One evening after work recording my solo album, Empty Glass, my friend Jeremy Thomas, the film producer, set up a screening of Bad Timing, directed by Nic Roeg. The film was a masterpiece, in which Art Garfunkel plays a university lecturer who becomes involved in an obsessive relationship with a student, played by Theresa Russell. My song ‘Who Are You’ was used in various scenes to highlight the turmoil that Garfunkel’s character is being thrown into by Russell’s much younger character.
Russell was 23, at the height of her beauty, and a completely convincing and committed actor. The film was full of explicit sex scenes. Chris Thomas and I were blown away by her. Jeremy explained that she was in a tempestuous relationship with Nic that had destroyed his marriage. I knew how that felt. I was hawking a version of the Lifehouse film script at the time, and there was a possibility Nic might take the project. It seemed like an ideal time to fly to LA and talk to Nic. I called his number and a woman answered. I recognised Theresa Russell’s voice at once.
‘Hi, it’s Pete Townshend. Can I speak to Nic?’
‘Hello,’ she replied. ‘This is Theresa Russell. Nice to speak to you. Nic is actually in Paris.’
‘Damn. I’m coming to town and was hoping to meet him.’ I paused. ‘But while I’m on the phone, I loved your work in Bad Timing.’
‘That’s wonderful, thank you.’ She seemed genuinely pleased, as all actors are when their work is recognised and complimented. ‘It was my idea to use your song. I’ve always loved it.’
‘Good, good.’ I had nothing more to say. I’d heard the voice I wanted to hear, and she sounded fabulous. We said goodbye and I put down the phone.
I stood helplessly for a while, just staring at the carpet. Then I called again.
‘Hello, Theresa?’
‘Yes, still here.’
‘I was going to invite you and Nic to join me and some friends to see Pink Floyd’s The Wall next week. I know you’re alone, but maybe you’d like to come with us?’
‘Wow. Wow. That would be great. Maybe you could call me when you arrive and we can confirm then?’
I put down the phone again and danced around the flat.
On the evening of The Wall concert I went first to meet my buddy, comedy writer Bill Minkin at Chateau Marmont Hotel. I was nervous about meeting Theresa and had shaved off my stubble for some reason, so my face looked kind of pasty. Bill offered me a small line of cocaine. I seemed to be operating with a completely new rule book: there was no point in trying to control my life.
The coke didn’t seem to do much. We drove around the corner to collect Theresa. She let me in to her apartment. The first shock was that her long blonde hair was now short, and looked a little red.
‘I fucked it up,’ she said, ruffling her bob. ‘Too much bleach.’
‘You look great,’ I said. Jesus Christ. She was without doubt the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her eyes were hypnotic and feline. She fussed around the room, uncomfortable.
‘Are you OK with this?’ I said.
‘Yes. No. Yes.’ Then she picked up a bag. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, without looking up.
We drove to the Coliseum and were given seats so far back in the huge venue that it was impossible to see the musicians’ faces on stage. During the interval we went backstage and I introduced Theresa to Roger Waters. It pleased me to see him make the same bemused assessment he had made when he met me and Karen at the first UFO Club Pink Floyd gig back in 1967. How the fuck does he do it? The show was extraordinary. David Gilmour’s rendition of ‘Comfortably Numb’ will remain with me for my entire life. Roger Waters was spine-chilling, as usual, a towering and formidable presence.
After the show we went to Le Dome, my favourite restaurant on the Strip. We were given a discreet table in the back room, and I tried to impress Theresa. Bill and I did comedy routines. She was quite a party girl, at one point sitting cross-legged in the middle of the table and trying to get Bill and me to sing something. At the bar I pretended to pass out. She shouted my name, over and over, in an adorable American accent: ‘Peeder, Peeder.’ I can still hear it today. ‘Get up, Peeder,’ she laughed, hauling me back onto my stool. I pretended my spine had collapsed. I heard her and Bill talking about me.
‘He’s adorable,’ she said.
‘He’s bluffing,’ said Bill.
Later I walked her to her door, where she made it clear I wasn’t going to get past the threshold.
‘I love Nicolas Roeg,’ she said.
‘But I love you,’ I whined.
‘I love you too, Peeder,’ she laughed, slowly closing the door in my face. ‘You’re cute. But Nic is the man. He’s the leader, sweetie.’ I didn’t fail to notice the rhyme.
The door clunked shut. I knocked a few times before giving up. I slumped to the floor. I felt as though I had been speared in the gut with a lance of fire. I remembered that pain from my childhood – when my mother, who needed to work, had tried to leave me with her mother, my wicked witch of a grandmother, when I was ill. Back then I had howled so loud my mother could hear me down in the street, and she had come back and took me with her.
Back at my hotel, decades later, I howled again, but this time the only response was the hotel manager, calling to tell me to keep the noise down. I called my driver. I explained I needed cocaine.
‘I’m fucking dying,’ I moaned.
‘Pete,’ he soothed. ‘Get a grip. She’s just a girl.’
The next day was Valentine’s Day. I bought a huge bunch of lilies and roses and a case of tequila and went to Theresa’s apartment. She wouldn’t open the door. I heard her on the phone to Nic, and he was obviously telling her off. She was shouting at him, defending herself, crying. She must have told him we’d gone out the night before.
I left the stuff outside the door and slunk off like a rat to Amigo Studios to write. The drug dealer met me at the studio, and the small amount of stuff he sold me was excellent – not that I was any kind of connoisseur. I worked efficiently and quickly, writing about eight songs and making demos. The lyrics of my song about Theresa say it all: ‘I felt like a flattened ant in a windstorm.’ At a dinner at Mo Ostin’s extraordinary hilltop house in Los Angeles I told the story of Theresa; Evelyn, Mo’s wife – almost as much a romantic fool as I was – told me to ‘go after her’. That wasn’t going to happen.
Deciding that cocaine would continue to help me with my work, I got one of our crew in London to score me a large quantity. It turned out to be cut with rubbish that made me ill, but it cost me so much money I continued to use it. Events with Theresa Russell had shaken me. Things with Jackie were still up in the air. Would I fall in love with every attractive woman I met? Would I become obsessed if I slept with them, and even more obsessed if I didn’t?
And what was I going to do about Karen? My two daughters were still little kids, I adored them, I missed them and they missed me. I wasn’t the first stupid husband to find myself in this predicament. I was entirely ready to commit to Jackie – I was nuts about her – but I wasn’t ready to leave Karen. It was absurd.
One evening Karen came to see me in the flat in the King’s Road. I was on the wrong side of a very bad night with my crap cocaine.
‘You’ve got to tell me what’s wrong, Pete,’ she said. ‘I want to help you, but I can’t if you won’t talk about it.’
I couldn’t explain it, ironic, but true. I can still see her face in that moment: sad, judgemental and pitying.
Nic Roeg eventually summoned me. I found him sitting alone and pensive at a Thai restaurant in Soho. I tried to speak, but he pre-empted me.
‘What you did was hurtful.’
‘Nothing happened, Nic,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You were a complete bastard to go behind my back.’
He was right. And instead of simply acknowledging my deceit at the time, I had made things worse by not calling him.
‘It’s your fault,’ I said, laughing. ‘You made Theresa so fabulous, so erotic in Bad Timing. I
’m sure I am not the only one—’
As I said this I realised that of course I wouldn’t be. Nic was much older than Theresa, and he might always be fearful she could be taken away from him by someone younger. (In fact I was wrong: they remained married for a very long time.)
Nic changed the subject. ‘The Lifehouse script is quite good. There are some good characters in it, but I don’t think it’s right yet. I don’t think it’s going to work for me.’
My heart sank. Had I fucked up the best chance I had of working with a great director on my most audacious project?
The Who went back on the road in March, starting with shows in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Phil Carson, the head of Atlantic International, had decided to come on tour with me. I’m still not sure why; the only contribution he made was to arrange an evening at a brothel in Amsterdam. After the show in Switzerland I experienced the most extreme withdrawal, and complained to Bill Curbishley, telling him I needed my cocaine and I was flying home. He just gazed at me like the wreck I’d become, and ignored me. He must have had dozens of such run-ins with Keith in recent years.
Instead of returning to the comfort of our lovely hotel in Bern I walked out of the hall and began to walk the streets. It was freezing. I walked all night, uphill, downhill, through parks and piazzas, getting lost in the countryside, then finding my way again back to the city by following small roadside streams down to the bottom of the valley. Bern is a stunning city. The bear pits are famous, so I decided to take a look. I couldn’t see any bears. I shouted for them, then jumped the fence and looked inside the caves. I could have been eaten alive.
When I got back to the hotel the band had flown on to Vienna, and Bill had made Wiggy wait for me. He apologised for having appropriated my crap cocaine to try to help me, and gave me a new supply, this time the real stuff. From that moment on, Wiggy and I were drug-buddies. There is no tighter compact of friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.
Bern without bears? That could be a song, I thought.
I landed in New York on 10 April to do some promotion on my solo album, and to begin an American tour with The Who. The two tours blurred together for me. I was drinking hard and using cocaine that Wiggy was carrying for me. I had told him to be generous to the crew when the supply was needed. I didn’t use a huge amount myself, and rarely during or after shows. It was recreational for me, so I never really got hooked on it properly. I still preferred Rémy, and often slept with the bottle in my arms cuddled like a baby. Sometimes I even sang the green bottle to sleep.
Even so, at the end of the tour the petty cash drawn by Wiggy on my behalf for cocaine was $40,000. I never carried drugs on flights, so I must have thrown a lot away. Hey, I was rich.
As for the booze, maybe I was kidding myself, but most of the time it was about having fun. I spent a lot of time laughing on the road, in the studio and with my friends. Laughter is well known to be a medicine that makes you feel happy, and so even when I was having trouble I would drink, laugh and feel better. I rarely felt angry when I was drunk. I was either funny, a jumping bean, or pathetic. I’d never been the kind of drunk who punched people, though I did break my hand on the first night of the second leg of our tour in June. I was copying Rabbit.
‘Hey!’ Rabbit shouted. ‘Fuck everything!’ And he punched a hole in a wall panel.
‘Hey!’ I shouted, and punched a different wall, only I spent the rest of the tour with my hand in plaster. Strangely enough, it didn’t affect my playing very much.
After a marathon seven shows in Los Angeles we went to Tempe, Arizona. Backstage in Tempe, I met a fashion model who liked my hit song, ‘Let My Love Open the Door’. I asked her to wait while I showered.
Jim Callaghan was in charge of security on the tour and was responsible for passing each of us money from the merchandising concessions. These concessions were still run by ex-pirates, who paid in cash. We called it cocaine money. Of course none of us had any idea how much was actually being made. We just took the cash, gratefully. After the seven days in Los Angeles, Jim gave me an envelope containing $50,000, the largest sum I’d ever received. I put the envelope in my tote bag and grabbed the model who was still waiting. I could scarcely believe my luck.
That night the fashion model and I arranged to go out to a nightclub where she wanted to show me off; we collected her brother and his girlfriend on the way. He seemed a nice guy, and we had a good time. The club didn’t serve Rémy, only a cheaper French brandy, which made me irritable and anxious to score some cocaine. The girl and her brother did their best to make connections, and so did the limo driver. We all failed.
That night the girl stayed with me and the next day she came with me to the airport. ‘You have to come to Dallas,’ I pleaded. ‘You just have to. I’ll send you a ticket. Give me your phone number.’
She said she would, we kissed and parted company. My heart was pounding all the way to Dallas.
When we arrived, Roger’s minder, Doug, took me aside.
‘Roger has left his cash in the safe at the hotel in LA,’ he said.
‘You’ll have to go back and get it,’ I explained. ‘It’s more than you think.’
‘I thought that bird you were with could pick it up at the hotel and bring it with her when she comes.’
‘I expect she could do that,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll give you her number. Can you organise her ticket for me? Make sure she gets a car? All that stuff?’
Doug nodded.
I was settling into my hotel room when I got another call.
‘Problem,’ said Doug. ‘Can I come see you?’
‘She won’t come? I knew it.’ I figured such a wonderful dream had to be short-lived. Doug came to my room. He looked nervous.
‘I called the number you gave me, and her mother came on the phone.’
‘And …’
‘She said her daughter wouldn’t be coming to Dallas.’
‘Bugger.’
‘She also said …’ Doug made a face, and this confused me. ‘She said we won’t get the money back.’
‘She didn’t already collect Roger’s money, did she?’
‘No,’ corrected Doug. ‘That’s what I thought at first. But Roger’s money is still in the hotel safe. Do you have yours?’
‘It’s in my tote bag,’ I assured him, understanding immediately that it wouldn’t be there. I looked, and it was gone. I wrote a song that night – ‘Did You Steal My Money?’ – and hoped it would be a big earner.
Back in London I hadn’t quite abandoned the King’s Road flat. Sometimes I ended up at home in Twickenham, or in a hotel, when I should really have gone to Cleeve. When I did go home, finding my door keys was often tricky. Karen wasn’t amused, needless to say.
One night, annoyed that I couldn’t find the right key and suspicious that Karen had changed the locks, I threw my bunch of keys into the darkness. I heard them fall. I searched for an hour. I tried the Spike Milligan method. Everything has to be somewhere.
No luck.
I tried Sherlock Holmes. Eliminate the impossible and what remains, however implausible, is the truth.
No luck.
I slept in the garden. At least it was summer.
Bill Szymczyk was producing Face Dances, The Who’s first album with Warner Brothers. He chose to work in Odyssey studios in London because he needed an American MCI board for recording. We did a test session there in March and it proved to be a good studio for the project. It was there that I met Marvin Gaye, who took over Studio 2 for a few weeks. I think ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, one of his first hits, is one of the greatest recordings ever made, certainly one of the finest from Tamla. Marvin didn’t write the song, but his voice is what makes the lyric so affecting and moving. Baby don’t you do it, don’t break my heart.
Marvin was in terrible shape – worse than me. He was my hero, and I found it hard to see him this way. In conflict with his old friends at Tamla, he was being courted by the London high-society establishment
, and had become involved with Lady Edith Foxwell, so-called ‘queen of London café society’. I knew her because she had shares in the Embassy Club, one of my favourite haunts. Marvin was still very good looking, and the London coterie seemed to be showing him off in a way that ultimately seemed to help them more than it did him.
I struggled to process the music he was making: he played all the keyboard parts himself over drum-machine rhythms. When I was in the room I didn’t understand what I was hearing, but it was a work in progress, and I, of all people, understood how huge changes can come about. He was producer and engineer on his own record; he had help, but he did most things all by himself.
One night, while I sat with Marvin as he negotiated to buy a rock of raw cocaine as big as a tennis ball, I decided to tell him what his music meant to me.
‘The lyric comes from the head,’ I said, ‘the music from the heart.’
I paused for effect.
‘But the voice, Marvin,’ I said, delivering a punchline, ‘that’s from God.’
‘Thanks, Pete,’ he said, gracious as ever.
He turned back to his keyboard synthesiser and resumed his improvisational noodling. Marvin may not have been a great keyboard player, but if he noodled around long enough he found what he wanted. In Our Lifetime was excellent when it was finally released.
Making Face Dances was fun. Bill was methodical in his work, always shooting three complete takes of each track so he could cut the best parts together if he needed to. Rabbit was totally on top of his playing on these sessions, working on the Bösendorfer piano I had shipped in from Oceanic. Once or twice we spoke about our respective marriages, and I realised how much time Rabbit and I had been spending together, and how our karmic worlds had become intertwined. He is a shy, complex man, and can be explosive. His playing is expressive and inventive, but he rarely managed to organise it into song form. Not for the first time I wished I was better at co-writing. Life would have been very different for Rabbit had his genius been more widely appreciated.
Who I Am: A Memoir Page 31
