The Age of Anxiety

by Pete Townshend

  Summoned to Walter’s music studio in his garden at Sheen I admit I felt a mixture of excited anticipation at what Walter might play me and anxiety about his mental condition. On the telephone he had sounded scattered, confused, and unfocused.

  “I’m doing creative stuff again,” he said. “But I also have an old feeling; I sense I’m losing Floss somehow. It feels as though this marriage could go the same way as it did with Siobhan unless I’m really careful.”

  “Don’t be daft,” I soothed. “You love each other. Floss has her work, you have yours.”

  “But in the entire fifteen years of this marriage I have never before exposed myself to the kind of trouble that composing seems to bring up for me.”

  “You’re worried about what you’re hearing?”

  “It’s making what is already difficult even worse.”

  “Don’t let yourself get lost,” I advised. “Try not to isolate, don’t get self-obsessed.”

  Walter laughed. “You have been nagging me for the last few weeks to throw myself into this, to allow my compulsive drive to emerge. I have some basic music now. Do you want to listen to it?”

  “You are an artist, Walter,” I reminded him. “Whether you work in the garden or compose. It’s the same.”

  “I don’t think the price is worth paying if I lose Floss.”

  “Every woman wants a song,” I teased. “Didn’t Siobhan just want one sonnet? And you couldn’t even do that?”

  “I wouldn’t do it,” replied Walter. “Should I compose music for Floss, about her, that reflects her, rather than what I am beginning to feel?”

  “It can’t hurt.” I laughed.

  “Floss wants me to do what is right for me. Not knock up silly love songs. I’m feeling a new load placed on me. My peers are all fifteen years older since the days of the band, just like me, but most of them have young children. They carry a sense of duty, responsibility, and both the burden of the past and the weight of the future. They all have money troubles and huge concerns about the environment. They want to see a safe and secure future for their children.”

  He laughed loudly. “Louis, around here we are surrounded by human breeders, yummy mummies and their City-boy husbands who want to have lots of children. But these are scary times to bring up kids. You must know that.”

  I understood. Walter’s peers were a lot younger than me, but we all had access to the same dreadful information. I was moving toward the twilight of my life; I knew that if I were younger with small kids I would not feel so sanguine. Indeed, Walter’s contemporaries carried the weight of the planet, not just of their own immediate environment. Nature was now redefined; nothing natural was unaffected by the explosion of the human race and the threat of the actual explosions it might unleash if they all failed to agree on who God was, if indeed such a personage existed in any shape or form.

  No, he could not write for Floss, because as an artist he could not contact her. He had become creatively imperious.

  When I arrived at the house in Sheen I walked into a dilemma that I prayed I might be able to help Walter to solve. However, I couldn’t disguise my fizzing excitement at hearing what he had composed in his new and disturbed state.

  Walter, in my opinion, had found in himself a streak of genius. His songs with the Dingwalls band had been good. Hearty pub rock was hard to beat, and not easy to make. His new work, his soundscapes, would surely be the kind of art I knew how to engage with, penetrate, analyze, value, and market.

  Closed eyes. Blindness. Then flashes, an infinite universe, layer after layer of stars, each promising a new beginning. A clarinet plays scales, disciplined and regular, obviously read from a book for practice and fluency of eye and hand. Gentle, the soft, reedy, slightly honking sound of the lower notes rings across a small suburban room, setting glasses rattling on the table. The player sometimes leaves his position at the music stand, and when he feels familiar enough with a section of the music approaching begins to walk around the room, raising his instrument to the ceiling. Over this cascading, regimented, and predictable nonmusical music comes the sound from the next room: a baritone saxophone, wild, playing with no boundaries, barping, stopping with glottal clicks, the rattle of the complex brass key system adding a percussive rhythm to the scales and extemporizations. Among all this swooping music is what sounds like a swooping light, like a kind of electronic ray, wooshing. Then a piano, in the wrong key, or is it in any key at all? The player is using mainly his right hand, his left framing random chords at the beginning of every four bars or so, and then flies all over the chord, up and down, like a bird soaring, sometimes like a trapped animal trying to escape from a cage, or a fly trying to batter through some glass to the light. Then a door seems to open and the piano breaks free, the baritone sax catches up with the clarinet and for a moment, a brief moment, they concur and flow. Then they each veer off on their separate flights. Now a double bass sets up a rhythm, so strong, so insistent that it demands not to be ignored, but it is ignored. The fingers plucking are replaced sometimes by a powerful bowing, percussive and mischievous, rising high on the strings, sometimes sounding like a viola or cello both slowed down into a new and sonorous range, but also sped up in an emulation of the inevitably clumsy and staggering patterns only a double bass can express. Then drums clatter along, then more saxophones, thin-sounding trumpets, joined by electric guitars being played far too fast, trying to sound like saxophones being overplayed hysterically. Next, electric instruments join in, organs, Wurlitzer pianos with their characteristic knocking, buzzing reeds. Synthesizers swoop in, playing in impossible clusters of harmonically forced intervals, fourths, fifths, sevenths—creating a modality reminiscent of another world, but somehow echoing the strange timbres of those dusty pipe organs in old churches pushed into overtones. This is the history, the mystery, the hysteria of jazz rattling and drifting in incoherent rusty waterfalls across the landscape. Then suddenly, without warning, everything stops and an alto sax is all that can be heard, a player disconnected from his soul but somehow connected to the universe.

  I think it is clear by now that I took my role as a godfather seriously. Perhaps too much so. The vows one is asked to take in the baptism service (and Harry was a Catholic) were of a religious rather than spiritual nature. But it was in the matter of Walter’s spiritual state that I felt most responsible. I wanted him to be fulfilled, to be happy, and to be able to bear with equanimity the frustration and difficult times when creativity was not free-flowing. I guessed Harry knew I would be better at this stuff than he would. Yet I wanted to offer practical help too. Walter had attempted to musicalize the written soundscape descriptions. As he played a few chords on the piano and sang some plaintive phrases, it became clear that he hadn’t gotten very far with it. As a composer he couldn’t capture what he heard in his head, what he had so eloquently and poetically described on paper.

  “Walter,” I said, “this is very interesting, but you need someone to remind you how to write music again.” I laughed, trying to reduce the impact of my negative review. “You need a kick up your musical arse! I hope you don’t mind me saying this.”

  Walter smiled and shook his head. “You’re right,” he confessed. “I’m trying my best. I seem to have lost the knack. Or maybe this is just too big a task for me?”

  I decided to ask Crow to visit Walter, as there was no one more down-to-earth, more practical. No one was better than Crow at kicking musical arse.

  Chapter 14

  Despite the fact that Walter was no longer performing at Dingwalls, I continued to go, and quite often. I had many friends there, and Frank Lovelace still managed Crow’s new band.

  I couldn’t really work out whether Frank was a villain or really cared about music. I knew that like me he loved the company of the women at the bar. Selena was sometimes around, still beautiful, mad as ever, and very entertaining. Crow’s wife Agneta would sometimes be there too, and she always had charming and becoming Swedish girlfriends in tow, but on this o
ccasion she was absent.

  Crow’s band was terrific, and true to his R&B thesis to the letter. Walter was missed, but Crow was a strong front man and his singing and guitar playing were cohesive and convincing.

  I loved talking to Crow. He never seemed to change. That evening he came to sit with me and brought me a Coke.

  “So Walter’s maze is finished.” He smiled. “Does he still have his head in a plastic bucket?”

  Selena saw us and came to join us, having overheard Crow’s last question.

  “Playing the harmonica,” she said with a laugh. “He loves the sound inside that bucket. Louis told me he started doing that when he was boy, didn’t you, sweetie?” She looked at me. “He used to say it made him feel as though he had a microphone and a bit of reverb.”

  “How is your work going, Selena?” Crow’s question surprised me. Was he really interested in her strange world?

  “I am starting to bear the ravages of healing a few too many of my friends, including your fabulous wife, Crow. She had arthritis, you know. I fixed it.”

  “You did,” accepted Crow.

  “And there are those who ask for healing but the problem I can see is that they have entities living within them like parasites.”

  Crow laughed. “Fuck off, Selena! Agneta doesn’t have parasites.” He got up and stalked off.

  Selena looked at me, her arms spread out. “Did I say Agneta had parasites?” She pulled an incredulous face. “I said I helped her arthritis.”

  My impression was that Crow had become more narrow-minded than ever in fifteen years. He was so hard to talk to about anything other than music, and even on that subject he was a fanatic and a pedant. Some might say that he was more focused; Crow was brilliant, especially if working with younger musicians where his historian’s view of music from the late fifties to the mid sixties always found a willing ear and added context and effective constraint to otherwise undisciplined young minds. On his own, driving his own small band, his playing just got tighter and tighter, his repertoire narrower and narrower, until in the end, his longish scraggy hair going suddenly gray within a single month, he was a happy anachronism. He used a regular introduction that his fans had come to anticipate with glee. Here’s one some of you may not have heard. He would then launch into “Susie Q,” or “Cathy’s Clown,” or some other classic well known even to someone who had recently walked out of a jungle in Borneo.

  I called Crow the next day at two in the afternoon and he was obviously still in bed and hungover.

  “Hey, Lou,” he said, hiccupping. “What d’you want?”

  I heard a female grunt in the background. I was pretty sure it was Selena. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

  “I want to speak to you about Walter,” I said. “Who’s that with you?”

  “Mind your own fucking business,” he cackled. “It’s Selena of course. Like a rat up a pipe.”

  He later confessed that Agneta had left him without warning a week before to marry her boss at the bank where she worked. Selena had offered “healing.” My guess was that she and Crow would surely become an item, but their sex life might be frustrated by Selena’s dream of getting Walter into bed.

  In fact, I suppose I’d better admit it, at the time it really annoyed me, Selena sleeping with Crow. I was jealous, or envious, or something. Selena always gave me a bit of a hard time, I felt.

  “Anyway, about Walter.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He has started to write again.” I sensed this might not be a smooth negotiation. I wanted Crow to look at what Walter was doing. “It isn’t quite music, not yet. It’s descriptions of music, and sound. I think it could be the basis of something pretty amazing. It could be really cool.”

  Crow wheezed as he lit a cigarette, and started drawling with no preamble.

  “In your day, Louis, back when you were at art school in the sixties—with the benefit of grass—everything probably felt cool in music, everything seemed new and fresh. It was all flooding over from America: R&B, Tamla Motown, New Orleans, Memphis, Bob Dylan. You probably called music ‘sounds,’ like the Yanks.”

  “True.” I laughed. “It seemed to carry some kind of message.”

  Crow gasped between puffs of smoke.

  “Who cares about a message? Sounds. It’s a good word. Sounds are all I want. Cool sounds. Simple sounds.”

  I could sense him pulling himself up, leaning back against the bedhead to allow him to give more force to what followed.

  “How arrogant does a fucking pub rock star need to be to believe they can carry a message to the audience?”

  He was probably referring as much to the Hansons and their work in the revived Hero Ground Zero, whose latest album had been the bestseller of the year. But perhaps he was also digging at Siobhan’s futile attempts, fifteen years back, to refine what Walter had been doing in the heyday of the Stand.

  “Sounds,” he barked. “That’s all it is. It’s all it ever was.”

  I explained that Walter was hearing sounds, real sounds, amazing sounds. He was reflecting the anxiety of the people around him.

  “In a way he is composing,” I went on. “But it’s just written descriptions at the moment, and very rough music demos. He’s hearing a grand mixture of sounds. He’s writing a kind of score, or libretto if you like. He calls them soundscapes.”

  “This is even worse.” Crow laughed, breaking into a broken smoker’s cough. “It sounds like he thinks he’s fucking Stockhausen.”

  I knew that the kind of sounds Crow was talking about were not like Walter’s sounds, but I was determined to get him to go and see his old friend.

  “Crow,” I urged, “you need to see Walter. He needs to see you.”

  It might not work out well; I knew that. Crow would listen to Booker T and the MG’s playing “Slim Jenkins’ Place” and he would classify the track as “sounds.” He would look at what Walter was doing and might classify what he saw, and what it might produce as music, as “a nightmare made real.” Even so, I knew that bringing them together was what I needed to do next. It occurred to me that the ally I needed to persuade Crow to visit Walter was Frank Lovelace. He might see a reunion in it for the Stand, or some kind of opportunity to make money. All I cared about was that Crow reconnected with Walter and would look at what he was doing.

  A large wooden wheel rolls through the dust of an unmade road. The cart creaks. The ox pulling it wheezes. The driver mutters as he snaps his straight whip at the ox’s seesawing haunches. A street seller shouts his wares, peanuts and biscuits, in Gujarati. Children giggle and laugh as they pass, neatly dressed, on their way to school. The blare of an overdriven radio pumps out bhangra-style dance music, distorted and colorful, energetic and rhythmic, lilting and swaying but with deafeningly vibrant drums. Sacred cows wander in front of hooting petrol-driven three-wheeled rickshaws, their bells clanging somberly in the racket. The pit-pat and stuttering across the square of a distant tennis match on a hard court, laughing voices in cultured England-educated Indian accents. A thundering, rocking, overloaded bus drives past, several ghetto-blaster radios playing at once, Qawwali, Bollywood, Indian disco, and more bhangra. A mullah calls the Muslim faithful from a distant tower, his voice amplified in the distance. Birds squawking, flapping, and fighting over a dead mouse in the road. Darkness. The flicker of a candle.

  Steve and Patty Hanson had sold fifty-three million of several albums over fifteen years. Hero Ground Zero, the band started by Paul Jackson aka Nikolai Andréevich in the sixties that the Hansons had revived in the nineties, was a prog rock band of the old school that broke all records in arenas and stadiums around the world. Patty had stopped playing the drums and stood up front in a wispy dress banging a tambourine. It was rumored salaciously that she performed without underwear. The light show was legendary, her body was legendary, her tambourine playing was Royal College of Music Grade 10, but it was her voice that made the band so huge. She sang like a husky siren, her voice almost without vibra
to; it was a cold sound, but still passionate and vulnerable. She and Steve together wrote ambitious and audaciously pretentious songs. They wrote about Kings Arthur and Alfred, the Greek myths, beautiful cars, dreams, nightmares, color, science, and even fashion. One successful album consisted of a series of songs based on early Hollywood movie titles.

  They respected no conventions, broke through all boundaries, sneered back at anyone who dared to sneer at them. They took drugs, they drank, they crashed cars; Steve Hanson even crashed a small plane and walked away. Patty spent more on dresses that would reveal her (alleged) lack of underwear than she did on drugs, but on their last recording session she had (allegedly) run up a bill for three hundred thousand dollars with her cocaine dealer. Also managed by Frank Lovelace, the Hansons were high in the Rich List.

  But by 2011, when Walter was trying to emulate the sound he was hearing every day in his head, Hero Ground Zero were burned out, creatively depleted. They were still filling large venues and attracting bids for festivals, but I could tell they could not write songs anymore.

  After I had spoken to Crow I called Steve and got Patty on the phone.

  “Louis,” she sang my name. “How fantastic to hear your voice, my darling.”

  She still sounded like a music teacher, slightly posh and had obviously risen at six and spent the morning practicing the cello or whatever. She also sounded slightly exhausted; perhaps I was projecting onto her voice what I wanted to believe: that they needed Walter. I asked how she and Steve were doing.

  “We’re a bit like Abba, my darling.” She laughed. “We are still married but have other things going on, if you know what I mean. Louis, you don’t want to take me out to dinner, do you? That would be wonderful. You could take me to Le Caprice. I haven’t been there for years.”

  “I’d love that.” I wasn’t being entirely truthful, but Patty was still a very beautiful and sexy woman. “I wanted to let you know I’ve got some interesting news about Walter.”