Who I Am: A Memoir (25 page)

Studio recording was completed by 1 August. Mixing began at my studio in a barn two days later. I was excited by this move, and looked forward to creating the soundscapes I felt would transform the music we’d just recorded into a stunning sonic journey. When finished it would provide us with a rock-opera piece cohesive enough to replace – even improve on –
Tommy
as the backbone of our stage show.

I spent part of the summer recording sound effects: rain, storms, thunder, trains, traffic and of course the sea. I also commissioned a radio announcer to cover the Mods and Rockers battles on the beaches, and recorded myself walking along a beach singing the first few lines of ‘Sea and Sand’ to use as a prelude. Taping birds taking off on the river was a major coup, and I had a lucky moment as I approached a gaggle of geese in my punt. This kind of sound design is almost as fulfilling to me as composing music.

Mixing ran from 3 August to 12 September. There were a few short breaks for business, family (as it was the holiday season) and catching up on the quadrophonic technology I hoped would allow me to do a quad remix once we’d completed the stereo. This was the most intensely creative and demanding studio work I had ever done.

Thus far, by mid-September 1973, every part of my evolving plan for
Quadrophenia
had unfolded gloriously. Apart from Keith’s occasional antics the band had supported me, given me creative space and done the most extraordinary work in the studio. All we needed was a month and we might have finished things properly. Instead, I was shocked to read in the press that the UK release date of the double album was less than a month away, on 13 October, with the first tour date a little more than two weeks later.

I still had to complete the quadrophonic mixes that I estimated would take about a month. And I’d figured that the rest of the work we had to do – mastering the stereo album in Los Angeles, mastering a quadrophonic version, preparing quadrophonic backing tapes for our stage rehearsals, rehearsing and getting the show on the road – would take us through the winter. I’d imagined we would probably tour the album in spring 1974, but the idiots at Track couldn’t bear to miss the lucrative Christmas selling period, and forced the premature release date.

I should say, in their defence, that the idiots at Track were as deeply in the red financially as The Who by this time, so their decision was probably necessary to keep the company afloat. Building Ramport studio had cost £330,000 at the time of opening (nearly ten times that at today’s standards). Roger was on edge. He had been harbouring grave doubts about our manager’s honesty.
*
The heavy spending – of his fellow band members, and Wiggy for the new studio – was driving Roger crazy.

Tension was building for me, too. When I rushed from Cleeve to Shepperton with stage tapes that had taken forty-eight hours to prepare, having had no sleep at all, and Roger announced he had waited long enough and was about to go home, I flipped. It wasn’t Roger’s fault, but I lashed out at him, trying to give him the Abbie Hoffman treatment with the neck of the guitar, while a film crew recorded for posterity every move we made. Roger responded by knocking me out.

Some observers claim I arrived drunk. Yes, Bob and I had celebrated finishing the stage tapes with a brandy in my limo, but on this occasion it would have been mainly exhaustion and frustration, not booze, that was ailing me.

Critical reaction to
Quadrophenia
’s October 1973 release was relatively muted compared with the raging success of
Tommy
, but over the years it has come to be seen as superior to
Tommy
both musically and conceptually, and as my ‘redemption’ after the collapse of
Lifehouse
.
†
The album sleeve note ends this way:

So that’s why I’m here, the bleeding boat drifted off and I’m stuck here in the pissing rain with my life flashing before me. Only it isn’t flashing, it’s crawling. Slowly. Now it’s just the bare bones of what I am.

A tough guy, a helpless dancer.

A romantic: is it me for a moment?

A bloody lunatic. I’ll even carry your bags.

A beggar, a hypocrite, love reign over me.

Schizophrenic? I’m Bleeding Quadrophenic.

Roger was the helpless dancer; John, the romantic; Keith, the bloody lunatic; and I, needless to say, was the beggar/hypocrite. But the four aspects of Jimmy the Mod’s multiple personality were, in a sense,
all
to be found in me, and I had always known it.

I had spent money creating a quadrophonic PA system similar to that used at the time by Pink Floyd. Again Roger was concerned about the cost, being particularly attuned to the financial chaos that surrounded us. We all had a longstanding gripe with Kit and Chris over the fact that seven years previously we had allowed our recording contract to be vested with Track (instead of directly with Polydor). We had thought that we would be partners or shareholders: this never happened. Jimi Hendrix was their biggest signing by far, but I’d brought them two No. 1 artists in Arthur Brown and Thunderclap Newman, and had received no royalties.

I was also covering some of Keith’s day-to-day expenses by lending him money that I clawed back in band meetings with accountants that he rarely attended. Kit and Chris didn’t try to hide their troubles, or their addictions at the time. They had hired two managerial second-in-commands in Peter Rudge (who went on to manage the Stones’ office in New York for a while) and Bill Curbishley, a childhood friend of Chris’s.

Keith himself had massive personal problems at this time. We all knew he was crazy about his wife Kim, so it was hard to work out what he was doing, bringing girls in and out of the studio, behaving as though we were on the road. Meanwhile my best friend Barney had taken to spending a lot of time at Tara House, ostensibly to hang out with Keith, but Barney had fallen in love with Kim.

When Kim left the family home in October to file for divorce, Barney sought out my advice. He wanted my permission to pursue her – he was terribly torn between loyalty to the band and his new passion for Kim. I pleaded with him not to be a party to the break-up, as it would mean my having to choose between him and Keith. Barney gave himself some time to consider my plea, and missed his moment. Kim went to stay with Ian McLagan (Mac) from The Faces. A week later Kim and Mac were an item. They fled somewhere together, leaving Keith to make death threats while Barney went back to Jan.

Not for the first time it occurred to me that I had to look no farther than life right around me to find the makings of a rock opera – at least of a rock soap opera.

I listened to Keith on the finished
Quadrophenia
album. His playing was great, but I worried about him: he had lost his first great love, and I was certain the impact on his self-esteem would be massive, and it was.

When we finally started touring in the UK we confronted the most complex technical difficulties. I had hoped we could use four screens on stage on which we could project the story in some form. Several experiments were undertaken, but there simply wasn’t time to get them working properly.

Even the music was problematic. Keith, who had been so brilliant playing along with the backing tapes on
Who’s Next
, couldn’t seem to cope with the stage tapes we’d put together for
Quadrophenia
. Our quadrophonic sound system was tricky too. In almost all of the smaller UK halls it was difficult to find safe positions for the two rear speaker systems. They needed to be hung high up and it wasn’t always possible to get them set up correctly before our time ran out.

What followed were some of the most shameful performances in our career on stage. I was utterly bereft that although we had made a great record it had not provided us with the new rock-opera performance piece we so badly needed. We were all disappointed, that most disastrous of emotions. My anger onstage with The Who had always been an act for the most part, but my frustration over the live performances of
Quadrophenia
boiled over. On
Top of the Pops
I lost my patience and smashed a cherished guitar (a gift from Joe Walsh), and in Newcastle I pushed over all of our sound equipment in a fit of rage.

Yet it was Keith who was the first to crack. In November at the Cow Palace in San Francisco he collapsed on stage after taking three elephant tranquilliser pellets. I had to drag him back to his drumkit when he came round; then he collapsed again. At first I thought he might be play-acting a little. When he was conscious he made jokes, and so on stage I treated the entire débâcle as funny. I didn’t get really upset until later, when it became clear he had taken a very powerful, and potentially fatal, substance.

It was the first show in our entire career that we had to give up on because one of us had openly goofed up in this way. The American tour to promote
Quadrophenia
continued after Keith’s collapse at the Cow Palace, and both Roger and I felt the need to try to explain the story before each show, and sometimes even between songs on stage. Reviews were mixed, mainly good, but Robert Hilburn in Los Angeles, always effusive, was troubled by the ‘impression that the group’s momentum – and therefore, importance – is waning’.

In Montreal, Keith held a party in an elegant suite in the brand new Four Seasons hotel. Piles of room-service food lay all around us. At one point some ketchup, refusing as ever to come out of the bottle, ended up on the wall. I thought it looked aesthetically pleasing. ‘Someone should frame it,’ I said.

Keith, agreeing, looked around the room. He took down a framed print from the wall, punched out the picture it contained, and held it up to frame the ketchup. There was applause. Reminded of my first lesson at Ealing Art College, I grabbed a steak knife, stabbed my hand, and wiped the blood on the wall. ‘That’s a line!’ There was more applause.

Bedlam followed. What had started as a joke ended with a sofa being thrown out of a window into the beautiful courtyard gardens. As it exploded through the tempered glass, revealing small ponds, ferns and miniature trees in the garden, we all stood quiet for a moment. Directly opposite us was the hotel reception area behind a glass wall. The hotel staff looked at us in shock; we stared back, equally horrified as we slowly came to our senses.

Three French-speaking policemen answered the call, and once in our room they went through my luggage and found some girlie magazines that they waved around as though they’d discovered a cache of chopped-up body parts. I admitted I’d taken part in the destruction. (I may even have muttered something about art, as I was still a little drunk.)

‘So,’ said one, in English, looking at my passport. ‘The cop-kicker.’ He went on to elaborate in French, which I didn’t much understand. It obviously wasn’t complimentary. They took me down to a basement room in the hotel, but fortunately, as they menacingly closed in on me, the hotel general manager, who had been roused from his bed, passed the open door.

‘What is going on here?’ he said in French.

‘It’s an interview,’ barked one of the cops.

‘The room allocated to the police is upstairs,’ said the manager, firmly. He gave them the room number, waited right there until the police moved, and locked the basement door behind me. He probably saved me from a serious beating.

Every single person in our party was arrested and put in jail, including Roger, who hadn’t even attended the gathering. The police cells were packed, so I shared a cell with Keith’s aide, Pete Butler. We took turns sleeping on the hard bench. Paraplegic Mike Shaw had been travelling with us, wheelchair-bound and unable to get in or out of bed without help. The police left him in the hotel, but took his nurse along with us.

Peter Rudge, who had joined in with the wrecking, managed to ring the promoter, who paid the hotel damages. Later, when I saw a photo of the room, I was shocked. Everything in it was destroyed.

As soon as we arrived back in Britain, Lou Reizner put on a second charity gala of his orchestral
Tommy
. I refused to participate, but happily attended. It was the first time I’d ever seen Roger from the vantage of the audience. He projected himself into the crowd, his eyes fixed right on the heart of the audience, and yet he addressed each of us. His technique was that of an experienced stage actor.

‘He’s really very good, isn’t he?’ I exclaimed to Karen.

A short series of Who shows followed in London, taking us right up to Christmas. The reviews of our shows were beginning to get rather picky; some were just bad. Compared to other bands we were still good, but we were going off the boil.

It wasn’t because we didn’t put all our energy into it on stage, and we certainly were putting in long performances, sometimes playing as long as two and a half hours. But we all realised that, however hard we worked on stage,
Tommy
had to a great extent been the element of our stage act that, from 1969 through to 1972, had helped us garner such positive reviews.

Quadrophenia
had failed to replace
Tommy
as the backbone of our live show.

17

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR

Tommy
was destined to be a movie. Since 1969 a number of producers, writers and directors had expressed serious interest in coming up with a decent script – Joseph Strick was probably the most distinguished – but nothing had stuck. Kit hung on to his dream of directing, even though, in 1973, he was using heroin every day. He and Chris had fallen out.

We all still adored Kit. He kept managing to work his way back into our affections, making us laugh with grand stories of his own absurdity. I had forgiven him, despite some lingering discomfort between us. He was still funny, clever and kind, but if I was resentful that too much touring had compromised my creative projects, he was resentful that I had cast him aside in the recording studio.

One afternoon in June 1973 I was walking down Wardour Street, recording, hoping for a quintessential Soho Mod moment that could be included in the
Quadrophenia
soundscape: a shout, a snatched conversation between boys dealing drugs or their bodies, something romantic, a racing tip or news of a hip, upcoming event. I was wearing headphones, carrying a stereo tape machine and holding out a stereo microphone. I kept my head down, surreptitiously slipping the microphone into groups of people standing around talking. Suddenly in my earphones I heard a familiar voice. It was Chris. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of months. He was talking about
Tommy
. I switched off the mike.

It turned out that Chris had just attended a meeting with Michael Carreras of Hammer Films; they had been trying to get hold of me to join them. Chris took me for a drink and told me Kit was opposing any deal that didn’t recompense him for his film treatment, but despite his threats of litigation things looked promising. (The treatment was something Kit and I had cobbled together in an hour at my studio in Twickenham.)

A little later, Robert Stigwood stepped in as producer of the film, replacing Hammer Films. I considered this a positive move, not only because Stiggy and Kit were friends and he promised to deal with Kit kindly, but because of our long-standing relationship with Stiggy. I believe Carreras had suggested Ken Russell to direct; I was a fan of Ken’s work, which ranged from serious Sixties
Omnibus
documentaries about composers to irreverent films about music and art in the late Sixties and early Seventies. I especially liked his films on Delius and Elgar, and the more recent
Savage Messiah
.

Ken Russell wouldn’t have considered directing
Tommy
were it not for Lou Reizner’s orchestral version, so when we first met at Ken’s home in Ladbroke Grove that was what we listened to. Ken was keen to inspire me to use orchestra as well as rock for the soundtrack. As an example of how powerful and brutal orchestral music could be, he played me Carl Orff’s
Carmina Burana
, which I hadn’t heard before. I told him I could orchestrate my music using synthesisers, and after Ken made a number of visits to Ramport he finally seemed convinced.

As it happened Ken was present when we recorded
Quadrophenia
’s ‘Drowned’ and a stormy rain found a leak in the roof, filling the piano booth with water. ‘Be careful what you pray for,’ said Ken, as we cleaned up. ‘You’re dabbling in the composer’s arts, Pete – both the dark and divine.’

One of the first changes Ken wanted to make was to nudge the story towards a kind of modern version of
Hamlet
, with the lover of Tommy’s mother killing Tommy’s father – rather than the other way round, as on the album. I was concerned about this at first, then I saw that the dead father would become a symbol for
Tommy
of the ‘Master’ he sees in his dreams.

There were a number of other changes: Ken needed to flesh out a lot of the story and introduce new scenes, which would require original or extended music. As mythic, absurd and exaggerated as the film may have been in some ways, the denouement remained true to the album and centred on the spiritual benefits of growing up in troubled circumstances. I was excited and intrigued by how this would unfold.

Once Ken had produced a basic script he felt he could use, I started on scratch lyrics for the additional scenes. As I completed them they were added to the script Ken had laid out in two columns: action to the left, lyrics to the right. No dialogue. Ramport was the obvious venue to record the music, and Ken wanted all the music in place before he shot a single frame. Ron Nevison, who had done such wonderful work on
Quadrophenia
, engineered. I gathered different groups of musicians for each music cue. Keith was spending time in LA, so I tried other drummers. We usually started work in the afternoon so Ken could attend, since he was doing a huge amount of pre-production work earlier in the day. We started recording in early January 1974.

Bill Curbishley effectively took over management of The Who early that same year. Roger adored him, and we all liked his straightforward approach, but it took me longer than the others to completely trust Bill. Bill had an unusual, and appealing, demeanour, like that of a cultivated but pugnacious boxing trainer. He quickly became a fan of the band, and came to understand its inner mechanics and mysteries, but was less intimidated or awed by it than Pete Rudge. Where Chris and Kit may have allowed gulfs to widen between Who members, Bill attempted to create bridges, and in his letters often addressed us together as a band, and circulated copies of any important documents.

If The Who had lived in a tax haven, we’d have been millionaires back in 1969. Bill Curbishley knew this, and his priority was to see us financially secure as individuals. There had been two ways to look at the financial vagaries around the band. One was that we only worked as much and as hard as we did because we needed the money; this pleased our fans, and also kept the band together. The contrary view, my own, was that the pressure of trying year after year to generate a big enough annual gross to live on would eventually break us.

Bill realised he had to resolve this situation. He wasn’t a creative thinker like Lambert and Stamp, but he was widely read, wrote poetry and regarded his managerial work as a chess game. The overwhelmingly positive difference between Bill and his predecessors was that he always made sure the finances were properly arranged. From the moment Bill took over Who management, my money worries were over.

Stiggy set about casting the film with Ken Russell, and I began to interfere. I disagreed with them on the inclusion of veteran actor Oliver Reed (playing Tommy’s stepfather), as well as the more Hollywood choices of Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson. Stiggy’s explanation of the Hollywood star system was succinct and persuasive: ‘We-Have-To-Have-Them.’

I knew Oliver Reed couldn’t sing, but as I knocked back mugs of Rémy Martin while coaching him line-by-tortuous-line, he did his thing in the studio and it worked extraordinarily well. I had been told that Jack Nicholson wasn’t a trained singer either, but he sang beautifully. (He has never stopped teasing me about how stunned I was when he began to croon like a world-class Fifties club singer.)

Ann-Margret I knew nothing about, and I thought her voice was too musical-theatre for
Tommy
. But she convinced me the moment we started to record. She displayed real passion, a sense of the absurd and an ability to make the songs her own; she sang in a drawling theatrical way – more Ethel Merman than Tina Turner – but it worked well. And of course she’d been in a movie with Elvis. The Who were small beer in comparison, yet she was respectful, and an amazingly hard worker in the studio.

Elton John, Tina Turner and Eric Clapton were of course easier for me to work with, being musicians, and each of them was magnificent. Tina had been having difficulties in her private life, but you would never have known it: as the Acid Queen, she was electrifying. Roger, a natural actor, created a new kind of Tommy character that was also utterly convincing.

The recording of the
Tommy
score continued at Ramport in March and April. Keith had a role acting (as a drummer) in Mike Appleton’s
Stardust
movie, a follow-up to his
That’ll Be the Day
, so I used a variety of other drummers: Kenney Jones (The Faces), Mike Kelley (from Spooky Tooth) and Tony Newman (Sounds Incorporated). Eric Clapton had spent a good part of the previous year getting himself into shape. Some of his treatment had been at the hands of Meg Patterson, the addiction therapist whose NeuroElectric Therapy (NET) reduced withdrawal symptoms. Eric claimed it did nothing of the sort, but he worked with Meg nevertheless.

Stiggy, Eric’s manager, pressed him into taking a role in
Tommy
. Eric wasn’t keen but did it partly for me, since I’d helped him put up the Rainbow concert. The song he would play was ‘Eyesight to the Blind’, and Eric wanted to create a new riff for the song to make it his own; he had the notion that he would like his guitar doubled by clavinet, the electric keyboard used famously by Stevie Wonder. As it happened Stevie was in town, so Eric took me with him to Island Studios to try to persuade Stevie to work on the track.

As we drove to the studio together I reminded Eric that Stigwood had originally suggested Stevie take the role of Pinball Wizard. Ken and I had been nonplussed: a blind musician playing the role of a sighted pinball champion who is beaten by a deaf, dumb and blind boy? What we didn’t know was that Stevie himself had been interested in the role, and was still considering it when he heard of my concern. He was told by his brother, who managed his affairs, that I had objected to him in the role because he was blind. Perfectly true; it didn’t make sense, given the story line.

Given this history I wasn’t surprised when we got to the studio that Stevie ignored me. He was sweet to Eric, but even so he refused to contribute in any way; we left feeling almost as rejected as Stevie had no doubt been made to feel by me. In the event, I tried to emulate his inimitable wah-wah clavinet style on the track, which certainly wasn’t easy.

Elton John took the role of the Pinball Wizard, and asked to use his own band and producer Gus Dudgeon to record his track. Elton arrived at the Battersea studio in a Phantom 5 limousine, similar to that used by the Queen; I hadn’t seen one in the rock world since Andrew Oldham’s in 1967. It was a revelation to observe how quickly and efficiently Elton and his band worked, nailing a driving track with solos, lead and backing vocals in less than four hours.

Principal photography on
Tommy
began in late April. I found Ken Russell bombastic, energetic, funny, tireless and inspiring. He had an obsessive eye for detail and planning that I now realise every great film director needs, together with the ability to adapt to fluctuating circumstances.

I never had a bad moment with Ken. During the
Tommy
film he only ever slept about four hours a night, and in the first six weeks of shooting I did the same. We’d have a script meeting for the next day’s shooting that lasted until two in the morning, and he’d be up again at six for a breakfast meeting. I survived on cognac. I have no idea how he did it.

Ken pushed his actors very hard indeed and wore a few people down, but during the filming I could stand aside and recuperate if I wished; and when we filmed our own sequences as The Who I simply behaved like the arrogant half-drunk rock star I was. Although Eric Clapton wasn’t crazy about appearing in the film he pulled his weight. The scene Ken arranged for ‘The Hawker’, the song based on ‘Eyesight to the Blind’, was set in a church, with voodoo as the theme. Arthur Brown, John Entwistle and I joined Eric as his acolytes, all wearing loose-fitting gowns. We looked like complete idiots. I felt a little embarrassed for Eric. My old buddy Arthur Brown, whose song ‘Fire’ was a No. 1 hit in the UK, knew voodoo like a New Orleans shaman, and seemed to be in his element. Ken filled the church with real paraplegics and disabled folk in wheelchairs; it shouldn’t have worked, but they all very much enjoyed their day of filming.

Eric came back into the studio to complete the recording. After we had finished he told me he was building up the courage to speak with Pattie, George Harrison’s wife and the subject of ‘Layla’, and beg her to leave her husband. Would I go with him and maybe spend some time with George so Eric could be alone with Pattie?

This turned out not to be difficult. George was happy to talk to me about Indian mysticism and music, even his use of cocaine. I found it hard to follow his reasoning that in a world of illusion nothing mattered, not wealth or fame, drug abuse or heavy drinking, nothing but love for God. We sat in his wonderful recording studio and talked for two hours. I fell in love with George that night. His sardonic, slow-speed, Liverpudlian humour was charming, and his spiritual commitment was absolute: yellow-robed young Hare Krishna followers living in the house wandered in and out as we chatted.

George lived a quiet life; his house was vast, rambling, and the reception hall was like a theatre it was so huge, with its ornate galleries. I think Pattie may have been more relieved to escape the house than she was to leave George. A superb gardener, his great love was Friar Park.

That night Eric tried to talk to Pattie about his feelings, and he said later that it was a crucial moment in their relationship. Pattie did eventually leave George for Eric, who celebrated that success by having as much fun as he could without drugs. Pattie seemed happy, and free. I hadn’t seen her smile in quite the way she did with Eric since I had first met her.

At a Chelsea restaurant soon after filming Eric’s scene in
Tommy
, Karen and I were invited to dinner with Bob and Mia Pridden and Eric and Pattie. The four of them arrived half an hour late, raging drunk, wearing gorilla masks. After so many years of being exposed to similar stunts by Keith, my response was studiedly nonchalant; without batting an eye I asked the four gorillas what they would like to drink. Eric thought at first I was angry, and became a little sheepish, but it was delightful to see how happy he was.