Who I Am: A Memoir (27 page)

Roger did an interview in retaliation, defending himself and attacking me for ruining shows while drunk. I may have blown a song or two, but never a complete show. Neither of us took this kind of thing to heart in the long run, but when it came to The Who we were both clearly confused and a little lost.

18

THE UNDERTAKER

There was an aspect of
Tommy
that was worrying me. I was angry with Ted Oldman, despite my fondness for him as a friend, for trying (unsuccessfully) to get me to sign Kit’s Grand Right document when I was drunk. Ted acted for Lambert and Stamp as well as the band. When Kit started ranting in the newspapers that he owned the copyright to
Tommy
, the penny dropped and I turned to Sam Sylvester, a leading show-business lawyer, for help. We had been introduced by The Who’s accountant, David Rosten. Sam’s advice was to deal with issue of the Lambert and Stamp agreement quickly.

Sam was passionate about music and the arts; he wasn’t a rock fan, but when he reached into my work for artistic context and meaning, he seemed to find it. Sam was deeply religious – not Orthodox, but the patriarch of a devoutly observant Jewish family – with an incredibly sharp mind. From the moment he became my legal advocate and friend, I was guaranteed a long life.

I’m sure Bill Curbishley learned a lot from the way Sam navigated the vagaries of our already over-complicated tax, recording and publishing contracts. In the USA Ina Meibach provided a similarly loving legal umbrella. The friendship that grew between Ina and Sam over time worked in my favour without alienating the other members of the band. As I mourned the loss of Kit as my Svengali, and Chris as my advisor in all things cool, Bill, Ina and Sam provided me with an entirely different style of life management.

It was Ronnie Lane who encouraged me to consider ‘Squeeze Box’ for the album. It was a rank outsider as a song, not even included in the songs I had first suggested to Roger. I had written it entirely for my own amusement, to show off my abilities on an accordion I bought at a local music shop. One evening I played Ronnie my demo, and he loved it. He said it sounded like a crazy Country & Western polka. He also thought it was time for me to give up on The Who.

Ronnie Lane knew me very well and respected me as a musician, not just as a rock polemicist. I knew I could articulate my ideas as an artist more clearly if unencumbered by the band, but I had hoped a movie of
Tommy
might address this need. Ken Russell had done a first-rate job, but during the final dubbing of the film I realised that Ken had missed a key point at the heart of my rock opera: that it spoke of the end of dictators and self-created messiahs. Somehow Russell, eighteen years older than we were, was operating on the far side of the generational divide. He knew the rigours of war first-hand: he had been bombed, blitzed, and had performed military service in both the Royal Air Force and the post-war merchant navy. But he had little sense of the next generation’s post-war shame and anger, or the way our parents’ denial of those feelings might need to be confronted by us, and cast aside.

The movie of
Tommy
premièred at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York on 18 March 1975. John Mosely and I were still fiddling with the sound system in the theatre when the time came for me to make my appearance on the red carpet.

Watching the movie I saw my life passing before me, but the rest of the audience response was, at first, quite strange. The first thirty minutes were set in a typical British post-war holiday camp, so the American viewers couldn’t relate. The breakthrough moment was Tina Turner’s stunning rendition of ‘Acid Queen’. The track I’d put together with Ronnie Wood had a Rolling Stones edge to it, and suddenly the sound system proved its worth. When the song finished the audience roared its approval. After that every song received applause, even the linking sections.

By the time the film ended I felt we had a hit of some kind. The real test would be when the film went on general release, but the first response was certainly encouraging. The soundtrack went straight to No. 2 in the album charts.

We flew to LA the next day for the West Coast première at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, complete with Klieg lamps combing the sky, then the London première at Leicester Square. Reviews were mixed, but I didn’t care. The film was grossing large amounts of money, and Stigwood’s accounting to us was very fast. We had become used to waiting for performance income to drift in six to nine months after a tour, so it was a shock to see millions of pounds accruing in The Who group bank account just two months after the film was released. It was a nice problem to have, but we were all concerned that the income would be taxed into oblivion should any of us choose to take the profits personally. We had no current tax schemes, and – apart from Keith, who wanted to live in California – no desire to move to another country.

Roger was still involved in the last weeks of shooting
Lisztomania
with Ken Russell. When the band convened at Shepperton studios for recording, Roger arrived in a twin-engined Jet Ranger helicopter, and announced that he owned it. Thirty minutes later he flew out again. Roger’s home was in West Sussex, so the helicopter was certainly useful, but we all found it strange. With the release of the movie Roger had become ostentatiously rich, a superstar teenybopper sex object, complete with helicopter.

Keith was clearly jealous – the two of them seemed to compete over such mine-is-bigger-than-yours displays. He gazed at Roger’s helicopter dwindling in the distance, and I could tell he longed for something equally impressive.

Did I long for anything? I was longing for my hair to stop receding.

I tried to meditate. One summer night, unable to sleep, I got up with the sun at 5.30, went down to the drawing room, made tea and sat before an open window at the front of the house. The low morning sun played on the ceiling as flickering reflections from the surface of the river danced with the corner shadows.

I put a cushion down, sat cross-legged and tried to put everything out of my mind. After a few minutes I passed into a kind of white light state. The sun warmed my closed eyelids. After ten minutes of meditation I spoke.

‘Dearest Baba! What should I do? I will accept your answer.’

Immediately I heard a voice say, ‘Go back to The Who until further notice.’

This was not what I hoped to hear.

‘How do I know this is what you want? Give me a sign.’

At that moment, in the window frame directly in front of me, a wildly dishevelled red-haired man without a shirt jumped up into view. His face was dirty, his eyes black, fiery and alive. He looked directly at me. ‘I heard you,’ he said.

I jumped up, ran to the door and caught a brief glimpse of a man scurrying away towards the river. I had seen him a few times, sleeping on newspapers and flattened boxes in our little front garden. I must have woken him with my prayers.

The Who by Numbers
was surprisingly well received. Roger was angry with me, which I knew was a response to my interviews.
*
I hadn’t intended for him to take them so personally, but he did. It was our New York lawyer, Ina Meibach, who, after listening to me speak about the void that had opened up between Roger and me, advised me to try giving Roger more control.

‘Control?’ I asked. ‘Control of what? All he seems to want to do at the moment is sue Kit and Chris.’

‘I’m not talking about legal issues,’ she said calmly. ‘I’m talking about the band.’

‘None of us controls this band. It’s uncontrollable.’

‘Can I give you just one piece of advice to take away? Think about it.’

‘OK,’ I replied.

‘Let Roger win,’ she said. ‘For once, let him win.’

I’d been here once before, and by conceding a role to Roger in the band’s creative direction that time, we’d kept it together. So I knew Ina was giving me good advice.

I wrote to Roger to apologise, offering to support him in whatever he wanted to do. There was no hidden agenda to this, it was just time to try something different. It was time to align myself more fully with Roger rather than continue with John and Keith in the long-established ‘back-line’ faction that was failing. In the matter of our management it was time, too, for me to align myself with Roger and his commitment to Bill Curbishley, rather than continue to hope for Kit and Chris to return on white horses. With a little help from Ina I suddenly became willing to try new methods.

Without any effort whatsoever my drinking stopped. It just stopped. Within a few days of writing to Roger my head began to clear. With it came the thought,
I need a holiday. A long one
. I flew with my family to Washington, DC, then chartered a Learjet to get us into the small airport near Myrtle Beach. At the Meher Baba Center we were given the Lantern Cabin, an exquisite cottage on the large lake at the heart of the land. Alligators basked on the banks; there were hummingbirds and snakes; the air itself conveyed a powerful sweetness that was almost cloying. As I walked down to the pristine beach I felt slightly heady. I had visited before, but never stayed.

We had a wonderful time. The four of us walked, sunbathed and swam. Emma and Minta met some friendly kids of their own age. On one occasion, while they were swimming, Karen and the girls got into difficulty with the powerful undertow, but I managed to guide them back to the shore. It was the one shock of reality in the midst of an otherwise dreamy experience. Minta spoke for years after about being sucked out to sea by the ‘Under Toad’.

In the autumn 1975 tour The Who were the first stage act in the world to employ high-powered lasers for dramatic lighting effects. We had no idea what it would cost, but we didn’t care when we imagined being on stage, bathed in mystical rays. The first night we used them before an audience, on 18 October in Granby Halls, Leicester, I was reminded of the way the three big Klieg lamps given to us by Bill Graham had lifted the finale of
Tommy
.

Wiggy used his rather modest single 4-watt laser, dispersed through a fast-moving microprocessor-controlled lens, to create a fan around Roger Daltrey’s head as he sang ‘See me, feel me’. As the fan widened it created a kind of moving ghostly ceiling above the heads of the audience. It was magical. For Roger there was a downside, however: to work best, the lasers were projected through a mist of light oil, which irritated his throat.

The day before the first Granby Halls show, Keith’s anger came to the boil. He had been frustrated by seeing millions of pounds spent on resources that would keep our road-crew employed for the next ten years, but would earn him nothing personally. Stuck in fog at an airport in Scotland, he walked up to the British Airways desk and was so brutally rude to the ground staff that he was arrested.

Because no airline would carry us for a few months after this, the rest of the tour required a charter plane, which cost us the profit from the entire UK and European tour, a sum equal to around £2 million today. Keith’s retort was a mocking laugh. ‘No problem, dear boy,’ he said. ‘We can write it all off against tax.’

In the dressing room after a show at Belle Vue in Manchester, Roger and Keith were frolicking with some girls Keith had met when he worked at the same venue with teenybopper heartthrob David Essex on the movie
Stardust
. I became aware of a girl left over, sitting by my right side, gazing at me intently.

‘You,’ she said appraisingly, ‘look like an undertaker.’

Until the British Punk-rock movement kicked off there were just two contenders for our crown: The Rolling Stones and the upstart Bruce Springsteen. Bruce had been celebrated in the
New York Times
in October 1975 with the headline: ‘If There Hadn’t Been a Bruce Springsteen the Critics Would Have Made Him Up.’ I concurred: in my mind I had already made him up, and Johnny Rotten too. I saw them both guaranteeing my extinction, or at least forcing my early retirement, a thought that triggered mixed feelings.

Rock for me was about catching fire on stage, going the extra mile. The Stones caught fire because Mick Jagger never let up, never lost focus on stage and spent millions on stage sets. Springsteen caught fire because he believed passionately in the importance of the audience, and the story the audience needed to be told. His sets were usually well over two hours long. He worked on stage the way I did: to complete exhaustion. He also honoured Roger’s working-class approach to singing, from both the heart and the lungs at once.

In October 1975, while setting out plans for shows outside the USA, Bill Curbishley suggested we might try to break into Japan around the time the
Tommy
film premièred there. I couldn’t see how we could possibly break any new territories without one of us dropping dead, and I was seriously worried it would be me. We couldn’t keep up with the demand from the UK, Europe and the USA, and if we opened up new territories like Japan, Australia and South America we might never get any down time at all.

In the background, Bill was being told by Roger and John that Keith’s life would be saved if only he could be kept on the road where we could keep an eye on him. I wasn’t so sure. I thought this was an excuse; they just wanted to tour all the time. Keith had told me many times that he was in trouble, but I couldn’t help but think we were probably all being played; Keith was a clever man.

After a show in Baton Rouge Keith ejected a difficult girl from his room. Around midnight I found her weeping in the lobby. She had finished telling Nik Cohn, who was travelling with us writing an article for a magazine, that ‘he took my heart and threw it away like a broken toy’. She had bleached strawberry-blonde hair, bright red lips, pretty eyes, and was wearing fraying jean shorts and a low-cut red top. She looked like a Texas bar girl. Her eye make-up was smeared, and when I asked if she was OK she quickly pulled herself together and smiled at me.

‘Hey,’ she said, laughing. ‘Don’t worry about me. This ain’t the first time I’ve been thrown out of a rock star’s room for talking too much. But he didn’t even fuck me first.’ Her accent was singsong, slightly Southern, the kind of American accent that to the indiscriminate English ear sounds cultured and sophisticated.