Who I Am: A Memoir (33 page)

21

THE LAST DRINK

It was 1981, four years after Punk. There had been a grand challenge, but the old guard, the Stones, Status Quo, Queen and The Who, were still filling huge venues while The Sex Pistols had splintered, and The Clash, The Jam, The Specials, and Siouxsie and the Banshees were the only Punk bands who still seemed truly dedicated to reforming rock.

For The Who it had been a watershed that seemed to affect us less as a collective than it did me as an individual. Keith had died, and we played on. Punk had been replaced by the New Romantic movement and its many offshoots. Roger and I had even cut our hair to try to fit in. We were both still in our thirties; we weren’t ready to remain untouched by the new trends. This was a new teenybopper era, with girls screaming again at good-looking young men like Madness, Adam and The Ants, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet.

Barriers were being torn down. Where Freddie Mercury tried to keep his homosexuality off the front pages, Boy George was openly and outrageously gay. Mark Almond was working the musical-hall arena that Ray Davies and I had mined years before, bringing it up to date. Devo, Kraftwerk, Visage, Ultravox and many others were starting to use computerised synthesisers and drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father and his clarinet were written off in the same way back in the late Fifties.

While I loved the new sound of The Who with Kenney on drums and Rabbit on keyboards, especially on stage, I knew in my heart that The Who had lost contact with our fan base. This was not so much to do with the sound we produced; but more to do with who we were, what we had become. I’m not sure that we knew exactly who we were playing for any more. Bruce Springsteen seemed to have swept up our old crowd, and The Clash threatened to challenge even him if only they could survive long enough.

In 1964, when The Who had first started moving, we knew soon enough who we were working for, and why. Now our audience of working-class young men had dispersed. Many of them were as lost as we were, not knowing what to make of how quickly the chaotic speed of Punk had turned into the heroin chic of the New Romantics. As an artist, performer and songwriter I could no longer pretend to have a viable patron among the young. ‘My Generation’ was comfortably moving towards their forties, living in middle-class affluence or – disturbingly – in cardboard boxes around the Waterloo area, only half a mile away from London’s wealthy West End.

The Who had started off when there was optimism among working-class youth, who grasped the fact that they had the opportunity to change and develop. ‘You never had it so good,’ said Prime Minister Harold Macmillan back in 1957 when I was twelve, and it just kept on getting better. For the first time in history a whole generation had the economic and educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead-end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatised by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity.

In this surge of hope and optimism, The Who set out to articulate the joy and rage of a generation struggling for life and freedom. That had been our job. And most of the time we pulled it off. First we had done this with pop singles, later with dramatic and epic modes, extended musical forms that served as vehicles for social, psychological and spiritual self-examination for the rock ’n’ roll generation.

However, by the late 1970s, at the tail end of years of Labour government in Britain, just before the Thatcher Conservative government quadrupled the dole queues, it was the Punks who were able to express the nihilism, fury and contempt of a new generation of youth, betrayed and thrown onto the scrapheap. With no future, no hope, The Who’s original manifesto was effectively shot.

This all sounds rather grand, but it’s a reading of what actually happened. Things changed under us. Songs like ‘My Generation’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ became anthems for a particular time, but by 1981 a gulf had opened up between The Who and the new younger generation. I had to accept that we had reached our peak of popularity at Woodstock, and however famous and successful we still were as a band, our ability to reinvent ourselves was declining as we continued a long slow descent from that moment when Roger sang ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me’, the sun rose up behind us and my guitar screamed to 500,000 sleep-tousled people.

So who was my patron now? If it was the generation I had grown up with, my solo musical projects might speak to them more directly than did The Who. But I looked outside music, becoming involved for the first time in radical causes and street-oriented charity work. I wanted to be more useful to society. I also wanted to give more creative vent to the literary side of my imagination. I wanted to write books, essays and – if necessary – polemics.

Back in 1968 I had written the music for my friend Richard Stanley’s first film,
Lone Ranger
. It was a comedy film and the music wasn’t serious, but there was something about the persona of the Lone Ranger, the lost boy who becomes the masked man and rides up with his sidekick Tonto to rescue those in need, that chimed very deeply with me. At the heart of it, I knew, were two key elements: my rock-star performance was a role I played – I might just as easily have worn a mask – and in the act of rescuing others I was hoping to rescue and redeem the lost boy in myself. In short, I still needed to grow up, to become a man who was valued by society.

In a documentary on
Quadrophenia
*
I said:

Jimmy is the hero, at last … It’s not about The Who, it’s not about Roger, it’s not about Pete, it’s not about John, it’s not about the Mods, it’s not about Ace Face. It’s not about drugs or any of that stuff. It’s just about Jimmy, and … that he realises he’s been looking outside himself, and what he has to do now is to try to ask a question internally.

To mature properly I needed to reach back to my lost youth, the eight-year-old I still carried within me. This was a long time coming, and even in early 1981 I had no idea how crucial the action of reclaiming my childhood self would prove to be in future years. Yet in the next two years my life would change in quite unexpected ways and I would find real redemption in helping others. That would prove to be the most important way I could find affirmation: no longer just in song lyrics, but in direct action.

For now I had to accept that my days of playing to kids, and speaking on their behalf, were numbered, and my new patrons, at the back of the theatre, in the cheap seats, were still too distant for me to see them, too far back in the past and too far into the future. And for the time being, I appeared to be as lost and as confused as ever. Between performing and writing I was still on a trail of what seemed like endless, mindless drinking, and this time not just on the road, or alone in a hotel room, but at home with my wife and children.

In the first few weeks of 1981 I was falling into the clichéd behaviour of the hard, resentful drinker. Thank heavens I was never violent. I wanted to be with my family, but the call of alcohol and cocaine was powerful, and Karen suggested that while I was struggling with my drinking I should probably live outside the family home. I joined St James’s Club and took some of my clothes, books and guitars there, and some to the house in Cleeve. I ended up living between these two places, and from then on rarely went home to Twickenham.

The Who cavalcade swung back into action with rehearsals in January for the tour that would accompany the release of our latest album,
Face Dances
. John’s song ‘The Quiet One’ and the rest of mine, ‘Don’t Let Go the Coat’, ‘You Better You Bet’, ‘Another Tricky Day’ and ‘How Can You Do It Alone’, were all whipped into shape. We also refined songs from the last two Who albums,
Who by Numbers
and
Who Are You
. Because of Keith’s death some of these had never been presented in the way they should have been.

Two shows in Cornwall fell at a weekend, and Karen decided to bring Emma and Minta to the Tregenna Castle Hotel, the scene of happier times on holiday, where they could spend time with their dad. Instead, after the second show I attended a party at the hotel the band were staying in, and ended up crashing in a room there. In the morning my family had left without me. I’m convinced Karen would have throttled me had I not been useful to her. By this time she was deeply involved in raising funds for a shelter for battered wives. A few days later, Karen, knowing I would be susceptible to doing anything she wanted, asked Bill if The Who would do a special benefit concert for her refuge at the Rainbow.

When we played at Lewisham Odeon young Zak Starkey, Ringo Starr’s son, came backstage looking worse for wear, with his sister. Outrageously, in spite of my own excesses, I took it upon myself to lecture him. He must have thought I was nuts. The second night Jackie Vickers came, and I played her my demo of ‘You Better You Bet’, the song I’d written for her at my Soho studio a few weeks before. As the tour rolled on all over Britain, show after show passed by in a haze of wonderment and alcohol.

My book publishing company was growing quickly, with books about David Bowie, Bob Marley, The Jam and Vivian Stanshall’s script for
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End
; the list included several books about Meher Baba, of course, and
Joys and Sorrows
, the autobiography of Pablo Casals, the famous cellist. Many of these books had been put together with journalists and photographers I knew from the music press. I myself began to write down the details of things I saw going on around me for the short stories I planned to publish.

In February Minta sent me a card:

Dear Daddy,

I miss you very much and I wish you would come home. I always feel unhappy when someone mentions your name. I am sorry to hear about the flu. I heard You Better You Bet on the radio and I like it. It’s not fair! Everybody else has got a dad who comes home at night. I hope you are not too worn out to come and see us again.

Love (etc).

Minta.

The poignancy of her plea punched a hole in the semi-fantasy I was living, but I couldn’t stop.

I persuaded my friend Peter Blake to do the artwork for
Face Dances
, due for release in March 1981. It would be the first record cover he had designed since The Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper
. He decided to ask twelve British artists each to produce a portrait of one member of the band. David Hockney, Ron Kitaj and Richard Hamilton – heroes of mine along with Peter himself – were among those who contributed. The album was released to limp reviews, though sales were good. Warner Brothers threw a lot of weight behind radio promotion and it paid off when ‘You Better You Bet’ became a hit. But something had passed between Roger and Kenney that had affected the spirit of the band. Behind the scenes, Roger pleaded with Bill to persuade John and me to remove Kenney.

Bill called a meeting in spring 1981. Roger confessed to Kenney that he couldn’t bear to work with him any more, and blamed him for what he saw as the primary defect of
Face Dances
– its lack of fire. Kenney claimed I had used the best songs available for
Empty Glass
, my first solo album. John blamed Bill Szymczyk, the album’s producer. I blamed the songs.

I always spoke to John about everything to do with the band’s creative direction, or its make-up. When we talked, the two of us would always summon the two thirteen-year-old boys from Acton with their cheap guitars, sitting together, eating their fish-and-chip suppers, fantasising about being as successful as The Shadows. Now John told me he was pleased with the new band, enjoyed hearing Rabbit’s inventive solos and liked the novelty of playing with Kenney, who kept the beat without decorating it. Like me, John was finding more space in The Who’s new sound, not less. We both welcomed the addition of brass as well.

If there was a real sense of The Who as a band when John and I sat together to talk, when we sat with Roger there was more the sense of a gang, with all that implies: loyalty, honour, history, self-sacrifice, courage, hard work and duty. Between John and me there really was no leader, but for the three of us in The Who, whether it was as band, brand or gang, Roger was the unquestionable leader. I controlled a lot of what we did because I wrote most of the songs, and by doing so greatly influenced the direction of the band’s music, but Roger was the leader, and always had been.

Why was this new system not working for Roger? Roger literally used to
dance
to Keith’s drums. He was balletic in his upper-body movements, just as I was balletic sometimes in my leaps and splits. (I once said to Roger that if you could combine his torso with my legs you’d have a hell of a man.) But when Kenney joined the band, Roger couldn’t dance to the music any more. He claimed that Keith had always followed the vocal line, and that he in turn
followed
Keith. And Keith was gone.

As I began to really stretch out on stage, I started to improvise. There was no ego involved, I was simply writing songs again while performing. Roger had an unerring knack for setting up a dynamic that generated an upward curve; we always ended in an anthemic or triumphant climax. He tended to favour the familiar songs that warmed up his voice, but this meant recycling our material from the past.

Below the surface things with The Who had taken a troubling turn, and I had no idea how to set them right. Kenney stayed, but the joy I had taken in the new Who had all but evaporated.

From my base in Soho I might start an evening at the John Snow pub. Bill Curbishley’s office was a short walk away and I often dropped in. WEA, the UK arm of our Warner Brothers record label in the USA, was on the same street, and Polydor Records was in nearby Oxford Street. My publishing company, Eel Pie Books, had offices on the top floor of the Soho studio. In the same building, Nick Logan, former editor of
New Musical Express
, became a tenant of mine, set up his huge art camera and began publishing
The Face
, the trendsetting lifestyle magazine. We were part of the creative and fashionable heartbeat of the city.