Who I Am: A Memoir (11 page)

10

GOD CHECKS IN TO A HOLIDAY INN

The Owsley LSD trip on the aeroplane was the most disturbing experience I had ever had. The drug worked very quickly, and although Karen and I only took half as much as Keith, the effect was frightening. Seasoned trippers have teased me since about how stupid we were, but Karen and I felt that Keith couldn’t be allowed to trip alone, and that we’d all be able to help each other. In fact Keith seemed to operate in total defiance of the drug’s effects, only occasionally asking how much we had taken to check if he was getting it worse – or bigger and better – than we were.

At one point I tried to console Karen, who was terrified, telling her I loved her. ‘Ah!’ Keith sneered, and John cynically joined in. Roger, sitting across the aisle, may have found the whole thing amusing, but I was reassured by his smile. After thirty minutes the air hostess, whose turned-up nose had made her look a little porcine, transmogrified into a real pig, scurrying up and down the aisle, snorting. The air was full of faint music, and I wondered if I was experiencing my childhood musical visitations again, but I finally traced the sound to the armrest of my seat. After putting on a headset I felt I could hear every outlet on the plane at the same time: rock, jazz, classical, comedy, Broadway tunes and C&W competed for dominance over my brain.

I was on the verge of really losing my mind when I floated up to the ceiling, staying inside the airframe, and watched as everything changed in scale. Karen and Pete sat below me, clutching onto each other; she was slapping his face gently, figuring he had fallen asleep. From my new vantage point the LSD trip was over. Everything was quiet and peaceful. I could see clearly now, my eyes focused, my senses realigned, yet I was completely disembodied.

I looked down at Keith picking his teeth, characteristically preoccupied, and at John reading a magazine. As I took this in I heard a female voice gently saying,
You have to go back. You cannot stay here
.

But I’m terrified. If I go back, I feel as if I’ll die.

You won’t die. You cannot stay here.

As I drifted back down towards my body, I began to feel the effects of the LSD kicking back in. The worst seemed to be over; as I settled in the experience, though extreme, felt more like my few trips of old: everything saturated by wonderful colour and sound. Karen looked like an angel.

John Entwistle married his school sweetheart, Allison, on 23 June, while the band spent a fortnight in London before returning to America for a ten-week tour supporting Herman’s Hermits, on what was to be their swan song. During this interlude Karen and I decided to look for a flat together, and found a perfect place in Ebury Street, closer to Belgravia. The flat comprised the top three floors of a pretty, though conventional, white Georgian house. The lease was short, and a great bargain, but the flat wouldn’t be available until autumn, which seemed a hundred years away.

Karen didn’t join me on the road – Herman’s managers wouldn’t allow that – but she did go to New York, staying with her friends Zazel and Val; when the band got close to the city I would try to hook up with her. I got a sense at one point that someone had actively and persistently pursued Karen while I was on the road. I heard a rumour that a musician or artist friend of Zazel’s boyfriend had been joining them on dates. At first I was insanely jealous, but I soon realised that this was the way things were. If one of us got swept away, then so be it.

The Who left London in early July 1967 and didn’t return until mid-September. This was our indoctrination into the real America. We touched down in almost every important town or city, and in quite a few places we’d never see again. On this tour we listened to
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
and not much else. The shockwave it caused challenged all comers; no one believed The Beatles would ever top it, or would even bother to try. For me
Sgt. Pepper
and the Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds
redefined music in the twentieth century: atmosphere, essence, shadow and romance were combined in ways that could be discovered again and again. Neither album made any deep political or social comment, but ideas were not what mattered. Listening to music had become a drug in itself. Keith Moon had become convinced he was ‘Mr K’ in The Beatles’ song ‘For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ from
Sgt. Pepper
. He played it constantly, and his ego began to get out of control. It could just as easily have been about Murray the K.

San Francisco was full of pharmaceutical gurus and New York was arguably the capital of the world, but some places in between felt reactionary in the extreme. In the South we were banned from swimming pools without bathing caps because our hair was too long, and nearly beaten up by men who took offence at what they saw as our obvious homosexuality. Even women, especially older ones, were open in their derision. We hadn’t been prepared for Middle America’s prejudices.

Yet at a Florida motel Herman (Peter Noone) had sex with a pretty young fan and her pretty young mother at the same time. When the two females emerged from his room together, we gazed in stupefaction. At one swimming pool a blonde girl in a bikini fluttered nervously around me. I was starting to chat her up when Roger took me aside and whispered: ‘Jail bait!’ In her bikini she looked like a woman to me.

Occasionally, on our rare days off, we got really drunk. One day Keith and I were walking along the second-floor balcony of a Holiday Inn when Keith suddenly climbed over the railing and leapt into the pool below. I followed, but miscalculated – I was falling not into the pool but towards its edge. I wriggled as I fell, managing to just scrape into the pool, badly grazing my back and one arm. I might have broken my neck, or my back. I should have known better than to emulate Moon’s antics, drunk or not.

Roger and his American girlfriend Heather, who had dated Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck among others, established an aristocratic rock relationship, and Roger began to appear more certain of himself, and more comfortable as a singer. The tensions of the past were receding. On this road trip I felt no responsibility to act as principal architect of The Who. I just played my guitar during our twelve-minute warm-up for Herman’s Hermits. The concerts made for a strange culture clash: we smashed our guitars and screamed about our disaffected generation, whereas Herman sang about someone who had a lovely daughter, and the fact that he was Henry the Eighth, he was.

On this tour we had less to do than we would have liked. I read Heinlein and Borges and tried to stay settled. Although today this sounds to me the perfect life, it didn’t feel that way at the time. For the first half of the tour I carried no tape machine; instead I drew diagrams of my studio back home, and began to consider various new approaches to recording. Later I would find that many of the ideas I was scribbling down were already becoming industry secrets, thanks to the efforts of engineers working with Brian Wilson and George Martin, The Beatles’ producer.

One idea involved laying off a guitar solo on a separate piece of two-track tape, replacing all the spaces in the solo with blank tape, inverting the tape and playing a new solo matching the old but backwards. Another involved tape loop chord machines operated by foot pedals; tape sampling had been invented in the Mellotron, a kind of organ used by The Beatles that used loops of tape triggered by a conventional piano keyboard. I also suggested recording loops of white noise and tuning them to make it musical. I described techniques for creating extreme reverb effects using tape delays combined with echo chambers, reverb through revolving organ speakers and through guitar amplifiers with the vibrato unit turned on; all these effects became part of my home studio creative arsenal.

I commissioned a small low-power radio transmitter that would simulate a true radio sound to check how my tracks would sound if they were ever broadcast. I was already experimenting with stereo ‘flanging’, taking two identical tracks and bringing them in and out of phase with each other to create a psychedelic effect. I built a speaker in a small box, attached a tube and put the tube in my mouth, allowing me to ‘speak’ music. When Frank Zappa leaned over to me conspiratorially at the Speakeasy Club in London and described this new invention to me, I was polite enough not to tell him I’d already come up with it.

In New York, The Who did a show on Long Island, then we went to the Village Theater to support Al Kooper’s Blues Project. On the same bill was Richie Havens, an intense, engaging man and an effervescent, unique performer. His acoustic guitar was usually tuned to a particular chord, and he sang his full-throated songs so powerfully that he sounded like a band in himself. My old buddy Tom Wright said that when you shook hands with Richie you had to be the one to break the shake first, otherwise you could be there, gazing at his beaming smile, for all eternity.

When the Hermits’ tour hit Baton Rouge, the tour manager warned us that there had been recent race riots: we were to be on our best behaviour, and vigilant for trouble. There was a possibility our show there would be cancelled. We were all hyped up, but there was no obvious sense of tension, no visible problem. We were aware that the race issue had caught fire in the South, but at the time we didn’t feel part of the battle.

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.