Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  In June 1970 Bill Graham persuaded the director of the Metropolitan Opera to host Tommy. Our shows there weren’t much to my taste, although I was proud to be there and confident we belonged. At Fillmore East during our week of Tommy shows in 1969 a smiling, elegant Leonard Bernstein had held me by the shoulders, looked into my eyes and asked me if I understood the importance of what I’d achieved. That same week Bob Dylan came to watch us. He’d said very little, but he was there, which said enough.

  At the Metropolitan Opera House we did our usual high-energy show, but we did it twice in one night. We also performed a short encore after the first set, which was quite unusual for us. After our even better second set we ended with a final burst of energy, like marathon runners crossing the finishing line. We had given it our all; we were physically, emotionally and creatively wrung out. But many people in the crowd had purchased tickets for both performances (the faces in the front ten rows hardly changed that night), and having enjoyed an encore in the first set they expected one in the second. They carried on shouting while we got out of our damp clothes and planned to unwind in our hotel.

  But Bill Graham had other ideas. He decided after fifteen minutes of cheering and stamping that we should go back on stage. I asked him to tell the audience to go home; he refused, so I did it myself. When the crowd realised what I was saying they started to jeer. I threw my mike stand into the pit and stalked off. I knew we’d done a good day’s work. Passing Bill in the hallway I looked him in the eye. ‘It’s easy to bring us on, Bill,’ I said. ‘It’s much harder to get us off.’ I still had a chip on my shoulder about the fact that the Fillmore East staff had failed to let us know about the backstage fire back in 1969, when I had ended up in court for kicking that cop.

  Bill Graham took a step towards me with steel in his eyes, but then he relaxed, shrugged and allowed me to win. It was good of him, because he was a very powerful man – and a pugilist who usually won his fights.

  We were soon back in the bear pit, and it was a big one, as we went from the pre-eminent US opera house to a baseball stadium outside LA. The Beatles had played New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965, but this was still a rarity among rock bands. John Sebastian opened for us, and was perfect for the ‘bring blankets and sit on the grass’ atmosphere of the event. He was gregarious and talented, a fantastic harmonica player as well as a gifted songwriter.

  Kit’s advice in our first year together had been to run onto the stage as though it was the place we most wanted to be in the world. He advised us to wear stage clothes, and to use exaggerated movements that would allow our energy on stage to be read by audience members at the very back of a large venue. I always favoured white or light blue, and often wore white trousers. Keith did the same for many years. Roger made himself seem bigger by wearing a lot of fringe that rhymed with his long flowing hair. John wore eccentric tailored outfits, suits made from the Union Jack flag and later a leather one with a white skeleton painted to scale.

  But what really made us work at long distance, apart from how loud we were and the epic nature of some songs, was the athleticism displayed by Roger, Keith and myself: Keith throwing sticks high in the air and standing at the kit; Roger swinging his microphone and bashing it into cymbals; me leaping, jump-kicking and swinging my arm in a windmill. And through it all, as if to anchor the experience, John stood like an oak tree in the middle of a tornado.

  Our next two shows were at the intimate Berkeley Community Theater, small, modern, with light wood-panelled walls and a sparkling acoustic. These shows were also produced by Bill Graham, who seemed determined to heal any rift between us. He not only laid on the most delicious steak and cheese fondue for us, but he solicitously cooked a selection for me himself.

  On the first night, when Roger sang ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me’, the lights went down and a single, very tight spot illuminated his face. Then, as we launched into the slow-build finale, a curtain behind us went up and three massive Klieg lights, the kind used on Hollywood Boulevard for a film première, roamed the audience with their white-hot glare. For a moment the crowd didn’t know what to make of it, but one by one they stood up, acknowledging that the music belonged as much to them as it did to us, until every single soul was standing. It was a brilliant piece of lighting design.

  The real surprise was yet to come. On the second night, after another successful show, Bill took me aside and told me that if we had space in our truck the lamps were ours. We hired a special truck to carry them away. Bill Graham had redeemed himself.

  In LA we stayed at a motel with rooms arranged around a pool. John Sebastian, whom I had wrongly taken for a New Yorker (he was born there), showed up for a visit with his new girlfriend. Catherine was a stunning blonde with penetrating eyes and an amazing mouth, always smiling. She seemed too young for him, probably 18 or 19, but otherwise a perfect foil for the charismatic Sebastian. It turned out that they had bought a little house in Tarzana; their shared obsession was tie-dye. John, egged on by Catherine, asked me for one of my white boiler-suits so they could tie-dye it for me.

  John also wanted to play me his latest song, a work-in-progress. He picked up a guitar and shuffled his chair near to me, so that he was, I felt, as an Englishman, rather too close. Look at the photos of John and the young Dylan playing together in Doug Gilbert’s sublime photo book Forever Young. They each hold the other’s gaze, merely inches apart. They share a level of intimacy I yearned for but was unable to cope with in reality. John looked into my eyes, held my gaze and began.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he sang. The song was lovely, but it put me in excruciating discomfort, seeming to be aimed at me in particular. I thought back to my friend Richard Stanley, and how he had misinterpreted my playing him ‘Welcome’ from Tommy. Now it was my turn.

  Catherine lay back on the bed looking like Monroe reborn. I would have happily gazed at her, but John’s earnest eyes held me in a vice. When the song was finished, he asked what I thought of it; did I have anything to contribute? I was almost ready to scream. For whatever reason, this level of intimacy between musicians and fellow songwriters has never been possible for me. Suffocated by feelings, I was unable to say a word. Catherine got up, they said their affectionate goodbyes, grabbed my white boiler-suit and left.

  Alone in my room I drank too much that night, and tried to work out why it was that after half a bottle of cognac I felt such regret at not being able to manage co-writing. The truth is that, drunk or sober, it’s out of my emotional range. I’m a loner, and never more so than when I’m in creative mode. I fell into a stupor and dreamt about John Sebastian’s girlfriend.

  The next morning I rolled over to face the sunshine streaming through thin motel curtains. My heart pounded: there was a shadow at the window. Someone was there. No. A body. Someone, some insane fool, had actually hanged themselves right outside my room. I could picture the rope tied to the canopy frame above my door, the lolling head, the torso, legs, feet. I watched tensely and saw no movement through the curtains except for a flickering shadow – the gentle, almost imperceptible sway of a body in the breeze. This, I thought, is what happens when you fuck with basic morality, even in your dreams. I leapt from the bed, grabbed the phone and dialled the front desk. ‘Something terrible, terrible’, was all I could say.

  When I heard the motel manager’s footsteps approaching my door, I nervously opened it and peeked out across to the window.

  Keith? Kit?

  It was my freshly tie-dyed boiler-suit stuffed with newspaper, complete with a large grinning Halloween pumpkin head and a pair of orange work boots.

  Benefits from our new fame didn’t follow us everywhere. In Memphis we were thrown off a plane and threatened with arrest. The pilot had emerged from his cockpit red-faced to demand who had used the ‘b— word’. I put up my hand – I’d told Pete Rudge that Live at Leeds was going down a bomb, and the young flight attendant had overheard me and misunderstood the British meaning of the word. She was in tears.

 
A few days later we were in Cleveland with our friends Joe Walsh and the James Gang, who supported us for five shows in June and July. My old friend Tom Wright, from art-school days, travelled from Detroit for the Cincinnati shows. I have a cassette recording of the entire evening, with Joe Walsh and me playing acoustic guitars together, exchanging songs and getting very drunk.

  In Columbia, Maryland, I arranged to buy a sleek-looking Dodge Travco 28-foot motorhome, and ship it back to Britain. I called Karen and told her about it, promising we could afford it, and that I’d find somewhere to park it in our narrow suburban street. She loved the idea.

  After the Columbia show one of John’s groupie frolickers attached herself to me; in a boozy haze I didn’t tell her to scram. In fact my heart revved with anticipation and ambivalence. We talked for a while in my room and it became clear she was well read and smart. I could have asked her – gently and kindly, of course – to leave, but I didn’t. After she took off her clothes and I took her in my arms, I quietly called her the devil. What could she have thought I meant by that?

  A week later I was back home. I had demanded a two-week break from touring, and Karen had found a holiday cottage for rent on an island called Osea, in the Blackwater Estuary of Essex. All the properties on the island, including ours, were sadly run-down, and the weather was vile. Towser, our spaniel, ran into the sea and grabbed a heavy piece of driftwood that was far too big for him; unwilling to let go, he began drowning, so I had to dive in and save him. In the process I swallowed a small jellyfish; the water was full of them.

  The cottage had no TV or radio; it was so cold that we huddled together, making love passionately but with chattering teeth, like Russian peasants in a Tolstoy novel; Karen said our second daughter Minta was conceived there, probably helped along by jellyfish protein.

  Although this time was supposed to be a break, I had given myself a creative mission during the holiday to set Meher Baba’s Universal Prayer to music. I succeeded, and it felt like a cosmic sign. One other job I had brought with me on holiday was journalistic. Ray Coleman, Melody Maker’s editor, had commissioned me to write fortnightly articles about music and anything else that interested me. I had enjoyed reviewing a few records in 1969, praising the début albums of Mott the Hoople and King Crimson. I had also taken to writing letters to the music papers whenever something niggled me. ‘Pete! You’ve been writing letters again!’ Ronnie Lane would say; Keith Richards sent a handwritten scrawl asking if we could be pen pals.

  My first Melody Maker article, written during the Osea holiday, was published shortly after. ‘I’m beginning my first page of this bulky journal in particularly strange surroundings … far away from the sounds of London’s traffic and Keith Moon, on an island in the Blackwater estuary called Osea.’ I went on with an unabashed plug for my buddy Joe Walsh, and the James Gang.

  Why was I doing this at all? I had a day job in a band, and my free time was almost entirely packed. I was supporting the Meher Baba Association and attending meetings; developing Trackplan, a company I formed with record producer John Alcock to build home studios for my pop-star buddies; I was recording an album with Thunderclap Newman; and involved in a film cooperative called Tattooist, writing their film music and even delivering a lecture for one of them at an art college. But when The Who were between engagements I was incapable of slowing down and spending time at home. I was a workaholic, running away from the present, and probably the past, because something about my life made me uneasy – I was myself a really desperate man.

  At a time when I could have been supremely happy I was feeling ashamed about being an adulterer, and oddly guilty about my professional success.

  Writing for Melody Maker I was at least being honest about one of my principal defects: I loved the sound of my own prattling. But it was more than just that. In his manifesto for the Ealing Art College Ground Course, Roy Ascott had used the word ‘feedback’ in a creative context. Feedback, he said, could be seen as the way an artist might evolve and deepen a creative project by observing the reactions of those who viewed your work or took part in it. With Tommy the feedback system began with Kit, and included Richard Stanley and Mike McInnerney. Even before my bandmates had fixed on the real picture behind Tommy and helped to make it happen, I had brainstormed with two smart, open-minded journalists, Rolling Stone magazine’s Jann Wenner and John Mendelsohn.

  Through my 1970 Melody Maker articles I hoped to do this again, but with clearer focus. The feedback I had enjoyed with Jann and John would be replaced by feedback from Who fans who would read my brainstorms and get involved. I would reproduce their responses in the Melody Maker articles, and a fertile creative loop would establish itself that would feed The Who its next big breakfast.

  In all of this I overlooked one important fact. If I couldn’t share my ideas too soon with the guys in the band, because they were so resistant to grappling with my awkward, often intensely secretive creative process, how did I expect our fans to help me? The journalists I’d worked with were used to brainstorming and creative risk-taking. They had closed the circle when The Who went on to do so many spectacular live performances of Tommy, underscoring my original aims, giving me a feeling that I had known where I was heading all along with Tommy, when in fact it had been a leap into the unknown. I could reach Who fans through Melody Maker, but how would they reach me back?

  I conceived the idea of Lifehouse in August 1970 in my big new camper bus, in which I stayed for a few days after playing the third Isle of Wight Festival. Although the complete story didn’t come together for another year, it was essentially one of a dystopia, a nightmare global scenario, a modern retelling of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. My hero in Lifehouse would be a good man, an advanced soul who would make a bad mistake and suffer the karmic repercussions. In the dark future I visualised in Lifehouse, humanity would survive inevitable ecological disaster by living in air-filtered seclusion in pod-like suits, kept amused and distracted by sophisticated programming delivered to them by the government. As with Tommy, people’s isolation would, in my story, prove the medium for their ultimate transcendence.

  In my draft, I touched on some of the major anxieties of the times. When the Earth’s ecosystem collapsed, its inhabitants would have to drastically reduce their demands on the resources of the world. Only through submission to a police state would we survive. The allied governments of the world would join forces to demand that ordinary folk accept a long enough period of hibernation in the care of computers, in order to allow the planet to recover.

  What would make forced hibernation, plugged into a mainframe called the Grid,* bearable? Only virtual experience, piped in through digital technology. What would free people from this forced hibernation? Live music and the Lifehouse. Rock music would be quickly identified by the controllers of the Grid as problematical. Because of its potential to awaken the dormant masses, rock music would be strictly banned.

  A group of renegades and nerds would set up a rock concert, experimenting with complex feedback systems between the audience and the musicians, and hack into the Grid. People from everywhere would be drawn to the Lifehouse, where each person would sing their own unique song to produce the music of the spheres, a sublime harmony that would become what I called ‘the one perfect note’. When the authorities stormed the Lifehouse, everyone would have disappeared into a kind of musical nirvana.

  The Mysticism of Sound, a book written in the 1920s by Inayat Khan, a musician who became a Sufi spiritual teacher, was my inspiration for the story’s musical solution. The core of my idea was that we could all hear this music – and compose it – if only we would truly listen.

  The idea of dystopian bleakness that could only be redeemed by creative fantasy† resonated with me at a deep, personal, psychological level. I knew there was a manic-depressive element to my personality, a seasonal swing in my psyche between periods of emotional bleakness (forced hibernation) and the dynamic creative activity (the Lifehouse) that served to pull me out o
f the void. I had always relied on my imagination and creativity to see me through the lowest points, the darkest days of my childhood, and later at school, art college and the early days with The Who. I had come to rely on this mechanism to fly me out of danger and depression, like the air-sea rescue of a drowning man.

  Before I could complete the story The Who were back on the road, playing a ten-day tour of Europe. The first show was in Munich, where during the improvisational part of ‘My Generation’ I started experimenting with completely new guitar work. I wanted to take the band into deeper musical terrain, and all three of my bandmates struggled to find a way into what I was doing. During the rest of the shows on this tour, and a set that followed in the UK, I continued to push hard to create mesmeric arpeggio effects on my guitar, leading into uplifting heavy riffs. Bob Pridden became like a third hand for me. He set up a series of complex fluttering echo effects, and by listening very carefully to what I played he introduced these at perfectly chosen moments.

  The sound I heard on stage was wonderful, soaring, stratospheric, intoxicating. One otherwise appreciative reviewer remarked that my freeform work went off at too many tangents, but musical tangents were precisely what I was trying to explore.

  In my second Melody Maker piece, published a few weeks after the Isle of Wight festival, I began my creative feedback experiment.

  Here’s the idea, there’s a note, a musical note that forms the basis of existence somehow. Mystics would say it is OM, but I am talking about a MUSICAL note. […] Do you hear it? I think you must, particularly the allegedly musical lot who read Melody Maker. Probably all musicians or music lovers, i.e.: people with trained ears waggle waggle. They all hear it. Musicians have to learn to listen before they can begin to learn to play. I think it’s the hardest part, the listening part. Probably why so many people involved in music are attracted to pot smoking, it helps one to listen.‡