Who I Am: A Memoir (29 page)

Meeting John Bundrick (Rabbit) was also an important event in my life as a musician. He wandered into the
Rough Mix
studio one day looking for session work. Here was a Hammond player who had worked with Bob Marley, and could play as well as Billy Preston. Offstage he could be reckless and impulsive, drinking too much, asking for drugs and telling crazy stories, but musicians of his calibre didn’t come around very often.

Critics seemed surprised that Ronnie Lane and I didn’t collaborate as writers. As I had never co-written a song in my entire career up to that point I thought they must be a bit dim. Ronnie never said he expected me to co-write, although later he expressed disappointment that we hadn’t even tried. In the last days of the sessions Ronnie and I bickered, I don’t know why. I loved Ronnie but wasn’t happy with myself, and no doubt it showed. In an effort to explain why I was so down I made the mistake of telling him I had cheated on Karen.

‘Why?’ he said angrily. ‘Are you trying to destroy her?’

I was stunned. I had expected empathy.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you see that you’re trying to drive her away?’

Ronnie was often right in my case, ready to tell me the truth as he saw it, like my friend Barney, but the thought made me explode. I lashed out at him, pushing him hard squarely on both shoulders. Ronnie flew like a man made of paper and came very close to smashing his head on a concrete step at the foot of a stairway. I could have killed him. At first I thought I didn’t know my own strength, but I later learned that Ronnie was exhibiting the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

Ronnie and I were interviewed about the
Rough Mix
album on BBC TV’s
The Old Grey Whistle Test
. While I tried to set Ronnie up as my straight man and attempted to be funny, Ronnie wanted to be serious about the record. I appeared childish, and almost dismissive about what we’d achieved together, trying to bring up the future of The Who, even though at that time there was no future.

The time I had spent with Ronnie Lane working on
Rough Mix
showed me that even someone I regarded as a best friend could trigger me to fight. I fought if I was up, and I fought when I was down. When I lost my temper it was all I knew to do.

But as the autumn weather softly announced the end of the year, a time I always loved, I fell into a wistful mood. I was listening to
Ommadawn
by Mike Oldfield, and the song ‘On Horseback’ touched me deeply, reconnecting me to an England I had once known. I listened to the music over and over again. It had sparked something in me and I wrote Mike a note, to which he responded, offering a pint of Guinness if I ever visited the Cotswolds.

My wistful mood evaporated on 17 December 1976, with a telex from Keith’s lawyer, Michael Rosenfeld. Keith was concerned that the band’s tax affairs were being arranged to suit the other three members, who had elected to remain living in the UK. It must have been frustrating for Keith to be earning money on the road with the band in the USA, and watch it return to the UK to be taxed into dust, but the way we’d set things up he was still an employee of Ramport.

Keith wanted to live in Malibu. There was nothing wrong with that, but suddenly I could see that what had troubled me for so long was now eating at Keith. A rock band with four young men of the same age appears to be a cooperative in which decisions are made at regular meetings with simple voting rules. But a band isn’t a unified fellowship, it’s an uneasy, sometimes competitive merger of young men with divergent ambitions who’ve agreed to play music together.

One exception to this was The Grateful Dead, with whom we played two shows in Oakland; I was told their long-term road crew received a share of concert royalties equal to the band members. We had been big-hearted with our own guys, but hadn’t gone that far. When we talked about it we couldn’t agree.

Queen, Springsteen, AC/DC – they all found ways to stifle the in-fighting and conflict that The Who struggled with too. I had even come to believe that our fans thrived on our arguments, and I tended to dramatise them in interviews. Roger always took the bait, and although there was no real war going on inside The Who we had our share of trouble: financially, because our companies only felt like they were a part of our life when we were on tour; socially, because Keith was constantly going back and forth to LA; and musically, because nothing new was happening – and neither Roger nor I had an easy answer for that.

Punk rock was a tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977. You could see it on the streets, hear it in the clubs and even smell it in the air. I welcomed its arrival as a regenerative force in music, while being well aware of its potential to turn The Who and all our generation into rock dinosaurs. It certainly gave us a compelling reason to snap out of our complacency and come up with something new.

Punk was now established in London, and Keith would arrive at the 100 Club, or the Vortex, like Elizabeth Taylor stepping out from her Rolls-Royce. He’d hold court at the bar, buying drinks for kids who wore zigzag eye make-up and safety pins in their clothes. They were mostly middle-class brats pretending to be tough. They threatened Keith, and he laughed at them, inviting them to come out and ride around in his car. I wasn’t so brave. I went with him one evening and met Billy Idol. I thought he was pretty scary, and he made me want to act tough myself.

But any pretensions I might have had to become a Born-Again Punk were quickly shattered when I was summoned to New York by Aaron Schecter, my New York accountant, who looked after Track Music, Inc, the US arm of my UK publishing company. There was a matter of great urgency I had to deal with. Without explaining to me what he was doing, or why, he walked me from my hotel to a large bank.

‘Go in,’ he said.

‘Why?’ I asked, confused.

‘Just walk in.’

I walked in, and approached one of the tellers, a pretty one.

‘Good morning, Mr Townshend,’ she said.

Wow! I spluttered. A bank full of Who fans!

‘Pardon me, Mr Townshend,’ she corrected me. ‘I am not a Who fan. Would you like information on your account?’

‘I don’t have an account.’

‘Mr Townshend, we hold a number of accounts here with individuals the bank regards as important enough for us to remember their names and faces. You are one of those individuals.’

‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Can I have details of my account? What’s the balance?’

The girl fiddled about for a few moments.

‘You have one million, three hundred thousand dollars on high-interest deposit on call, and a further fifty thousand dollars in your main account. Would you like to make a withdrawal?’

‘No, thank you.’ I had never seen a million of any currency, apart from Italian lire, in my entire life.

Aaron had joined me at the desk. ‘Ask yourself, Pete,’ he said ‘why did you not know your money was here?’

He then slipped away. As I left the bank I bumped into Annie Leibovitz.

‘Hi Annie,’ I mumbled. ‘Take my photograph. I’m rich.’

When I returned to London I went directly to see David Platz, my publishing partner in Fabulous Music, and its manager. I complained that my writing royalties were being held up in a bank in New York, in my name. The same bank was used by Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp for Track Records and New Ikon in the US, and I was worried there could be some intrigue. I held David Platz responsible. He told me he was aware of the problem and had already asked his friend Allen Klein to look into it.

I was stunned, but David assured me the money would come to me very soon. Shortly afterwards I was summoned to a meeting at David Platz’s office with Chris Stamp and my attorney, Sam Sylvester, to meet with Allen Klein. ‘This should be a simple affair,’ I said, when I arrived for ten o’clock tea. ‘Royalties owing to me have been found in a bank account in New York, and they merely need to be disbursed.’

David looked at me deadpan.
You charged me to sort this out
, his eyes said.
This isn’t going to be simple
. Chris explained. ‘On your behalf, David has alleged wrongdoing. Kit, Pete Kameron and myself have been cited. In such circumstances Allen is able to freeze the money in question on your behalf, in lieu of a legal case, or an agreement.’

Klein added a numbing footnote. ‘For an unlimited period of time.’

I asked for a private word with Sam. He confirmed all this.

‘So what does Allen want?’ I asked. ‘A huge fee?’

‘I doubt he will settle for a fee,’ Sam replied soberly.

Klein, it emerged, would only clean up the mess if given a percentage of all my future publishing income, and of the money he was holding. Although he was legally within his rights to withold funds he had sequestered, I considered this demand for a cut rather than a fee to be blackmail, and I didn’t want to give in.

We had more tea, coffee, sandwiches for lunch, more tea, more coffee. Klein was in and out of the room like the cuckoo on a Swiss clock, each time with a new set of computations. Sam was struggling to keep up with the figures. I was lost. Klein’s trick was to develop percentages of percentages to add weight to any particular proposal. ‘If you give me ten per cent, and David and Chris take a reduction of five per cent respectively, they only lose two per cent of their share of the net income and you gain by twenty in the gross.’

The meeting went on until the evening. I have never felt so stupid. The maths was beyond me, even at its most basic level. I became weary as the day wore on, but Klein by contrast became more and more alert. He thrived on this kind of encounter.

At eight o’clock that evening an agreement was reached. David and Chris, acting also for Kit in this meeting, would pay Klein the commission he demanded in order to release the money. They would also further reduce their share to give me an increase.

‘Thanks for doing this, Chris. But what is Kit going to say about it?’

‘He’ll go nuts,’ replied Chris. ‘Let’s go and get a drink.’

And so we did. We went to the Speakeasy that night where I met two of the Sex Pistols, and started to preach at them, raging about money. Until the very end, I thought Paul Cook, their drummer, was Johnny Rotten. I wasn’t even that drunk, just angry about our submission to Klein. I should have gone home. When I did finally get into my big limo, Tom Jones and the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck pulled alongside in a Rolls.

‘Any birds in there?’ Their faces were full of hope.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Just a few dead bodies.’

‘Who Are You’ was written the next day, and reflected the fix I was in. Back in my studio I was writing songs about music, songs about songs and songs about touring: ‘Music Must Change’, ‘New Song’, ‘No Road Romance’ and ‘Sister Disco’. But with a million pounds more to my name, I decided to stop touring with The Who and to sail around Cornwall on
Ahmednagar Queen
with my parents. I started a book-publishing company, Eel Pie Books, with Matthew Price, and, with Delia DeLeon, opened a bookshop in Richmond called Magic Bus, where we sold the book Barney and I had put together,
The Story of Tommy
. At Shepperton I formed an equipment-hire company for small gigs, filling a gap in the high end of the rock business.

After the wonder of the demos, recording the
Who Are You
album was no fun. I was really proud of my new songs, but Roger felt some were over-produced. He didn’t fight me over this, but he did punch Glyn Johns on the nose, and my brother-in-law Jon Astley took over. Jon loved my work of the time, and was very encouraging. At one session Keith laboured over the jazzy 6/8 swing of ‘Music Must Change’, but when I offered to drop the song from the record Keith came alive. He stood up, his sticks in the air.

‘I can do triplet jazz! I’ve wallowed in the gutter with Phil Seamen.’ (Seamen, the legendary British jazz drummer, had died a few years earlier, addicted to heroin and booze.)

Keith was off on his grandiose Crown Prince Moon the Loon routine.

‘I am the best …’

He caught my eye. I looked at him sadly. Keith hesitated for a split second, before he carried on.

‘I am the best …’ another pause for thought, ‘Keith Moon-type drummer in the world!’

There was no arguing with that.

I took my family to our new house at Cleeve for Christmas 1977. The Astleys, Karen’s parents, lived just up the Thames. Anyone sitting at the table at dinner would have noticed that Karen was uncomfortable with me. She spoke with enthusiasm about the teaching course she was on, but when I was asked about my work and my plans for the future, and I began to prattle about it, her face would clench. The expression said that she’d heard it all before.

Karen’s brother Jon was working with me in the studio, and knew what was going on – that Keith was failing and that it was badly affecting the recording process. They all knew. My eyes moved from face to face around the table, trying to divine whether Karen’s family could tell me anything that would help me feel I was doing the right things – by taking on the new house at Cleeve and Meher Baba Oceanic, and by trying to help Keith by refusing to tour until he’d stopped drinking for good.

Rabbit was also having drink problems: at an experimental Who rehearsal in March 1978, Rabbit, his musical brilliance clear to all, got so drunk that he threw himself from a moving taxi to avoid paying the fare. He broke his wrist, and some proposed test shows were abandoned. I was upset because the rehearsals had been very exciting.

Rabbit was true to his name, a fast keys player, in my book; he brought tricky new songs like ‘Music Must Change’ and ‘Sister Disco’ to life, and allowed us to avoid the use of stage tapes. His Hammond and piano solos were often mind-blowing. Yet, however badly Rabbit behaved, Keith was still my main concern. At these rehearsals, which we filmed, he was hilarious as ever, but I spent a lot of time attempting to get him in line.

One evening Keith invited Rabbit and me to a small gathering at Keith Richards’s house in Chelsea. Mick was there with Carinthia West, an old friend of mine I’d met with Mike and Katie McInnerney. She was tall and beautiful, the only female there. While Mick and Keith were playing old R&B records and I was bantering with Eric Idle and Ahmet Ertegun (founder and chief of Atlantic Records), Rabbit decided he’d never be an important enough rock star to attract women like Carinthia, so he tried to drown himself in a bathtub full of water. Then he leapt from a second-floor window like a jinn, and ran off down the street with no shirt.