Pete Townshend: Who I Am

In August we passed back through New York to do some recording: ‘Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands’, some more overdubs on ‘I Can See for Miles’ and a version of ‘Summertime Blues’. During this process I began to question some of Kit’s technical decisions for the first time; he was trying to keep me out of the recording process, but by this time I knew a lot about it, and had a lot to offer. I considered some of his technical decisions amateurish, and he seemed to be pressing engineers to lower their standards to get more level on a master, causing distortion by having all the needles in the red. As a result many of our recordings from this time don’t sound as clean as they should have.

We had no illusions of making any money on this tour. We just weren’t very well known yet, and we were primarily playing in a support role. Many of the shows were less than half full; some were cancelled. I’m sure we collected a few fans on the way, and the word probably spread that we were a colourful, eccentric English outfit. But ten minutes on stage, a smoke bomb and smashed equipment says very little about what The Who hoped to become.

What did we hope to become? Was my mission to embellish the acid trips of an audience that no longer cared when a song began or ended? Had the song itself become a mere frivolity? Look at the pretty colours. I loved smoking a little grass and listening to my two favourite albums, Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, and every time I listened I heard something new, but I wish I could say I heard something important. These two great albums indicated the future, but passed on no tools, codes or obvious processes that would lead to a door. I ached for more than just a signpost pointing to the future, which is what these albums were to me.

Brian Wilson went on to attempt a masterwork he called Smile, but lost it to mental disorder and over-ambition. The Beatles went on to work on the prematurely curtailed Magical Mystery Tour, which we supposed was meant to be the film version of Sgt. Pepper. Both were wonderful, but both made clear that these pop alchemists had failed to produce anything but gold: they hadn’t produced the love or passion of Broadway, nor inspired the humour or hope of Beat poetry, Bebop or Pete Seeger’s Hudson River Peace Boat.

As the Sixties dripped by I felt like the messenger from Mars in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, who promises that the secret of all existence is simply to learn to wait.

My wait came to an end in a most unlikely place. In a room of a Holiday Inn in an Illinois town called Rolling Meadows – with a vibrating bed far too big, a TV with a fuzzy screen, sheets and towels that smelled slightly of something warm but not quite alive, a terrace that looked out onto a car dealer’s lot, grasshoppers buzzing in the scrub grass, a distant freight-train sounding its horn, the hiss of tyres from a passing Buick on the road nearby, a car door slamming and someone shouting ‘Goodbye y’all!’ – I heard the voice of God.

In an instant, in a very ordinary place at an unexceptional time, I yearned for some connection with a higher power. This was a singular, momentous epiphany – a call to the heart.

Why did God favour this particular place in America? Because it was so new? Because it was so sunny? Suddenly it became clear that I longed for a transcendent connection with the universe itself, and with its maker. This was the moment I had longed for. My mind was being set alight by the psychedelic times, but revelation came to me in the quietude and seductive order of Middle America.

I was drawn equally to both extremes, longing simultaneously for the traditional pastoral life I had left behind in England, a gentle life as an earnest, hard-working art student, which had been interrupted almost before it had begun by a brutally sequestered, constrained, testing life on the road, away from friends and loved ones.

While I made progress with my search for meaning, Keith was causing havoc with a birthday cake, a car, a swimming pool, a lamp and a young fan’s bloody head.

How amusing it has been to spend my life pretending it was amusing. In truth, this day was unpleasant for me, though it has been turned into something of an apocryphal joke by everyone involved.

Keith was determined to have a great birthday party, egged on by the Holiday Inn banner outside the hotel: ‘Happy Twenty-First Keith Moon’. He was actually only twenty. By the time I reached the party room the cake was all over the floor, the walls and Keith’s face. In the swimming pool a Lincoln Continental balanced precariously, half in and half out. Later I heard Keith had released its brake and it had rolled in. I was trying to get Keith back to his room (he was raging by this time) when a young man approached, asking for his autograph; Keith threw a lamp at him, hitting him on the head. Keith then managed to knock out his own teeth, and it was only because he was hidden away at the dentist that he wasn’t arrested.

The Who were banned from Holiday Inns for life.

We stopped in Las Vegas on the way home. It was Herman’s nineteenth birthday. While trapped there in the searing heat I wrote a few lyrics and recorded three demos on a little Wollensack tape rig. These were ‘Tattoo’, ‘Boats Are Coming In’ and ‘Touring Inside US’ (directly quoting an early Beach Boys song, ‘Surfing USA’); ‘Tattoo’ was inspired by recent events on the road: were we men, or were we something else?

In Gold Star studios we finished ‘I Can See for Miles’, which we then played, along with ‘My Generation’, on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. For televisual effect, Keith set off an oversized theatrical charge of gunpowder, blowing up the entire band in front of a panic-stricken Bette Davis and a sweetly concerned Mickey Rooney. My hair caught fire and my hearing was never the same. Keith was such a twat sometimes, even if he did make this TV show a significant moment in pop history.

I was looking forward to returning home to Karen, a new flat and a new studio back in London. But because the entire summer had been used up so profligately, we had to catch up, which meant The Who planned to go straight back into the studio. And because these sessions needed to be paid for, we’d have to play lots of British shows at the same time. We committed to a package tour with a bunch of current British pop groups with UK chart hits, as though we’d learned nothing at all touring with Herman’s Hermits. We topped a bill of artists who all believed they should be topping the bill: Traffic, The Herd, Marmalade and The Tremeloes, all of whom would have legions of female fans screaming for them outside in the street every night.

Would anyone scream for The Who?

How the blazes would I know? I was still deaf.

***

The day we got back in September, Chris Stamp asked me to meet him at the Track Records offices in Old Compton Street, where he presented me with the proposed track-list for the new album. I was taken aback. We had ‘I Can See for Miles’, ‘Rael’, ‘Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands’, ‘Our Love Was’, ‘I Can’t Reach You’, ‘Glittering Girl’, ‘Relax’ and a song by John called ‘Someone’s Coming’; ‘Summertime Blues’ could be put on the list as we had recorded it on tour. But there was little else of consequence, and only ‘I Can See for Miles’ seemed a potential chart song.

I had written very little on tour, having come to depend so much on writing in my home studio. I told Chris I didn’t feel we were ready to release; we needed more songs, and I needed more time away from Keith and Holiday Inns to write them. Chris was unusually adamant: this was what we would be releasing. Suddenly I saw that he was now running a record label with a schedule to fill, as well as managing a band. He had, in some sense, gone over to the other side.

I took a little time to consider our dilemma. I’d written a couple of songs that weren’t on Chris’s track-list. I’d demoed ‘Tattoo’ in my hotel room in Las Vegas during our three-day vacation, and a song called ‘Odorono’, named after a deodorant stick. ‘Odorono’ led us to the most perfect pop idea of all time: we would make our next record a vehicle for advertising. When we called Kit to explain, he was as excited as we were. I suggested we link the gaps between songs with jingles like those on commercial pirate radio.

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