Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  I began my Stones induction speech by saying: ‘Keith Richards once told me that I think too much. The truth is, I talk too much, but I don’t think first … The Rolling Stones are the only group I have felt unashamed about idolising. Each one of them has given me something as an artist, as a person, and as a fan. It would be crazy to suggest here that all the things they gave me were wholesome, practical and useful …’

  I carried on in a similar, deeply affectionate vein, and meant every word of it.

  While in New York I had a meeting with Ina Meibach, our attorney, who had done some basic maths. If I agreed to do the tour and made a new Who album, it would be hard work but in the year ahead I would be generating £14,000 every day. I wondered – and I’m not joking – would that be enough, but I very quickly came around. I couldn’t pass up this kind of money. My emotions oscillated once more as I considered that this windfall would also keep Roger and John secure. Finally I decided to commit.

  ‘I’ve had enough, Pete,’ Karen said. ‘We can’t go on like this.’

  She took her dog Blue and went off for the entire day, not returning until late. She had been to Stonehenge to think things through. She was seriously thinking of leaving me, and I could understand why. This wasn’t the first time Karen had threatened to leave. She had sat with me through a number of dramatic mood-swings and was probably beside herself with confusion about whether I was in charge of my own life, or at least the part of it that I wanted to share with her. When she was angry she said that when our girls left home life with me alone would be pointless, that we lived alongside each other, not with one another.

  I didn’t disagree. In fact I had actually tried hard to live a parallel life, so I could do my work and Karen could conduct her own life in her own way. This seemed ideal to me. In any event, she wasn’t happy.

  This was ironic, because from where I stood things in the family were still looking and feeling pretty good. Minta was 18, taking a year off school before going to university. She found it hard to get up in the morning, as I did, but once she was up and about she worked hard every day. Emma was at King’s College, Cambridge, studying Economics and History. Her boyfriend James was an organ scholar.

  The difficulties Karen and I faced were resolved – at least for a while – when she became pregnant in March.

  The Who tour was announced in April. I did a week of PR in New York, and the rest of the time I spent plugging Iron Man, which had been released to critics that month. Coca-Cola had shown interest in using one of the songs, ‘A Friend Is a Friend’, for a summer ad campaign.

  During rehearsals for the tour I was worried about my hearing, and insisted that the drums be placed in a booth during rehearsals. Instead, Bob Pridden put me in a booth with my guitar, which made me feel that my problem was not really being taken seriously enough. We rehearsed for several weeks, learning over fifty songs, many from my solo career.

  Before I left for the tour Karen went for an ultrasound scan. When she came back I was still in bed.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ she said, and started to laugh.

  I leapt up. Fuck, I was happy. How did that work? This was the affirmation I had been hoping for: I really had been getting my family life right after all. Karen and I had hiccupped a few times, but that was to be expected. As Paul Simon said, ‘When something goes right, it’s likely to lose me, it’s apt to confuse me, it’s such an unusual sight.’ Emma, Minta, and now a son. Actually, I wasn’t just happy. I was euphoric.

  In mid-June the band moved to Glens Falls, Saratoga, for six days of technical rehearsals there. Our first show was at the Civic Center. The band sounded good from the start, even in the echoing, empty hall. I was travelling with seventeen pieces of luggage, much of which was my portable recording studio. I had two young men working for me as porters to transport it and set it up at each hotel.

  Rabbit got drunk a lot, and I nearly had to fire him. He thought that after eight weeks’ rehearsal he was indispensable, to which I responded by threatening to replace him. The set list was wide-ranging, including a selection from Tommy and The Iron Man, John’s ‘Too Late the Hero’, Boudleaux Bryant’s ‘Love Hurts’ and a range of new songs from the 1980s. The show lasted more than three and a half hours, and I sang about ten songs of my own.

  ‘New music, new shades, each song a new challenge. That’s what I like,’ I wrote after the first show, but by mid-July I was feeling the strain. My ears were ringing badly, so I had to use earplugs for the loud numbers from then on, which made me less effective. I told myself that the most important thing was to be happy; to play and dance with abandon was more fulfilling than to play well.

  The reviews of the critics were piling up, and I tended to focus on the bad ones. ‘Roger will be pleased at being described as “godlike”,’ I wrote. ‘I am unhappy at being described as “looking like a churchman”.’

  He may have appeared godlike, but Roger was in a state of near-collapse from exhaustion. After Bill called me with this news, I rang Roger to cheer him up. He’d been to a hospital, had had a thorough physical and had been told he was all right. This upset him even more. He knew something was wrong. On 10 August, after three consecutive shows in Atlanta, Roger wrote an open letter to the entire band and crew.

  Dear All,

  This is to tell you that since the beginning of the tour I have been suffering from immense personal and physical problems … it is a battle I am winning. I have great admiration that you all have made sure the shows are a great success, and that my times on the stage during this tour have been the most enjoyable and memorable of my career.

  Allhamdulia

  Roger

  The letter worried me more than it soothed.

  Roger had been obsessed with his health, taking an eccentric German yoga masseuse with him, and all kinds of strange medications. And yet it was I who nearly brought this massive rolling megalith to an end. In Tacoma, Washington, I speared myself on my guitar’s whammy bar – it went right through my hand. I went into shock, but fortunately Karen was there; she met me backstage and whispered to me tearfully as my trolley was being rolled to the medical station backstage. ‘Now will you stop all this stupid shit?’

  I didn’t know whether she meant swinging my arm or touring.

  Mum arrived on the day of our special Tommy concert at Universal Amphitheater on 24 August 1989. Within an hour she was causing trouble, drunk, jetlagged and getting locked out of her room every few minutes. My entire family – my two brothers and their children, my brother-in-law and his wife – were there, and tried to look after her, but it was a real distraction.

  Elton John missed the soundcheck and sent a note saying he was ill and wouldn’t be appearing as the Pinball Wizard, but at the very last moment he showed up, did a line or two of coke and put on the most amazing performance. I adore Elton; he’s not just a talented musician and composer, he’s also an amazing trouper.

  Our other guests were Steve Winwood, Patti LaBelle, Phil Collins and Billy Idol. The night was wonderful. Lionel Richie and Madonna were in the audience. This was another charity event, and the proceeds were added to the monumental sum of money we’d raised in our shows at Radio City in New York.

  The Universal Amphitheater itself is a large room, yet from the stage the performer could see every face. The sound was excellent. My best moment was being fêted afterwards by the hugely talented and slightly tipsy Whoopi Goldberg, who surprised me by being rather flirty. It felt like a great Hollywood gathering, a celebration of what the band and Tommy had meant to all the assembled agents, lawyers, promoters, actors and backroom boys of the movie business. At the party afterwards I met Lionel Richie and his now famous daughter Nicole, who was a sweet little kid. He suggested we work together in the future, but living 6,000 miles away I knew this was unlikely to happen. Still, all in all it was a triumphant day.

  Throughout the tour I had been accompanied at every step by two policemen from Cleveland, Officers Baepler and Kunz, both named Greg. Bi
ll Curbishley had persuaded me to accept this protection, which was very expensive indeed, but Bill had given me no reason why I needed it. In the past the presence of my former bodyguard Jim Callaghan had been welcome when I had been drinking, and once or twice he had probably saved me from a beating in a nightclub, but two guys carrying guns seemed a little over the top, now that I was eight years sober. But Bill insisted.

  In LA he came to see me. ‘There’s a problem,’ Bill said, producing a bulky file of handwritten letters decorated with childlike drawings from someone who had threatened to shoot me during the tour.

  ‘This is obviously someone very disturbed,’ I said.

  ‘We know who he is, and that’s why we’re taking this seriously.’ Bill was looking a little shaky.

  ‘Why can’t he be arrested?’

  ‘Because before the tour got started he went missing.’

  ‘You don’t know where he is?’

  ‘We do now,’ said Bill gravely. ‘He’s somewhere here in California. On and off through the tour he has been sighted by our detectives, but we’ve always lost track of him. He’s been following the tour, Pete.’

  ‘He’s here in California?’

  Bill nodded. ‘But we’ve lost him again …’ So that was why he’d insisted on police officers to guard me.

  The man’s letters had been sent to The Who’s New York office, and allowed to pile up. If they had reached me I would simply have replied, and possibly defused the situation. I’d dealt with my share of the mentally ill, and had often made lifelong friends of people whose first letters to me had expressed a desire to string me up.

  The drama heightened with the discovery that the suspect was a trained marksman, a sniper. At our forthcoming show in Oakland the layout of the neighbourhood would be perfect for such a person to get a shot at me while I was on stage. Bill arranged for part of my family to go to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch as guests until the man was apprehended. The rest of them were sent home to the safety of England.

  Not surprisingly, the review of my performance was bad: I had been more than a little preoccupied, waiting for the sniper’s bullet to kill me.

  After two shows in Texas, one in support of the Special Olympics, where we were honoured by the presence of our own stalwart Mike Shaw in his wheelchair, we returned to the UK. A dense clutch of shows had been put together: four at the NEC in Birmingham (the UK’s largest exhibition centre), four at Wembley Arena and two to finish at the Royal Albert Hall.

  At just after 2 o’clock on 21 November 1989 my son Joseph was born. I was by Karen’s side, and when I drove home I was soaring on an incredible drug-free high. Even in the absence of money worries I still felt that urgent need to provide once again.

  For Christmas 1989 I bought myself an AgendA: a personal digital assistant. Within a few days I could type entries without looking, with the device itself out of sight in my pocket, under a table, or by my side if I was driving. The third entry I made was:

  Fr29Dec89 01:15 – I approach the year with mixed feelings … I let Iron Man sink so I could do the Who tour. But the tour was a triumph in many ways, most of all for the way it brought together the families of Daltrey and Townshend.

  24

  PSYCHODERELICT

  The Who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 18 January 1990 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. We were in good company. That year other inductees included Hank Ballard, The Four Seasons, The Four Tops, The Kinks, The Platters and Simon & Garfunkel. This was the highest honour in the rock industry, created by Jann Wenner, Ahmet Ertegun and other truly wise brokers in the business.

  Before our 1989 anniversary tour we had pledged $500,000 towards the ground-breaking of the proposed building of an actual Hall of Fame, which would be a museum in – of all places – Cleveland.

  In my acceptance speech I chided record companies who were trying to censor the lyrics of rap artists.

  I sat with Ina Meibach and was upset to realise too late that Chris Stamp, who lived in New York, hadn’t been invited to the induction ceremony. Later in the evening the celebrity divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson came to our table. Roger’s wife Heather leaned over and whispered to me, laughing,

  ‘Get me his telephone number.’

  On 1 April 1990 I wrote to Roger, John and Bill Curbishley.

  I want to take this opportunity to say that I will remember 1989 as one of the happiest of my life and career. There are lots of factors, but the most important element was the friendship I felt enhanced every aspect of the tour: front of stage, in the band, in the management team, in the crew, and in the audiences …

  Good luck in 1990.

  I returned to my work at Faber with a vengeance. I pushed hard to get the Faber editorial group to investigate the emergent market of CD-ROM, especially for educational projects. I was experimenting with an animation program called Macromind Director (now Adobe Director) and saw it not only as a way of producing interactive programs based on books and plays, but also as the forerunner of a kind of theatre in itself. The latter would require the fast-evolving internet.

  I stayed up very late into the night working on these projects. Karen again yearned for the man I would never be. I spent hours in fantasy, sometimes painting Karen from memory, and embellishing her image as I saw fit. My studio, which I called The Cube, became affectionately and disparagingly known as my ‘garden shed’, in the sense that it was where I went to hide away with my thoughts, my toys and my tinkerings, like a working man with his fishing flies, train sets, or dismantled motorcycle engine.

  The Orlando Sentinel published a story on 8 November 1990 that I was bisexual, prompting our Catholic cleaning lady to quit. My old friend Danny Fields, editor of 16 magazine, had described our night together back in 1967 in a rather more romantic way than I would have done myself. For a while I was angry, but Danny and I had been lovers, even if he had given me the Sixties version of Rohypnol. I didn’t feel inclined to defend myself then, or now. For a public figure like me this was a flea bite. It might even help me appear more complex and interesting than I actually was. On top of all that Danny was a cherished friend, and I didn’t want to do anything that would change that.

  In one of those letters written to the gods that were never delivered, I wrote to my son. ‘Be a pessimist,’ I advised Joseph on his first birthday on 21 November. ‘It is the safest, most pragmatic way to be. Being an optimist may enrich the lives of others (with good cheer and smiling), but it leads you unaware to danger.’

  By the end of the year, taking my own advice, I was in a very dark frame of mind. The best thing was how much I was enjoying Joseph. He was deeply attached to me, was very funny and we had a lot of fun together.

  I had always wanted to be there for my wife and children in a way that my parents were not always there for me. But the childish, devilish, selfish-sod-bastard artist deep inside me didn’t give a toss for fatherhood – he needed freedom. I knew I had to be careful. I loved my son, and would work hard to be a good father to him and try never to break any promises I made him. But I also knew I already carried a gene within me that demanded attention, and if ignored it would become dangerous.

  One evening in December I tested the strength of my sobriety by drinking a tiny amount of cognac. Immediately I felt as though I had seen God – not the Jewish or Christian one, but Dionysus or Hedone, the gods of rock ’n’ roll.

  Be happy, the god whispered in my ear, have sex, go to the theatre, have dinner parties, be happy.

  As the year ended, Karen stayed awake early into the morning while I was downstairs writing. When I got into bed beside her, she spoke.

  ‘We must do something about our life.’

  How I wanted to do something about our life. I wanted to throw myself back into it, to be proactive and positive. I was determined to take charge. But I couldn’t drink. I knew that if I drank all bets were off. At our New Year’s Eve party I poured wine all evening for my friends, flirted with some of the
women and wondered what it would be like to live the reptilian life of a retired rock star, trapped in an inner world of pain and self-doubt.

  In my life, of course, the idea of retirement was purely wishful, the decadence poignantly imagined rather than acted out, but the inner world of self-doubt was all too familiar. Very soon afterwards I started working on songs for my new solo album that would eventually become Psychoderelict. To do so, I spent time in Cornwall working on ‘The Glass Household’, the story that would provide a backbone to the album. It took a number of turns, and I was working it and reworking it. McCrum read an early draft and was encouraging, feeling I’d found a voice.

  The album began to take shape musically in summer 1991, and was due for delivery to Virgin in July. The reworked story was loosely placed in the setting of my years of lonely exile ten years before, in my house at Cleeve. It was the biography of Gabriel, the reptile I had fantasised about, a retired rock star who enters into a disastrous email-based relationship with a young female fan. It wasn’t meant to be about me or my life but I wanted to introduce to the world the character-type that I knew most intimately.

  Going to work on the story every day I felt I was battling with a living, writhing animal. It wouldn’t stay in one place. With every revision I found myself diverted into darkly erotic territory, or whimsical forays into the heady, dystopic techno days of Lifehouse. The discipline I’d managed while working on Iron Man had given way to a more protean process.

  Frustrated by the distractions of other artists working at Oceanic’s recording studio, I’d created a new studio for myself on Grand Cru, the barge outside Oceanic, which turned out to be one of the most effective spaces since the tiny rooms in the little Georgian house in Twickenham. It had a large Synclavier, a 32-track digital tape machine, a wonderful vintage Neve desk, a grand piano, two of my old electric organs that were usually in storage, and enough space to work with drums and vocals. When the tide came in, the barge would rock slightly in the wind. I started working through the night again.