Who I Am: A Memoir (23 page)

Chris and Nik were buzzing on cocaine in the middle of the day, punting ideas in front of a classroom blackboard where they had chalked a lyric fragment by Stephen Stills. I never felt a part of the discussions.

The producer Lou Reizner wanted to record an orchestral version of
Tommy
. I met him in November and, as I had completely forgetten Kit’s own ambitions for its orchestral implementation, gave Lou my blessing. When Kit heard I had approved the project he was deeply hurt, and yet another obstacle was placed between us.
Tommy
was chiefly my work so I had no need to feel guilty, but Kit had played a major part in it.

Before the band was packed off to the USA, we performed at the Oval cricket ground with our friends in The Faces. Rod Stewart kicked footballs into the crowd and the party atmosphere continued hours after the event, while Kit chased after the promoter who had run off with the money, allocated for a charity. I was drunk by the time I drove through the exit gates with less than an inch to spare on either side of my big American camper bus.

The US tour started in Charlotte, North Carolina. I took the opportunity to visit Meher Baba’s American home in nearby Myrtle Beach. One of the verses of the song ‘Who Are You’ refers to my experience walking through the forest there for the first time.

I know there’s a place you walked

Where love falls from the trees

My heart is like a broken cup

I only feel right on my knees

I spill out like a sewer hole

Yet still receive your kiss

How can I measure up to anyone now

After such a love as this

I was overcome. I tried to sleep in one of the simple guest cabins arranged around the secluded lake at the heart of the estate. The next morning, before joining the band in Charlotte, I was shown round Meher Baba’s modest house. My mind was racing ahead to the show I had to do that night, when suddenly my guide opened a door and showed me in. ‘This,’ she said dramatically, ‘is where beloved Baba slept. You will want to be alone here for a while.’ She left the room and closed the door behind her.

I had no idea how to behave, what to do, how to pray. My friends who had visited Meher Baba’s tomb in India had felt deeply moved when they had placed their heads on the marble capping of his headstone. So I knelt and lay my head on the edge of the bed. Nothing happened. I waited a little longer, hoping for … I didn’t know what. And then I had a vision: Meher Baba as the superb young man he had been in his youth, lying face down on the bed, naked, and I was his lover. The vision felt less like a specific memory and more like a familiar feeling, somehow connected with my childhood. I pulled myself up off the bed, shocked and a little ashamed.

Alcohol helped. In Miami, slightly hung over in a rented convertible Pontiac, I stood up to feel the hot, rushing air. It felt sublime: my hair blowing in the wind, Moby Grape on the radio, Wiggy doing his racetrack weaving through traffic. After our first show a wealthy friend of the promoter invited us to a party at his house in the Keys, which was dominated by a huge indoor swimming pool. I was drunk enough to swim naked for the first time in my life in the company of fifteen or twenty other young people. I repaired to the sauna – and there she was again, the ‘devil’ girl from Columbia. I wondered if I was being stalked. This time, though, instead of turning to me she began to caress the girl I had followed into the steam.

I ran back to the pool and swam the width underwater, my eyes firmly closed, only to emerge between the legs of yet another voluptuous, smiling blonde. I really didn’t know how to manage this rock ’n’ roll infidelity thing at all.

I had only been away from my family for a week. I did my job, packed and unpacked my suitcase, and hoped for a good night’s sleep uninterrupted by Keith wrecking his room. Drinking was now necessary every day there was a show, but I knew when I got back to my family I could knuckle down and behave.

We had two shows arranged in New Orleans, our first time there. When we arrived I was greeted by Chris Stamp, who had brought Nik so we might continue brainstorming a new idea for a film that would involve the band. I pitched a working title: ‘Rock is Dead, Long Live Rock’. I also had a few written notes for a dual album about rock ’n’ roll decadence in conflict with its youthful, idealistic roots. I had engaged my brain no further than the end of my nose, but Nik and Chris were content to have something to work with. Nik started right in interviewing the other three members of the band, taking notes.

Backstage in Los Angeles it was clear that the band had reached a new level of cool. Glamorous Hollywood actresses walked in and out of our dressing room, and Mick and Bianca Jagger watched our show from the side of the stage. I wore a crown I had found at a theatrical outfitter and asked Mick what he thought.

‘It’s hard to take you seriously, Pete,’ he said fondly. ‘You look like a cunt.’

We had two shows in San Francisco where I further developed the idea for the
Rock Is Dead
project. Instead of confining myself to a ‘before and after’ double album, each member of The Who would write (or curate) one side of a double vinyl album each. This harkened back to 1966, and Kit and Chris’s plan for each band member to write a quarter of the songs. Meanwhile, Nik and Chris worked in secret on a movie treatment called
Rock Is Dead (Rock Lives)
.

The brief of the movie’s narrative turned out this way: to present The Who in a simple, accessible way, in vivid, brilliant cameos. Nik had worked hard on it, seeing that a stylised documentary about the band would not only be entertaining, but could also go some way to explain why rock had happened at all. I needed help, and Nik had offered it. After my theoretical tsunamis with
Lifehouse
, Nik’s introductory notes were a lesson in brevity.

The Who have now worked together longer and harder than any other major group; have played to more people on more nights in more places under more pressures than anyone, until they have come to encapsulate almost all of Rock, past, present and future, within themselves. So if one catches their development, that isn’t simply a story about four kids growing up and getting rich. Partly, yes, but it also becomes a metaphor for Rock in general – their public, and their context, and their time. That, in the simplest terms, is what
Rock Is Dead
aims for: to catch The Who and, by doing so, catch the essence of Rock itself.

I couldn’t have hoped for a more affirming beginning from Nik. Indeed, with time much of what he envisaged for The Who came to pass.

Interviews Nik had conducted on our recent tour informed the cameos he created for each member of the band. For me they made sobering reading, and I decided not to share the treatment with my fellow band members, afraid of the hurt that it might cause. In hindsight this may not have been the best decision, but at the time it seemed right. Of course anyone looking at The Who in this period would have seen a lot of comedy, absurdity, hypocrisy, grandiosity, infidelity and pathos, mixed with stadiums full of powerful rock shows, available women and massive dollar grosses. Nik’s treatment, after its smart and incisive introduction, churned all of that up.

The Who were really quite ridiculous. As the band’s principal architect I had known it all along. I put the treatment away in a file and never referred to it again.

15

CARRIERS

I drank, then I didn’t drink, then I drank, then I didn’t. It was black and white, on and off, at home or on tour. I tended to drink heavily but rarely got helplessly drunk. The options it gave me, to be up, down or merely numb, got me through some difficult years.

As 1972 began, Emma was two and a half, Minta six months. At last we had a nanny to help, Trisha, who was also my part-time secretary. Trisha was sparky, resilient and unimpressed by me. She was a Bowie fan, and irritated me with her rapturous descriptions of his brilliant make-up as Ziggy Stardust. I probably irritated her by claiming that
Tommy
had been his inspiration.

While I planned my visit to India and ruminated over the rise of Ziggy Stardust, we started weekending at The Temple at Cleeve. It had never been intended as a permanent home – in any event we wanted to stay in our small Georgian house in suburban Twickenham. The cottage was draughty, cold, unpleasant and shoddy. I hated it. But it was a few feet from the river flowing past, faced the southern meadows and rolling hills of Streatley on the opposite bank, and when the sun came out it was a pleasant enough. The river close by was the redeeming factor, much as it was at Twickenham, where even though Karen had knocked down some walls we were still packed in like sardines.

Living modestly as we did, I could pretty much say what I wanted about anything that offended me about the rich – whoever they might be. Few of our friends had ostentatious homes. None of the band was wealthy. Roger bought his beautiful Tudor house with a surprisingly small amount of cash and did a lot of the restoration with his own hands. Keith’s Tara House was splendid and mad, but mortgaged to the hilt. John had yet to splash out on a big house, content to live in Ealing in a semi-detached, but made up for it with the Cadillacs in the garage and whatever pharmaceuticals he kept in their gloveboxes. Our cars – silly, flash or boring – were all purchased on credit. We had worked hard. We had enjoyed success. But we were, effectively, still broke.

My two brothers still lived at Woodgrange Avenue with my parents, in the flat upstairs where Barney and I had lived for a while. Mum had taken in an untold number of musicians and given my Nanny Dot a home for her last years. Uncle Jack, too. There were always people around, and lots of conviviality. Woodgrange Avenue was a cul-de-sac, and my parents knew everyone in the street, and everyone knew them. My notoriety was something all the neighbours enjoyed. They could all talk about what a snotty little git I’d been as a boy.

If any Who fans appeared on the doorstep, my parents would entertain them. They kept an open house, really. Dad played less and less music, more and more snooker and golf, slowly allowing himself to retire. Mum was harder driving, and rarely stopped. A raconteur, she managed to laugh a lot and was well loved by her friends, but could still explode in aimless anger. I learned a lot by watching my parents. Together, they seemed to show me the Middle Way, the Buddhist path to inner liberation.

During Dad’s birthday celebration on 28 January he coaxed me to have a whisky. I had managed to stay off the booze for a month, but Dad was persuasive – and a biblical drinker.

The next day, slightly hung over, I set off on my pilgrimage to India.

I had been summoned by Sarosh Irani, the member of Meher Baba’s family who had organised the celebrations of the Master’s passing. When I arrived, the Meher Baba people suggested I perform a few songs. On this first trip I played ‘O Parvardigar,’, my version of ‘The Master’s Prayer,’, and ‘Drowned’, which would appear on
Quadrophenia
. While I performed in front of the Tomb where Meher Baba’s body lay, I glimpsed him for a moment, sitting in an armchair, waving one hand from side to side like a metronome. On the recording I made, you can hear me skip a beat at the sight.

My spiritual submission to Meher Baba at the Tomb was fraught with the same trouble I’d had by his bed at his house at Myrtle Beach: all I could think was lewd thoughts. I still have no idea where they sprang from, but they certainly made it impossible for me to be subsumed like the other pilgrims. Even so, I was enchanted, not only by Meher Baba’s disciples and close followers, but also by India itself.

I stayed at Sarosh’s villa in comparative luxury, and his wife Viloo looked after me kindly. But it felt like a whirlwind trip. I had felt a more profound sense of Meher Baba’s presence at Myrtle Beach, and although meeting many of his Indian disciples meant a lot to me, what I enjoyed most about this trip was that it felt so normal, natural, gentle, real and homey.

Back in London, Lou Reizner began recording his
Tommy
orchestral album in April. I had been uneasy about Lou’s desire to cast Roger as Tommy; I felt we were losing the opportunity to bring in a new, different voice. But as soon as I heard Roger’s first tests I changed my view. Roger had grown enormously as a singer, and hearing him in the context of an orchestra was proof positive that he was the perfect choice.

Lou lined up a great array of celebrities to perform alongside us. I did no work at all with the arrangers, and attended only the first and last of the sessions at Olympic studio. I found the first session horrifying. As David Meesham began conducting the London Symphony Orchestra with the legendary Keith Grant engineering, a rock drummer and bass player with a large amplifier kicked in. The orchestral detail was lost in their thunder; the effect was dreadful.

Keith Grant did his best, but it wasn’t good. The recording was made in a few takes, but I could find nothing helpful to say about it. Lou Reizner sacked the musical arranger for his inclusion of live drums and electric bass and gave the job to Will Malone. Sublime by contrast, his pieces also sounded more like real rock ’n’ roll. Even so, I didn’t go back to the studio until the last session.

The first public performances of this orchestral
Tommy
were to come later in the year.

Once Karen, the girls and I were properly set up in the Cleeve cottage in June 1972, I wanted to get the studio equipped. I had the Neve mixing desk ready to go and fancied doing the installation myself, as I had in all my previous home studios. The acoustic work was tedious, though, and the wiring complicated. Instead of eight channels I was dealing with sixteen, and with a larger mixing console and its many additional connections the sheer amount of cabling was beyond me. Trisha suggested I might like to meet a friend of hers, Rod Houison, a musician and sound engineer who could take on the installation of my studio and also act as chauffeur and minder for me.

I liked Rod immediately. To facilitate the journey from Twickenham to the studio, I bought a Mercedes Grand 600 limousine. This extraordinary car, with its six doors, black windows and TV, became Rod’s daily runabout. He worked a six-day week, driving to and from Cleeve every day, averaging 1,000 miles a week.

With Rod driving, I could also safely go out with friends and get drunk. I sat in the back like a twat, drinking cognac, dictating replies to fan mail and playing music loudly. Sometimes, to make it clear a yobbo rock star was in the car, not a financial potentate, dictator or pope, I lowered the window and stuck out my Doc Marten boot.

I had another epiphany that June, less theoretical than the one that had spawned
Lifehouse
, but personally just as risky. If I was to serve The Who with new material, I had to take complete control. I knew it would be hard work, but I had recovered sufficiently from
Lifehouse
to attempt a new album. I would try to avoid film. Music and story: I’d keep it succinct, simple and effective.

I also realised that there was something important about Nik’s
Rock Is Dead
treatment that I had missed. The four members of the band were very different, and by this time, even as relatively young men, extremely eccentric. This offered contrasting doorways into the music for our fans. Nik’s treatment helped me recognise that The Who were
carriers
for our fans. Live shows gave us a sense of being filled and refuelled; we carried that energy from our fans and used it to power our performance. Without live shows we lost our entire sense of function.

In band meetings I found myself experiencing a strange duality. I could see myself as the band’s guitarist. I did my job, rarely did a bad show, and caught my share of praise. Seeing myself as an equal member of the band was good for my humility. There were a dozen guitar players far better than me. But when I did press interviews I suddenly took on the role of primary driver of The Who’s musical direction. A new voice started to talk, and like a man possessed I was often surprised by what it said. This, for instance, in a
Rolling Stone
interview two years earlier in May 1970:

I believe rock can do anything, it’s the ultimate vehicle for everything. It’s the ultimate vehicle for saying anything, for putting down anything, for building up anything, for killing and creating. It’s the absolute ultimate vehicle for self-destruction, which is the most incredible thing, because there’s nothing as effective as that, not in terms of art, anyway, or what we call art. You just can’t be as effectively self-destructive if you’re a writer, for example, or a painter, you just can’t make sure that you’re never going to fucking raise your head again; whereas if you’re a rock star you really can.

The duality continued when I closed my studio door and started writing and recording new songs; then The Who became a kind of client. It was in that mindset that I turned to
Rock Is Dead
. The glimpse I had been given by Nik of the four extreme characters in The Who was all I had. How could I write something new and grand for The Who and simultaneously make each band member feel they were truly a part of the process?

My idea was to take the band back to our roots. We’d been different then; we’d been subsumed in the Mod gang, and we needed to do that again. At least I did. I had grown up in a gang when I was a four-year-old street kid running wild in Acton. When you’re part of a gang you soon find the parts of you that don’t fit. These apparent defects can become assets; they’re the things about you that make you interesting and useful.

So what did this mean for me? All the piss-taking I got from the band about following Meher Baba made it clear that what couldn’t be accommodated in The Who gang was my spiritual longing, my increasing concern that I lacked purpose. That summer I wrote the following reflection:

The river makes me think of old times. Somehow, those days on the water were the best, with a first love, full of potential. Things should have turned out better. These feelings lead to more desperation. Not mental, not problems of the heart, not physical, not frustration. Rather, a deep, nauseating spiritual desperation. Nauseating because there can be no answer. Why should I care, if I have to cut my hair?

This was to be the first line of the song ‘Cut My Hair’, which arose out of the cognitive dissonance between my worldly concerns and my spiritual desperation. I also referred to
Tommy
, making it plain that this time I wanted to try to stay
inside
my hero for the entire opera. I went on: ‘Trace the late teens of a kid to the point he experiences a lot of things that fuck him around. I will take a four-angled approach. The kid is – sort of –
quadzrophenic
.’

This is the first mention of what would become the working title for
Quadrophenia
(with the ‘z’ dropped). In this first sketch there is no elaboration of the setting that became so fundamental later on, but already I saw my new hero as a Mod.

He goes through a series of temptations. He realises what the four facets of his character bring out in him. The good, the bad, the romantic and the insane come together. His triumph is strange, he feels ecstatic to find all his parts combined. He is also sad to be nostalgic again, looking back. Something makes him want to get back into life.

My hero was someone I was still holding close.

After our vacation débâcles on Osea Island and Bayshore, Karen and I decided we needed a real family holiday. We would use the American camper and take with us all the food our children required. We wanted sun, so we decided to go to the South of France, and booked a place for the bus near Marseille. I built a permanent cot for Minta in the back, gathered up Emma’s trike and my guitar, and we set off. The drive took us through the heart of France, and every stop-off was a new adventure.

Sometimes I drove through the night while my family slept; it was uplifting to come upon small villages, where after midnight entire families still sat outside their homes, the lights welcoming, drinking wine, playing
boules
and enjoying the cool air. When we shopped, Karen and I bought huge flagon-baskets of cheap local wine – tasting better than claret – and made love when the girls were asleep. It was a happy time.

In France I generally tried to keep my new idea out of my mind, but on long drives I allowed it to surface.
Quadrophenia
. I wanted to do an album that would mark The Who’s tenth anniversary. I wanted a replacement for
Tommy
in our stage act. I was also looking for a way to stroke four eccentric egos, generate a sense of optimism and rally us. I believed I had one last chance to do something that might hold us together. My bandmates had almost stopped listening to me.

On 2 August Bob Pridden called, in some distress, about Eric Clapton. Bob’s partner and future wife, Mia, was a good friend to Alice Ormsby-Gore, Eric’s then girlfriend, and was desperately worried that the couple had succumbed to long-term heroin use. Alice, the youngest daughter of Lord Harlech, had begun seeing Eric when she was still sixteen. Bob asked if I would go with him and Mia to assess the situation.

We met that evening at a pub near Bob’s home in Ripley. It was pouring rain, so we didn’t get out of the pub and on our way to Eric’s exquisite Arts and Crafts country home nearby until after closing time. Slightly drunk and proudly touting my Porsche’s perfect road-holding in all conditions, I lost control of the car on a wet country lane and nearly killed us all. We ended up between two trees, but had miraculously missed both. We arrived at Eric’s house at 11.30. I didn’t see the irony in a drunk showing up to offer assistance to a junkie.