By February 1991 I had access to a whole set of Apple computers for music, graphics, animation and word-processing. I had been interested in multimedia platforms for years, ever since art college, and was fascinated by the potential in combining the aural with the visual. Psychoderelict was initially planned to be a radio play, but my experiments with Macromind Director demonstrated that it might be possible for me to create a DVD to accompany the CD, which would be very useful should I ever decide to bring Psychoderelict to the stage. I was also beginning to write basic computer code and designing my own logging program so I wouldn’t lose track of the various digital files I worked with. All this high-speed creative wrangling did help generate music, by osmosis, chaos, discovery and the power of noodling.
On the negative side I was sleeping badly, and was out of synch with Karen, which caused constant tension – sometimes confrontation. Karen and I knew each other too well (and perhaps in some ways not at all): when Karen looked at me she remembered her failed hopes of a dependable, faithful friend, lover, husband and father. When I looked at her I saw all the ways I had let her down, and how it was becoming too late to put them right. My time with Joseph, in contrast, was like a vital breath of real life.
The bleak themes of ‘The Glass Household’ – of depravity, solipsism, retirement, disappearance, privacy, loneliness, alienation – weren’t new ones for me. However, this fictional scenario that I wrote in March 1991 would have a creepy parallel with real events in my life a decade later. In the story, the rock star’s redemption from isolation was triggered by an investigative journalist who intercepted his email and set him up to look like a paedophile. Faced with this devastating attack on his character, the rock star was forced to engage the larger world – and fight. (In real life it would be through the work of one particular investigative journalist that I would manage to achieve some kind of closure after being similarly accused.)
Probably the most powerful song I had ready by spring 1991 was ‘Don’t Try to Make Me Real’. The use of the word ‘real’ here was loaded. My rock-star hero was trying to resist being brought down from the heady clouds of celebrity into the kangaroo court of tabloid journalism.
Make me of clay, make me of steel
But whatever you do don’t try to make me real
Make me your dream, a secretive deal
But don’t ever scheme to try to make me real
Karen encouraged me to sail – it probably seemed healthier to her than me hiding in The Cube, the studio at Tennyson House where I was currently recording. I wanted to sail faster than Blue Merlin would allow, so I found Pazienza, a good Laurent Giles design from 1956, built in wood by the eminent Italian yard Beltrami, and made the swap. Pazienza was a fast, classic sailing boat. We christened her on Nicola’s birthday on 18 June.
Karen bought a timeshare for a house on Tresco, in the Scilly Isles, for August, and I decided to sail there. On Friday the 13th, after an exhilarating day of sailing, I went ashore, rented a push-bike and cycled off to the cottage on the opposite side of the island.
High from the holiday, and holding a VHF portable radio, careering downhill I hit a pothole and went over the handlebars, scraping along the rough concrete, ripping the skin off my shoulder. As I came to a halt the bike smashed into my right arm, near the wrist. I had never broken a limb before, but I knew what had happened was serious.
A helicopter took me to Truro Hospital where I was given a powerful sedative, but my operation was postponed because an injured baby had been rescued from a car accident that had claimed both of its parents. By the time my surgeon got to me it was nearly three in the morning. He had saved the child’s spine, but he crossed his fingers about what he might be able to do for me. He did tell me he couldn’t afford to wait another day; the damage to my wrist was very bad.
To strum a guitar the palm is vertical, to accept change the palm is horizontal. So which did I want? He said it was either/or. I decided to have my wrist set so that I could play the guitar. I’d have to have someone pass the hat if I ever needed to ask my audiences for change.
For a month I had all kinds of stainless-steel wires and splints to immobilise my hand while it healed, and I still have a long titanium plate in my wrist. As for my guitar playing, I cannot flourish flamenco-style in quite the way I once could, but in some ways my playing has improved because I worked so hard to regain my facility. Looking back, there’s a temptation to fly the priestly helicopter very high and imagine an irritated God flicking me off my bike merely to stop me, to bring me to my senses.
I was pleased with the way the solo album was turning out, but couldn’t do any more work on it with my hand as it was. I wanted to deliver it to Virgin and be paid, so I played my work-in-progress to my manager Bill Curbishley, who felt most of it was pretentious and overly precious. I stood my ground. I felt that once the songs were set against the story they would sparkle and make more sense – as they almost always did – but Bill could hear only what I was able to play him. Or perhaps he was looking for the punch of another classic Who anthem.
With Iron Man I’d overworked the songs so they sometimes came across without enough edge, and seemed almost lightweight. With the new songs, set against the dark story of ‘The Glass Household’, I felt I was really getting the balance right. As usual, I had made the mistake of accepting advances from two record companies who, despite their commitment to my broader ambitions, weren’t in the business of funding musicals for the stage. They were putting up millions of dollars, and wanted successful radio tracks. And I’m sure Bill longed for the 1970s, when even substandard Who records sold millions. I couldn’t blame him for that, even if it wasn’t a longing I shared.
By November 1991 the painkilling drugs I was taking were producing huge mood-swings. My damaged hand felt like a claw, and my forearm felt wooden and heavy. Karen and I argued often, sometimes quite bitterly. She didn’t like having my office in the house, which led to a lot of coming and going. She also said it created more tension for me, as I never seemed to be off-duty. Karen decided to buy a flat in Bath, and it seemed to me she was doing it to get away from me. But I told myself that the problems of success hadn’t exactly snuck up on us. Our first kiss had been after a Who show. The Who had a record in the charts on our first date. We made love for the first time in my posh pop star’s flat in Belgravia.
From 1992 through to the 2000s there were a number of revivals, re-stagings and adaptations of both Tommy and Quadrophenia, not only on Broadway and in London’s West End but internationally.* The first of these, in 1992, was a new staging of Tommy by Des McAnuff, artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse, near San Diego, California.
I wouldn’t return to Psychoderelict, as I had started to call it, for about a year (when my Atlantic delivery date required me to cough up). Roger visited me and made one final attempt to persuade me to go back to The Who. In an early version of Psychoderelict the reptilian washed-up rock star Gabriel is visited by his good old buddy Ray High, whom Gabriel has left behind, and I couldn’t help feeling Roger was playing Ray High to my Gabriel. He wanted to know what my plans were for The Who in 1992, and whether I wanted to play in Australia and Japan.
I was in a financially pragmatic mood, which made Roger sad. My point was that my two solo deals were excellent, hugely lucrative, and were not performance-based – they were guarantees – and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice and blow them out the way I had the Warner Brothers deal. What Roger then offered was, on any new record deal, to let me recoup some of what I lost when I forced him to end the Warners contract in 1983. He said that he and John were prepared – if I did a new Who contract with them – to recompense me some of the one-million-dollar loss I’d suffered at that time. He was very sweet to me, and his passion for The Who was as evident as always.
That evening, as we lay in bed, Karen asked what Roger had wanted. She’d said nothing all day. I was concerned that she would be afraid I would go back on tour.
‘Don�
��t worry,’ I said. ‘He was very kind, but I can’t help him, not now.’
‘It isn’t Roger I’m worried about,’ she replied.
In La Jolla, working on the Tommy musical in June 1992, I was still having manic-depressive episodes, and any time alone in my hotel room saw me climbing the walls. These had crept up on me since my son’s birth, perhaps a backswing of that terrible pendulum that had been stopped, poised, for a while for the first year of his life. I was occasionally experimenting with very small amounts of alcohol, but I believe the problem was my pain medication, which I had begun to turn to for emotional relief after the physical pain from my wrist was long gone.
So it was no surprise for me to wake up to find a diabolical gremlin literally shaking my bed. As I bounced up and down, I shouted, ‘Just fuck off, will you’, and rolled over to go back to sleep. But I could hear the chandelier tinkling, and when I sat up I realised the room was swaying. I went to the window and saw the building across the street shaking the way a large animal might dry itself upon emerging from a river crossing.
It was an earthquake.
I quickly pulled on some clothes and walked down the fourteen flights of stairs to the lobby, which was full of shocked people wandering aimlessly. It was very spooky. We were far away from the epicentre, but the hotel – built on rollers to survive extreme quakes – was still lurching back and forth, and continued to do so for much longer than I imagined the architect had intended.
Later, when I drove to the theatre, there were cracks in the road, and constant aftershocks made everything feel apocalyptic.
Back in London I was still keen to complete the work I’d started with Ted Hughes. I had contacted the Youth Coordinator at the Young Vic Theatre about the possibility of doing a version of Iron Man as part of their children’s programme there. They were very interested, so I started editing and pulling together all the songs as they related to my original dramatic scenario. It became clear very quickly, having done the work with Des on the ‘book’ for Tommy, how far I’d managed to get and what would and wouldn’t work on stage. It was also glaringly obvious that I needed a narrator. I was very keen to set Ted’s prose to music, and every line fell easily into my musical experimentations.
I was also engaged in a songwriting/recording project with my two brothers, Paul and Simon. They were both very talented, but had struggled. We decided to do a kind of Rough Mix together. It was an inspired idea: our voices blended together very well when we sang backing vocals, and we each had a different style of songwriting. We hoped to write together if possible, or at least collaborate in some way. I paid both my brothers an advance; I’m not sure either of them felt my heart was completely in the project, but I loved working with them, partly because I loved them so much.
In May I returned to Psychoderelict with a vengeance. I was now working with a much tighter story, with more humour and irony. I’d combined the two leading male characters (Ray and Gabriel), and lightened the mood of the piece. I’d introduced a specific reference to Lifehouse, calling it ‘Gridlife’, which felt a little contrived at first but allowed me to dip back into the reservoir of ideas and music experiments I’d accumulated.
As usual I was juggling projects, but this time it involved the development of three dramatico-musical works: Psychoderelict, The Iron Man and the La Jolla Tommy. I heard from Des in October 1992 that we had secured the St James Theatre on Broadway for Tommy. This was momentous news. He was working on Much Ado about Nothing at La Jolla, and I was back recording in London. When I got the schedule for the transfer of Tommy to Broadway, I was amazed to see that not only were we to start auditions and casting in early November 1992, but after opening in April 1993 we’d be moving quickly, two months later, to put together another company for a national tour.
I had known Liz Geier, a friend of Barney’s, since 1979. She was very tall, with a deep voice, strident personality and wonderfully dry sense of humour. There was no romance between us; I simply couldn’t get past her scepticism of me.
‘Now and Then’, on the Psychoderelict album, was about our first meeting and was inspired by our unhappy friendship. I’m not even sure she had ever been a true fan of mine, but something had clicked when we first met, and neither of us had been able to let go. For her, I was hard to forget because I was famous. For me, Liz was just hard to forget, especially for a man who spent a lot of time on his own in a studio feeling lonely. Suddenly, here was a real love song at last, one of the few I’d ever written, and it was about a frustrated affair.
I was eager to give Liz a copy of the song. She was working at Cafe 44, a few blocks down from the Royalton where I was staying in New York. When I’d consumed my sixth Coca-Cola I asked if she had any of that ‘alcohol-free beer’ we have in Britain. She said she did, and gave me a Rolling Rock.
It took just a few seconds for me to realise there was alcohol in my glass. I hadn’t taken a drink in public for eleven years, since October 1981.
‘This isn’t alcohol-free beer, is it?’ I held the bottle up to the light.
‘It may as well be,’ she said, laughing.
I didn’t drink any more.
An hour later I was on my knees in my hotel room praying. My prayer was not, however, for help with this accident, or to keep me away from another drink; it was to thank God for showing me what I needed to feel complete, for giving me back the only sociability medicine that had ever worked for me.
I was literally weeping with happiness. Cafe 44, Rolling Rock and Liz Geier, it seemed a match made in heaven.
25
RELAPSE
I didn’t start drinking again immediately. Indeed, I didn’t drink again for several weeks, but I knew pretty well what had happened. In the eleven years I’d stayed dry I’d read a lot of research about the way alcohol works in the brain of those who were addicted to its effects. The theory was that the 10 per cent of the population predisposed to alcohol addiction produced disproportionate amounts of endogenous neurotransmitters when they drank. I hadn’t drunk enough Rolling Rock to make myself even slightly drunk, but I’d imbibed enough for my body to flood my brain with endorphins. Maybe I wouldn’t have slipped at all had I not been tiptoeing around Liz Geier, pretending that one day she and I might suddenly work out. So no surprise here: my problem was not only that I was an addict, but also a fantasist.
The disciple who had brought me closest to Meher Baba, Delia DeLeon, died on 21 January 1993. Her funeral five days later was not at all a sad affair; it was a celebration of what Mani Irani, Meher Baba’s sister, called Delia’s ‘freedom’. Delia had always behaved as though Tommy was something she had played a part in bringing to fruition, and in a sense she was right. Meher Baba would always be a presiding presence over my work on Tommy, in whatever form.
After the wake Barney and I went to my studio barge and started to sharpen the script of Psychoderelict. Barney was a perfect collaborator on this project, able to keep the story light and funny, but also attest to the parts of it that were authentic and real. The Lifehouse strand started to feel as if it really fitted, and I added a few of the outtakes from my 1971 electronic demos. The songs Bill had found so unsatisfactory the previous year suddenly seemed to come alive when set within the body of the story, just as I’d hoped they would.
Ruth Streeting, my fictional journalist who conspires with Ray’s manager to get the ageing rock star back on the boards, does so by abusing Ray, not praising him. She knows how best to trigger him. Ray has been lost in the comforting glow of the few fawning fans who still write to him. Streeting gets him out into the world by setting him up with a seductive young fan who sends him a salacious photo at the moment he finally, after years of frustration, seems to be cracking his ‘Gridlife’ project.
This was a transparent dig at my own lingering obsession with Lifehouse, as well as my tendency to romantic fantasy. Barney had felt no obligation to dissuade me from parodying myself, and other old rockers, in this way. And Ray was a mix of two kinds of rock st
ar; one part of the creative concoction – the nostalgic old trouper yearning for the good old days – was most emphatically not me.
I delivered the album to Atlantic on 27 February. Bearing in mind how unhappy Doug Morris had been with Iron Man I was delighted when he told me he thought Psychoderelict could be the biggest album of my solo career. The play-with-music form was new to him, but with Tommy in the neighbourhood, and rumours already afoot that the Broadway show would do well, Doug was ready to embrace Psychoderelict. We started putting artwork together for a sleeve, and arranged a photoshoot.
I flew in and out of New York so often that spring that my assistant Nicola finally just stayed behind to be there each time I returned. My work was very exhilarating. I could walk to Broadway if I wanted to take in the bright lights. Tommy had a neon sign in the big square at that time. But I was increasingly aware that my marriage to Karen contained a large element of fantasy, which meant that it could come crashing down on me at any time.
In what proved to be a serendipitous event, I missed my plane back to London and decided to stay in New York overnight. At a party thrown by Tommy Hilfiger, a blonde girl walked over to our table and sat next to me. ‘I’ve come to kiss you,’ she said.
After the party Barney suggested we go to a bar called Lucky Strike in the Village. The girl who had kissed me was with her boyfriend, a social worker teaching children with mental disabilities, a good-looking man with long dark hair. While he and I talked in the taxi downtown, his girlfriend who had wanted to kiss me (it had been a bet, she said later) looked out of the window.
Who I Am: A Memoir Page 39
