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7 I CAN’T EXPLAIN

Roger considered ‘I Can’t Explain’ to be ‘soft, commercial pop’ and said he wouldn’t record anything so anodyne again. He wanted our studio work to reflect the power of our R&B set list. Although I felt a little aggrieved by Roger’s vehemence, I agreed with him. Our stage act was getting tougher and tougher, and that’s what we needed to get down on vinyl.

The film Kit and Chris had made at the Railway Hotel screened to a full audience, and The Who played on Beat Room, a BBC show, and, best of all, Ready, Steady, Go! This was special because Kit had befriended the producer, Vicky Wickham, who allowed a number of our Marquee boy fans – the so-called ‘100 Faces’ – to make up the audience. They went wild when we came on, waving colourful college scarves, the Mod fashion of the week.

When we sang ‘I Can’t Explain’ on Top of the Pops, it immediately climbed into the Top 10. All the pirate radio stations picked up the track, and it was an incredible buzz to drive through my own neighbourhood hearing the first song I’d written for The Who, imagining the airwaves emanating from ships anchored at sea. Driving along, hearing myself on the radio, my art-school ideas started to seem overcooked. When the band started I had taken solace in the notion that we wouldn’t last long, and I could claim that in our downfall I had demonstrated my auto-destructive plan. Now I was being tested. Did I really need to be so po-faced and serious? Maybe it wasn’t so bad to just be a successful pop star. Maybe I didn’t really need to blow everything to smithereens in the name of art. Anyway, wasn’t what I was doing truly creative? Denying denial didn’t seem quite such an urgent matter any more.

On Friday 12 March The Who triumphantly returned to the Goldhawk, our musical home away from home. For Roger and me it had special resonance because we had both been pre-teen members of the Sulgrave Boys Club just down the road. Many of the club’s old members – now teenagers – came to the Goldhawk to show off their new Mod threads, drink beer, take pep pills, fight and pull girls. We played ‘I Can’t Explain’ over and over. The crowd went berserk.

Afterwards a delegation asked if they could come backstage and speak to me. Led by a gangly Irish boy called Jack Lyons, they paraded in and told me they really liked the song. I thanked them, asking them what they particularly liked about it. Jack stuttered that he couldn’t really explain. I tried to help: the song’s about being unable to find the words.

‘That’s it!’ Jack shouted; the others all nodded.

Without my art-school training I doubt that this moment would have touched me the way it did. But it changed my life. I had been set up at college, especially in my last days doing graphics, to look for a patron, to obtain a brief, to find someone to pay for my artistic excesses and experiments. My new patrons stood before me.

Their brief was simple: we need you to explain that we can’t explain; we need you to say what we are unable to say. It would be wrong to say that I floated home on a cloud that night, but I felt vindicated. I was still hooked on sudden fame and notoriety, being on the TV and radio, having written a hit song. But now I knew The Who had a greater mission than just being rich and famous.

And – pretentious as it might still seem, even today – I knew, with absolute certainty, that after all what we were doing was going to be Art.

Anya and I had sex again once or twice when Kit was out and I wasn’t working. I adored her; she was witty and sharp – the first person I ever heard use the term ‘slag’ towards a man. But we never talked very seriously, or went out for dinner; if we had I might have felt less like her toy boy. Kit eventually intervened in what he saw as Anya’s sexual vampirism, and as penance he tasked her with finding me a flat close enough to his own so he could make sure I kept it tidy. In April she found the top flat in a Georgian house at Chesham Place, in Belgravia. The rent was £12 a week, well within my means.

This was the first place I ever lived on my own: I had it carpeted, simply furnished, kept it clean and tidy, and devoted one of the rooms to a recording studio. This was one of the busiest periods of my life. When I felt isolated among the diplomats and aristocrats of Belgravia, that loneliness became the engine of my creative drive. I worked mainly at night, when I could play records loudly through two partly rebuilt four-by-twelve speaker cabinets, casualties of my destructive stage act. The other apartments in the building were still vacant, and the building on the other side of my studio wall was being developed as a new embassy building for the Lesotho High Commission. I felt entirely free to make music for the first time in my life.

Kit often came to my flat to listen to the demos I was recording, and became a real mentor in my songwriting. His system was always the same. He would smoke several Senior Service cigarettes and pace around, listening and blowing smoke in the air. If I’d written several songs he would listen to them all before making any comment, then pick his favourite. He was incisive, and astutely never said anything I did was bad, or could be better, or would be better when it was finished. When he didn’t like something, he found something about it to praise.

It turned out that Kit was an expert at keeping the artist in me properly stroked. He was essentially kind, but I also took pleasure in the sense of his investment in me, expressed in a creative partnership. He treated me like a serious composer. If he laughed, it would always be a joke he knew I could share.

Roger sold our van and purchased a lorry to carry our gear. He always wanted to drive one. It was like a furniture hauling van, with no windows or seats in the back, except for a bench that wasn’t bolted down. It was far too big and our equipment crashed around us as Keith, John, Mike and I tried to avoid vomiting. It was also very slow, managing only 55 mph on the motorway, so it took ten hours to drive to Blackpool. Roger had installed his girlfriend in the front seat so we were confined to the rear, travelling in the dark. He wanted to keep the rest of us out of his hair when driving long distances. He was a nervous passenger, and rarely allowed himself to be driven anywhere.

On 30 July we played at the Fender Club in Kenton. Karen Astley, a college friend from Ealing, came to the gig, and even handsome Chris commented on how cool she looked, calling her a ‘dolly bird’, a great compliment at the time. She had brought her best friend, who was keen on John Entwistle. It was fun to speak to someone from the old gang, and we all went out drinking together. Outside the hall after the show, as we waited for a taxi, Karen suddenly threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

The essence of the song ‘My Generation’ had probably been contained in the first, abandoned lyric for ‘I Can’t Explain’, which only Barney ever heard. That first version was a kind of talking blues. The title came from Generations, the collected plays of David Mercer, a dramatist who had impressed me at Ealing. Mercer was a socialist, like Arnold Wesker, verging on Marxist, and his rallying on behalf of his plays’ working-class anti-heroes later offered me a way to connect with the West London fans of the band.

At that time Kit Lambert had loaned me a record that changed my life as a composer. It was what I had played during my Scotch-fuelled listening experiment – a Czech recording called Masters of the Baroque including the principal movements of Purcell’s Gordian Knot Untied, a baroque chamber suite, the most powerful part of which was the Chaconne. The performance is passionate, tragic and deeply moving. I was struck by Purcell’s unique, luxurious use of suspensions, a staple part of baroque decoration at the harpsichord, but in Purcell’s hands the suspensions were elongated into heartrending, tortuous musical modes, especially in the minor keys. I began to experiment, and the first time I used suspensions successfully, in ‘The Kids Are Alright’, it was mostly to suggest a baroque mood.

Belgravia, a rich neighbourhood where women in fur coats shoved me out of line as if I didn’t exist, only made more starkly apparent the generational divide I was trying to describe. I worked on ‘My Generation’ all through the summer of 1965, while touring in Holland and Scandinavia (we caused a street riot in Denmark). I produced several sets of lyrics and three very different demos. The feeling that began to settle in me was not so much resentment towards those Establishment types all around my flat in Belgravia as fear that their disease might be contagious.

What was their disease? It was actually more a matter of class than of age. Most of the young people around me in this affluent area of London were working on transforming themselves into the ruling class, the Establishment of the future. I felt that the trappings of their aged customs and assumptions were like a death, whereas I felt alive, not solely because I was young, but really alive, unencumbered by tradition, property and responsibility.

The Who played a string of summer shows, some at seaside towns, which brought back happy childhood memories of Dad’s band. We were invited to play in Sweden, where Chris thought we could perform without our usual equipment, but this proved an insane notion. Borrowing gear from our support bands, some who could hardly speak English, and trying to explain to them that we were expected by the audience to smash their gear to pieces just didn’t work. It was a frustrating tour. The Swedish press seemed to be really looking forward to some smashed guitars and were vocal in their disappointment.

We returned to Sweden again for three shows in October, and in an unfortunate recurrence of bad luck our gear got misrouted and we repeated lacklustre shows with borrowed gear. Keith, John and I took a lot of pep pills on this trip, prompting constant, mindless chattering, and in Denmark, worn down by our hyperactivity, Roger finally complained. When Keith challenged him, Roger lashed out with his fists, bloodying Keith’s nose, turning what would have been a minor spat into a melodrama.

One significant thing about this outburst was Keith’s response. Instead of responding with humiliation, he seemed to sober up. It was clear he was about to establish a boundary that Roger could never cross again.

Keith and John said they didn’t want to work with Roger any more, but after a long period of uncertainty Chris met with Roger and asked him to never use his fighting skills to win an argument again. Roger agreed, so Keith and John decided to put the matter behind them.

***

Home from Sweden we recorded the final version of ‘My Generation’. Kit had heard my first demo, a version that was very much inspired by Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’, a song we later introduced into our stage repertoire. The vocal on my demo was laid back in imitation of Mose, casual and confident. Kit hadn’t really seen the promise in the song, but Chris persuaded me to try a second demo with a heavier guitar riff. Then Kit chimed in, observing that the music was rather repetitive and needed several modulations – changes of key – to bring it to life.

This worried me a little, partly because I saw Ray Davies as a master of the art of modulation and I didn’t want to be accused of copying him. Chris picked up on a stutter on my vocal on the second demo, so I played him John Lee Hooker’s ‘Stuttering Blues’. Roger had been experimenting with stuttering on stage ever since Sonny Boy Williamson Jr had joined us on harmonica at our first Marquee dates; Sonny Boy used a stutter rhythmically when he sang. Before I completed the third demo we experimented until the stutter became exaggerated and obvious. On this final demo we also created space for an Entwistle bass solo. John was becoming the outstanding bass revolutionary of the day, and I wanted to provide him with a vehicle for his incredible playing.

I was listening to a lot of new music. London was full of specialist record shops, and I visited them all. A high point that summer was the UK release of Miles Davis’s live concert from Carnegie Hall, 1964, featuring his wonderful rendering of ‘My Funny Valentine’. This led me to Miles’s Sketches of Spain. I also found Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, and listened to some Wagner operas for the first time. Best of all, I found two great albums by the Everly Brothers. One was called Rock and Soul, the other Rhythm and Blues. Noting the shift to R&B and soul music among groups in the British invasion of the USA, the Everly Brothers, whose superb stream of hit singles I’d grown up with in the late Fifties and early Sixties, had gone into the studio with their own incredible session musicians from Los Angeles and Nashville to show us how it could best be done.

The Everly Brothers played a number of R&B classics, but it was their original material – or the very obscure material they introduced as covers – that I thought exceptional. ‘Love Is Strange’ is an eerie bluegrass song that the Everlys transformed into a driving showcase for jangling electric guitars and nasal vocals. The Everlys’ composition ‘Man with Money’ is also a magnificent song. Their interpretation of Roy Orbison’s ‘Love Hurts’ was excellent too. Roger, John and Keith loved the new tracks as much as I did, so we incorporated all three of these songs into our repertoire. There were few artists that all four of us respected and enjoyed, and the Everly Brothers were among them.

I lost contact with Barney. I missed him and my other art school friends, but I assumed my separation from them would be brief. I still imagined the band would have a short career and then implode, at which time I could go back to my studies, installations and future life as an artist. Suddenly, putting things into perspective for us all, our beloved production manager Mike Shaw fell asleep at the wheel of a minivan while delivering stage lights to one of Kit and Chris’s other bands up north. The accident broke his neck and he was paralysed from the shoulders down.

I went with Chris’s personal assistant, Patricia Locke, to see Mike at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Despite having no feeling below the neck Mike insisted that he needed to feel Patricia’s breasts, which she bravely tried to facilitate, and Mike bravely tried to follow through. His sense of humour and appreciation of the absurd would sustain Mike through many difficult years of adjustment. But the effect of his disablement on The Who, and on Kit and Chris, was terrible. He was truly adored by all of us, and none of us had encountered such difficulty until then.

On 2 November, at a celebratory return gig at the Marquee, we played the three Everly songs, along with the final version of ‘My Generation’, live for the first time, just after its release.

I was twenty. Many of my old friends were married; some even had children. But I still lacked the courage to pursue girls and risk rejection.

Keith, John and I bought a 1936 Packard V12 hearse for £30, drove it home from Swindon and parked it outside my flat. At some point it disappeared. I feared it had been stolen, but when I reported this the police told me it had been towed away. Someone important had complained about it.

Out of nowhere I received a call from a man who wanted to buy the Packard. It emerged it had been impounded at the request of the Queen Mother. She had to pass it every day, and complained that it reminded her of her late husband’s funeral. The bill to recover the car was over £200, an absurdly large sum of money, but the buyer offered to pay the fee in return for ownership. I agreed, and resentfully dedicated ‘My Generation’ to the Queen Mother.

I purchased a 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II. I knew nothing about the car, but I loved it – black and low-slung, a two-door coupé that looked like an overgrown Thunderbird. I had no idea that both Elvis and Sinatra had owned and loved the same car. Shortly after I bought it the front end collapsed, but my affection for the car was undiminished.

The Who played ‘My Generation’ on Top of the Pops on 11 November. Two days later we flew to Paris, performing to a glittering crowd at La Locomotive, buoyed by glamorous French film stars. The single was at No. 4 in the charts when, on 27 November, Karen Astley, my Ealing Art College friend who had kissed me goodnight, rang me. We had a long, funny, magical conversation and decided to start seeing each other. I liked feeling like an artist again.

With a hit single and all that TV exposure, The Who were in high demand. I remember Kit bringing Mick Jagger to Chesham Place and playing him ‘Magic Bus’, which I was working on at the time. Although Mick was a friend, I was concerned by the thought that Kit might be collaborating with our most serious competition. I was also suspicious he was having a sexual dalliance with Mick, and felt a little jealous.

Mick is the only man I’ve ever seriously wanted to fuck. He was wearing loose pyjama-style pants without underwear; as he leaned back I couldn’t help noticing the lines of his cock laying against the inside of his leg, long and plump. Mick was clearly very well-endowed. It reminded me of a photograph I’d seen of Rudy Valentino similarly displaying his equipment. In the band we all started to arrange our parts in such a way, especially on stage or in photographs.

A legal dispute was brewing between Kit and Chris and Shel Talmy. It turned out that Shel’s deal with Decca Records was itself a sub-licensing deal, so the royalty he paid through to us was paltry. The row seemed to threaten our entire career and I became quite fidgety, not knowing what was going on.

On top of this anxiety, I’d lost track of who I was meant to be paying rent to in Belgravia, so I’d stopped sending in my cheques. Having also lost my keys, I had connected a thin, almost invisible, paired wire to the downstairs door buzzer. By touching the wires together I could buzz the front door and gain entry. My comings and goings always took place at night so no one worked out how I was doing it. When they changed the lock on the flat door I simply assumed someone had latched it, so I climbed up the scaffolding on the adjacent embassy building and got into my flat through a roof hatch.

In the end I was caught inside the flat. The chairman of the Catenian Association, which owned and managed the house, was a decent fellow, and allowed Kit to pay the back rent so I could retrieve my possessions, including guitars and demo tapes for ‘Magic Bus’.

Despite having a hit record, I sank into a depression. To make matters worse, the Observer magazine decided to put The Who on the cover, and sent a photographer to Manchester where we were playing at the Jigsaw Club. At the time I wore the Union Jack coat I had commissioned for John, and at the Manchester hotel where the photo session was staged Chris placed me in the front of the group. From my photography classes I knew what an extreme wide-angle lens looked like, and the effect it had when thrust close to the face of a subject: the nose appears to protrude. As the camera moved closer and closer to me, I realised what the photographers intended; my nose, not small in any lens, would look enormous. I tried to muster the courage to ask them to back off, but I was too proud. Unfortunately, this photo remains one of the most enduring images of The Who from this period.

By early 1966 my first Rickenbacker 12-string and 6-string guitars were gone, leaving me with the remains of two more Rickenbacker 6-strings, two Danelectros and a Harmony. Despite my bravado, I was worried about the growing pile of broken parts, and decided to try to salvage them. I was also putting together a portable music system, a kind of precursor to the Walkman.

I listed in my notebook records or artists I wanted to hear: ‘Marvin Gaye, 1-2-3, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder’s Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert [Nina Simone], Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk Around Midnight and Brilliant Corners.’ I drew designs for revolving speakers, which I hoped to use in my stage rig, as well as designs for a complex surround-sound speaker system for my home hi-fi system. And this:

I think I will write a book. It will take a year to write. It will be about the year I am 21, which will be this year in May. I will tell the truth. I have a wish to record what I’m doing because it’s very important, and I don’t have a very close friend at the moment to whom I can reveal my worries.