Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  When John started work on the brass parts, he gathered for the purpose at least twenty or thirty magnificent trumpets, horns and valve trombones. He could play all of them, writing out his parts on manuscript paper like an orthodox composer, and working through the recording meticulously until his lips started to go numb. He was wonderful to work with, disciplined, funny and inspired. What he arranged and played on a whole variety of exotic brass instruments fitted my own synthesiser and strings arrangements perfectly. The Who members still had that one all-important facility when we were making music: we listened to each other.

  The rule we established during recording was that energetic musical rage would be used throughout. We didn’t need throwaway tracks for light relief, we didn’t need light and shade, irony or humour. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extraordinary range of human emotion: withering sadness, self-pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage and frustration, joy and triumph.

  The angst of those teenage years in which we all feel misunderstood is easy to make fun of, but it’s real, and it brings my hero Jimmy to the brink of suicide. When, at the end of the album version of the Quadrophenia story, Jimmy steals a boat and takes it out to a rock in the middle of the sea, his anguished but jubilant cry, ‘Love reign o’er me’, suggests that he has finally been able to integrate his multiple selves. Even as author and composer I realised I had no right to decide whether or not Jimmy should end his own life. I let Jimmy decide for himself.

  Studio recording was completed by 1 August. Mixing began at my studio in a barn two days later. I was excited by this move, and looked forward to creating the soundscapes I felt would transform the music we’d just recorded into a stunning sonic journey. When finished it would provide us with a rock-opera piece cohesive enough to replace – even improve on – Tommy as the backbone of our stage show.

  I spent part of the summer recording sound effects: rain, storms, thunder, trains, traffic and of course the sea. I also commissioned a radio announcer to cover the Mods and Rockers battles on the beaches, and recorded myself walking along a beach singing the first few lines of ‘Sea and Sand’ to use as a prelude. Taping birds taking off on the river was a major coup, and I had a lucky moment as I approached a gaggle of geese in my punt. This kind of sound design is almost as fulfilling to me as composing music.

  Mixing ran from 3 August to 12 September. There were a few short breaks for business, family (as it was the holiday season) and catching up on the quadrophonic technology I hoped would allow me to do a quad remix once we’d completed the stereo. This was the most intensely creative and demanding studio work I had ever done.

  Thus far, by mid-September 1973, every part of my evolving plan for Quadrophenia had unfolded gloriously. Apart from Keith’s occasional antics the band had supported me, given me creative space and done the most extraordinary work in the studio. All we needed was a month and we might have finished things properly. Instead, I was shocked to read in the press that the UK release date of the double album was less than a month away, on 13 October, with the first tour date a little more than two weeks later.

  I still had to complete the quadrophonic mixes that I estimated would take about a month. And I’d figured that the rest of the work we had to do – mastering the stereo album in Los Angeles, mastering a quadrophonic version, preparing quadrophonic backing tapes for our stage rehearsals, rehearsing and getting the show on the road – would take us through the winter. I’d imagined we would probably tour the album in spring 1974, but the idiots at Track couldn’t bear to miss the lucrative Christmas selling period, and forced the premature release date.

  I should say, in their defence, that the idiots at Track were as deeply in the red financially as The Who by this time, so their decision was probably necessary to keep the company afloat. Building Ramport studio had cost £330,000 at the time of opening (nearly ten times that at today’s standards). Roger was on edge. He had been harbouring grave doubts about our manager’s honesty.* The heavy spending – of his fellow band members, and Wiggy for the new studio – was driving Roger crazy.

  Tension was building for me, too. When I rushed from Cleeve to Shepperton with stage tapes that had taken forty-eight hours to prepare, having had no sleep at all, and Roger announced he had waited long enough and was about to go home, I flipped. It wasn’t Roger’s fault, but I lashed out at him, trying to give him the Abbie Hoffman treatment with the neck of the guitar, while a film crew recorded for posterity every move we made. Roger responded by knocking me out.

  Some observers claim I arrived drunk. Yes, Bob and I had celebrated finishing the stage tapes with a brandy in my limo, but on this occasion it would have been mainly exhaustion and frustration, not booze, that was ailing me.

  Critical reaction to Quadrophenia’s October 1973 release was relatively muted compared with the raging success of Tommy, but over the years it has come to be seen as superior to Tommy both musically and conceptually, and as my ‘redemption’ after the collapse of Lifehouse.† The album sleeve note ends this way:

  So that’s why I’m here, the bleeding boat drifted off and I’m stuck here in the pissing rain with my life flashing before me. Only it isn’t flashing, it’s crawling. Slowly. Now it’s just the bare bones of what I am.

  A tough guy, a helpless dancer.

  A romantic: is it me for a moment?

  A bloody lunatic. I’ll even carry your bags.

  A beggar, a hypocrite, love reign over me.

  Schizophrenic? I’m Bleeding Quadrophenic.

  Roger was the helpless dancer; John, the romantic; Keith, the bloody lunatic; and I, needless to say, was the beggar/hypocrite. But the four aspects of Jimmy the Mod’s multiple personality were, in a sense, all to be found in me, and I had always known it.

  I had spent money creating a quadrophonic PA system similar to that used at the time by Pink Floyd. Again Roger was concerned about the cost, being particularly attuned to the financial chaos that surrounded us. We all had a longstanding gripe with Kit and Chris over the fact that seven years previously we had allowed our recording contract to be vested with Track (instead of directly with Polydor). We had thought that we would be partners or shareholders: this never happened. Jimi Hendrix was their biggest signing by far, but I’d brought them two No. 1 artists in Arthur Brown and Thunderclap Newman, and had received no royalties.

  I was also covering some of Keith’s day-to-day expenses by lending him money that I clawed back in band meetings with accountants that he rarely attended. Kit and Chris didn’t try to hide their troubles, or their addictions at the time. They had hired two managerial second-in-commands in Peter Rudge (who went on to manage the Stones’ office in New York for a while) and Bill Curbishley, a childhood friend of Chris’s.

  Keith himself had massive personal problems at this time. We all knew he was crazy about his wife Kim, so it was hard to work out what he was doing, bringing girls in and out of the studio, behaving as though we were on the road. Meanwhile my best friend Barney had taken to spending a lot of time at Tara House, ostensibly to hang out with Keith, but Barney had fallen in love with Kim.

  When Kim left the family home in October to file for divorce, Barney sought out my advice. He wanted my permission to pursue her – he was terribly torn between loyalty to the band and his new passion for Kim. I pleaded with him not to be a party to the break-up, as it would mean my having to choose between him and Keith. Barney gave himself some time to consider my plea, and missed his moment. Kim went to stay with Ian McLagan (Mac) from The Faces. A week later Kim and Mac were an item. They fled somewhere together, leaving Keith to make death threats while Barney went back to Jan.

  Not for the first time it occurred to me that I had to look no farther than life right around me to find the makings of a rock opera – at least of a rock soap opera.

  I listened to Keith on the finished Quadrophenia album. His playing was great, but I worried about him: he had l
ost his first great love, and I was certain the impact on his self-esteem would be massive, and it was.

  When we finally started touring in the UK we confronted the most complex technical difficulties. I had hoped we could use four screens on stage on which we could project the story in some form. Several experiments were undertaken, but there simply wasn’t time to get them working properly.

  Even the music was problematic. Keith, who had been so brilliant playing along with the backing tapes on Who’s Next, couldn’t seem to cope with the stage tapes we’d put together for Quadrophenia. Our quadrophonic sound system was tricky too. In almost all of the smaller UK halls it was difficult to find safe positions for the two rear speaker systems. They needed to be hung high up and it wasn’t always possible to get them set up correctly before our time ran out.

  What followed were some of the most shameful performances in our career on stage. I was utterly bereft that although we had made a great record it had not provided us with the new rock-opera performance piece we so badly needed. We were all disappointed, that most disastrous of emotions. My anger onstage with The Who had always been an act for the most part, but my frustration over the live performances of Quadrophenia boiled over. On Top of the Pops I lost my patience and smashed a cherished guitar (a gift from Joe Walsh), and in Newcastle I pushed over all of our sound equipment in a fit of rage.

  Yet it was Keith who was the first to crack. In November at the Cow Palace in San Francisco he collapsed on stage after taking three elephant tranquilliser pellets. I had to drag him back to his drumkit when he came round; then he collapsed again. At first I thought he might be play-acting a little. When he was conscious he made jokes, and so on stage I treated the entire débâcle as funny. I didn’t get really upset until later, when it became clear he had taken a very powerful, and potentially fatal, substance.

  It was the first show in our entire career that we had to give up on because one of us had openly goofed up in this way. The American tour to promote Quadrophenia continued after Keith’s collapse at the Cow Palace, and both Roger and I felt the need to try to explain the story before each show, and sometimes even between songs on stage. Reviews were mixed, mainly good, but Robert Hilburn in Los Angeles, always effusive, was troubled by the ‘impression that the group’s momentum – and therefore, importance – is waning’.

  In Montreal, Keith held a party in an elegant suite in the brand new Four Seasons hotel. Piles of room-service food lay all around us. At one point some ketchup, refusing as ever to come out of the bottle, ended up on the wall. I thought it looked aesthetically pleasing. ‘Someone should frame it,’ I said.

  Keith, agreeing, looked around the room. He took down a framed print from the wall, punched out the picture it contained, and held it up to frame the ketchup. There was applause. Reminded of my first lesson at Ealing Art College, I grabbed a steak knife, stabbed my hand, and wiped the blood on the wall. ‘That’s a line!’ There was more applause.

  Bedlam followed. What had started as a joke ended with a sofa being thrown out of a window into the beautiful courtyard gardens. As it exploded through the tempered glass, revealing small ponds, ferns and miniature trees in the garden, we all stood quiet for a moment. Directly opposite us was the hotel reception area behind a glass wall. The hotel staff looked at us in shock; we stared back, equally horrified as we slowly came to our senses.

  Three French-speaking policemen answered the call, and once in our room they went through my luggage and found some girlie magazines that they waved around as though they’d discovered a cache of chopped-up body parts. I admitted I’d taken part in the destruction. (I may even have muttered something about art, as I was still a little drunk.)

  ‘So,’ said one, in English, looking at my passport. ‘The cop-kicker.’ He went on to elaborate in French, which I didn’t much understand. It obviously wasn’t complimentary. They took me down to a basement room in the hotel, but fortunately, as they menacingly closed in on me, the hotel general manager, who had been roused from his bed, passed the open door.

  ‘What is going on here?’ he said in French.

  ‘It’s an interview,’ barked one of the cops.

  ‘The room allocated to the police is upstairs,’ said the manager, firmly. He gave them the room number, waited right there until the police moved, and locked the basement door behind me. He probably saved me from a serious beating.

  Every single person in our party was arrested and put in jail, including Roger, who hadn’t even attended the gathering. The police cells were packed, so I shared a cell with Keith’s aide, Pete Butler. We took turns sleeping on the hard bench. Paraplegic Mike Shaw had been travelling with us, wheelchair-bound and unable to get in or out of bed without help. The police left him in the hotel, but took his nurse along with us.

  Peter Rudge, who had joined in with the wrecking, managed to ring the promoter, who paid the hotel damages. Later, when I saw a photo of the room, I was shocked. Everything in it was destroyed.

  As soon as we arrived back in Britain, Lou Reizner put on a second charity gala of his orchestral Tommy. I refused to participate, but happily attended. It was the first time I’d ever seen Roger from the vantage of the audience. He projected himself into the crowd, his eyes fixed right on the heart of the audience, and yet he addressed each of us. His technique was that of an experienced stage actor.

  ‘He’s really very good, isn’t he?’ I exclaimed to Karen.

  A short series of Who shows followed in London, taking us right up to Christmas. The reviews of our shows were beginning to get rather picky; some were just bad. Compared to other bands we were still good, but we were going off the boil.

  It wasn’t because we didn’t put all our energy into it on stage, and we certainly were putting in long performances, sometimes playing as long as two and a half hours. But we all realised that, however hard we worked on stage, Tommy had to a great extent been the element of our stage act that, from 1969 through to 1972, had helped us garner such positive reviews.

  Quadrophenia had failed to replace Tommy as the backbone of our live show.

  17

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR

  Tommy was destined to be a movie. Since 1969 a number of producers, writers and directors had expressed serious interest in coming up with a decent script – Joseph Strick was probably the most distinguished – but nothing had stuck. Kit hung on to his dream of directing, even though, in 1973, he was using heroin every day. He and Chris had fallen out.

  We all still adored Kit. He kept managing to work his way back into our affections, making us laugh with grand stories of his own absurdity. I had forgiven him, despite some lingering discomfort between us. He was still funny, clever and kind, but if I was resentful that too much touring had compromised my creative projects, he was resentful that I had cast him aside in the recording studio.

  One afternoon in June 1973 I was walking down Wardour Street, recording, hoping for a quintessential Soho Mod moment that could be included in the Quadrophenia soundscape: a shout, a snatched conversation between boys dealing drugs or their bodies, something romantic, a racing tip or news of a hip, upcoming event. I was wearing headphones, carrying a stereo tape machine and holding out a stereo microphone. I kept my head down, surreptitiously slipping the microphone into groups of people standing around talking. Suddenly in my earphones I heard a familiar voice. It was Chris. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of months. He was talking about Tommy. I switched off the mike.

  It turned out that Chris had just attended a meeting with Michael Carreras of Hammer Films; they had been trying to get hold of me to join them. Chris took me for a drink and told me Kit was opposing any deal that didn’t recompense him for his film treatment, but despite his threats of litigation things looked promising. (The treatment was something Kit and I had cobbled together in an hour at my studio in Twickenham.)

  A little later, Robert Stigwood stepped in as producer of the film, replacing Hammer Films. I considered this a positive
move, not only because Stiggy and Kit were friends and he promised to deal with Kit kindly, but because of our long-standing relationship with Stiggy. I believe Carreras had suggested Ken Russell to direct; I was a fan of Ken’s work, which ranged from serious Sixties Omnibus documentaries about composers to irreverent films about music and art in the late Sixties and early Seventies. I especially liked his films on Delius and Elgar, and the more recent Savage Messiah.

  Ken Russell wouldn’t have considered directing Tommy were it not for Lou Reizner’s orchestral version, so when we first met at Ken’s home in Ladbroke Grove that was what we listened to. Ken was keen to inspire me to use orchestra as well as rock for the soundtrack. As an example of how powerful and brutal orchestral music could be, he played me Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, which I hadn’t heard before. I told him I could orchestrate my music using synthesisers, and after Ken made a number of visits to Ramport he finally seemed convinced.

  As it happened Ken was present when we recorded Quadrophenia’s ‘Drowned’ and a stormy rain found a leak in the roof, filling the piano booth with water. ‘Be careful what you pray for,’ said Ken, as we cleaned up. ‘You’re dabbling in the composer’s arts, Pete – both the dark and divine.’

  One of the first changes Ken wanted to make was to nudge the story towards a kind of modern version of Hamlet, with the lover of Tommy’s mother killing Tommy’s father – rather than the other way round, as on the album. I was concerned about this at first, then I saw that the dead father would become a symbol for Tommy of the ‘Master’ he sees in his dreams.

  There were a number of other changes: Ken needed to flesh out a lot of the story and introduce new scenes, which would require original or extended music. As mythic, absurd and exaggerated as the film may have been in some ways, the denouement remained true to the album and centred on the spiritual benefits of growing up in troubled circumstances. I was excited and intrigued by how this would unfold.