Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  There was a creative lull from me after Tommy, caused by the tumultuous flood of shows after its initial release, then Woodstock, and the mounting wave of enthusiasm triggered by the Woodstock movie. There was no time for me to form ideas for songs, and I had little energy left after our sets to sit around and play guitar. However, towards the end of every Who show I would play a few phrases finger-style, often down on one knee, with the audience silent, waiting for the explosion to come. On a single hearing, Keith and John chimed in powerfully, playing as though we’d been rehearsing the improvisation for a month. We were tight, coordinated and riffing in such a way that all Roger had to do was throw in a few moans and screams, pose gorgeously, and we were full on.

  Anything worth repeating I used in subsequent shows; then, over a week or so, Roger or I would come up with proper lines to sing. In this way we were developing new songs on the stage – and also inventing a new form of rock, though we didn’t really understand this at the time. Led Zeppelin later used a similar formula; I don’t know if they were as freestyle as we were, but the effect was similar.

  Our record company was demanding our cooperation in controlling bootleg recordings of our show. What they didn’t understand was that unlicensed recordings were being made by promoters as well as fans. Bill Graham recorded almost all of them, often using an on-site studio. Bob Pridden, our soundman, sometimes found pins inserted into stage cables leading off to makeshift recording bays. One such studio, in a box at Fillmore East in New York, hadn’t been sanctioned by Bill Graham, who was the promoter, so he hurled the bootleggers and their expensive recording gear down the fire escape. I don’t think any of us in the band knew, or cared, what might happen to all this music fifty years on. Graham knew it was important, though; he even discreetly filmed certain concerts.

  I found out from a fan that Who bootlegs were being passed around widely: six songs performed at Monterey in 1967; the second night of our two-day stint in April 1968 at the Fillmore East (the night we got thrown out of our favourite hotel in New York, when Keith set off cherry-bombs in the elevator that contained the manager’s wife); a set in New York supporting The Doors; another in Central Park; ten shows of varying quality and interest from 1969, including our set at the Fillmore, when I kicked the off-duty policeman off stage; and Woodstock, where I did the same to Abbie Hoffman and Michael Wadleigh.

  The Tommy demos had been partly recorded at my top-floor home studio in Ebury Street, in London, and completed at my new, cramped home studio in Twickenham. My home recordings may have been starting to sound as good as what we produced in the multi-track professional studio, but generally the equipment was still expensive, cumbersome and – worse – delicate. Two of the band’s stereo Vortexion tape recorders – good workhorse British machines, with military-grade components – were rugged enough so that I suggested to Bob Pridden that we carry one to record every show on the US tour. We would only have a stereo mix, but it could be refined throughout the tour, and we might get one really great show we could give to Decca, to beat the bootleggers to the punch.

  Back in September 1968, before we had released Tommy, following rumours I had started myself that we planned to release a live album before starting a new studio album after Tommy, Decca had rushed out a strange collection of tracks called Magic Bus: The Who on Tour. It was a catch-all, intended to capitalise on the rumours, and contained not a single live track, merely a collection of singles, B-sides and a few random album tracks.

  This time, in autumn 1969, I was convinced we’d have the album we wanted. Bob would record thirty shows in all. I couldn’t really fathom how he might get a good sound using a single tape machine, the PA mix and one or two additional microphones, but he did. The band was playing really well, and Bob’s recordings were superb. I listened to a few of Bob’s tracks myself in his hotel room. Together, with planning and enthusiasm, we had cracked it, technically speaking.

  Shortly after Christmas 1969, with the intimidating prospect of a number of Tommy shows at the very posh opera houses of Europe hanging over us, I met up with Bob. He had been holed up in a studio listening studiously to each of the thirty performances he had recorded.

  ‘So what have we got?’

  ‘There’s definitely an album here,’ he said.

  ‘So which show do you rate as the best?’

  ‘They’re all amazing, Pete.’

  ‘But which one stands out?’

  ‘They all sort of stand out. They’re all fantastic.’

  ‘So we should just pick one at random?’ I was being my usual acerbic self. ‘Let’s have a look at your notes.’

  Bob’s worried expression revealed the dilemma: he hadn’t taken any notes. After all, compiling albums wasn’t what he did for a living. I had asked him to listen and tell me what he thought, and that’s what he had done. Still, I was angry; there wasn’t enough time for us to wade through thirty shows again. Plus we now had an additional eight that Bob had recorded in England – including the most recent show at the London Coliseum. For me to listen to thirty-eight shows would take five days in a studio. Even with notes I would lose track. This live album was never going to happen if we didn’t do something, and fast.

  ‘After the opera houses, have we got any shows we could record here in the UK using a professional mobile rig?’

  ‘Leeds and Hull – Valentine’s Day weekend,’ replied Bob.

  ‘Hire an eight-track rig, record the two shows, I’ll mix them both at home on my new eight-track machine, and the best of the two nights will have to do.’ I had just further upgraded my home studio with a pro multi-track tape machine and new mixing desk.

  Bob was looking anxious again. ‘What shall I do with the live tapes from the tour?’

  Still irritated, I made one of the stupidest decisions of my life.

  ‘Destroy them,’ I snapped, and before leaving the room I uttered a warning. ‘And if I ever hear a bootleg of any of those tapes I will know where it came from.’

  This was terribly unfair to Bob, the most loyal of all Who employees and friends. It was also a dumb decision commercially and historically. I have long been chief protector of The Who archive, and those 1969 summer concerts in the US would have made a fabulous set of collectable shows – especially online as a complete cycle. They included the seven shows recorded in our Tommy week at the Fillmore in New York, and two wonderful performances at the Boston Tea Party, as well as other great nights.

  Bob faithfully destroyed them in a bonfire in his garden. During the process he phoned me to ask if he could preserve just one tape for posterity. Foolish and sarcastic to the end, I taunted him.

  ‘Ah! But which one are you going to preserve, Bob?’

  When I arrived at Leeds University Refectory on Valentine’s Day, 1970, where the first of the two new live recordings was to be made, I was surprised not to see a mobile vehicle of some kind. I had hoped we’d be using the recently built Rolling Stones Mobile. Instead, a junior engineer from Pye studios had showed up in a van with a bunch of bits and pieces in military-grade boxes, and was wiring them together in a room backstage. It hardly seemed an improvement on the basic rig Bob and I had dreamed up for the US tour, and I hoped there wouldn’t be any problems.

  The refectory (an eating place) wasn’t particularly large, and the packed crowd made the atmosphere intense and hot-house. University crowds were often irreverent and noisy, but at Leeds they respected the fact that we were recording, and behaved very well. The sound in the hall was good too. I played more carefully than usual and tried to avoid the careless bum notes that often occurred because I was trying to play and jump around at the same time. The next day we played a similar set in City Hall in Hull. This was another venue with a good acoustic for loud rock, but it felt less intense than the previous night.

  I had a few weeks free from engagements to mix and edit the two new live tapes, but it only took me two days. The first reel I put up, from Hull, had no bass guitar track. If I had listened to the sub
sequent reels I would have discovered that this was only an intermittent problem, that more and more of John’s playing had been safely recorded as the show went on. But it seemed such a tricky problem to fix that I moved quickly on to Leeds. Here the problem was that the backing vocals hadn’t been correctly recorded. I arranged a session at Pye studios, played the show back, and John and I simply sang along. We covered the backing vocals in one take, preserving the immediacy of the live concert.

  I didn’t discuss with anyone what we would put on the record. I’m not sure why I decided not to include any of Tommy. I fixed a few blips here and there before realising that the entire recording was blighted by loud clicks. Each one needed to be cut from the master reel, and there were about fifty such razor-blade edits. Many more minor clicks, and noises during quiet passages of music, I simply couldn’t fix. Chris added a note on the record label implying they had been left in deliberately. One questionable decision I made was not to try to pump up the audience’s applause. There had been no audience track recorded, so I just left it as it was, a flawed but accurate artefact.

  None of us in the band was ready for the overwhelmingly positive response to Live at Leeds. We’d thought of it as an interim record, as padding designed to quiet Decca and appease our fans. But this album vaulted us to yet another level. There is little doubt that the heavy guitar-driven energy on the record (the mainly hard-rock songs I chose to include), combined with John, Roger and Keith’s thunderous bravura musicianship, inspired the heavy-metal revolution that soon followed. The improvised blitz-riffing featured towards the end of the record and in the soloing on ‘Young Man Blues’ launched a thousand electric guitar bands in which crude force would be the main component of the music.

  Apart from ‘Amazing Journey’ there were no other songs from Tommy on the album, and the softer, more musical side of what we were doing at the time was set aside. Led Zeppelin were also working with a powerfully driving stage sound, but Jimmy Page was following the tradition of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. By comparison, Live at Leeds is more direct and spontaneous. Our intention was simply to blow you away.

  Nik Cohn, whose conversation with me had helped make Tommy accessible and less po-faced, wrote in the New York Times: ‘Tommy is rock’s first formal masterpiece. Live at Leeds is the definitive hard-rock holocaust. It is the best live rock album ever made.’ This was a glorious review, but after the critical success of Tommy it set another sky-high mountain of a benchmark that I’d need to transcend with whatever The Who recorded next.

  Could I do it? And if I could, what else would I then have to prove? Where else could my life go?

  ACT TWO

  A REALLY DESPERATE MAN

  Focusing on nowhere

  Investigating miles

  I’m a seeker

  I’m a really desperate man.

  ‘The Seeker’ (1970)

  Inside outside. Leave me alone.

  Inside outside. Nowhere is home.

  ‘5:15’ (1973)

  13

  LIFEHOUSE AND LONELINESS

  We were rock stars. All of us – Keith, John, Roger and I – had reasons to be happy, yet each of us was soon to suffer some kind of difficulty dealing with our new-found celebrity. What had happened? We were successful, hugely so. That success changed everything for us, for the band and for Kit and Chris.

  At the end of 1969 The Rolling Stones had suffered an awful, stigmatising tragedy when a fight broke out at their Altamont show near San Francisco, and a member of the Hell’s Angels, hired as security enforcers, was filmed stabbing a man to death. It seemed as though ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was coming back to haunt them. At the beginning of 1970 The Beatles split up. In contrast, The Who seemed to have the gods on our side.

  Looking back to 1965, when I believed The Who would only last a few years, I was amazed at our change in fortune. For the first five years of our career The Who had been struggling to compete with bands like The Move, The Kinks, The Pretty Things, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Free and The Small Faces, and we weren’t in the same league as the Stones or Beatles.

  Now, suddenly, we were on our own. This isn’t to say we were on top of any pile; but rather, we were out in open water when many of our equally serious peers seemed to be struggling to stay afloat in a sea of pop lightweights like Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, or The Herd. These bands were perfectly good, but they had no ambition to do anything adventurous. They just wanted hit singles. But by 1968 having a hit single seemed almost irrelevant – at best a dubious achievement – and before long some of the bigger rock bands would turn their backs on the singles charts completely.

  Yet by spring 1970, in the wake of Tommy and Live at Leeds, without any other musical project for the time being, no immediate ideas for a new large-scale work, I was emotionally and spiritually unsettled. This had probably been the most intense, vigorous and successful period of The Who’s career, and now that everything was slowing down a bit all eyes were turning back to me, the composer.

  The attention was challenging, and felt like an honour, and of course I was excited by the thought of creating some new, exciting project, but it was also disquieting and scary. From this point forward, my life was often fraught with the paradox of success and creativity. When I was brainstorming every day, searching deeply into myself – and the world around me, the past, the future, the band, its fans and music itself – for some kind of kick-start for inspiration, my actions sometimes seemed deranged and absurd.

  This wasn’t clinical schizophrenia, though in some ways it produced big mood-swings and compulsive behaviour in me. I was still a young man, learning a new trade as I went along, and I didn’t really understand the pressures on me, or the damage and confusion I might cause to those around me, especially to Karen.

  My spiritual longings, and continuing attachment to Meher Baba, were constantly under siege by all-too-worldly ambitions, undermined by residual scepticism and ambivalence, and challenged by my sexual yearnings. I didn’t know then that Meher Baba would have worried less about the sexual stuff than I did, as long as I was sincere about loving him and accepting him as my master.

  Even the addictions that would plague me for years seemed to have no internal consistency, regularity or logic. I could be sober and responsible for days, weeks, months, even years. I could behave with dignity, and take on a range of ambitious commitments that would lead me into new, exalted circles, not only musically but intellectually. I could strive to achieve – and even pioneer – radical acts on behalf of social change. And I could also behave, frankly, like a complete arsehole.

  In retrospect I can see that the desperate, chaotic and increasingly fragmentary nature of my life over the next twenty years was chillingly foretold in the lyrics of a song I was soon to write.

  As spring 1970 wore on I neglected my dentist, rarely cut my hair and never saw my doctor. I was trying to keep the band recording, and at one point invited them to my home studio for a week of work. But we all had small ideas compared to Tommy. My best efforts were ‘The Seeker’ and ‘Naked Eye’.

  I was writing songs purely for fun – we were all trying to have fun together too, as a band. Maybe that’s why it didn’t occur to me just how much the words of ‘The Seeker’ – a song about a man I could see in my mind’s eye as I wrote it, that wild-eyed Vietnam vet who grabbed Karen when we did our first tourist walk of Haight-Ashbury – reflected the impasse I was facing.

  People tend to hate me

  ’Cause I never smile

  As I ransack their homes

  They want to shake my hand

  Focusing on nowhere

  Investigating miles

  I’m a seeker

  I’m a really desperate man

  I learned how to raise my voice in anger

  Yeah, but look at my face, ain’t this a smile?

  I’m happy when life’s good

  And when it’s bad I cry

  I’ve got values but I don’t know how or why
<
br />   I’m looking for me

  You’re looking for you

  We’re looking in at each other

  And we don’t know what to do

  My characteristic stance on stage – the leaping, windmilling and wrecking of guitars – was by now a purely physical display of macho swagger, yet at a psychic level the Angry Yobbo, or hooligan, had seared himself into my soul, and I was still no wiser about where all that energy came from.

  That Angry Yobbo had also somehow penetrated the soul of The Who as a band, but here the effects were largely positive. Live at Leeds had made us realise just how potent we were as live musicians and performers. The Who were a unit, a machine, a force of nature. As a composer I was just beginning to understand how to harness the power of our stage sound, and balance it with light and shade when making an album. Ironically enough, the idea of variance of mood and tone on an album would soon be tossed away. Hugely successful bands like AC/DC would make album after album using precisely the same degree of intensity.

  As the number of big rock groups multiplied, each claimed a stratum of the available sound-field for themselves and guarded it jealously. Any artist straying into the territory of another would appear guilty of a lack of conviction. There were now two expectations of The Who that I could readily identify in our audience but had no idea how to reconcile. One was that for our next album we would produce some audacious new idea, a new Tommy. The other was that the album would rock the way Live at Leeds had rocked.

  If the band was playing as a unit, its internal machinery and its management seemed more at loggerheads than ever. If Roger and I (as well as Who fans) felt released by some of the raw power of Live at Leeds, Kit was still chasing the whale, as it were, of pop gimmicks. He was always egging Keith on to wilder publicity stunts, and me on to more arrogant statements to the press.