Who I Am: A Memoir (22 page)

Impatiently, I ran up the fire escape to Kit’s room, a few floors above mine. I was an hour ahead of schedule. Anya and Kit had neighbouring rooms, and their respective doors were open to catch the breeze that blew into the hallway. As I approached I heard Kit’s animated public-school voice.

‘If Townshend thinks he can swan over here to my new world and just take over he’s wrong.’ He was extremely angry. I could tell he was striding up and down the room.

‘Kit,’ Anya argued. ‘The music is great. Pete is just –’ As I entered the room, Kit saw me and, not knowing whether or not I’d heard his rant, attempted a smile and turned away.

‘Kit is calling me “Townshend” now?’ I murmured to Anya. I had never heard Kit call me by my surname. I loved him, and felt terribly betrayed. Anya had opened both sash windows to their limit and the park stretched like a green lake into the distance. Music filled my head, and the air around me danced with flitting lights as I walked to the window and looked out. I had a sense of weightlessness, and at that moment whether I lived or died seemed of no consequence. As I started to fall forward between heaven and hell Anya was suddenly by my side, grabbing my sleeve. She whirled me around.

‘Pete,’ she barked. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Coming to my senses, I ran from the room.

Later I spoke to Roger and told him I was abandoning the recording sessions. I called and arranged a flight home. Throughout the afternoon my head continued to swirl. I wasn’t drinking, I wasn’t taking drugs, but at one point I imagined the room was full of agents and powerbrokers from Universal and Decca records. I heard them grumble that I had humiliated them, that I was a failure and that I would pay. As the ghosts in my dreams came to life I was being beaten by two Mafia-style thugs … then there was a knock at the door. I slipped into the bathroom, and my nose was indeed bleeding. I cleaned myself up quickly and opened the door.

It was Devon, a friend of Roger and Heather. I had seen her once or twice with Roger, usually backstage at the Fillmore. She was a great beauty, a statuesque girl with an astonishing figure, her face slightly Ethiopian. She said she had come to offer me help and came towards me with a tissue to wipe the trickle of blood from my nose. I must have presented a pathetic picture.

‘I’m sorry, Devon, you can’t help me,’ I said. ‘I’m really fucked up here.’

As I said this she was reaching her arms out to me. In my wildest dreams I might have been able to handle such a woman, but in reality she frightened me. I was also suspicious.

‘Did Roger send you?’

‘Roger? I heard from Anya, who said you tried to jump out a window.’

I was still confusing dreams and reality. ‘Universal have a contract out on me,’ I whispered. ‘I’ve been threatened by the Mafia. Kit is behind it all.’

Devon was still trying to hold me as I babbled on, but I pushed her away.

She was understandably furious. ‘I supported one of the greatest musicians in the fucking world all the way through a nervous breakdown.’ She started to say that she had been Miles Davis’s girlfriend – and I knew this to be true – but I was beyond conversation.

‘Thank you. Thank you very much, Devon, but you have to go.’

She didn’t say another word, but drew herself up to her proud, full height and stalked out, while I continued to mumble my thanks.

The next day I was back in London. The Who still had a record to make. This wasn’t just a contractual issue; more than two years between albums was too long. I attempted to enlist first-rate engineer Glyn Johns (our old producer and former lead singer of The Presidents) to work with Kit in London to complete what we’d started in New York, but Glyn wouldn’t countenance working with Kit. Glyn was my model of what a good producer should be – someone who guides the music and creates the right sound – and there was great mutual respect and fondness between us. We were both impatient in the studio, perfectionists who worked quickly. It was his work as an engineer on the early Who sessions with Shel Talmy that had made them sound so great.

Glyn listened to the tapes from the Record Plant and agreed they were good, but he made no bones about the fact that he could do better. He also felt that a completely fresh start would re-energise the entire band. I agreed. Some tricky politics flared up over the Atlantic with Kit over production control and credits, but Chris smoothed it over. I was still hanging on to the frail hope that I could sequence the
Lifehouse
songs to reveal the meaning of the story behind them. I had enough songs for a double album, and quite a few lyrics that I knew had great promise, if only I could grab some time to complete more demos. I imagined a gatefold sleeve in which, at the very least, I could publish my manifesto for the
Lifehouse
idea.

The recording with Glyn at Olympic studios immediately demonstrated that his approach was superior to Kit’s. After a couple of weeks we had enough tracks ready to start thinking about the shape of the album. I presented Glyn with my ideas for sequencing. It was then that I came up against his intransigence. Sequencing the album to serve a story would undermine one of Glyn’s greatest strengths, which was to sequence an album to best serve the music. Glyn invited me to coffee at a nearby café so I could explain
Lifehouse
to him.

I did my best, but
Lifehouse
wasn’t an easy idea to pitch in a few minutes. I did a poor job of explaining it, and Glyn – who had been concentrating very hard – responded in typically direct fashion. ‘Pete, I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said.’ His befuddlement was yet another nail in the coffin. Incredibly, my exhaustion and disappointment gave way to an enormous sense of relief.

Soon after we started recording with Glyn in April, The Who had one more weekend engagement at the Young Vic – a fundraiser that coincided with the birth of my second daughter, Minta. I smoked a cigar on stage and announced her arrival – just as that motorcycle messenger had announced my own birth to Dad in Germany: ‘It’s a girl!’ We played ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ for the first time in public with the backing tape, and the impact was profound. The rest was a bit of a mess, and we treated the several shows that followed as tests, almost rehearsals for the two elements of the
Lifehouse
project that I refused to let go of – synthesisers and backing tapes. The shows were carefully spaced, two or three days apart, and paced to allow us to do good studio and rehearsal work.

In rehearsal it became obvious that using analogue synthesisers on stage wasn’t going to work. I needed a preset synthesiser for each song (there was no way to retrieve patches on the first synthesisers). But the backing tapes had proven themselves at the Young Vic, and Keith could play to a pre-recorded tempo exceptionally well, something that every good drummer can do today, but was unheard of in 1971. As we got on top of the recording with Glyn we slowly increased the frequency of live shows, all in the UK. Roger says that working on songs in live shows before recording them is his favourite method, and Glyn often got good studio performances from us in one or two takes.

In July, at a happy party at Keith’s wonderfully eccentric house in Chertsey, we launched the new album.
Lifehouse
became the pathetically titled
Who’s Next
. The album cover was, in my opinion, a joke in bad taste. On the front we stood next to an obelisk against which we had been pissing. On the back we were all pissed in a dressing room after a show. The sleeve almost stank of urine. I was utterly confounded when so many fans and friends I respected loved the title and the sleeve design.

I fell into a petulant mood, but recovered as I realised that by some miracle Glyn was putting together a single album from the rubble of
Lifehouse
that would be the first Who material in a long time to be properly recorded.

Joseph Strick, the American film producer, writer and director, came to visit me in London a number of times. His film
Ulysses
had been highly regarded, and he wanted to make a movie of
Tommy
. His ideas were dark and interesting, and he was keen to dig into the project, but I had very little time to give him. The Who had a US tour booked starting on 29 July, and on the 16th my family would be travelling to New York on the
Queen Elizabeth 2
ocean liner.

My friend the artist Johanna Freudenberg had arranged a house for us to use during the summer in Bayshore, on Long Island. Her family had a holiday home nearby, so we would be near the beach. A series of shows had been arranged that were all within easy reach of New York. Emma was now two years old; Minta was still in a carry-cot. In July, determined to try to combine family and touring, Karen and I arrived in New York and moved into the house.

The Who’s first show was on Long Island itself, at Forest Hills, a short drive from Bayshore. On stage I felt a release of explosive claustrophobia, rage, frustration and depression as The Who’s music – and my physical workout – converted emotion into adrenaline-fuelled passion and exhilaration. I drank neat Rémy Martin on stage that night, and insisted on having a bottle near my amplifier.

I ended this show by smashing two guitars, hurling one into the air and, in homage to the venue’s famous tennis tournament, I used the other as a racket. After I walked off the stage and my adrenaline started to dip I decided I didn’t want to go back to Bayshore. Wiggy had booked the road crew into a nearby hotel since we had another show at the same venue in two days’ time. I planned to have a couple of drinks with Wiggy and Bob Pridden, listen to some music and let the adrenaline settle before going back to my wife and babies. I lay on Wiggy’s bed to rest.

On the radio news we heard that a security guard had been stabbed to death by a fan outside the stadium after being told there were no tickets. The blame was attributed to the violence of our show. I was deeply shaken. Until that moment I’d been comfortably tipsy. As I began thinking about getting home, the girl from Maryland whom I’d called the devil appeared at the door looking more like an angel. She was wearing a flowery summer dress, her breasts firm and proud under the thin fabric.

Within seconds our re-acquaintance had become a sexual reunion. Where I had resisted Devon and paid the price of comfort that might have helped me, this time I decided not to resist, and paid an entirely different price. I knew that living a lie would eat away at me, and it did. Many people around me felt I made too much of this kind of thing, and looking back I agree with them. I was a young rock star after all. But my standards weren’t high, they were just muddled.

My capacity for booze while on stage was enormous, especially if I stuck to cognac, but I still refrained from using the drugs my friends were using; cocaine was everywhere backstage, and both Keith and John combined it with Mandrax, which couldn’t have done their hearts much good. Roger smoked a little grass, and occasionally drank alcohol, but he didn’t necessarily need a fix – girls always wanted to have sex with him. The next day I went to Manny’s famous music shop in New York and bought $30,000 worth of guitars, a symbolic act of shameless self-indulgence I could ill afford.

On stage in Chicago Roger tried to get me to take control of my sound. I took no notice but started to spin on the spot like a dervish. He became angry and kicked over my amplifiers, knocking down a crew member who was standing behind them. Later that night, unbeknownst to me, he put his hand through a glass window in frustration.

Bit by bit, chunks of
Tommy
had sneaked their way back into our set list, which was usually put together by Roger a few minutes before each show. By the end of the tour we were playing a kind of
Tommy
medley along with the heavy rockers we’d made famous with
Live at Leeds
. New songs from
Who’s Next
were slow to become familiar and established, but it was some consolation that we arrived home in time to see
Who’s Next
go to No. 1 in the UK.

The Who now lived in splendour befitting our status as rock stars. Keith had Tara House, his modern pile in Chertsey. Roger bought a beautiful sixteenth-century house in Sussex, and lavished money on developing it. John bought silly cars, dozens of basses and brass instruments, custom-made luggage and a fairly modest new house in West London. Karen and I wanted to build a house with an architect, and were looking for land; we wanted to be close to Karen’s family and their country home on the upper Thames. We also intended to keep our house in Twickenham. Even though it was too small, we loved it.

After some false starts we found ‘The Temple’, a delightful riverside plot in Cleeve on the Thames, five miles downriver from my in-laws’ house. We retained the cottage and outbuildings, but tore down the house (intending to replace it with something more exciting). With three weirs near the cottage, the place was stimulating. Our gardener pointed us to a book about the area that described ley lines running between Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Goring-on-Thames, ‘where a temple was formerly sited near the river crossing of several prehistoric tracks’. I had serendipitously happened upon a promising site for my new studio – a creative, stimulating environment complete with ancient energies.

After the failure of
Lifehouse
Chris Stamp was determined to find a film treatment that would serve the band, reunite us, pull Kit back into the fray and trigger some new giant leap. He went back to Nik Cohn, the
wunderkind
critic who had inspired the pinball
leitmotif
of
Tommy
and anointed
Live at Leeds
in the
New York Times
. Chris commissioned him to advise us, and possibly write a script.

In the late summer and autumn of 1971 we had a number of meetings with Nik. I dropped small bombs into our conversations, and took photos with my new Nikon camera. One is of Chris and Nik at the Track offices in Wardour Street; they are young and smiling. Chris is his usual handsome self, hair a little long in front, swept in a long fringe to one side. Nik has his mop of unfashionable curly blond hair and glasses, his face like Mr Punch.