Love and Hydrogen (28 page)

OR THIS, from the captain of the Irish steamer Charles Bal: “At 2:30 we noticed some agitation about the point of Krakatau, clouds or something being propelled from the NE point with great velocity. At 3:00 we heard all around and above us the sounds of a mighty artillery barrage, getting evermore furious and alarming; and the matter, whatever it was, was being propelled with even more velocity to the NE. It looked like a blinding rain, a furious moiling squall. By 4:00 the explosions had joined to form a continuous roar, and darkness had spread across the sky.”

AND HERE'S what I imagine, from the eyewitnesses who spent those last minutes standing around with their hands in their pockets on the Java Coast and Sumatra, from Lampong Bay to Sebesi and all the other islands in the strait:

Some made out an enormous wave in the distance like a mountain rushing onward, followed by others that seemed greater still.

Some made out a dark black object rising through the gloom, traveling toward the shore like a low range of hills, but they knew there were no hills in that part of the strait.

Some made out a dark line swelling the curve of the horizon, thickening as they watched.

Some heard the roar of the first wave, and the cry, “A flood is coming.”

Some heard the rushing wind driven before the immense dark wall.

Some heard a whipsawing noise and saw the great black thing a long way off, a cliff of water, trees and houses disappearing beneath it. They felt it through the earth as they ran for sloping ground. They made for the steepest ravines. There was a great crush. Those below climbed the backs of those above. The marks where this took place are still visible. Some of those who washed off must have dragged others down with them. Some must have felt those above giving way, and let go.

But this is the only account hand-copied and tacked to my bulletin board, the testimony of a Dutch pilot caught on shore near Anjer, a city now gone: “The moment of greatest anguish was not the actual destruction of the wave. The worst part by far was afterwards, when I knew I was saved, and the receding flood carried back past me the bodies of friends and neighbors and family. And I remembered clawing past other arms and legs as you might fight through a bramble. And I thought, ‘The world is our relentless adversary, rarely outwitted, never tiring.' And I thought, ‘I would give all these people's lives, once more, to see something so beautiful again.'”

WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN

We were the great group for things going wrong. Cancellations, electrical failures, bad weather, broken-down vans, missed dates, slashed thumbs, broken noses, sprained knees, bugger-all equipment, beggary, rookery, penury, and out-and-out thuggery: all just a part of that tag-along high-speed death march that called itself The Detours/The High Numbers/The Who.

We'd come on with sticking plasters, bleeding. We had fistfights onstage. Every five minutes someone was quitting the band.

For the first fifteen years we owed money because of everything we smashed up, and everything we needed. From the beginning we traveled with a small bungalow's worth of Marshall cabinets and amps, and four or five Rickenbackers for Pete, and always a triple kit of red sparkle Premier drums with a big crate of spare skins and sticks besides, because our drummer was the most physically destructive mild-mannered middle-class boy in the Western Hemisphere.

By 1965 we had the world's loudest gear onstage, and we'd scream like victims of the Inquisition and not hear our voices. Staying in key was an act of faith. It was like when you listened to something with earphones and sang along out of tune because there was no way to tell. We always had someone in the house who could signal us visually as to how we were doing. More than once Keith and I got a few bars into one song and realized that Pete and Roger were having a go at another.

In pubs and rooming houses we were the Little Hooligans' Circus, because there all we had was each other, and we hated each other. With Moonie it was always, “A bottle of brandy!” and when it came along, “Fuck me, I've fucking knocked it over! Let's have another, all right, hey? Fucking brandy, eh?” and he'd pour some on Roger and Roger'd knock him on his Middlesex behind. One night Roger went for some of his chips and Keith stuck a fork in his hand.

ALL SCHEDULES disintegrated. All alliances were temporary. Eventually our manager, who was equal parts long-suffering and insufferable, negotiated a truce. A certain amount of pride had to be swallowed on each side. We promised to behave and Roger promised not to hit us.

FIGHTS WITH the paying customers started from all sorts of things, usually after we came offstage. They didn't last long. Roger only had to punch you once and that was it. A girl got knocked flat by a mike stand in one, and we were all hauled in front of a magistrate.

Keith would go up to anyone around the bandstand and say, “Have you got anything in the upward direction, hey?” At Reading he gulped down some poor sod's purple hearts—twenty-four of them—at once. The guy complained to me afterward that he'd planned them to last three weeks.

We had this kid called Pill Brian who used to come down on his scooter to our shows. He'd come down and say, “I've got these today,” and we'd take all of what he had. “This one's for rheumatism,” he'd finally say, and Keith'd say, “Yeah, I'll have that.”

We played night in, night out for cellars full of kids out of their brains and getting off on R&B. The unstable fell over in various directions and you'd see clearings appear in the packed-in heads. Strangers traded hand jobs along the walls while keeping track of the show. It was like Imperial Rome. When the clubs were raided it sounded like hailstorms when everyone emptied the pills from their pockets onto the dance floor. The cops went round frisking people, and it was like they were walking on gravel:
crunch crunch
crunch.

POOR ROGER couldn't do the pills because of his voice, and because he drove the van. So he'd be stuck stone sober driving this bunch of pilled-up louts about. He hated it.

WHEN PETE FIRST STARTED writing, his songs were other people's songs badly remembered. He was knocked out by the Kinks' “You Really Got Me” when he first heard it, and went home and tried to remember it and couldn't, and came up with “I Can't Explain” instead.

Ours was a weird kind of enraged, what's-the-use protest rock. “My Generation” was a song that said, “We don't have to be shit because you say we're shit. We can be shit because
we
say we're shit.”

I WAS THE LEAST POPULAR one, the immobile one onstage, stolid Johnny. Fans called me The Ox. I had much to be quiet about. I was hopeless for Keith's girlfriend, Kim. I'd met her ten minutes after he had. She was sweet to me, nothing more. I hung about and watched her cook. I rubbed myself against banisters and gateposts after she'd gone by.

“You're a mate,” Keith'd say to me when I'd offer to phone her, let her know he'd be back late or not at all.

“Oh,
shit,
” she'd always say, and even that was worth hearing.

Pete and I knew about unrequited longing. As a boy I had nothing going for me, and Pete was a nose on a stick.

He grew up with parents who came out of the end of the war with big ideas and left him behind. We met in school, when we were eleven: I remember this willow switch with a wicked great hooter behind me in line sneering, “Entwhistle: what kind of posh name is that?”

We spent all our time ducking school at his house since no one was there. He didn't have much music at home except his Dad honking away on a clarinet in the back room. They didn't have much of a record player and they had Chiswick's shittiest radio. He had a strange relationship with his mother. She was beautiful and his Dad was good-looking so who knew what they made of him. He always said, “I fail to interest them.” He was very self-pitying, even then.

His parents split and left him with his grandmother, who was insane. She walked naked in the streets and things like that. He said his first musical experience was in the Sea Scouts, on a boat ride. A brutal summer day and he was lying in the gunwale sweltering and dropping in and out of heatstroke while the outboard motor kept making these funny noises. The
noises,
he said, got inside his skull and took it over while he lay there in his swoon. By the time he'd gone up the river and back again, he'd had to be carried out of the boat. He'd been so transported by the sound.

After Tommy came out he said to a BBC interviewer, “Where did ‘
See me, feel me, touch me
' come from? It came from a four-and-a-half-year-old in a fucking unlocked bedroom in a house with a madwoman.
That's
where it came from.”

WE MET ROGER when we were thirteen. He beat up a friend of ours and Pete shouted that he was a dirty fighter because he'd kicked the boy when he was down. Roger came over to us and said, “Who called me a dirty fighter?” And Pete said, “
I
didn't.” And Roger said, “Yes you did.” And he took off his belt and whipped Pete across the face with the buckle. We should've taken it as a sign.

Every time he came up to us in the corridor at school we thought, “Oh my God, what's he going to do now?” He was a horrible, horrible boy. A real kind of spiv. And then one day he stopped us and said, “I hear you play the guitar.”

He was the balls of the band when we started out. He ran things the way he wanted. If you argued with him you got a bunch of fives.

He was a shit singer at first, but nobody needed a singer in those days anyway. What was needed was somebody who could fight, and that was Roger.

We listened to records and copied what we could. We rehearsed together in the front room of Pete's house. He had a good guitar that he'd paid for himself with a paper route. Our rehearsals never went well. None of us had much talent. A month or so of that and his grandmother came in shouting, “Turn that bloody racket down!” And Pete said, “I'll do better than that,” and smashed his guitar against the wall. A hideous big cuckoo clock pitched from a nail from the impact. He bashed it to smithereens with the remnants of his guitar while we stood there. The little wooden cuckoo ended up atop my foot. He said, “Now will you
fucking get out of my life
?” and she stomped out.

The three of us stood about looking at the wreckage, and Roger said, “What now?” When Pete didn't answer, I said, “Another paper route, I think.”

Someone at Philips offered a record deal if we dropped our drummer, because he was too old: thirty-six. Keith was there and said, “I can do better than him.” At his audition he broke the drum pedal and high hat and put a hole in the skin. “I'm hired, aren't I?” he asked when he finished, and saw us all looking at him. We met Kim a year later in the Disc A Go Go in Bournemouth.

Nights he wasn't home I phoned her, but couldn't bring myself to speak.
“Oooohhh,”
I'd say, holding the receiver to my chest. “Owwwwww. Uuunnnrrh.”

“Sod off,” she'd say, after a moment, and hang up.

NO ONE REMEMBERS where the name came from. Maybe a guy who'd been a friend of Pete's.
The Who:
it made people think twice, and worked well on posters because it was so short and printed up big.

PETE'S NORMAL STATE when awake was also frustration, and back then it was particularly hard. There were a lot of brilliant young players around. Beck was around; Roger first saw him in a band called the Triads or the Tridents or something and came back and said there was this incredible young guitar player. Clapton was around. Page. So Pete was morose that he couldn't manage all that flash stuff. So he just started getting into feedback. And he expressed himself—as he put it—physically. I always thought of it as making up visually for what he couldn't play. He got the windmill bit from watching Keith Richards warm up backstage.

CHARLIE WATTS said that the first time he came to hear us, he looked at our drummer and thought,
My God, that guy's not doing
the same number.
All those mad fills. Then he realized that our Keith had left the backbeat behind. Charlie'd been sitting there going, “This is rubbish,” until it hit him that Keith was another lead instrument. One night at a club, everyone else passed out, Charlie said, “It's exhilarating hearing you lot trash numbers everyone else does so faithfully.” I don't think I ever told the rest of the band. If you couldn't stay awake, you missed praise from the Rolling Stones: that's the way I looked at it.

FROM THE BEGINNING, we had just these massive, massive amps. People came just to see
them.
One atop another on both sides of us, like an ogre's steamer trunks. At small clubs Pete had to turn some sideways to fit them all onstage. People like the T-Bones, and Clapton and the Yardbirds, had only these little Vox AC30s. Doctors issued warnings about our concerts in the local papers. Word got around that outdoors at Croydon, we'd surpassed 120 decibels.

Even so, the big power chord sound that Pete got wasn't only his amps. He also used hugely thick strings, and hit them so hard that he shattered picks and tore the skin from his fingerprints. Really, the sound came from us playing as a three-piece band, but trying everything we could to sound like more. In any number, Keith or I might take over the lead while Pete bashed out the chords.

A journalist for the NME saw us on one of those Maximum R&B Tuesday night shows at the Marquee. He said we sounded like someone chainsawing a dustbin in half. It was one of our favorite notices.

OUR FIRST TIME on Ready Steady Go! the producers never knew what hit them. We took over the show by blocking anyone who wanted to get in who wasn't our sort. We nicked their tickets and filled the place with our audience, all mods. No one else could get past Roger. He shoved someone from BBC security who tried to intervene down two flights of stairs and the poor sod never came back. The Hollies, who were on before us, didn't know
what
was going on. They found themselves surrounded by all these step-dancing geeks all dressed alike. The geeks seemed to be singing our lyrics to Hollies songs. Then for our first number the director had the genius idea of putting Keith and his whole kit on a rostrum with wheels, and having everyone push it this way and that through the crowd. Pandemonium. Geeks were knocked hither and yon. The BBC's big old cameras could barely roll out of the way in time. Between numbers our crowd kept swaying and singing, like at a football match. You couldn't hear Roger announcing the next song. Mods then wore all these old college scarves and at the end they tossed them all onstage. The four of us just held our poses after the last note, festooned.

I WANTED MY SONGS to be like songs no one else was writing. My bandmates didn't agree on anything except the notion that my songs were inferior. Keith was the nicest about it. He said, “What do you give a toss what
we
think?”

But the truth was I was trying something different, dark, in a childrens' book sort of way. “Silas Stingy”; “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” They weren't autobiographical; God knew, I wasn't one for
opening
up.
What was I, a can of beans? Kids responded when the singles came out; kids loved “Boris the Spider.” Keith and Roger came round a bit when they saw that, and we talked about releasing a kids' rock album, but it never happened. The songs all ended up as B-sides.

I wrote two about Kim, though nobody knew it: for a year or so our concerts always opened with one—“Heaven and Hell,” about the perils of mortal misbehavior. Its position on the playlist didn't mean the group was any more enthusiastic about my writing. Everyone just thought it was a good song to tune up to. It featured a lot of open strings.

The other was “Smash Your Head Against the Wall.”

OUR BIGGEST HITS involved Pete's mock-baroque bits, like the pseudo-flamenco thing he used to kick off “Pinball Wizard.”

I always admired his handling of his songwriting. He said what he wanted to say and ignored or patronized our suggestions about ways he might improve. He told us during one depression, “I'm sulking because you don't worship me for making your lives financially viable.”

A JOURNALIST doing a behind-the-scenes piece wrote long harrowing accounts about Keith and Roger and Pete, and then when it came to me, the article said only, “Entwhistle was never around— permanently asleep, apparently.”