Pete Townshend: Who I Am

I was listening to a lot of new music. London was full of specialist record shops, and I visited them all. A high point that summer was the UK release of Miles Davis’s live concert from Carnegie Hall, 1964, featuring his wonderful rendering of ‘My Funny Valentine’. This led me to Miles’s Sketches of Spain. I also found Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, and listened to some Wagner operas for the first time. Best of all, I found two great albums by the Everly Brothers. One was called Rock and Soul, the other Rhythm and Blues. Noting the shift to R&B and soul music among groups in the British invasion of the USA, the Everly Brothers, whose superb stream of hit singles I’d grown up with in the late Fifties and early Sixties, had gone into the studio with their own incredible session musicians from Los Angeles and Nashville to show us how it could best be done.

The Everly Brothers played a number of R&B classics, but it was their original material – or the very obscure material they introduced as covers – that I thought exceptional. ‘Love Is Strange’ is an eerie bluegrass song that the Everlys transformed into a driving showcase for jangling electric guitars and nasal vocals. The Everlys’ composition ‘Man with Money’ is also a magnificent song. Their interpretation of Roy Orbison’s ‘Love Hurts’ was excellent too. Roger, John and Keith loved the new tracks as much as I did, so we incorporated all three of these songs into our repertoire. There were few artists that all four of us respected and enjoyed, and the Everly Brothers were among them.

I lost contact with Barney. I missed him and my other art school friends, but I assumed my separation from them would be brief. I still imagined the band would have a short career and then implode, at which time I could go back to my studies, installations and future life as an artist. Suddenly, putting things into perspective for us all, our beloved production manager Mike Shaw fell asleep at the wheel of a minivan while delivering stage lights to one of Kit and Chris’s other bands up north. The accident broke his neck and he was paralysed from the shoulders down.

I went with Chris’s personal assistant, Patricia Locke, to see Mike at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Despite having no feeling below the neck Mike insisted that he needed to feel Patricia’s breasts, which she bravely tried to facilitate, and Mike bravely tried to follow through. His sense of humour and appreciation of the absurd would sustain Mike through many difficult years of adjustment. But the effect of his disablement on The Who, and on Kit and Chris, was terrible. He was truly adored by all of us, and none of us had encountered such difficulty until then.

On 2 November, at a celebratory return gig at the Marquee, we played the three Everly songs, along with the final version of ‘My Generation’, live for the first time, just after its release.

I was twenty. Many of my old friends were married; some even had children. But I still lacked the courage to pursue girls and risk rejection.

Keith, John and I bought a 1936 Packard V12 hearse for £30, drove it home from Swindon and parked it outside my flat. At some point it disappeared. I feared it had been stolen, but when I reported this the police told me it had been towed away. Someone important had complained about it.

Out of nowhere I received a call from a man who wanted to buy the Packard. It emerged it had been impounded at the request of the Queen Mother. She had to pass it every day, and complained that it reminded her of her late husband’s funeral. The bill to recover the car was over £200, an absurdly large sum of money, but the buyer offered to pay the fee in return for ownership. I agreed, and resentfully dedicated ‘My Generation’ to the Queen Mother.

I purchased a 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II. I knew nothing about the car, but I loved it – black and low-slung, a two-door coupé that looked like an overgrown Thunderbird. I had no idea that both Elvis and Sinatra had owned and loved the same car. Shortly after I bought it the front end collapsed, but my affection for the car was undiminished.

The Who played ‘My Generation’ on Top of the Pops on 11 November. Two days later we flew to Paris, performing to a glittering crowd at La Locomotive, buoyed by glamorous French film stars. The single was at No. 4 in the charts when, on 27 November, Karen Astley, my Ealing Art College friend who had kissed me goodnight, rang me. We had a long, funny, magical conversation and decided to start seeing each other. I liked feeling like an artist again.

With a hit single and all that TV exposure, The Who were in high demand. I remember Kit bringing Mick Jagger to Chesham Place and playing him ‘Magic Bus’, which I was working on at the time. Although Mick was a friend, I was concerned by the thought that Kit might be collaborating with our most serious competition. I was also suspicious he was having a sexual dalliance with Mick, and felt a little jealous.

Mick is the only man I’ve ever seriously wanted to fuck. He was wearing loose pyjama-style pants without underwear; as he leaned back I couldn’t help noticing the lines of his cock laying against the inside of his leg, long and plump. Mick was clearly very well-endowed. It reminded me of a photograph I’d seen of Rudy Valentino similarly displaying his equipment. In the band we all started to arrange our parts in such a way, especially on stage or in photographs.

A legal dispute was brewing between Kit and Chris and Shel Talmy. It turned out that Shel’s deal with Decca Records was itself a sub-licensing deal, so the royalty he paid through to us was paltry. The row seemed to threaten our entire career and I became quite fidgety, not knowing what was going on.

On top of this anxiety, I’d lost track of who I was meant to be paying rent to in Belgravia, so I’d stopped sending in my cheques. Having also lost my keys, I had connected a thin, almost invisible, paired wire to the downstairs door buzzer. By touching the wires together I could buzz the front door and gain entry. My comings and goings always took place at night so no one worked out how I was doing it. When they changed the lock on the flat door I simply assumed someone had latched it, so I climbed up the scaffolding on the adjacent embassy building and got into my flat through a roof hatch.

In the end I was caught inside the flat. The chairman of the Catenian Association, which owned and managed the house, was a decent fellow, and allowed Kit to pay the back rent so I could retrieve my possessions, including guitars and demo tapes for ‘Magic Bus’.

Despite having a hit record, I sank into a depression. To make matters worse, the Observer magazine decided to put The Who on the cover, and sent a photographer to Manchester where we were playing at the Jigsaw Club. At the time I wore the Union Jack coat I had commissioned for John, and at the Manchester hotel where the photo session was staged Chris placed me in the front of the group. From my photography classes I knew what an extreme wide-angle lens looked like, and the effect it had when thrust close to the face of a subject: the nose appears to protrude. As the camera moved closer and closer to me, I realised what the photographers intended; my nose, not small in any lens, would look enormous. I tried to muster the courage to ask them to back off, but I was too proud. Unfortunately, this photo remains one of the most enduring images of The Who from this period.

By early 1966 my first Rickenbacker 12-string and 6-string guitars were gone, leaving me with the remains of two more Rickenbacker 6-strings, two Danelectros and a Harmony. Despite my bravado, I was worried about the growing pile of broken parts, and decided to try to salvage them. I was also putting together a portable music system, a kind of precursor to the Walkman.

I listed in my notebook records or artists I wanted to hear: ‘Marvin Gaye, 1-2-3, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder’s Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert [Nina Simone], Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk Around Midnight and Brilliant Corners.’ I drew designs for revolving speakers, which I hoped to use in my stage rig, as well as designs for a complex surround-sound speaker system for my home hi-fi system. And this:

I think I will write a book. It will take a year to write. It will be about the year I am 21, which will be this year in May. I will tell the truth. I have a wish to record what I’m doing because it’s very important, and I don’t have a very close friend at the moment to whom I can reveal my worries.

8 SUBSTITOOT

By spring 1966, when the Observer magazine cover story on The Who was published, I had become disaffected towards the press. Depressed and paranoid, I had carelessly admitted taking drugs on national television, although no one seemed to mind. The Observer story itself was a puff for Kit and Chris, but the rest of us were represented as braggarts, spendthrifts, dandies and scumbags. For at least a week after the publication I lost interest in the success of The Who. This may seem childish, but the polarities of my ego – the artistic grandiosity and the desperately low self-regard – were both powerfully triggered when I held the Observer story in my hands for the first time.

I arranged a new flat for myself in Old Church Street, Chelsea, in the penthouse of a building next door to Sound Techniques recording studio, thinking the studio’s late-night rumblings would provide excellent cover for my own recording activities at home. The Thames was 100 yards away, and I regularly wandered down to contemplate the grey, swirling river. I often drove alone to the Scotch of St James nightclub, where I would sit with a Scotch and coke at a table surrounded by the likes of Brian Jones and the Walker Brothers. It wasn’t like me at all, but I was pleased to be out with people I knew. Brian and I saw one of Stevie Wonder’s first London shows there. Transported by the music, our adulation and his own adrenaline, Stevie got so excited he fell off the stage.

One night I drove a band of revellers back to Chelsea and, showing off, driving too fast in the rain, slid into a graceful skid at Hyde Park Corner, breaking an axle of my Lincoln. The party continued by taxi to my flat, where I played the National Anthem at five in the morning, and eviction loomed again.

‘Substitute’ began as a homage to Smokey Robinson by way of The Rolling Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’. (‘Substitoot’ had become a sublime buzzword since Smokey had used it in his masterpiece ‘Tracks of My Tears’.) I set up my two tape machines, now stereo, in my new flat, and wrote. I heard in my own voice the tumult of a young man playing a role, uneasily, repackaging black R&B music from America, relying on gimmicky outfits, and pretending to be wild and free when in reality he needed to be looked after by his mother.

Keith and John had forged a drug-fuelled alliance with a wizened, charismatic Parisian chemist-cum-dealer. At several shows in March they had turned up red-eyed and glowing, excluding Roger and me from their decadent orbit. We also found ourselves on the outside of a conspiracy. It turned out that Keith and John were flirting with the idea of leaving The Who and writing their own songs, playing more surf-inspired music and having more fun. Being in The Who in 1966 was uncomfortable, unfulfilling and – with record-company lawsuits hitting Kit and Chris – the money was getting bad for the other three Who members. (To some extent I was protected by songwriting royalties starting to flow in; The Performing Right Society paid royalties only to songwriters.)

With my first pay cheque in April I exchanged my 1956 Lincoln Mark II for the more recent 1963 Lincoln Continental Convertible, and bought a 28-foot motorboat, which I moored on the Thames at Chiswick, close to the place where I had first heard celestial music as a child. On one of the boat’s first voyages we took wheelchair-bound Mike Shaw for a river trip.

Even before the Talmy case came to court Kit and Chris moved their offices into a space provided by Robert Stigwood (‘Stiggy’), one of Britain’s first independent record producers; there they created their own production company, New Ikon, as a step towards a record label of their own. I felt part of this new venture, and spent a lot of time designing a zippy logo for it.

‘Substitute’ was The Who’s first single not to be produced by Shel Talmy, and I was elected to produce it. Kit and Chris used Stigwood’s Reaction label to release it on 4 March. The record charted quickly. Shel responded by bringing legal action against Stigwood’s distributor, Polydor, and provided a legal affidavit claiming that he deserved the lion’s share of the royalties because he had contributed significant musical guidance. I had worked from my own demo, as had Shel, and in my own affidavit claimed that if the court compared my demos with Shel’s they would see that all the creative work had been done by me before Shel even heard the songs.

On one of The Who’s many trips away I began imagining that my fabulous new girlfriend Karen was deceiving me. Keith had been through something even more powerful in his early relationship with his wife Kim, who as a professional photographer’s model had once been pursued all the way to her home in Bournemouth by Rod Stewart. It was this kind of paranoid, unhinged thinking that spurred me to write ‘I Can See for Miles’, one of my best songs from this period. The first lyric was scribbled on the back of my affidavit in the case between Talmy and Polydor. Perhaps that’s why the song, about the viciously jealous intuitions of a cuckolded partner, adopts the tone of a legal inquisition.

***

The Talmy case came to court, and Kit and Chris lost. My demos were disallowed as evidence, and Shel was informed that his contract stood. This meant that we were still tied to Shel and the feeble royalty he paid us. I turned for guidance to Andrew Oldham, who took me for a ride down Park Lane in his stately chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. He told me he thought his friend Allen Klein might be able to exert leverage to break Shel’s grip, but to do that we might have to break with Kit and Chris. Klein wasn’t yet involved with The Beatles, but he was the Stones’ US publisher and managed the great Sam Cooke.

Allen Klein sent me a first-class ticket to New York, and in June I flew there in secret to meet him. Klein came to pick me up in his Lincoln Continental, exactly like the one I’d just bought, down to the colour. He made it clear that the only way I could escape Talmy’s grip was to repudiate my contract with Kit and Chris. If I gave him the word he would start proceedings, then he and Andrew Oldham – still at that time the Stones’ manager – would take over management of The Who. I flew back home and slept badly on the plane. I must admit I was seriously considering recommending to the band that we sack our managers. Friendship aside, I felt that the deal they’d committed us to with Talmy was criminal.

Guy Stevens, the DJ at the Soho Scene Club who’d helped Peter Meaden launch the singles he’d written for us, was now a record producer. He’d heard a rumour that The Who were getting involved with Allen Klein, so he came over one afternoon with his boss, Chris Blackwell, to plead with me to let them guide The Who. They seemed genuinely worried. Klein had a reputation as someone who took absolute control over any publishing he could lay his hands on – in other words, he was a music publisher like any other – so I wasn’t sure what the drama was about.

As they started to explain why I should avoid any involvement with Klein my doorbell rang. It was Kit, distraught, also having heard about my trip to New York. Guy and his boss hid in my study for half an hour while Kit anguished over the problems we all faced, and asked me to give him a chance to sort everything out. To crown this series of unsettling events I was evicted from my lovely Chelsea penthouse flat for making too much noise. Furious with myself, I went to stay with my parents until I found a new home.

An estate agent charged with finding me somewhere with no living neighbours got me a top-floor film-editing suite at the corner of Wardour Street and Brewer Street in Soho. It was a beautiful, light room with half-moon windows. A carpenter knocked me up a bed and some shelves for my tape machines and disk-jockey rig, and the flat became my recording studio and personal nightclub, though I rarely slept there.

For a while Karen shared a flat in Pimlico with a friend, then her father bought her a basement flat in Eccleston Square, close to Belgravia. I spent a lot of time there, going to Soho to work or when Karen and I had arguments. At night Soho was violent and sleazy, but if you lived there you found a way of moving about unnoticed.

Next door to my flat was Isows, a posh kosher restaurant whose owner would allow me breakfast sometimes at four in the afternoon, even on a Sunday. Once or twice I tried to fit into the gang at the Colony Club where the hard-nosed arty-alkies drank, and where I could see the painter-genius Francis Bacon and Daily Mirror diarist Daniel Farson in Wardour Street, deep in conversation. They were both very cool, but the brassy woman behind the bar tried to take the piss out of me, assuming I was a rent-boy because of my tight Mod trousers and pink shirt.

Once a group of us were in my flat smoking grass and listening to records at deafening volume when we looked up to find a policeman standing there. I thought we’d been busted, but he was just looking for a burglar who’d climbed over my roof. The rule of law barely held sway in Soho, but I loved it.

The studio was big enough so I could play the drums, and I learned how to play keyboards on a clunky Hohner Cymbelet electric piano I had bought from Jim Marshall. I tried hard to write orchestral pieces and recorded an instrumental I called ‘M’. Based on a 12-string guitar part that I made up as I went along, it ran for seven minutes, with rising and falling dynamics reinforced with basic drum overdubs and an additional guitar. I was immensely proud of this recording, which stands as one of the finest expressions of my free-form ability as a guitar-composer.

Roger, meanwhile, was cracking under the strain of Mike Shaw’s accident and rows over Keith’s drug use. He missed a number of gigs, where I had to stand in for him. Around May it appeared that he’d made up his mind to leave The Who entirely. My diary is venomous about him and the rest of the band, even about Kit and Chris. I’m also very hard on myself, challenging myself to deepen my study of Charlie Parker, Coltrane and Purcell, and to develop my guitar style. On the page I sound determined and unhappy.

The schism in The Who, that had first opened up when Roger punched Keith in Sweden, widened. One night Keith and John, with Jimmy Page, did a recording session with Jeff Beck (‘Beck’s Bolero’) and word spread that they planned to start a new group, christened Led Zeppelin. The Who’s first show after this was a modest gig in Newbury. Keith and John arrived very late – and very drunk. Roger and I had been holding the fort by playing without them, which was the pattern at the time. An argument broke out on stage, and – at my wits’ end – I threw my guitar at Keith. He tried to throw one of his larger drums at me and fell into his kit, gashing his leg. We were all utterly sick of each other.

A few days later, argument forgotten, I was driving down the M1 motorway in the early hours when I ran into an accident that had happened ten minutes earlier. Warning lights weren’t set up and for a critical few moments I ignored a man waving a torch, thinking he was trying to get a lift. When I hit the brakes they locked and the car went into a time-freezing drift. At the very last moment of my skid, I smashed tail-first into a Jaguar that had rolled over, and still contained two trapped elderly people waiting for an ambulance. They already had multiple injuries so that bump caused them considerable pain. I felt terrible for them, and shame for the habit I’d fallen into of driving too fast when the road was empty. I was convicted of careless driving and heavily fined, although I didn’t lose my licence.

The legal battle with Talmy had been lost, but only in the UK. Allen Klein wanted another meeting with me, so on 27 June 1966 I went back to New York once more, this time with our lawyer, Edward Oldman. This meeting took place on a chartered motor yacht that sailed around Manhattan as we listened to Barry Mann’s ‘Mandy’, and other songs Klein controlled. This was my first time on a luxury yacht, and I was surprised to find superb sleeping cabins on the lower deck. The New York night sky was alive and sparkling, and though I was suspicious of Allen I was captivated by the whole affair.

Another uneasy overnight flight home, and the build-up of frustration and exhaustion started to eat into me. As soon as I landed I drove to a Who gig in Sheffield, forgetting how far it was; when I arrived at about 10 p.m. the rest of the band had given up on me and gone home. I turned around and headed home myself. Not having eaten or slept for hours I fell asleep at the wheel, waking up upside-down in a ditch with petrol dripping on my face, and a police officer asking me if I was OK. I gave the breakdown man my Rickenbacker 12-string as a reward for pulling me out of the ditch.

My New York trip and Allen Klein’s obvious interest made it clear that some smart business people believed we’d soon break into America. Ted Oldman had reported to Kit and Chris that Klein was trying to take over the band, and they quickly brokered an out-of-court settlement with Talmy. He would no longer produce The Who and we’d be free to make a new deal with any record company we chose. This would improve things for all concerned. The Who would get a bigger share, and Shel would get a commission on all future recordings as well as participate in all recordings made during the period of his original contract, without having to work, or fund our sessions.

Through this deal Kit and Chris kept control of the band, but at the time we knew nothing of the punitive settlement Kit had to make with Shel. The summer dragged on, the band’s antics on stage becoming a parody of auto-destruction complete with smoke and flashes. During the finale at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival, Keith ran to the front of stage with a whip and a blonde actress in a leather outfit.

In August we recorded ‘I’m a Boy’ and ‘Disguises’ with Kit finally in the producer’s chair. Our new record deal was with Track Records, founded by Kit and Chris with the promise that we would own shares as well as receive royalties. Kit was a joy to work with; he made recording fun, and seemed to be recording a more musical sound, although Roger and I still felt tied to the bluff, tough sound we had developed in The Who live gigs.

Meanwhile I was becoming obsessed with a bigger idea: could I write a real opera?

***

While ‘I’m a Boy’ was being prepared for release as the band’s new single, Karen and I took a holiday to Caesarea in Israel. Her miniskirts were a novelty that attracted a lot of interest, especially from the Arabs, several of whom I had to literally fight off. On one occasion I turned to help from Jewish passers-by, dressed in Western clothing, who interceded before chiding me: ‘What is a young Jewish boy doing allowing such an attractive girl to dress so provocatively?’

When I got home I began to ask people what was going on in Israel. One of my legal advisors, who was interested in international affairs, described the growing tension between Israel and Egypt, as well as the emergent communist threat from China, a country with a population growing so fast, he said, that it would soon dominate the entire planet. This sparked the idea for my first opera, later entitled Rael, whose plot deals with Israel being overrun by Red China. Over the next year I developed the story, and planned to complete it as a major full-length operatic composition outside my work for The Who. I hired a Bechstein upright piano from Harrods and installed it in Karen’s bedroom in her flat in Pimlico. I wrote the first orchestrations there for Rael using a book called Orchestration by Walter Piston that I still refer to today.