Who I Am: A Memoir (42 page)

By this time it was clear to everyone who knew me that Karen and I were in serious trouble. I squired Lisa Marsh in and out of the theatre on a string of awkward dates. One night, after several dates with me seeing her home and ending up on my knees outside her apartment, she said, for whatever reason, that I could stay over. We got drunk, had sex and it was everything I had imagined.

I wandered out onto Broadway at six in the morning and was intercepted by a young black girl wearing a thin T-shirt. I put my hand in my pocket, thinking she was going to ask for money. Instead she held her hands up to my face.

‘You have the most beautiful eyes,’ she said, and walked on.

Lisa had a good friend in Robert Kirk, a photographer working on most of Lisa’s fashion shoots, who took photos of my show during rehearsals. He had family experience with troubled drinkers and his presence helped me stay sober at first. Lisa had also continued to operate as my informal stylist, encouraging me to wear black jackets, tighter trousers than I was used to, and to be clean-shaven with something hanging around my neck – sometimes a slug of silver, sometimes a Celtic cross.

At the first
Psychoderelict
show in Toronto, at Massey Hall on 10 July, many in the crowd already knew the words to all the songs. Others had come hoping to see The Who. My three actors found it strange to work with a rowdy rock audience who not only parroted their songs, but shouted constantly that the show was rubbish, or that they loved it, or that they wanted ‘Magic Bus’, or for me to smash my guitar. It was affectionate but disrupting; it was also very cool somehow. The actors soon got used to it; I was shouting above the rabble, playing to the lip of the stage, pausing between lines to let the crowd have their say.

The tour was the most fun I have ever had in my life on stage, and if it hadn’t been for a ‘slip’ on my part I might have continued with my solo career in happy sobriety. One day when I turned up at the
Tommy
stage show tour rehearsals at 890 Studios in New York, one of the doormen who had seen my show at Jones Beach the night before described it as ‘The best fucking rock ’n’ roll show I have ever seen in my fucking life – that includes The Who, Springsteen and Neil Young.’ I felt great about that.

The slip? A little context first. I was falling in love with Lisa very quickly. I found her funny, I liked her friends, they tolerated me, she liked to drink, to eat, dance and have sex. She was glamorous, well dressed, smart and really pretty. The bumpy nose was a killer for me. She travelled with me to Chicago, and before I went on stage two things happened. One was that the drummer Buddy Miles was backstage with his bad leg, telling stories about the last days with Jimi Hendrix. The other was that I saw a girl from the 1989 Who tour. Her name was Mary Beth Nawa and she and I had started a long, affectionate friendship with a boat trip on the lake and bleary sex in Chicago while I was doing heavy meds for a bronchial condition. I should have had no difficulty introducing Lisa to Mary Beth, but suddenly I started having an anxiety attack, while Buddy went on and on.

I should have asked everyone to step out and give me a moment alone, but I knew Buddy would be offended. It was great to see him, and at any other time it would have been great, but I was shaking as my anxiety threatened to become full-blown panic.

Just before my call to the stage I asked a crew member to get me a bottle of vodka, planning to settle my anxiety as I had many times before. It didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t done this for over eleven years. I slugged down half the bottle, straightened up and walked on the stage. That’s pretty much all I recall. What I heard later was that quite a few fans were upset to see me falling over and ranting. A large number asked for their money back.

During a break in the
Psychoderelict
US tour I joined my family for a week in the Scilly Isles. I had my own bedroom, and things were uneasy for Karen and me. I was still fielding phone calls from Lisa, and not trying very hard to hide from Karen that I had a new girlfriend.

At our house in Twickenham I had moved into my studio, The Cube, aka the ‘garden shed’. It lacked a real kitchen, the bathroom was dowdy and the bedroom tiny. Joseph would wander down to see me there, and we played happily together, but otherwise I was a portrait of misery. And Karen hated the fact that I wouldn’t live in the house with her. On one night when I tried to, I had the most shocking nightmare about my time with my grandmother, a door opening and someone entering …

The second leg of my solo tour began with two shows at the Wilshire Theater in LA, where I did an interview for
Playboy
magazine in which I revealed I had begun ‘controlled’ drinking again. The journalist David Sheff seemed more worried about it than I was, and followed up with a concerned personal letter to me.
*

After a show in San Francisco I talked to Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam. He was having problems adjusting to fame and was thinking about going back to being a surfer. I gave him my philosophy: we don’t make the choice, the public does. We are elected by them, even if we never stood for office. Accept it.

I returned to New York to play two shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one for television. The TV people wanted me to play the entire show in the afternoon for their camera line-up, which I did, but by the evening show I was tired and my voice was very rough. I sounded like Rod Stewart. Happily there were not very many high notes in my set.

I went back to Cornwall to spend time with Joseph, do some sailing and try to work out what to do next. A few months short of four years old, Joseph was game for anything. We went crabbing, swimming and rowing. He loved being on boats and wanted to get a wetsuit so he could snorkel in the icy Cornish waters; it was fun shopping for the very small one he needed.

Around this time there was the most awful tragedy. Joseph’s nanny’s baby died in a cot death. She had been bringing the baby to work while she looked after Joseph, and we all knew and loved her. We were heartbroken.

I was dividing my time between London for
Iron Man
rehearsals and the States for the continuing
Psychoderelict
tour. I flew back and forth so often I lost track of time.
Iron Man
required a new last-minute recitative from me, and I enjoyed writing it, but I often didn’t remember having made changes when I attended rehearsals. I was coming close to nervous exhaustion and ended up being carried to my limo at a Madonna show at Madison Square Garden. I was drunk again after drinking almost nothing that day. I do remember that it was an incredible show, until I blacked out.

By the time
Iron Man
opened to the press in November I was beyond exhausted. The show was extremely ambitious musically. The parts written for the cast were very demanding, and there was a lot of running around that affected their breathing. After a few shows we added drums to the band, which helped drive things along a little. We also added bass guitar. Yet the music never felt quite right. Some of the recitative sections were very moving and I was pleased with them, but a couple of the songs were excruciating, and I didn’t have the energy or will to fix them. David Thacker, artistic director at the Old Vic, was a real believer in the piece and wanted to transfer it to the West End, but I was reticent.

I asked Tom Stoppard to come and see it, and he gave me some very helpful but sobering suggestions. Frankly, he felt there was far too much to fix. Richard O’Brien, who wrote
The Rocky Horror Show
, was a fanatical supporter, coming for almost every show in the first couple of weeks, and was very kind to me about the problems we faced. Many of my friends loved it, though, and accepted it as a work-in-progress.

Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, who had become a family friend, took his grandchildren and wrote me a note saying how powerful he felt the ‘message’ was. Ted Hughes himself seemed to enjoy the show, especially the huge robotic Iron Man that the designer Shelagh Keegan had constructed of old junk. The show wasn’t a hit with critics, but most were at least encouraging – everyone in London always wants the Young Vic to do well. The show did very well at the box office, running through Christmas and beyond. But when the decision needed to be made about what to do next I was blacking out almost every night and knew I couldn’t be trusted to think clearly.

A sense of darkness had truly descended on me. Everything felt as though it was shutting down. Back in England, just before Christmas, my friend and property advisor Perry took me to look at a house Roger Waters was selling facing the sea on the south coast. It was a bleak day. The house was almost unfurnished; a few old sofas looked out on the greyness as the first winter snow fell. I had a vision of myself alone, like Gabriel, my washed-up psychoderelict rock star, gazing at the distant Isle of Wight, freezing on the beach, yearning for New York.

By 1994 I had completed the recording of
Psychoderelict
, done my first solo tour, put up the Broadway production of
Tommy
with Des McAnuff, an award-winning hit; the cast album had been a great coup, one of the last major projects George Martin would produce; I had at last managed to get
Iron Man
to the theatre; and I’d helped cast, rehearse and promote an American
Tommy
tour.

Although my marriage was failing, I had a beautiful son as well as two beautiful daughters who were both doing well at university. I had fallen in love, and the girl I had found was slowly falling in love with me too. And I was rich. So what was messing me up?

It would be easy to point to alcohol, but the problem wasn’t the booze; it was the fact that it no longer worked as a medicine to fix the dire consequences of my self-obsession, overwork, selfishness and manic-depression. Back in London around New Year’s Eve I attended a party at Ronnie Wood’s house on Richmond Green; it was a hoot as always, but I was shocked to wake up the next day and find my Mercedes outside my studio. I had no memory of driving it there. I promised myself this would never happen again.

I could hear a distant echo from 1962 in the White Hart Hotel in Acton, where I first got drunk as a 17-year-old. The bartender’s words as the pub prepared to close were definite, and final.

‘
Time, gentlemen, please.
’

26

NOODLING

I stopped drinking on 6 January 1994. I started seeing a professional counsellor in London twice a week, and found an informal group that gathered two or three times a week in my neighbourhood for group-therapy sessions and mutual support. I began meeting dozens of men and women who had all suffered as I had, either because of the ravages of drinking or because it had stopped working for them as medicine. I started feeling better very quickly, though I had created a lot of chaos in my life that needed sorting out.

I was living in The Cube, my studio at the bottom of the garden, and I began looking after Joseph more regularly.

Lisa and I had discussed my drinking back in December when I had been really having problems with it. She was always supportive and had introduced me to a friend of hers who gave me some telephone numbers of people I might look up in London who might help. Back in August Eric Clapton had reached out to me as well, and through him I met a professional relapse intervention counsellor and was carrying his card in my bag. One night at a party after the
Iron Man
show in London Karen had been introduced to two of Lisa’s friends at the bar, and realising who they were – or possibly mistaking one of them for Lisa – Karen left abruptly, and I had exploded. Lisa had been wonderful to me, but even before I stopped drinking I knew what I had to do.

I wrote to Lisa to say that I couldn’t see her again, and that she couldn’t come to London. She responded by sending a book by Pete Hamill,
A Drinking Life
, with a note inside. It began sadly, then became angry, and closed with a sting.

‘I hope you find what you’re getting is worth what you’re sacrificing.’

I would ponder this often in the years ahead.

Roger had committed to an orchestral tour performing Who songs, to be called
Roger Daltrey
Performs a Tribute to Pete Townshend
. At some point in December, bleary with overwork and black-outs, I’d told Roger I would perform with him at the first show in Carnegie Hall. In the new year I realised this event was filling me with utter dread. It was a lovely idea and I was greatly flattered, but in my fragile sobriety I was suddenly filled with an unusual anxiety at the prospect of performing.

When I called Roger and told him I didn’t think I could fulfil my promise, he went ballistic. When Nicola tried to explain on my behalf he raged at her. In a poignant coincidence, while all this hysteria was going on, I heard that Harry Nilsson had died. The secret to being a successful hellraiser, it seemed, was to stop raising hell before hell razed you. I was doing my best.

The last time I had stopped drinking, back in 1981, I talked all about it in the press, then entered therapeutic analysis and kept quiet. Like so many addicts I’d thought that if I could only sort out my life I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around.

I took a deep breath, called Roger again, and agreed to appear. The concert was set for 23 February. Roger was rehearsing in London in January, and there would be a further rehearsal with the orchestra and a soundcheck in New York in the early part of February.

I threw myself into counselling sessions and group meetings. I tried to look after myself, eat well and see old friends. Although my life in The Cube was very basic, my fast-launch
Zephyr
, a river commuter boat I had had built with my friend Bill Sims who sold me Oceanic back in 1976, provided a welcome bit of peace. I had a few business meetings in London in the first part of the year, and enjoyed the luxury and peace of commuting on the river rather than by train or busy road.

Karen and Joseph accompanied me to New York for Roger’s concert. I had recently been prescribed spectacles, and wore a suit for the show. I’d decided to play two of my favourite songs solo, knowing they would sound superb with Michael Kamen’s orchestrations – ‘And I Moved’, along with an acoustic version of ‘Who Are You’. On the night my nervousness disappeared. What I did seemed magical, although I felt very detached from it. Lisa Marsh was sitting in one of the boxes with a group of friends, and Karen was in another close by.

My friend John Hart said I was magnificent, and that everyone else on the show looked like rock throwbacks, but that wasn’t the prevailing view of fans or critics. One critic said I could have been Roger’s father. A fan wrote that she had been disappointed with me, having paid $1,000 for her ticket, because I had failed to have fun. She urged me to enjoy, not to worry so much. Roger went on record complaining I had deliberately chosen not to play any hits.

In the background Roger and I were in legal conflict over the
Tommy
Grand Right document,
*
and how much he and John were earning from the show. Roger also didn’t like what Des and I had done with the play of
Tommy
. With John he had hired his own lawyers, while Ina and Sam acted for me. Fairly soon we would go to war – it was in the air between us every time we met.

Karen and I had separate bedrooms in our large suite at the Four Seasons. There was an undercurrent of sadness between us, tinged with her irritation and the occasional outburst. But Joseph, five years old, was such a calming soul that he always seemed to keep us civil. Maybe Karen thought that because I wasn’t drinking we’d be able to rebuild as we had back in 1982; maybe she’d just had enough. I wasn’t capable of divining what she felt, and we weren’t getting along well enough to talk about it.

Tommy
productions were still rolling out faster than Des and I could handle them. John Hart had commissioned one of the first CD-ROM interactive applications, which would go deeply into
Tommy
using music and video as well as hypertext links and material from my archive. We were both very excited about it.

Des and I were trying to build what he called a ‘clean-sheet project’, an entirely new play or musical, or even a music-theatre installation (for Las Vegas or Disneyland) that might be built into the fabric of a themed hotel. We were also hoping to persuade Ted Hughes and Matthew Evans to allow us to approach Disney and Warner Brothers about making an animation film of
Iron Man
. Both companies were interested, but Disney wanted to own the music – that was how their system worked – and I wasn’t ready for that.

The theatre production of
Iron Man
closed on 14 February, with tickets still selling fairly well. Ted Hughes arranged for the giant junk-robot man from the Young Vic show to be hung up in a shed at his home in Devon, where I hope it remains today.

In early March 1994 Karen and I had two sessions of couples counselling. We had both agreed to give it a try. Obviously it was partly for Joseph’s sake, but there was still great respect between us. Whether we were to stay married or not, we needed help. The first session was all right, but the second was less successful.

Of course the work never stopped, nor did I really want it to. It was a welcome distraction from my personal troubles. I made my first visit to Frankfurt to meet the producers of the proposed
Tommy
show, which was to be sung in English. The theatre was in Offenbach, on the opposite side of the river to Frankfurt, which evoked memories of lonely times on the road in Germany with The Who.

At Frankfurt airport I was instructed at security to remove my jacket. Since I wasn’t wearing one, just a shirt with nothing underneath, I refused. A huge argument kicked off, and my own security man stepped in to try to quieten things down. I duly took off my shirt, and everyone had a good laugh, including me, and we all shook hands.

‘
Alles ist in Ordnung
,’ I said. ‘
Kein Problem. Grüss Gott
.’

This had been the first real challenge to my ability to stay calm in the face of mindless authority since I’d stopped drinking. Back in London my recovering friends explained that this kind of encounter often surfaced for ex-drinkers, and that there would be more on the horizon. They all cited road rage as a real challenge – simple exchanges with other car drivers that could turn into out-and-out fist-fights. The secret was acceptance, they said. Only a few months sober, I really didn’t know what they meant.

I became fascinated with astrology around this time, particularly the predictions of Patrick Walker and Shelley von Strunckel. I rarely acted on what I read, but it comforted me. Some nights I’d wake up, alert and buzzing. Sometimes I’d go to the window and see a fox in the moonlight. I was reconnecting with my psychic, intuitive, animal side.

The
Tommy
CD-ROM and meetings about the Toronto show took me back to New York in June. By the time work began in earnest in Toronto, Lisa and I were trying to salvage things despite my renewed bouts of anxiety – and I was also suffering from withdrawal.

I headed back to LA twice in July for more work on
Iron Man
(now called
Iron Giant
to distinguish it from the famous American comic of the same name), and to help launch The Who boxed set (
Maximum R&B
). I flew back home for Minta’s graduation from Exeter University (she’d taken French and Italian), which was a lovely occasion.

In August I raced
Pazienza
in the classics rallies. There was a really bad storm one day after a race, while I was sleeping alone aboard
Pazienza
, and I spent the entire night fighting to keep the yacht from smashing itself up on a dock. I decided to buy a larger motor yacht to use as home base in Cornwall, and sent
Pazienza
off to the Mediterannean with a live-aboard crew.

In Nice I found an adorable little boat,
Nuovo Pensiero
, owned by Bjorn Borg’s ex-wife. I now had a floating home in Cornwall so I could entertain Joseph without too much discomforting contact with Karen, and have space to live comfortably. I thought I had reached an agreement with Karen that she would stay at our house in Cornwall, and that when I returned to London I would take over Tennyson House. When the day arrived for Joseph to start school in Cornwall, however, he didn’t show up and and lost his place there.

I called Karen to find out what was happening. She was coming back to London. I moved back into The Cube, and called Fran Bayliss, the High Mistress at Ibstock Place School in Roehampton, where Emma and Minta had been. There was a last-minute place available. Jose could once again run down the garden to see me any time he wanted.

The Cube had been my composing studio when we first moved to Tennyson House. I was now using the small, narrow room once dedicated to electronics as a sleeping cabin with a single bed. There was a Yamaha piano in the large room, and since my wrist accident I had been using piano practice to loosen up and restore flexibility. My piano playing was improving, especially my ability to pull off basic chromatic runs and some fairly eloquent patterns around the black notes. I allowed myself to drift into creative reveries, recording hours of free-form piano and guitar, something I hadn’t really done much since winter 1981.

Aunt Trilby had encouraged me to enjoy noodling, a word that is now in the dictionary: ‘informal: improvise or play casually on a musical instrument’. Now, back in The Cube, I noodled.

I had found myself a one-to-one counsellor to work with, but continued to attend group-therapy sessions. In autumn 1994 I had a call from Alice Ormsby Gore, who was in rehab. She said it was hard to deal with the group therapy on offer because she felt she couldn’t speak openly about her time with Eric. I told her that if she didn’t speak about it she wouldn’t get clean. As much as I loved Eric, I told Alice to take care of herself for once. She stuck to her guns and died, tragically, the following year.

My counsellor lived in Teddington, further up the Thames from Twickenham. It was a short drive, but often after our sessions I went off to find lunch locally. In January 1995 I met a remarkable young man there, collecting for a charity in the street. He explained he was working to raise money for the orphanage where he grew up, in Moscow. We spoke for some time, and he told me about his background. The story he recounted was to greatly affect the course of my life over the next few years.

His parents had been addicts, and both had died when he was an infant. He was taken to a State orphanage where boys got up to mischief, stealing, buying and selling small amounts of drugs, running wild. If they were caught by the police they wouldn’t be arrested, simply ordered back to the orphanage where the men in charge would shoo the children out again so they could drink their vodka in peace.

At the age of twelve the young man ran away from the orphanage to one run by an organisation funded by the Russian mafia. Conditions in this orphanage were far better. The boys were treated well, but were trained in the art of pickpocketing, selling hard drugs on the street, carrying drugs and so on. The girls were kept separate; their fate was bleaker because they were usually coaxed into prostitution.

The young man’s name was Oleg; he said he was collecting money for a new orphanage in Russia that hoped to fill the gap between the State and criminal facilities. I gave him a few pounds and took his phone number. We shared the same area code.

I had received an offer to license
Psychoderelict
as a movie as well as a show. I didn’t know how to respond. There was an irony in all this. Whenever I started work on a new song-cycle or rock opera, I saw myself moving through story, songs, recording, workshop, performance, shows with a new cast and then movies. Finally, I saw each piece as an orchestral score, outliving me for centuries, being performed all over the world. Although
Psychoderelict
was one of my favourite pieces, I was slightly bored with it, bored too with
Iron Man
,
Tommy
and
Lifehouse
. Des and I wanted more than anything to come up with a brand-new idea we could collaborate on, but we were both caught up in the spin of our personal lives, careers, and trying to manage the future of
Tommy
. At some point the creator has to let go, and in my life I had never been able to do that – indeed I had been discouraged from doing so by the rock system of endless recycling of old hits.