When I was handed my ticket to Sydney at Heathrow I saw it was tourist class, and turned around to catch a taxi home. We had been promised first-class seats. John Wolff (known as Wiggy), our production manager, chased after me, persuading me that we’d all hang together and the flight would be a piece of cake. It was Wiggy’s job to get us to the shows; not his fault, but the flight was shocking, with four long stops along the way. When we arrived, shattered after thirty-six hours of travel, we were surprised to meet an aggressive group of journalists who put us through an inquisition. Roger had taken to wearing a large crucifix at the time, and one of the reporters, clearly drunk, thought this was religious hypocrisy. I was challenged for looking unkempt. ‘Couldn’t you even brush your hair to meet your young fans?’ There were no young fans anywhere in sight, just these arsehole hacks, fresh from a long stint at the bar.
It was a shock for which we could have been prepared: artists far more conventional than we had suffered a similar fate. The shows proved to be as difficult as our shoddy, half-baked trips to Sweden. We had our big amplifiers and guitars this time, but not the big PA system we used in Britain to get Roger’s vocals across. The sound wasn’t good. When we began to smash equipment the technicians at each venue seemed completely unprepared, and the newspapers began a ferocious campaign of ridicule.
We didn’t really care. The halls were almost sold to capacity, and we were having fun. I was enjoying hanging out with Ronnie Lane. Steve Marriott found a ravishing girl called Rosie, and when I chatted with her she asked me what I was interested in at the time. When I told her I had decided to become a follower of an almost unknown Indian teacher called Meher Baba, she said, ‘Oh, yes. I follow him, too.’ She reached into a pocket and gave me a little button bearing his image.
I was stunned. I had no idea Meher Baba had made several visits to Australia – it turned out there were several well-established centres there. It seemed too extraordinary to be coincidence, and cemented two jetlagged ideas in my mind: that I had made the right choice in Meher Baba and the wrong choice in Karen, for here before me was a very sexy girl who shared my new spiritual enthusiasm precisely. Unsurprisingly, we ended up sleeping together. I was very affected by Rosie and wrote a song about her (that I never played for her) called ‘Sensation’.
She overwhelms as she approaches
Makes your lungs hold breath inside
Lovers break caresses for her
Love enhanced when she’s gone by
Who fans will recognise the lyric: I adapted it with a gender switch for use in Tommy.
On a flight from Sydney to Melbourne the flight attendant was uncomfortable dealing with us, and when the coffee trolley passed down the aisle she didn’t serve any of the band. When English singer Paul Jones complained, she said she thought we had our own refreshments, pointing to the Australian musician sitting next to me happily drinking his own beer. When Jones wasn’t mollified, she ran to complain to the pilot, who emerged looking angry and determined. Naturally he took her side, telling us that as soon as the plane landed we would be thrown off and arrested.
The truth didn’t make a good enough rock ’n’ roll story, so in the media retelling I became a leading figure in the events on the plane. In fact I first piped up when we were held by the police after landing; I challenged them to arrest us or let us go. They let us go. A few days later we were handed a telegram from the Australian Prime Minister himself, informing us that because of our misbehaviour he was withholding our tour receipts against damages. He also requested that we never again return to Australia.
The news of our ‘misbehaviour’ preceded us to New Zealand, where the hotel manager in Wellington warned us on arrival that he wouldn’t stand any nonsense. Refused room service, or even a bowl, I ate the breakfast cereal I purchased from the corner shop out of the sink.
There were lighter moments. Steve Marriott had a birthday party and decided to do a Keith Moon and throw a TV set off his balcony. It landed on the pavement just as a police car drove by. The police came directly to our room, and we opened the door thinking we were done for. To our astonishment they were very cheery, didn’t even mention the TV set, wished Steve a happy birthday and left us a case of beer so we ‘wouldn’t think the Kiwis were as inhospitable as them miserable Ozzies’.
When we prepared to leave New Zealand for Hawaii, Rosie broke down. ‘Everyone leaves me behind when they go home.’ I was unhappy too, although distracted by her use of the word ‘everyone’. When I got home I decided that in keeping with our new agreement – we had pledged to be absolutely honest at the very least – I must tell Karen what had happened. On some level I probably hoped it would send her a message that I wouldn’t make a good husband, and that maybe we should both make other plans.
When I asked Karen if I could speak to her about something very important, she arranged herself in the Soo Choo Mandarin Throne, a grand wicker throne from Liberty’s, one of the very first bits of furniture we had purchased together for our new home. She sat with legs crossed, looking very regal indeed, not to mention formidable. As I began to mumble, she picked something up from her lap. It was a letter. I knew immediately it was from Rosie. In an instant Karen had trumped my intended admission with her own forgiveness. There was no great moratorium, no dramatic declarations or intimidation. Implicit in the tense exchange that followed was the expectation that we’d now stop pretending and get married.
It may appear that I agreed to marry Karen out of guilt, but in fact it was important for me to ground myself in the reality of my life in London. Australia was a long way away. I had been a fool. My future wife was beautiful and smart, and we had a good life together. This didn’t diminish the pleasure of my dalliance with an exotic girl on the other side of the world, but I was home now, looking at Karen, and I felt damned lucky to have her.
I felt certain that radio stations in the States would adore The Who Sell Out – it was, after all, a tribute to their power and influence. But Joe Bogart, director of WMCA, New York’s biggest radio station, called our album ‘disgusting’ and said he had ‘grave doubts anyone would play it’. It seemed I’d got it wrong once again.
Burying myself in work, I brought my brothers Paul and Simon to my studio – they were both anxious to be musicians – and recorded them. I also recorded a little gem of a song in the style of Brian Wilson in Smiley Smile called ‘Going Fishing’, suggesting that even a bream can impart useful wisdom if only we would listen. I was going a bit soft. I went greyhound racing with Chris Morphet, taking me back to my childhood with Dad at White City. In the warm glow of domesticity I wrote two songs, ‘Dogs’ and ‘Welcome’, the latter about the value of friends. When I played the demo to Richard Stanley, who was lodging with us for a few weeks, he thought I was using the song to invite him to partake in a ménage à trois.
The Who were in and out of studio sessions in the first months of 1968, Kit pushing as usual to cobble something together out of thin air. I went along with it, but I was secretly planning to sweep all this nonsense aside – and soon.
We toured America again at the end of February, by bus. In my notebook I wrote my first plan for what would become Tommy. Our first shows were in California and I went a few days early to meet Rick Chapman, who ran Meher Baba Information out of Berkeley; he drove me to our first show in San Jose in his massive old 1959 Lincoln Continental. En route he explained that Meher Baba had counted marijuana among those drugs he wished sincere followers to stop abusing, so I began to wean myself off it.
Rick smoked little Indian cigarettes called beedies, which I used for many years as a substitute for pot. They were foul-smelling and tasted almost as bad, but the nicotine hit was enormous. The Who stayed in North America until April, hitting Canada for the first time, meeting real Mods on scooters in Edmonton and finding authentic English beer in Toronto.
I was already bored with bus-tour life despite someone in the band bringing on an extremely good-looking, effervescently crazy girl. Keith strip
ped her naked, tied her to a seat with loose ribbons and pretended to rape her. When I worriedly intervened, she was the one who told me to ‘fuck off’.
After she’d romped around the bus naked for seven hours between Toronto and Edmonton, I was feeling pretty stirred up, and when we arrived at our hotel, and she knocked on my room door, my vanity got the better of me. In fact, Keith and John, who thought I was stuck up around groupies, had paid her $100 if she would share her gonorrhea with me.
She was gorgeous. We had great sex. I caught the clap, and took the injection. I couldn’t afford to be angry – this was rock ’n’ roll ‘hi-jinks’ and in a way I was pleased to be included.
Karen Astley and I got married on 20 May, the day after my birthday. The party was held at Karen’s parents’ country house, where Richard Stanley jumped in the pool with his clothes on, but Keith Moon was well behaved. Mum wore a perfect hat. Linda and Lesley, two young Mod fans, were the only gatecrashers.
The chauffeur of the old Rolls I hired for the wedding turned out to be Great Uncle Pat Dennis, Granddad Maurice’s youngest brother. I had never met him before until we got under way, when he turned and shouted an introduction through the glass. He got extremely drunk at the party, and at the end of the night I drove him home in the Rolls.
I cut down my drinking, and had stopped smoking grass. I was certainly changing. Kit was terribly sniffy about my Meher Baba interest, and began to make jokes about Karen and me setting up home together in our new Georgian house in Twickenham, calling us Lord and Lady Townshend. He claimed he’d been standing in the rain one day trying to hail a taxi, and we’d sailed right past him in my Lincoln Continental as he waved his arms to catch our attention.
In June, on Karen’s birthday, I bought her a spaniel puppy called Towser. We all know what the acquisition of a puppy signifies for a young couple – and sure enough, shortly afterwards she became pregnant. A life with children was not Kit’s idea of a well-laid plan. He thought it would spell the end of my career with The Who. In retrospect, I should at least have expected the chaos that was to ensue.
One of the important documents I referred to while writing Tommy was a diagram I had sketched of the beginning and end of seven journeys involving rebirth. I was attempting two ambitious stunts at once: to describe the disciple/master relationship and, in a Hermann Hesse-style saga of reincarnation, to connect the last seven lives of that disciple in an operatic drama that ended in spiritual perfection. In ‘Deaf, Dumb and Blind Boy’ I borrowed from Meher Baba’s teachings to underpin ideas I’d been playing with during the previous year of psychedelia.*
Each time the child/disciple Tommy is reborn, he returns with new inner wisdom, but still his life is full of struggle. Since the boy’s ignorance of his spiritual growth is a kind of disability, I decided my deaf, dumb and blind hero could be autistic. This way, when I wanted to demonstrate the glorious moment of his God-realisation, I could simply restore to my hero the use of his senses. It was a good plan; the boy’s sensory deprivation would work as a symbol of our own everyday spiritual isolation.
At the very moment I began to gather what I needed to make sense of my story, The Who set off on a gruelling tour of the States, and in the process I lost valuable time. I had talked about rock opera to everyone who would listen, and, though I’m sure that, as with guitar feedback, many others had the same idea around the same time, I hoped we’d be the first rock band with a major thematic work. But as we began the tour I knew that wouldn’t happen.
Some photos of the tour show me jumping up four feet in the air holding a Les Paul guitar and wearing high-top Doc Marten work boots. I was astonishingly fit, and it was a good thing, too, for in the years to come my cast-iron constitution and athletic body, honed purely on the stage with The Who, would be my only protection from the rigours of alcohol abuse and extreme overwork. Keith, equally fit from stage work, had moved into using complex cocktails of drugs and alcohol. However, one of the great consolations of being on a boring tour was that he was so funny most of the time, as was Wiggy, our production manager who had been promoted from John and Keith’s chauffeur.
Poor Wiggy. His worst moment was pulling us off a plane from Calgary to Saskatoon in Canada because the baggage handlers couldn’t get our stage equipment into the hold. We then spent the entire day without food or drink waiting for an old cargo charter plane to take us to the show with our gear. When we got there the audience, kept waiting for four hours by a promoter unwilling to return their ticket money, watched us troop gloomily onto the stage to rush off a thirty-minute show that, ironically, we played with someone else’s gear. For years after that, Wiggy could make us laugh simply by comparing a venue with Saskatoon – a bit unfairly, really, given how patient and forgiving the audience had been.
‘Magic Bus’ was released in late July in the States. It didn’t do very well at first, but would later become the most requested song at our live shows, along with John’s ‘Boris the Spider’. In Detroit I met up again with my old art-school buddy Tom Wright, who now managed the Grande Ballroom there. He lived in the old skating rink, washed his grey sweatshirts in the toilet sink, ate tuna out of the can and lent us roller skates so we could zoom around the ballroom floor.
We played several shows with The Troggs, whose hit single ‘Wild Thing’ had been borrowed by Jimi Hendrix. A show with The Doors marked the first time I’d met Jim Morrison, who was respectful, but very drunk. During The Doors’ show a girl ran on stage and tried to touch Jim’s face. He was startled and turned suddenly; two bouncers misinterpreted his action and threw the girl into the barrier, cutting her face quite badly. Jim hauled her back out again and she was brought backstage, where I was among those who comforted her. The incident became the inspiration for my song for Tommy called ‘Sally Simpson’.
In California I met a whole group of Meher Baba lovers from the Bay area through my friend Rick Chapman. I was stunned at how many there were. They weren’t brainwashed, nor obviously religious in any way. They’d lived hard, done drugs, had lots of sex and decided to hunker down to follow Meher Baba. They were a mixed bunch, often eccentric (which I regarded as a positive), and also very real. The more of his adherents I met, and the more I learned about Meher Baba, the more convinced I became that I’d found a genuine master.
In San Francisco I hung out with Jann Wenner one evening at the home of Jack Casady from Jefferson Airplane. Jack and his friends were doing cocaine, while Jann was there with his friend Boz Scaggs. I shared my thoughts about Tommy, using the opportunity to work it through in my own mind.
‘It’s a story about a kid that’s born deaf, dumb and blind, and what happens to him throughout his life. The boy is played by The Who. He’s represented musically by a theme that we play, which starts off the opera itself, followed by a song describing the boy. But what it’s really all about is the fact that the boy exists in a world of vibrations. This allows the listener to become profoundly aware of the boy and what he is all about, because he’s being created by the vibrations of The Who’s music as we play.†
‘It’s a very complex thing,’ I said, ‘and I don’t know if I’m getting it across.’
Jann assured me I was. We talked long into the night. Jann recorded what I said and published it a month later, spread over two issues of Rolling Stone, San Francisco’s newest magazine.
By September 1968 Karen and I were ensconced in our new Twickenham home. For the first months we lived there we fell in love with it over and over again. The house had been built around 1745. The layout was delightful and traditional. Above a narrow kitchen extension a small anteroom had been turned into my new studio. The house was small, and I kept all my clutter in the cellar. I had to get used to working in my studio in cramped conditions with limited resources, but Karen and I were happy.
In winter 1968 we experienced our first serious flood. Heavy rain had swollen the Thames, and when it reached the tiny windows to the cellar it started to rush in. In the street, cars were being submer
ged, some being carried off down the river. People were panicking, trying to save their cars or rescue what was inside them, in some shocking instances their kids or pets. I was home at the time, and had been partly prepared for the deluge, but it got dark during the worst of the flooding and water kept pouring in.
The situation made it impossible to keep up my normal studio work, or to even store my instruments where I needed them. This generated an almost apocalyptic mood in me for a number of weeks – more high tides were predicted and one did fill the basement again, this time harmlessly because we’d emptied it of valuables. The rather upbeat tone of my first sketches of Tommy, with its hero seeking to find a way through the spiritual planes, and gathering affectionate followers around him as he went, was replaced with a rather less benign view that was harder, closer to Hesse’s hero Siddhartha’s tough lessons at the feet of the ferryman.
It was asking a lot of this small house to expect it to provide a home as well as a working recording studio. My recording kit was now squeezed into one end of the tiny anteroom I had made my control room. At the opposite end my Bechstein upright piano – rented from Harrods – barely fit across the back wall. I had the same sound system at home as I did on the road: Sound Dimension speaker cabinets originally intended to be used with organs, capable of adding glorious reverb effects, as well as a mysterious quality to acoustic guitar. Sometimes the entire house would vibrate with sound when I was recording. My neighbours opposite were destined to spend the next four years listening to my demos and experimental recordings, but they were paragons, and never once complained.
Who I Am: A Memoir Page 14
