Love and Hydrogen (29 page)

Oh, he was a miserable bastard, that John Entwhistle. Who else wrote horror songs for children? Dressed all in black and kept to himself and then moped about when people left him to his own devices? “Why haven't they come and coaxed me out?” he said to himself. Sold himself as his best friend's best friend when all he was thinking was,
He'll never know how lucky he is.
Angry about most things and frightened about everything. Guilty of all he saw in others, and maestro of a self-pity as vast and chilly as the North Sea—

THERE'S A CERTAIN attack a bass guitarist gets in his style when he's miserable. All great bass guitarists are miserable.

THE ROCK GODS did four things for us: they sent us Keith, kept me miserable, gave Roger his ego, and put the idea in Pete's head of writing for Roger as an alter-ego. Pete would no more expose himself directly than
I
would—his own family never really got to know him—but when it came to Roger, he got, in his songs, the braggadocio, the grandiosity, the aggression, the flash, the emptiness. We all kept waiting for Roger to go, “Hey,
wait
one minute . . .”

Pete wrote his best about characters he could see from the outside. When he got introspective, it turned into melodramatic dross. If you want my opinion.

By 1966 he was writing for Roger's voice—for those things in Roger that he thought he was lacking. He didn't have one of the most crucial things Roger had: that
conviction.
Which was why he was no good in fights. He also certainly didn't have Roger's magnetism. Or his looks. All he had was talent. He
hoped.
He was this angry nose with a guitar.

What he was trying to do was to get himself halfway to Roger, and drag Roger halfway to him. They resented the way they used each other, but they never stopped taking full advantage of it.

WHEN PEOPLE THOUGHT about The Who they thought about Pete and Keith, playing music and tearing into controlled substances as though they had only twenty-four hours to live. From the very first there were nights when they didn't remember who they were, walked offstage and into the audience, got into fights and got the daylights beat out of them. In Birmingham two security people were sent to hospital trying to protect them. By our first U.S. tour of '68, the only bandmember who
could
fight, Roger, would be sitting with me in the dressing room sipping carbonated water and wondering where they'd gone to.

I'd phone up Kim and let her know where Keith could be retrieved in the morning.

They'd married in March of 1966 at the registry office in Brent, in Middlesex. It rained the entire day. Our manager's idea was to keep the marriage a secret at the time.

They had a daughter, Mandy, that July.

He was a lunatic for the clubs, before and after Mandy. There were nights I worked through the playlist thinking this was the night I'd phone Kim and finally explain myself. I'd watch Pete pinoning around in his white boiler suit, Roger in his buckskin fringes swinging his mike like a lasso, Keith in his cartoon T-shirts, spinning and pinwheeling his drumsticks into the light—
Substitute:
me for him; substitute: my coke for gin; substitute: you for my
mom—at least I'll get my washing done
—and I'd funnel all motion into two hands, not moving my feet twelve inches the entire show, all in black so that I'd disappear even sometimes when lit.

ONSTAGE WE WERE the musical version of a row in a moving van. But what was the alternative? We were never one of those Serious bands, all dignity and sobriety and “minor sevenths” this and “atonal chord progression” that in interviews, that pillaged mediocre classical music and traveled with a Philharmonic in tow. We were a gang of louts you wouldn't trust round your back garden, never mind your mum's china. We were best booked into rough places. Anywhere else, we didn't fit in, and we weren't happy, anyway. We performed Tommy at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and Keith screamed over Pete's big finish, “It's like playing to a fucking
oil
painting—” And the crowd cheered, like it had been saluted.

ONE NIGHT in the rear of a club, lying on his back buried in Skol and Carlsberg bottles, Keith told me that every morning he went home, he and the missus smashed up the flat with fights. It was terrible for little Mandy. “What should I do?” he asked. I didn't say,
You can't go on like this,
or
Stop what you're doing, for fuck's sake.
“She's a great woman,” I managed instead. “She is, she
is,
” he agreed with a moan. In Tottenham he took a hammer to all nine pieces of his kit at the end of “Magic Bus.” Roger threw his microphone off into the seats. Pete toppled a stack of amps and bounced his Rickenbacker on the debris. By that point if we waited too long to lose our tempers, we'd start to hear during the breaks, “Throw something! Smash something!”

Because what did that kind of music come down to, in the first place? What was the audience at a concert saying, if not,
You stand
there so we can know ourselves
?

Of course, the crashing irony was that all of our songs had always been about pathetic little wimps:
Can you see the real me?
Can you? Can you?
But we were
presenting
pathetic wimps with anthemic power: my hair-raisingly overamped bass, Keith's Hammer of Thor drumming, Roger's Valkyrie voice, Pete's power chords. At times I thought
Quadrophenia
was the best thing Wagner ever wrote. Here it was the story of a sad little mixed-up kid and every track on it sounded like a war cry, like something designed to terrorize the natives.

Rage in the service of self-pity was what we'd
always
been about. It was what
rock
had always been about.

I GOT MARRIED. A lovely woman, at the Acton Congregational Church, a year after Keith and Kim. I was going to be a homebody and not hang out and about anymore. It wasn't good for me.

Recently my wife turned up an old battered and juice-stained appointment book from 1970, and after a few pages I couldn't bear to read any more: 9/12, Munster, Germany, 9/13, Offenbach, Germany, 9/16, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 9/17, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 9/18, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 9/20, Copenhagen, Denmark, 9/21, Aarhus, Denmark . . .

IT WAS A MATTER of being bored with who we were, with being selfish fuck-ups each and every night and each and every gig. For all our arrogance. Keith took to traveling with a hatchet and chopping hotel rooms to bits: televisions, chairs, dressers, cupboard doors, beds: the lot of it.

His version of himself was Moonie the amiable idiot, the genial twit, the victim of his own practical jokes. He broke his collarbone, knocked out his front teeth, gave himself three or four concussions. But he was only playing the same game as the rest of us. Look at photographs of us next to Roger: it's like three frightening goons with Jesus of Nazareth. During a backstage squabble, Pete shouted, “I don't know who's worse: Mr. God's Gift to Hammersmith or the rest of us with our Self-Hatred badges.”

“I vote for the Wooden Indian,” Keith called from the floor. He liked calling me the Wooden Indian when he was in his cups.

“I've done it again, haven't I, Wooden Indian?” he'd say in those wee hours when he was back in Kim's shithouse. She finally moved out, though she kept track of him through friends. I finally phoned. We chatted and I didn't even mention if she needed anything, etc. I phoned back a few weeks later and she was out. She went on holiday. The holiday extended itself. Years trooped up my chest and down again. Round about this time, Pete helped his friend Eric Clapton take the great love of his life, Patti Harrison, away from her husband, George. I didn't talk to him for a month. About the same as George.

“YOU LOVE ME or not, Ox?” Moonie would say when he'd been the cause of particular unpleasantness: when there was a mess to be cleaned, or so forth. So when he died, why would we have done the right thing? Why would we have acted adequately? When had we acted adequately our entire lives?

He came apart step-by-step, over years. Cry for help? He started
his
when he was ten. The man broke his wife's nose with his head. He burst into tears at stoplights. He was arrested for disorderly conduct in a mortuary. He paid New York cabbies to blockade each end of a side street so he could throw all of his hotel furniture into the street. In Boston in '76 we kicked off “Substitute” and I looked back and there was no one behind the drum kit. He'd pitched over onto his face. He was ambulanced to the hospital. The crowd rolled forward in murderous little wavelets until it finally sank in that Pete and Roger were promising a make-up concert at the end of the tour.

He had no direction, no nothing. “Why don't I ever, like, pick up a bloody
book
?” he asked me once. I gave him back the old Entwhistle silence. He used to tell us he was the best Keith Moon–type drummer in the world. Alcohol, downers, uppers, painkillers, horse tranquilizers, anything you could fit in a capsule or pour down your throat. “Fuck-all drank all my maple syrup,” Pete complained one morning on an American tour. In one recording session he just lay on his tom-toms, and when I asked if he was okay he said, “God, it's hard.” Roger asked me to talk to him. “He might listen to you,” he said. “His old lady's worried to death.” She's talked to
you
about it? I remember thinking.

He was the original Madman who had to outdo everyone else in rock. And imagine what kind of degenerate one had to be to outdo everyone else in rock. Eventually it got so bad that even he had to go for the cure. He started calling each of us each night to say good night and that he loved us. You'd pick up the phone and only know who it was because he was crying so hard. A week into that his girlfriend found him dead in his apartment from an overdose of Heminevrin, the drug they gave him for his other addictions. When I heard I thought: we must've saved his life thirty times, getting him up and walking around, getting him to a hospital. I thought of him saying, “John, let's throw it over and join the Beach Boys.” I thought of the nights I'd gotten him on his feet and he'd slurred some version of, “John, you're me only friend.”

I asked if anyone had contacted Kim. The police had. After a few drunken nights I went over but she only talked to me through a crack in the door.

“I can't
face
anyone right now, John,” she said. I could hear Mandy wailing in another part of the house.

“We're thinking of you,” I told her. I hung my head and clasped my hands before me, like the undertaker. Still all in black. “Let us know if there's anything that would help.”

“Poor Keith,” she said.

The three of us remaining filled the airwaves with talk of how The Who couldn't go on without him. Then we went on without him.

Eleven boys and girls were trampled to death in Cincinnati before a show a year later. We'd insisted on festival seating instead of reserved—we didn't want
our
fans having to sit in numbered rows, unable to move about or dance or shove their way to the front. So naturally when the doors opened there were stampedes. In this case too few doors were opened. We were backstage and knew of a commotion but how many gigs had we played
without
commotions?

What we said to the press, scribbled out and read by Pete in a stupefying hangover at the next tour site, was: “It seems that everyone wants us to shed the theatrical tear and say ‘I'm sorry.' Whereas what we have to do is go on.” Even Kenny Jones, our new drummer, seemed a little stunned by the heartlessness of it all.

We should have stopped the tour. We knew it. Everyone with whom we dealt was a cretin. Lawyers, managers, promoters, fans. And we sat atop the pile: the emperors of stupidity.

Imagine being as drunk as you've ever been, seven, twelve, fifteen nights in a row. Imagine not knowing which pills are doing what. Imagine each day when you come round you're reminded how much depends on you, how many responsibilities you have for the next few weeks. Imagine something terrible happens. And your head feels like there's been a heavy heavy rain and this is now the runoff, and you're in a big easy chair in a haze listening to the details on the radio and your manager is keeping after you about the way the first three weeks of a tour pay for the fares and expenses, and the next two the road managers and managers, and three preteens in braids and microhalters like Pippi Longstockings from Weimar apparently grew up listening to your music, and are bouncing on their hands and knees on the bed in your suite while your manager keeps repeating himself through the closed door.

We were told after the show how many had died. For one second, our guard dropped. Then it was up again. Everywhere we went journalists asked the same question: “Anything to say about Cincinnati?” And how could it not start to seem false, anything we said? “Oh, we were deeply moved, the terrible tragedy, the loss of life, arrgghh—”

It was like the crowds had out-Moonied us. They'd finally out-Moonied us.

We'd only become who we were because of him. He'd been the missing part. He'd made the rest of us work to capacity. With him in his bicycle saddle bashing away for dear life, all the bad parts and the wrong parts became this awesome and distorted energy. The day he'd met us it was like we'd recognized each other. We hadn't
liked
each other, but we'd known that everyone in the room was pissed off with the way everything was, and with the alternatives. We'd looked around at one another and known right then that we would make it. And we'd had a sense, even as bollocks-stupid as we were, of what making it would mean: of the bodies we'd leave behind.

One thing no one ever seemed to understand: When Pete smashed his guitar, it was because he was
pissed off.
When Keith threw his snare out into the front row, same thing. And why
did
I never move? Why did I
stand
there in the midst of all of this mayhem, like a bloody statue? It was my way of making my mark and erasing my mark, simultaneously. There's nothing like it for exaltation and nothing like it for rank, flat-out failure. You're working as hard as you can to get one fucking song across—to get some livable part of
you
across—and it's never really perfect, it's never really acceptable, it's never even really
right,
is it?