Pete Townshend: People just felt that pop was getting out of their hands; groups like the Pink Floyd were appearing, scary groups, psychedelic . . . What were they all about? With their flashing lights and all taking trips and one of them’s a psycho. So they all turn over to good old Englebert Humperdink . . . It’s a sign of the fact that the music got out of step with the people. [1968]
The Kinks’ Dave Davies told Beat Instrumental he felt equally baffled: ‘Just looking at the charts makes [me] feel a bit . . . insecure. More insecure now than a couple of years ago. The Scaffold getting to number one with “Lily the Pink”, for instance. I mean, it’s hardly a predictable number one, is it? . . . I find it strange – you look ahead at what might happen during 1969 and find out that it could be anything at all. No distinct pattern anywhere.’
As summations of the 1968 charts go, ‘no distinct pattern’ is as good as any. If bands were uncertain of the way ahead, a number of them concluded that it was better to disband than stay together and figure things out. And almost the first to abandon ship was the very band that seemed to have bucked the trend and kept its pre-psychedelic audience, Small Faces. At year’s end, they announced that they were going their separate ways, as if the job was done. Townshend, for one, was not surprised: ‘I think it was natural in a way that the Small Faces broke up after Ogdens’ Nut Gone [Flake] . . . You do your classic album and then you really have to use every ounce of stamina and guts to stick together, because it’s so tempting to relax.’
The Kinks, too, were wondering whether or not they should soldier on – in their case, issuing their defining album had done nothing to reverse their fortunes. And at least one member had made it clear he’d had enough. Pete Quaife made his decision during Christmas 1968, and though briefly talked out of it, by the following March he was officially ‘out’. For some time he had been of the opinion that ‘we were pandering to what Ray wanted to be, how he wanted to be perceived’, but he kept his counsel, only expressing such thoughts to the Kinks chronicler Andy Miller in 2002.
Year’s end brought no shortage of bands following their lead. These included three English bands whose contribution to the psychedelic pop scene had already been significant: Cream, Traffic and the appositely named The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. If The Move had survived the loss of live wire Ace Kefford, and the Floyd were soldiering on regardless, it was increasingly hard to see where the future of English rock lay. As of 10 January 1969, when George Harrison walked out on The Beatles (although he returned to complete the ill-fated Let It Be and, ultimately, Abbey Road), the writing was on the wall even for England’s greatest pop export. Pete Townshend again had his own take on what was causing this sense of doubt that was eating away at more progressive pop outfits at this time:
Pete Townshend: At that time the Moody Blues and [other] people were doing ambitious works . . . and they were instantly getting labelled as pretentious, and at the same time garbage was being pushed out into the charts . . . Anybody that was any good . . . was more or less becoming insignificant again. They weren’t new anymore, they weren’t fresh, and a lot of the new stuff that was coming out was really trash. There was a lot of psychedelic bullshit going about. [1974]
Ray Davies and David Bowie were two such figures determined to fight against the tide of ‘psychedelic bullshit’. In both cases, it was the same concern that kept them on the straight and narrow – fear that the rattling skeletons of a troubled childhood might be unleashed. Bowie would tell a sceptical Playboy in 1976: ‘Acid only gives people a link with their own imagery. I already had it . . . I never needed acid to make music.’ But his landlady and lover at that time, Mary Finnegan, offered a more prosaic explanation: ‘David was terrified of mind-warping drugs like LSD, and he used to lecture his fans on the dangers of tripping.’ The last thing he wanted was for some drug to ‘wipe away’ all he was ‘brought up to believe as a child’.
At the same time, the failure of VGPS had not done a great deal for Davies’ precarious hold on his mental equilibrium; and his response was to withdraw still further from the kind of pop productions DJs tended to play. As 1969 dawned, he had become a songwriter for hire, writing a song a week for a TV series called Where Was Spring? Typically, he personalized the sense of loss implicit in the title, writing the great lost Kink classic ‘Where Did My Spring Go?’, further proof that he intended to retreat more into the past. Unfortunately, his private little war against ‘psychedelic bullshit’, at Pye’s expense, was yielding only the most pyrrhic of victories.
Perhaps the only sane solution was to send up all the ‘psychedelic bullshit’. Roy Wood’s pseudonymous 1969 Acid Gallery single, ‘Dance ’Round the Maypole’, recorded while the post-Kefford The Move found its feet, was one oft-overlooked, gloriously silly riposte. Another was Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Intergalactic Magicians Walking Through Pools of Velvet Darkness’, recorded in May 1968. Containing lines such as, ‘I am here and you are there / And we are all going nowhere’, it was a largely improvised, one-day-at-the-Beeb send-up of those still pushing a psychedelic agenda. The powerhouse blues combo, who had yet to sight their bird of ill omen, or associate with the kind of people that liked to dose their ‘friends’, would soon be taking their own stroll through pools of velvet darkness leading nowhere.
The only contribution Syd Barrett had made to the output of the mighty EMI Records in 1968 was the last cut placed by ‘his band’ on the Floyd’s first post-Barrett outing, ‘Jugband Blues’, recorded back in October 1967. For anyone paying attention, it seemed like a not-so-fond farewell to psychedelia from a man looking to strip away the insane instruments that once played in his head, in this instance manifested as a Salvation Army band who had been instructed by Barrett to play whatever they liked in the coda. After previewing the song in session, BBC DJ John Peel confessed that he, for one, was baffled by the meaning behind the title. Well, if, as I have suggested elsewhere, the title is a self-conscious reference to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 paean to ‘Jugband Music’, then Barrett was finally ready to take the doctor’s advice: ‘The doctor said, give him jugband music / It seems to make him feel just fine.’
If Barrett had barely started on the road to recovery from his own acid explorations, by the start of 1968 Pete Townshend had finally unblocked the creative dam that had resulted from kowtowing to the counterculture’s ‘explore thyself’ mantra. Providing a remarkable parallel to Dylan’s own experience after his bad acid trip in May 1965, Townshend’s poetic way of coming to terms with his post-Monterey burn-out was his own ‘piece of vomit about twenty pages long’. And it included passages of scourging self-analysis such as:
I am alone. More alone in my ignorance now than ever before.
At least before I thought I knew what life was about . . .
The darkness of this place is unbelievable.
It’s so dark it clouds my mind. As though this
Is where nothing only exists. But fear . . .
Trapped in womb-like darkness, my mind is
Creating its own lying illusion to save its sanity.
Here, my mother, here my father, here other
Reasons to cling to prejudged life as I know it.
Aside from its fair share of similar poetic couplets, it had one persistent refrain:
Sickness will surely take the mind
Where minds can’t usually go
Come on the amazing journey
And learn all you should know.
Dylan, stripping away the verbal vomit, chanced upon ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. In Townshend’s case, he had come upon his own ‘Amazing Journey’. Which would prove to be ‘the very first composition for Tommy. [Indeed,] Tommy was originally going to be called Amazing Journey, and this song really summarizes the “plot” of the [original] story.’ It would be a largely drug-free voyage of discovery, one designed to realign his own divided self.
2. 1969: Something In the Water
Madness (contrary to most interpretations of ‘schizophrenia’)
is a movement out of familialism towards autonomy. This is the real ‘danger’ of madness and the reason for its violent repression. Society should be one big happy family with hordes of obedient children. One must be mad not to want such an enviable state of affairs.’
– David Cooper, The Language of Madness, 1978
I’m only a person with Eskimo chain
I tattooed my brain all the way
Won’t you miss me?
– Syd Barrett, ‘Dark Globe’, 1969
Pop is a light medium. A pop song about the horrors of war is out of place . . . This means that the sick things [on our new album] have a pre-emphasis. We hope that people’s preconceptions will get screwed around by this.
– Pete Townshend, May 1969
Hippy ideals had initially precipitated a headlong rush back to childhood, triggered by Lennon’s expressed desire to go back there (on the back of another quick flip through the collected works of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Kenneth Grahame). Yet it had apparently not occurred to those bent on regression – Lennon included – that what awaited them there was far more terrifying than anything they’d experienced to date. Or that, to quote another European son, in dreams begin responsibilities. Those English songwriters born to the baby boom generation, the spectre of war, the decline of Empire, protracted postwar rationing and a national struggle to make ends meet, were hoping all such concerns had been washed away by the lysergic tide. But when the tide went out, the racial memories came back.
Such was the subject matter for a series of albums that would define rock music in the year 1969, heralded by perhaps the last album to make it into the shops in 1968, The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow. One of the bands who ran for cover just as psychedelia’s arch collapsed at the end of 1967, The Pretty Things had close ties to Pink Floyd, sharing a record label, producer, booking agent and post-acid transition from r&b combo to psychedelia incarnate (Dave Gilmour even sat in when they performed S.F. Sorrow for the first time in thirty years in 1998).
And just like the Floyd, it was in November 1967 that they found out the hard way psychedelia no longer tickled the tastes of a wider audience, in their case by issuing the masterful ‘Defecting Grey’. As frontman Phil May explained, ‘The character in the song was a defecting grey, i.e. he had found something in his life, which took him out of what was perceived as normal . . . We used to call everybody who did a normal job “greys”.’ Pieced together from three or four separate song ideas, ‘Defecting Grey’ was a wildly ambitious ragbag of musical notions. In its original acetate form, it ran to five-and-a-quarter minutes. Much influenced by musique concrete, the one thing it was not was commercial. It prompted Chris Welch, an early Pretties advocate at Melody Maker, to lament the very fact that ‘groups [like The Pretties] ever discovered that word “progress”’.
Dispirited by this turn of events, The Pretty Things held back from issuing the catchier ‘Turn My Head’. Instead, they rush-released ‘Talking About the Good Times’ as a further stop-gap – to a similarly negligible response from the record-buying public – whilst commencing work on an ambitious year-long project, S.F. Sorrow, that would hopefully reinvent the 12” wheel. As singer Phil May informed the New York Times just before the album’s 1998 reprise: ‘I could never understand why an album had to be five A-sides and five B-sides with no connection.’
Based on a short story by May, S.F. Sorrow was another work from this heady period to address a troubled childhood in code. It is at the mid-point of the album, as the hero walks the streets trying to come to terms with the death of his fiancée, that he encounters Baron Saturday, who invites Sorrow on a journey, and then, without waiting for his response, ‘borrows his eyes’, which promptly initiates a trip through the Underworld. The trip – and we are left in no doubt that this is the appropriate term – begins with Sorrow convinced he is flying towards the moon, but it is in fact his own face. The Baron pushes him through the mouth and down the throat, where they come upon a set of doors. Saturday throws them open, showing a room full of mirrors. Each of them displays a memory from Sorrow’s childhood, which the Baron suggests he studies. Leaving the hall of mirrors, they come upon a long winding staircase that leads to two opaque mirrors that show Sorrow further ghastly truths from his own life. Sorrow is psychologically decimated by this trip and becomes the loneliest man in the world; a curious conclusion coming from a band that was still popping tabs like they were Smarties.
Unbeknownst to The Pretties, Pete Townshend had also started to construct his own album around a single central character traumatized by experiences from his childhood. But as S.F. Sorrow took on a life of its own, The Pretties became increasingly aware that The Who were hard at work on their own ambitious concept album. The difference was that The Pretties were well advanced with theirs, at a time when Townshend was still trying out the storyline on a number of accommodating rock journalists (he later came to feel he’d said ‘so much of what I had wanted to say in Tommy in print . . . [it actually] made it harder to say musically and get off on it’).
The genesis of S.F. Sorrow goes back to before the release of Sgt. Pepper – i.e. the spring of 1967 – when the media seemed to be suggesting the forthcoming Beatles LP would have more conceptual unity than would prove to be the case, much to the surprise of The Pretties’ bassist, Wally Waller, when he finally gave it a spin: ‘I heard people tell me about Sgt. Pepper before I heard it, [and] it sounded like they had done a story. I mean the words rock opera never occurred to me but I thought they did a story with music. I thought what a brilliant idea, why on earth didn’t somebody else think of that? Trust The Beatles to do that. When I got Sgt. Pepper, it wasn’t that . . . [so] I thought, Why don’t we do it?’
However, a number of contagions were eating away at The Pretties at a time when they needed all hands to the volume-pump. Their record label, EMI, had lost faith in the band’s potential to deliver the goods, and it took producer Norman Smith’s wholehearted support to even complete what was in truth a piecemeal project, constructed over some nine months, using other bands’ downtime at Abbey Road studios.
Equally unfortunately for The Pretties, they had already used up some of their best melodies on the five songs recorded for singles the previous autumn; while drummer Skip Alan had, by his own admission, ‘OD’d on the scene’, and wanted out. Just as problematic was Phil May’s industrial drug use. His own apposite description of the S.F. Sorrow sessions – ‘fourteen [sic] months on acid’ – says it all. Guitarist Dick Taylor also had his fractured mind on other things and he, too, would quit on its completion. The result was an album no tighter in the way the songs linked together than Sgt. Pepper. In fact, though the record purported to relate the life story of a disturbed lad from the cradle to the grave, it required a brief chapter between each song to elucidate the actual storyline. And these were only printed on the sleeve, not recited à la Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake.
S.F. Sorrow had another major disadvantage over the album The Who were close to finishing – it couldn’t be played live. The only two performances they gave of the finished work, at the Roundhouse in January 1969, billed as ‘The Pretty Things in Mime – A new production: S.F. Sorrow is Born’, were of necessity performed to backing tapes. Nonetheless, when Tommy finally appeared in May 1969, there were assorted folk happily pointing out that the first ‘rock opera’ had been released five months earlier, and it was by The Pretty Things. Initially, even Pete Townshend seemed prepared to own up to certain similarities, telling Beat Instrumental three months before his own album’s appearance, ‘It’s fairly similar in format to the Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow, but a little tighter.’
What the author of ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’ didn’t expect was that people would extrapolate from this open admission some kind of thematic debt to its predecessor that simply wasn’t there. Although Townshend was some months behind The Pretties in terms of studio time, he was years ahead when it came to stockpiling songs that could work in a ‘rock opera’ contex
t. And he was in no doubt in whose tradition he was really treading:
Pete Townshend: I felt a series of three-minute songs, vignettes, cameos, each one very different, none of them musically related to each other, none of them having shared themes or anything, would be able to tell a story. It was as simple as that . . . There was [also] a sense that what we were thinking of had already happened on Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds or Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. [2004]
The one part of the Tommy storyline that could, at a pinch, be said to resemble S.F. Sorrow – its ‘from the cradle to the grave’ arc (or in Tommy’s case, from birth to rebirth) – originated with producer Kit Lambert. In fact, it was only introduced after Townshend had already started telling journalists he was ‘working on an opera . . . I am thinking of calling it “The Amazing Journey”. I’ve completed some of it . . . The theme is about a deaf, dumb and blind boy who has dreams and sees himself as the ruler of the cosmos.’ Townshend, who had a great deal of faith in Lambert’s ideas, decided to make Tommy an amalgamation of the two conceits:
All the Madmen Page 6
