanted to play me his latest song, a work-in-progress. He picked up a guitar and shuffled his chair near to me, so that he was, I felt, as an Englishman, rather too close. Look at the photos of John and the young Dylan playing together in Doug Gilbert’s sublime photo book
Forever Young
. They each hold the other’s gaze, merely inches apart. They share a level of intimacy I yearned for but was unable to cope with in reality. John looked into my eyes, held my gaze and began.
‘Welcome back,’ he sang. The song was lovely, but it put me in excruciating discomfort, seeming to be aimed at me in particular. I thought back to my friend Richard Stanley, and how he had misinterpreted my playing him ‘Welcome’ from
Tommy
. Now it was my turn.
Catherine lay back on the bed looking like Monroe reborn. I would have happily gazed at her, but John’s earnest eyes held me in a vice. When the song was finished, he asked what I thought of it; did I have anything to contribute? I was almost ready to scream. For whatever reason, this level of intimacy between musicians and fellow songwriters has never been possible for me. Suffocated by feelings, I was unable to say a word. Catherine got up, they said their affectionate goodbyes, grabbed my white boiler-suit and left.
Alone in my room I drank too much that night, and tried to work out why it was that after half a bottle of cognac I felt such regret at not being able to manage co-writing. The truth is that, drunk or sober, it’s out of my emotional range. I’m a loner, and never more so than when I’m in creative mode. I fell into a stupor and dreamt about John Sebastian’s girlfriend.
