Pete Townshend: Who I Am

At the time I didn’t realise how many other people were working through similar feelings. So many children had lived through terrible trauma in the immediate postwar years in Britain that it was quite common to come across deeply confused young people. Shame led to secrecy; secrecy led to alienation. For me these feelings coalesced in a conviction that the collateral damage done to all of us who had grown up amid the aftermath of war had to be confronted and expressed in all popular art – not just literature, poetry or Picasso’s Guernica. Music too. All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to the truth.

With The Who I felt I had a chance to make music that would become a part of people’s lives. Even more than the way we dressed, our music would give voice to what we all needed to express – as a group, as a gang, as a fellowship, as a secret society, as subversives. I saw pop artists as mirrors of their audience, developing ways to reflect and speak truth without fear.

Still, I was more certain then of the medium than the message. Surely, God help us all, we weren’t just going to write songs about falling in love, or hopeless longing? What was it, then, that needed to be said?

I had found a new sound. Now I needed the words.

In a remarkable act of synchronicity, two young men, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, had been searching London in order to make a film about some wonderful new, as yet undiscovered band that came from the street. Kit saw us perform that first time at the Railway Hotel in July when I smashed my guitar and described us as satanic. He persuaded Chris to come and see us, and they quickly decided to make us the subject of their film.

The two friends (later dubbed by the media ‘the fifth and sixth members of The Who’) came from very different backgrounds. Chris, from the East End of London, was the son of a Thames waterman; Kit was the son of Constant Lambert, the musical director of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. Chris was drop-dead handsome, even better looking than his famous film-star brother, Terence. Kit had a look of Brian Epstein about him; we all thought he was gay. Most importantly, the two of them knew how to get things done.

Kit and Chris made their film. (That film still exists; Roger now owns the only remaining copy.) Then they decided to go one better, and offered to manage us. But Peter Meaden and Helmut Gorden didn’t want to give us up. At some point in the negotiations Meaden brought the manager of the Stones, Andrew Oldham, to see us play at a rehearsal hall in Shepherd’s Bush. He liked us, but when Kit’s name was mentioned it quickly became clear that Oldham already knew Kit (they were neighbours), and Oldham wasn’t going to get embroiled in Peter Meaden’s failing power struggle.

Kit and Chris later confronted Meaden at a band rehearsal – an occasion on which Phil the Greek, Meaden’s henchman, flashed a knife and menaced Kit. But Peter Meaden eventually stood aside for the then princely sum of £200, and Kit and Chris took over the management of the band. They quickly gave us back our proper name – The Who.

We had begun to play on regular summer Sunday concert bills with established major artists, all of whom had chart hits at the time. We supported The Beatles, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, the extraordinary Dave Berry and Lulu. The Beatles’ audience was almost entirely young girls who seemed lost in their own fantasy world while the music played. (The theatre really did smell of urine after the show.) Unlike the Stones, The Beatles seemed almost like royalty, distant and caught up in their own extraordinary potency. After they had been whisked away after their show, we hung around, and Kit was mobbed by girls who thought he was The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein.

Lulu was just fifteen when we played with her in Glasgow, after which we attended her sixteenth birthday party. She had an enormous, soulful voice, and while the accordion played I nearly got off with her best friend. Dave Berry’s hit was ‘The Crying Game’, and his act was the antithesis of the others. He moved slowly, with measured, controlled movements, almost like a mime artist, but he too drove the girls wild.

Away from the big-city Mod strongholds, these shows were like mini-festivals of bands with recent or current hits. We were all young, but there was solidarity between us reminiscent of the show business of Dad’s generation. We learned from everyone we performed with, secure in the knowledge that none of them would borrow too much from us: our whining guitars and auto-destruction were our own inviolate territory.

At last we seemed to be achieving something, but it was proving a much slower, harder grind than promised in the heady days when Peter Meaden was telling us we’d be huge overnight. We passed one BBC radio audition but failed another, and also failed an audition for a recording contract with EMI. Our heavy-handed style confused a lot of older people, including record executives, and we mainly played covers of R&B material. The record labels wanted bands that wrote their own songs.

The Who kept working, trying and failing to get a guitar-smashing moment into the national newspapers. The Decca Records audition was our most encouraging. Kit’s friend Russ Conway, the popular boogie-woogie TV pianist and principal investor in Kit and Chris’s management company, arranged the audition and persuaded A&R man John Burgess to take us seriously. Kit and Chris later confided that we would have passed the audition had we played original compositions. Knowing I could write songs, they encouraged me to come up with some new material that might suit the band.

This was the most critical challenge I had ever faced. I isolated myself in the kitchen of the flat in Ealing where I kept my tape machine, listening to a few records over and over again: Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’; Charlie Mingus’s ‘Better Get It in Your Soul’ from Mingus Ah Um (I loved Mingus and was obsessed with Charlie Parker and Bebop); John Lee Hooker’s ‘Devil’s Jump’; and ‘Green Onions’ (although my record was nearly worn out). I tried to divine what it was I was actually feeling as a result of this musical immersion. One notion kept coming into my head: I can’t explain. I can’t explain. This would be the title of my second song, and I was already doing something I would often do in the future: writing songs about music.

Got a feeling inside, I can’t explain

A certain kind, I can’t explain

Feel hot and cold, I can’t explain

Down in my soul, I can’t explain

At the time I was still using a clunky old domestic tape recorder to record my songs, which I used to put down a simple demo. Barney listened to it when he got home from college and liked it. I remember him describing it as Bob Dylan with a hint of Mose Allison.

Kit and Chris, through a friend of their glamorous personal assistant, Anya Butler, met with the producer of The Kinks’ recent chart hits, Shel Talmy, who had his own label deal with Decca in the USA. He agreed to hear us.

I ran back to my tape machine and listened to The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ – not that I really needed to, it was on the radio all the time. I tightened up ‘I Can’t Explain’ and changed the lyrics so they were about love, not music. I tried to make it sound as much like The Kinks as I could so that Shel would like it. I already had the title for the song that would follow it: ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, words I had scribbled on a piece of paper while listening to Charlie Parker.

We played Shel Talmy the revised ‘I Can’t Explain’ and he booked us a session at Pye studios to record it. Shel also brought in some additional musicians, which Kit had warned me he might do. Keith jovially told the session drummer who appeared to ‘scarper’, and he did. Because Shel wasn’t sure I could play a solo, he had asked his favorite session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to sit in. And because our band had rehearsed the song with backing vocals in Beach Boys style, but not very skilfully, Shel arranged for three male session singers, The Ivy League, to chirp away in our place.

Shel Talmy got a good sound, tight and commercial, and although there was no guitar feedback I was willing to compromise to get a hit. We wouldn’t know if the gamble would pay off until after the New Year.

In November, Kit and Chris secured us a residency on Tuesday nights at the Marquee Club, a jazz and blues venue in Soho, and mounted an inspired campaign to make sure our first evening didn’t fail. In one of my art notebooks Kit and Chris found some doodling they liked for a Who logo, incorporating the Mars symbol I’d used in my design for The Detours van years before. We had already done a number of photo sessions for various magazines, but Kit and Chris organised their own, and the photographer took a solo picture of me swinging my arm.

A graphic designer friend from Ealing made the ‘Maximum R&B’ poster now legendary in collectable Who paraphernalia, and Kit and Chris had it plastered all over central London. They went further: along with a general card for hand-out, they printed up 150 special invitations to join ‘The 100 Faces’, an elite hand-picked group of Mods, with free entry to the first few weeks of our residency. Again, for some reason, only my face was featured, not one of our prettier boys.

Kit hired Chris’s school friend Mike Shaw to act as our production manager. He became the only person ever to pass through The Who camp that no one will ever say a bad word about. He was a joy. He ran around all our gigs finding the coolest-looking Mod boys and handing them cards. Our attendance was about 90 per cent male, but a few girls were in the front row at the Marquee in the early days. Attendance started slowly, but built up very quickly to a packed house.

That winter playing our regular gig at the Marquee became an event I looked forward to. I remember wearing a chamois jacket, carrying a Rickenbacker guitar, coming up from the bowels of the earth at Piccadilly Circus train station feeling as though there was nothing else I’d rather be doing. I was an R&B musician with a date to play. It was a great adventure, and I was full of ideas. In my notebooks I was designing Pop Art T-shirts, using medals and chevrons and the Union Flag to decorate jackets I intended to wear. At the Marquee I felt, like many in our audience, that Mod had become more than a look. It had become a voice, and The Who was its main outlet.

A magazine photographer visiting our flat one day for a shoot had to climb up a stepladder to get his equipment out of the knee-deep rubbish that filled the room, trash now invisible to Barney and me. After the photo was taken Kit quietly took me aside and explained that he and Chris had obtained a very smart residence and office in Eaton Place in Belgravia, and felt I should move there. I worried a little that I might appear to be moving in to sleep with Kit, but the next morning I said goodbye to a stunned Barney and moved into the exquisitely tidy bedroom – adjacent through glass doors to Kit’s – in a high-ceiling first-floor flat in a Georgian building in what is still the poshest street in London. I taped up some nifty Pop Art images cut from magazines, set up a record player and lived like a prince.

Chris, it emerged, didn’t have a bedroom in the flat, and Kit never attempted to seduce me, to my disappointment, although I probably wouldn’t have responded. Happily, though, Anya did seduce me. I was 19, she was 30, and the sex was gloriously educational. While sending me into ecstasy with her long, sharp fingernails, she told me she had spurned the advances of all three other members of the band.

Kit and Chris asked their friend Jane, wife of Kit’s old army friend Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall, to run a fan club for us. She became known as ‘Jane Who’, collected letters for us and kept a mailing list. Jane gave mail addressed to me unopened, and thinking that one day I might write this book I decided to leave one of those letters sealed until the day I finished it.1

For a time I lived under Kit’s nose quite blissfully. I felt completely safe, protected, adored, cherished and valued, although I was still smoking a lot of grass, which I think Kit disapproved of. One evening I decided to conduct an experiment. Instead of my usual ritual of listening to music stoned, I began to listen to some of my choicest records while drinking good Scotch whisky. As I listened and drank, I wrote down what was going on in my head:

I begin to feel afraid. Childhood self-pity arises. Music is inside me. Am not afraid to let it in. Finding new perceptive levels. I’m underwater, not going too deep. Going to write with eyes closed. Swimming with the fish. Unexplainable emotion now. Death.

My demons were still with me, but I was learning how to use them to fuel my creative process.

1 See Appendix

7 I CAN’T EXPLAIN

Roger considered ‘I Can’t Explain’ to be ‘soft, commercial pop’ and said he wouldn’t record anything so anodyne again. He wanted our studio work to reflect the power of our R&B set list. Although I felt a little aggrieved by Roger’s vehemence, I agreed with him. Our stage act was getting tougher and tougher, and that’s what we needed to get down on vinyl.

The film Kit and Chris had made at the Railway Hotel screened to a full audience, and The Who played on Beat Room, a BBC show, and, best of all, Ready, Steady, Go! This was special because Kit had befriended the producer, Vicky Wickham, who allowed a number of our Marquee boy fans – the so-called ‘100 Faces’ – to make up the audience. They went wild when we came on, waving colourful college scarves, the Mod fashion of the week.

When we sang ‘I Can’t Explain’ on Top of the Pops, it immediately climbed into the Top 10. All the pirate radio stations picked up the track, and it was an incredible buzz to drive through my own neighbourhood hearing the first song I’d written for The Who, imagining the airwaves emanating from ships anchored at sea. Driving along, hearing myself on the radio, my art-school ideas started to seem overcooked. When the band started I had taken solace in the notion that we wouldn’t last long, and I could claim that in our downfall I had demonstrated my auto-destructive plan. Now I was being tested. Did I really need to be so po-faced and serious? Maybe it wasn’t so bad to just be a successful pop star. Maybe I didn’t really need to blow everything to smithereens in the name of art. Anyway, wasn’t what I was doing truly creative? Denying denial didn’t seem quite such an urgent matter any more.

On Friday 12 March The Who triumphantly returned to the Goldhawk, our musical home away from home. For Roger and me it had special resonance because we had both been pre-teen members of the Sulgrave Boys Club just down the road. Many of the club’s old members – now teenagers – came to the Goldhawk to show off their new Mod threads, drink beer, take pep pills, fight and pull girls. We played ‘I Can’t Explain’ over and over. The crowd went berserk.

Afterwards a delegation asked if they could come backstage and speak to me. Led by a gangly Irish boy called Jack Lyons, they paraded in and told me they really liked the song. I thanked them, asking them what they particularly liked about it. Jack stuttered that he couldn’t really explain. I tried to help: the song’s about being unable to find the words.

‘That’s it!’ Jack shouted; the others all nodded.

Without my art-school training I doubt that this moment would have touched me the way it did. But it changed my life. I had been set up at college, especially in my last days doing graphics, to look for a patron, to obtain a brief, to find someone to pay for my artistic excesses and experiments. My new patrons stood before me.

Their brief was simple: we need you to explain that we can’t explain; we need you to say what we are unable to say. It would be wrong to say that I floated home on a cloud that night, but I felt vindicated. I was still hooked on sudden fame and notoriety, being on the TV and radio, having written a hit song. But now I knew The Who had a greater mission than just being rich and famous.

And – pretentious as it might still seem, even today – I knew, with absolute certainty, that after all what we were doing was going to be Art.

Anya and I had sex again once or twice when Kit was out and I wasn’t working. I adored her; she was witty and sharp – the first person I ever heard use the term ‘slag’ towards a man. But we never talked very seriously, or went out for dinner; if we had I might have felt less like her toy boy. Kit eventually intervened in what he saw as Anya’s sexual vampirism, and as penance he tasked her with finding me a flat close enough to his own so he could make sure I kept it tidy. In April she found the top flat in a Georgian house at Chesham Place, in Belgravia. The rent was £12 a week, well within my means.

This was the first place I ever lived on my own: I had it carpeted, simply furnished, kept it clean and tidy, and devoted one of the rooms to a recording studio. This was one of the busiest periods of my life. When I felt isolated among the diplomats and aristocrats of Belgravia, that loneliness became the engine of my creative drive. I worked mainly at night, when I could play records loudly through two partly rebuilt four-by-twelve speaker cabinets, casualties of my destructive stage act. The other apartments in the building were still vacant, and the building on the other side of my studio wall was being developed as a new embassy building for the Lesotho High Commission. I felt entirely free to make music for the first time in my life.

Kit often came to my flat to listen to the demos I was recording, and became a real mentor in my songwriting. His system was always the same. He would smoke several Senior Service cigarettes and pace around, listening and blowing smoke in the air. If I’d written several songs he would listen to them all before making any comment, then pick his favourite. He was incisive, and astutely never said anything I did was bad, or could be better, or would be better when it was finished. When he didn’t like something, he found something about it to praise.

It turned out that Kit was an expert at keeping the artist in me properly stroked. He was essentially kind, but I also took pleasure in the sense of his investment in me, expressed in a creative partnership. He treated me like a serious composer. If he laughed, it would always be a joke he knew I could share.

Roger sold our van and purchased a lorry to carry our gear. He always wanted to drive one. It was like a furniture hauling van, with no windows or seats in the back, except for a bench that wasn’t bolted down. It was far too big and our equipment crashed around us as Keith, John, Mike and I tried to avoid vomiting. It was also very slow, managing only 55 mph on the motorway, so it took ten hours to drive to Blackpool. Roger had installed his girlfriend in the front seat so we were confined to the rear, travelling in the dark. He wanted to keep the rest of us out of his hair when driving long distances. He was a nervous passenger, and rarely allowed himself to be driven anywhere.

On 30 July we played at the Fender Club in Kenton. Karen Astley, a college friend from Ealing, came to the gig, and even handsome Chris commented on how cool she looked, calling her a ‘dolly bird’, a great compliment at the time. She had brought her best friend, who was keen on John Entwistle. It was fun to speak to someone from the old gang, and we all went out drinking together. Outside the hall after the show, as we waited for a taxi, Karen suddenly threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

The essence of the song ‘My Generation’ had probably been contained in the first, abandoned lyric for ‘I Can’t Explain’, which only Barney ever heard. That first version was a kind of talking blues. The title came from Generations, the collected plays of David Mercer, a dramatist who had impressed me at Ealing. Mercer was a socialist, like Arnold Wesker, verging on Marxist, and his rallying on behalf of his plays’ working-class anti-heroes later offered me a way to connect with the West London fans of the band.

At that time Kit Lambert had loaned me a record that changed my life as a composer. It was what I had played during my Scotch-fuelled listening experiment – a Czech recording called Masters of the Baroque including the principal movements of Purcell’s Gordian Knot Untied, a baroque chamber suite, the most powerful part of which was the Chaconne. The performance is passionate, tragic and deeply moving. I was struck by Purcell’s unique, luxurious use of suspensions, a staple part of baroque decoration at the harpsichord, but in Purcell’s hands the suspensions were elongated into heartrending, tortuous musical modes, especially in the minor keys. I began to experiment, and the first time I used suspensions successfully, in ‘The Kids Are Alright’, it was mostly to suggest a baroque mood.

Belgravia, a rich neighbourhood where women in fur coats shoved me out of line as if I didn’t exist, only made more starkly apparent the generational divide I was trying to describe. I worked on ‘My Generation’ all through the summer of 1965, while touring in Holland and Scandinavia (we caused a street riot in Denmark). I produced several sets of lyrics and three very different demos. The feeling that began to settle in me was not so much resentment towards those Establishment types all around my flat in Belgravia as fear that their disease might be contagious.

What was their disease? It was actually more a matter of class than of age. Most of the young people around me in this affluent area of London were working on transforming themselves into the ruling class, the Establishment of the future. I felt that the trappings of their aged customs and assumptions were like a death, whereas I felt alive, not solely because I was young, but really alive, unencumbered by tradition, property and responsibility.

The Who played a string of summer shows, some at seaside towns, which brought back happy childhood memories of Dad’s band. We were invited to play in Sweden, where Chris thought we could perform without our usual equipment, but this proved an insane notion. Borrowing gear from our support bands, some who could hardly speak English, and trying to explain to them that we were expected by the audience to smash their gear to pieces just didn’t work. It was a frustrating tour. The Swedish press seemed to be really looking forward to some smashed guitars and were vocal in their disappointment.

We returned to Sweden again for three shows in October, and in an unfortunate recurrence of bad luck our gear got misrouted and we repeated lacklustre shows with borrowed gear. Keith, John and I took a lot of pep pills on this trip, prompting constant, mindless chattering, and in Denmark, worn down by our hyperactivity, Roger finally complained. When Keith challenged him, Roger lashed out with his fists, bloodying Keith’s nose, turning what would have been a minor spat into a melodrama.

One significant thing about this outburst was Keith’s response. Instead of responding with humiliation, he seemed to sober up. It was clear he was about to establish a boundary that Roger could never cross again.

Keith and John said they didn’t want to work with Roger any more, but after a long period of uncertainty Chris met with Roger and asked him to never use his fighting skills to win an argument again. Roger agreed, so Keith and John decided to put the matter behind them.

***

Home from Sweden we recorded the final version of ‘My Generation’. Kit had heard my first demo, a version that was very much inspired by Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’, a song we later introduced into our stage repertoire. The vocal on my demo was laid back in imitation of Mose, casual and confident. Kit hadn’t really seen the promise in the song, but Chris persuaded me to try a second demo with a heavier guitar riff. Then Kit chimed in, observing that the music was rather repetitive and needed several modulations – changes of key – to bring it to life.

This worried me a little, partly because I saw Ray Davies as a master of the art of modulation and I didn’t want to be accused of copying him. Chris picked up on a stutter on my vocal on the second demo, so I played him John Lee Hooker’s ‘Stuttering Blues’. Roger had been experimenting with stuttering on stage ever since Sonny Boy Williamson Jr had joined us on harmonica at our first Marquee dates; Sonny Boy used a stutter rhythmically when he sang. Before I completed the third demo we experimented until the stutter became exaggerated and obvious. On this final demo we also created space for an Entwistle bass solo. John was becoming the outstanding bass revolutionary of the day, and I wanted to provide him with a vehicle for his incredible playing.