Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  When we got to the hospital it turned out that Eric had simply taken too many painkillers. Still, I was glad to see my old friend.

  My little posse went from there to Los Angeles. We planned to do some sessions with Jody’s friend, one of James Taylor’s backing vocalists, David Lasley. I also did a gig with one of Jody’s other friends who had a band; it was in the venue on Sunset now known as the Viper Club. While in LA we visited my friend Joe Walsh, who’d played with The James Gang, and then with The Eagles until their break-up the year before. His house was in Santa Barbara. It was a long drive. When we got there Joe had laid out a line of cocaine at least three yards long. Jody snorted the entire line in a single drift from one end of the marble countertop to the other as we watched in amazement.

  ‘That’s all there was, Jody,’ drawled Joe.

  Of course it wasn’t.

  Kit’s memorial service was to be held in Covent Garden on 11 May 1981. I gave a heartfelt eulogy to the tearful gathering. The London Symphony Orchestra played the overture from Tommy by Will Malone, ‘Pinball Wizard’ arranged by my father-in-law Ted Astley, an excerpt from Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande and the poignant Chaconne from Purcell’s The Gordian Knot Untied. It was an extraordinary affair. Everything about it was perfect. Afterwards Chris Stamp and I scored some coke and hung out, which also seemed appropriate somehow.

  Mark Macauley, a shareholder in the Embassy Club, had the brilliant idea that he should take me and my daughters to see Cats in London on opening night. He had seen previews and loved it. I asked Mark to pretend Louise Reay was his partner, so I could attend without losing a precious night out with her. Louise had done something with her hair, pulled it tighter to her head than usual, and worn a high-neck navy and white polka-dot dress; she looked exquisite and behaved perfectly. But my girls, although only ten and eight years old, saw through the ruse and went home to tell their mother I was with another woman.

  Whenever I was separated from Louise I felt a unique anguish. In this case it wasn’t just the remembered pain of my childhood and my mother, but rather a longing for what was good about Louise to remain above the high-tide line of our lives. I wanted her to last, to linger as she was that night of Cats at the New Theatre in Drury Lane. Even compared to Bonnie Langford, the show’s star, who gave me a knowing wink as she meowed and pranced up and down the aisle, Louise was transcendent.

  I was desperate to hang on to her, and to have her illuminate my life. I invited her to New York where I thought I might do some more work at Atlantic Studios. We attended a party with Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, and hung out with Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams. Photographer David Bailey told me his wife, Marie Helvin, was a fan of mine – I think they were drifting apart and he was hoping I would take her on a date.

  The partner-swapping mood continued when at the end of the evening Mick asked Louise for her number, and I was stunned when she gave it to him. She had done this once before when we went to a party thrown by Bernie Cornfeld, the international financier, and he had asked for her number and got a result. The trip turned even worse for me because Karen managed to find out where I was and called my room at the Navarro, complaining I had taken my new crush to her favourite hotel. I went to bed depressed, and Louise went out to watch Madness perform alone.

  The next day Louise made it clear she’d had a wonderful evening without me. I felt sorry for having dragged her across the Atlantic only to be subjected to my possessive, childish behaviour.

  The New Romantics all had glamorous and well-defined images – they had their own looks. Even the bands that defied this vogue, like The Clash, Madness and PiL, nevertheless took part in carefully choreographed photo-sessions. I wanted my next solo album to be part of this vogue. I might be an old rocker when working with The Who, but as a solo artist the field was wide open for me to do whatever I felt like doing.

  In my new studio at Oceanic I mixed my demos of Face Dances and Body Language. Jackie Curbishley – who was effectively my manager, with Chris Chappel providing street cred – liked them, but Bill wasn’t so sure. I had decided to mix spoken word and free verse with the lyrics. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I was working on a film noir idea at the time called Bilder von Lily, and all the songs I was preparing for my next solo album were intended to illuminate this story.

  Terry Rawlings, the music editor who had been so helpful to me on the Tommy movie, went to work on Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. In the middle of May he sent me a script to read, and asked me to compose the score. Terry had told Scott I would do a great job. I could see this would be an incredible opportunity, and was pleased to be asked, but I knew there was no way I could take on a movie when I was about to go into the studio again.

  When Bruce Springsteen came to London in the first week of June 1981 I travelled up to Birmingham with Louise to see him perform. I played with Bruce that night as Little Stevie van Zandt called out the chords. There is nothing quite like playing guitar with Bruce Springsteen on ‘Born to Run’, a hymn to breaking free. My role was to enforce the guitar part with Little Stevie by my side, while Bruce made that special connection with his audience.

  A few days later the Oceanic sessions for my second solo album began in earnest, recorded by The Who’s soundman Bob Pridden. I’d decided I wanted to record all the tracks live, so the band gathered in the studio where we could all hear each other. I was playing my old Telecaster through a Fender twin amp, Tony Butler and Mark Brzezicki from my brother Simon’s band were the rhythm section, Jody Linscott was on percussion, and Peter Hope-Evans on the harmonica and Jew’s harp. For these first sessions Chris Stainton, who played with Joe Cocker and Eric Clapton, was on piano and Hammond, while Polly Palmer (from Family) played tuned percussion – glockenspiel, marimbas and vibraphones.

  In one week we rehearsed ‘Face Dances’, ‘It’s In You’, ‘Stop Hurting People’, ‘Dance It Away’, ‘Man Watching’, ‘Sean’s Boogie’, ‘The Sea Refuses No River’ and ‘Communication’. The sound was epic. I didn’t drink very much, and although there was cocaine around, not much of it found its way onto the rehearsal studio floor.

  Every night after work I’d loon off to the Venue, or some other place, hoping to see other bands. One night I performed with Taj Mahal, who name-checked me as an ally and supporter whenever I went to see him play. It was a joy. I ran into my sister-in-law Virginia at the Venue, and she agreed to play piano and keyboards on some of the forthcoming sessions. Rabbit had gone to ground, and I couldn’t even raise him on the phone. Since The Who shows in March I hadn’t seen or heard from him.

  Before autumn arrived, I returned to The Temple at Cleeve and invited Mum to come and stay in the cottage there. She had drinking problems of her own, and had isolated herself in the villa in Menorca I’d bought for her and Dad many years before. I thought we might help each other. I suppose this attempt at solidarity in alcoholism was as mad as Mum thinking that sending me off to live with her crazy mother Denny might help me – but I found The Temple a peaceful and restorative place, and I imagined it might help Mum too.

  It did help us both for a few days, but I quickly became impatient with Mum’s self-obsession. I went to the local bookshop in Wallingford and bought Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. I took long walks while Mum cooked food I couldn’t eat – usually strange Spanish fish dishes – and did endless crosswords in the puzzle magazine she bought in the village when I wasn’t reading.

  In September 1981 Chris Thomas and Bill Price started in on my solo album Chinese Eyes at Oceanic. We only worked for a week or so before we got stuck. The problem was that the songs I’d written were incredibly hard to perform. Chris had to start work on an album in Paris with Elton, so I was forced to face the fact that I wouldn’t make the revised November delivery date Atlantic was hoping for.

  I had to find a way of putting Louise out of my mind, and Barney suggested I start dating Krissy Wood, Ronnie’s ex. I went to visit her, and she was still adorable and slig
htly flaky – she lived at Wick Cottage with her son Jessie – and still spoke often of her ex-husband ‘Woody’.

  I took Krissy out to a trendy club in Baker Street, where I was having a very good time – until I woke up in a Chelsea hospital with a six-inch Adrenalin needle sticking out of my chest. Apparently I had been found unconscious in the club toilets, having overdosed on cocaine. I was technically dead, but luckily for me I’d been resuscitated in time.

  I went to Twickenham to let Karen know what had happened before she read something in the tabloids. When I told her she hit me so hard I saw stars. I think she may have been holding a wooden spoon. It damned well hurt. It was the first time either of us had ever hit the other.

  ‘I don’t think you had better do that again,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s no refuge yet for battered husbands.’

  I wrote to Bill Curbishley on 24 September, saying I needed time off. He replied the next day.

  I feel it is definitely for the best, and I think you need a complete break of two or three months. Some sailing, tennis, sunshine wouldn’t go amiss, and no dope, booze or [nightclubbing]. No London or New York and most of all you have to mean it.

  He went on in the most understanding way. The album would be postponed until the spring, everything would be dealt with, and I shouldn’t worry.

  More people cared about me than I realised (or probably deserved), but there would be no more Who shows that year. Bill set aside his optimistic projections for the planned American tour of autumn and winter.

  Still in Louise’s thrall, I pleaded with her to give me some time, and we spent a few days hanging out around Portobello. One evening, after I’d been introduced to her sister and her husband, Louise told me the story of her unhappy early teenage years. When I railed at her that until she had a child she would never be truly happy, she ended up weeping and telephoning an old boyfriend who arrived quickly to smooth things out for both of us.

  Louise later suggested we go and spend some time at The Temple. While we were there, playing Scrabble, I got a call from Chris Thomas asking if I would go to Paris to put some acoustic guitar on one of Elton’s tracks. I made arrangements very quickly, then suggested to Mum and Dad that they come with me and Louise. In a crazy fantasy I was creating an instant family. When Mum met Louise she said simply, ‘She’s beautiful’ (she approved) and ‘She’s very young’ (she disapproved). Louise was 23 and I was 36, an age gap that didn’t seem particularly large to me.

  The session with Elton in Paris was superb. I was using a little cocaine and drinking Rémy, and after a few takes I started to feel in the presence of God. My playing got tighter and tighter when the reverse should have been happening, but we kept doing retakes because Chris said the drummer’s ‘feel’ wasn’t quite right. The next day Elton, battling his own demons, didn’t show up, and I used the time to record the track for a song of my own, ‘Vivienne’.

  We stayed in Paris for a couple of days. John Entwistle and his entourage were in town, so I threw a dinner for twenty people. Then we went to a club to drink and eat, where I vomited into a champagne bucket.

  Home alone at Cleeve, I chatted to the devil himself. He was so close to me – sitting right on the end of my bed – that I could actually smell him. The odour was nauseating. Next morning I called my doctor, who arranged for me to meet a hypnotherapist specialising in addiction and alcoholism treatment, which saved my life. The doctor also prescribed me Ativan and sleeping pills. To celebrate this good turn of events I bought myself my first Ferrari, which I was certain I wouldn’t drive when drunk. I was turning into Keith Moon.

  Karen had decided to buy a larger house, still in Twickenham, just down the river, and sold our old house to her brother. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sell it, but as I wasn’t around there wasn’t much I could do to stop it happening. The new house was beautful, and had a pontoon onto the Thames. Karen and the girls moved into it without me in December. I bought them a piano for the house.

  As Christmas approached I began freebasing cocaine. On a trip to New York my friend Ike and I spent the entire time cooking up cocaine with Wall Street traders. One morning, as we left the crackhouse with an attractive girl on Ike’s arm, one of the Wall Street guys came over to me.

  ‘Tell your friend,’ he whispered, ‘that girl he’s with isn’t really a girl.’

  I took Ike aside and told him.

  Ike looked at me as though I was insane. ‘I don’t bloody well care what sex she is.’

  We’d spent twelve hours in a crack den, and cooked up at least half a kilo of pure rock cocaine. I suppose issues like gender really weren’t that important in the greater scheme of things.

  By January 1982 I was living entirely alone at The Temple. I drove my Ferrari here and there and met a few new friends, but my heart wasn’t in it. I hadn’t touched alcohol for two months, but I needed help to break my dependence on prescription drugs and heroin. I was doing very little work. I called Meg Patterson in California and asked if she could help me. She set things up for me to go to a rented house on Balboa Island in California, where she would arrange for controlled withdrawal using her NET system.

  Meg insisted that Karen be with me during my withdrawal. I said I didn’t expect Karen would do that, but Meg said that if Karen didn’t join me she might not take any responsibility for her part in our troubled marriage. Although Karen had accompanied me when I went to see my hypnotherapist, and she and I were getting on much better these days, the situation was different. Karen was living in the new house – portentously called The Anchorage – and my two daughters were at critical periods of their education. In the end she didn’t come, and I didn’t press.

  I spent five days climbing the walls and being preached to by Meg’s charismatic husband George. His visions for the third world were inspiring; his Christian faith was infectious, but I felt Meher Baba (as a mystical force) had never let me down. I just had to find a way home, wherever home was.

  On my last day in California my minder Alan Rogan and I drove to Laguna for lunch. It was Valentine’s Day. Afterwards we walked on the beach. My rehab had taken thirty days, and I was clean at last. Suddenly, in the sand, I spotted one of the brown medicine bottles used by cocaine dealers in the States. The first time I’d ever had one of my own had been on Valentine’s Day in 1980, when I’d asked a friend to get me a supply to help me deal with Theresa Russell’s rejection, two years ago to the very day. I picked up the bottle and unscrewed the black cap. I tasted a tiny amount.

  Cocaine.

  There were about fifteen grams. It must have been thrown into the sea from a boat coming in from Catalina after a booze-cruise. I put the lid back on and tossed it into the waves. Alan looked at me askance.

  ‘What?’ I thought I’d done a good thing.

  ‘You may have given up cocaine,’ he said, laughing, ‘but some of us …’

  In my absence, The Who had started recording at Glyn Johns’s new studio in the country, with Andy Fairweather Low standing in on guitar. I felt pressure to jump off the plane from rehab and join them directly, just as I had after my last Valentine’s Day mess two years before. This time I didn’t, and it wasn’t until 3 March that I drove down to meet everyone.

  Much had been said in the press about what I had or hadn’t delivered to The Who as its major songwriter, but I wanted a brief from them, some guidance. My head was empty. John mined his own creative vein in a way that probably wouldn’t change – and would mostly be directed at his solo work. Roger and Kenney spoke about wanting to perform songs reflecting the important issues of the day.

  ‘They’re more at sea than I am,’ I told my driver Paul as he took me home.

  I got together with Louise just once in 1982, my first year of white-knuckle abstinence. We had lunch in order to create a kind of ‘closure’. We laughed and talked easily, and then I went back to my studio and tried to write the song I felt I owed her. I saw Louise once again that year, at a distance, as I was leaving my therapist’s room in H
arley Street. She was clearly on a medical mission. I hoped she was pregnant, and that she would have the child I had thought would redeem her.

  Karen and I decided to spend some time together alone, so we went to Venice and stayed at the Cipriani. When we got home we attempted to spend a weekend at Cleeve as a family. It was extremely tense and hard for Karen, and I was full of mixed emotions, as usual.

  My first public performance in 1982 was for the inaugural Prince’s Trust Concert on 21 July. I had helped organise it, and had asked David Bowie to appear with me. He agreed, it was announced, but then the dates seemed to change under me, or I’d got them wrong, and it turned out he couldn’t do it. He was filming The Hunger in London, and his work schedule couldn’t be rejigged to cover my error. He and I stayed friends, but his manager was vituperative towards me ever after.

  This was the last time I saw Ike, my friend-cum-drug-connection. ‘So,’ he said when we met backstage, ‘you went to the police.’ This was an expression used at the time for addicts who had gone into rehab, leaving their old using buddies behind. I made no excuses.

  Ike died of a suspected overdose a few months later. When I attended his funeral and met his family I learned that his father had been British Consul to the UK for many years, and had disowned Ike at some point. I felt his family believed I could have saved his life – a couple of his friends had said as much. He had been my closest friend for many months in 1981. I was extremely fond of him, but there was no way I could have saved him; I wasn’t even sure I could save myself.

  The next Who album, It’s Hard, came out on 4 September 1982. It nearly wasn’t released at all. When Roger heard the final mixes he wanted to hold it back, because to his ear it didn’t really feel finished. But with the tour closing in on us we were running out of time, and I persuaded him to let it stand.