Читать книгу Pete Townshend: Who I Am - Pete Townshend - Страница 12
ОглавлениеBy spring 1966, when the Observer magazine cover story on The Who was published, I had become disaffected towards the press. Depressed and paranoid, I had carelessly admitted taking drugs on national television, although no one seemed to mind. The Observer story itself was a puff for Kit and Chris, but the rest of us were represented as braggarts, spendthrifts, dandies and scumbags. For at least a week after the publication I lost interest in the success of The Who. This may seem childish, but the polarities of my ego – the artistic grandiosity and the desperately low self-regard – were both powerfully triggered when I held the Observer story in my hands for the first time.
I arranged a new flat for myself in Old Church Street, Chelsea, in the penthouse of a building next door to Sound Techniques recording studio, thinking the studio’s late-night rumblings would provide excellent cover for my own recording activities at home. The Thames was 100 yards away, and I regularly wandered down to contemplate the grey, swirling river. I often drove alone to the Scotch of St James nightclub, where I would sit with a Scotch and coke at a table surrounded by the likes of Brian Jones and the Walker Brothers. It wasn’t like me at all, but I was pleased to be out with people I knew. Brian and I saw one of Stevie Wonder’s first London shows there. Transported by the music, our adulation and his own adrenaline, Stevie got so excited he fell off the stage.
One night I drove a band of revellers back to Chelsea and, showing off, driving too fast in the rain, slid into a graceful skid at Hyde Park Corner, breaking an axle of my Lincoln. The party continued by taxi to my flat, where I played the National Anthem at five in the morning, and eviction loomed again.
‘Substitute’ began as a homage to Smokey Robinson by way of The Rolling Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’. (‘Substitoot’ had become a sublime buzzword since Smokey had used it in his masterpiece ‘Tracks of My Tears’.) I set up my two tape machines, now stereo, in my new flat, and wrote. I heard in my own voice the tumult of a young man playing a role, uneasily, repackaging black R&B music from America, relying on gimmicky outfits, and pretending to be wild and free when in reality he needed to be looked after by his mother.
Keith and John had forged a drug-fuelled alliance with a wizened, charismatic Parisian chemist-cum-dealer. At several shows in March they had turned up red-eyed and glowing, excluding Roger and me from their decadent orbit. We also found ourselves on the outside of a conspiracy. It turned out that Keith and John were flirting with the idea of leaving The Who and writing their own songs, playing more surf-inspired music and having more fun. Being in The Who in 1966 was uncomfortable, unfulfilling and – with record-company lawsuits hitting Kit and Chris – the money was getting bad for the other three Who members. (To some extent I was protected by songwriting royalties starting to flow in; The Performing Right Society paid royalties only to songwriters.)
With my first pay cheque in April I exchanged my 1956 Lincoln Mark II for the more recent 1963 Lincoln Continental Convertible, and bought a 28-foot motorboat, which I moored on the Thames at Chiswick, close to the place where I had first heard celestial music as a child. On one of the boat’s first voyages we took wheelchair-bound Mike Shaw for a river trip.
Even before the Talmy case came to court Kit and Chris moved their offices into a space provided by Robert Stigwood (‘Stiggy’), one of Britain’s first independent record producers; there they created their own production company, New Ikon, as a step towards a record label of their own. I felt part of this new venture, and spent a lot of time designing a zippy logo for it.
‘Substitute’ was The Who’s first single not to be produced by Shel Talmy, and I was elected to produce it. Kit and Chris used Stigwood’s Reaction label to release it on 4 March. The record charted quickly. Shel responded by bringing legal action against Stigwood’s distributor, Polydor, and provided a legal affidavit claiming that he deserved the lion’s share of the royalties because he had contributed significant musical guidance. I had worked from my own demo, as had Shel, and in my own affidavit claimed that if the court compared my demos with Shel’s they would see that all the creative work had been done by me before Shel even heard the songs.
On one of The Who’s many trips away I began imagining that my fabulous new girlfriend Karen was deceiving me. Keith had been through something even more powerful in his early relationship with his wife Kim, who as a professional photographer’s model had once been pursued all the way to her home in Bournemouth by Rod Stewart. It was this kind of paranoid, unhinged thinking that spurred me to write ‘I Can See for Miles’, one of my best songs from this period. The first lyric was scribbled on the back of my affidavit in the case between Talmy and Polydor. Perhaps that’s why the song, about the viciously jealous intuitions of a cuckolded partner, adopts the tone of a legal inquisition.
***
The Talmy case came to court, and Kit and Chris lost. My demos were disallowed as evidence, and Shel was informed that his contract stood. This meant that we were still tied to Shel and the feeble royalty he paid us. I turned for guidance to Andrew Oldham, who took me for a ride down Park Lane in his stately chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. He told me he thought his friend Allen Klein might be able to exert leverage to break Shel’s grip, but to do that we might have to break with Kit and Chris. Klein wasn’t yet involved with The Beatles, but he was the Stones’ US publisher and managed the great Sam Cooke.
Allen Klein sent me a first-class ticket to New York, and in June I flew there in secret to meet him. Klein came to pick me up in his Lincoln Continental, exactly like the one I’d just bought, down to the colour. He made it clear that the only way I could escape Talmy’s grip was to repudiate my contract with Kit and Chris. If I gave him the word he would start proceedings, then he and Andrew Oldham – still at that time the Stones’ manager – would take over management of The Who. I flew back home and slept badly on the plane. I must admit I was seriously considering recommending to the band that we sack our managers. Friendship aside, I felt that the deal they’d committed us to with Talmy was criminal.
Guy Stevens, the DJ at the Soho Scene Club who’d helped Peter Meaden launch the singles he’d written for us, was now a record producer. He’d heard a rumour that The Who were getting involved with Allen Klein, so he came over one afternoon with his boss, Chris Blackwell, to plead with me to let them guide The Who. They seemed genuinely worried. Klein had a reputation as someone who took absolute control over any publishing he could lay his hands on – in other words, he was a music publisher like any other – so I wasn’t sure what the drama was about.
As they started to explain why I should avoid any involvement with Klein my doorbell rang. It was Kit, distraught, also having heard about my trip to New York. Guy and his boss hid in my study for half an hour while Kit anguished over the problems we all faced, and asked me to give him a chance to sort everything out. To crown this series of unsettling events I was evicted from my lovely Chelsea penthouse flat for making too much noise. Furious with myself, I went to stay with my parents until I found a new home.
An estate agent charged with finding me somewhere with no living neighbours got me a top-floor film-editing suite at the corner of Wardour Street and Brewer Street in Soho. It was a beautiful, light room with half-moon windows. A carpenter knocked me up a bed and some shelves for my tape machines and disk-jockey rig, and the flat became my recording studio and personal nightclub, though I rarely slept there.
For a while Karen shared a flat in Pimlico with a friend, then her father bought her a basement flat in Eccleston Square, close to Belgravia. I spent a lot of time there, going to Soho to work or when Karen and I had arguments. At night Soho was violent and sleazy, but if you lived there you found a way of moving about unnoticed.
Next door to my flat was Isows, a posh kosher restaurant whose owner would allow me breakfast sometimes at four in the afternoon, even on a Sunday. Once or twice I tried to fit into the gang at the Colony Club where the hard-nosed arty-alkies drank, and where I could see the painter-genius Francis Bacon and Daily Mirror diarist Daniel Farson in Wardour Street, deep in conversation. They were both very cool, but the brassy woman behind the bar tried to take the piss out of me, assuming I was a rent-boy because of my tight Mod trousers and pink shirt.
Once a group of us were in my flat smoking grass and listening to records at deafening volume when we looked up to find a policeman standing there. I thought we’d been busted, but he was just looking for a burglar who’d climbed over my roof. The rule of law barely held sway in Soho, but I loved it.
The studio was big enough so I could play the drums, and I learned how to play keyboards on a clunky Hohner Cymbelet electric piano I had bought from Jim Marshall. I tried hard to write orchestral pieces and recorded an instrumental I called ‘M’. Based on a 12-string guitar part that I made up as I went along, it ran for seven minutes, with rising and falling dynamics reinforced with basic drum overdubs and an additional guitar. I was immensely proud of this recording, which stands as one of the finest expressions of my free-form ability as a guitar-composer.
Roger, meanwhile, was cracking under the strain of Mike Shaw’s accident and rows over Keith’s drug use. He missed a number of gigs, where I had to stand in for him. Around May it appeared that he’d made up his mind to leave The Who entirely. My diary is venomous about him and the rest of the band, even about Kit and Chris. I’m also very hard on myself, challenging myself to deepen my study of Charlie Parker, Coltrane and Purcell, and to develop my guitar style. On the page I sound determined and unhappy.
The schism in The Who, that had first opened up when Roger punched Keith in Sweden, widened. One night Keith and John, with Jimmy Page, did a recording session with Jeff Beck (‘Beck’s Bolero’) and word spread that they planned to start a new group, christened Led Zeppelin. The Who’s first show after this was a modest gig in Newbury. Keith and John arrived very late – and very drunk. Roger and I had been holding the fort by playing without them, which was the pattern at the time. An argument broke out on stage, and – at my wits’ end – I threw my guitar at Keith. He tried to throw one of his larger drums at me and fell into his kit, gashing his leg. We were all utterly sick of each other.
A few days later, argument forgotten, I was driving down the M1 motorway in the early hours when I ran into an accident that had happened ten minutes earlier. Warning lights weren’t set up and for a critical few moments I ignored a man waving a torch, thinking he was trying to get a lift. When I hit the brakes they locked and the car went into a time-freezing drift. At the very last moment of my skid, I smashed tail-first into a Jaguar that had rolled over, and still contained two trapped elderly people waiting for an ambulance. They already had multiple injuries so that bump caused them considerable pain. I felt terrible for them, and shame for the habit I’d fallen into of driving too fast when the road was empty. I was convicted of careless driving and heavily fined, although I didn’t lose my licence.
The legal battle with Talmy had been lost, but only in the UK. Allen Klein wanted another meeting with me, so on 27 June 1966 I went back to New York once more, this time with our lawyer, Edward Oldman. This meeting took place on a chartered motor yacht that sailed around Manhattan as we listened to Barry Mann’s ‘Mandy’, and other songs Klein controlled. This was my first time on a luxury yacht, and I was surprised to find superb sleeping cabins on the lower deck. The New York night sky was alive and sparkling, and though I was suspicious of Allen I was captivated by the whole affair.
Another uneasy overnight flight home, and the build-up of frustration and exhaustion started to eat into me. As soon as I landed I drove to a Who gig in Sheffield, forgetting how far it was; when I arrived at about 10 p.m. the rest of the band had given up on me and gone home. I turned around and headed home myself. Not having eaten or slept for hours I fell asleep at the wheel, waking up upside-down in a ditch with petrol dripping on my face, and a police officer asking me if I was OK. I gave the breakdown man my Rickenbacker 12-string as a reward for pulling me out of the ditch.
My New York trip and Allen Klein’s obvious interest made it clear that some smart business people believed we’d soon break into America. Ted Oldman had reported to Kit and Chris that Klein was trying to take over the band, and they quickly brokered an out-of-court settlement with Talmy. He would no longer produce The Who and we’d be free to make a new deal with any record company we chose. This would improve things for all concerned. The Who would get a bigger share, and Shel would get a commission on all future recordings as well as participate in all recordings made during the period of his original contract, without having to work, or fund our sessions.
Through this deal Kit and Chris kept control of the band, but at the time we knew nothing of the punitive settlement Kit had to make with Shel. The summer dragged on, the band’s antics on stage becoming a parody of auto-destruction complete with smoke and flashes. During the finale at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival, Keith ran to the front of stage with a whip and a blonde actress in a leather outfit.
In August we recorded ‘I’m a Boy’ and ‘Disguises’ with Kit finally in the producer’s chair. Our new record deal was with Track Records, founded by Kit and Chris with the promise that we would own shares as well as receive royalties. Kit was a joy to work with; he made recording fun, and seemed to be recording a more musical sound, although Roger and I still felt tied to the bluff, tough sound we had developed in The Who live gigs.
Meanwhile I was becoming obsessed with a bigger idea: could I write a real opera?
***
While ‘I’m a Boy’ was being prepared for release as the band’s new single, Karen and I took a holiday to Caesarea in Israel. Her miniskirts were a novelty that attracted a lot of interest, especially from the Arabs, several of whom I had to literally fight off. On one occasion I turned to help from Jewish passers-by, dressed in Western clothing, who interceded before chiding me: ‘What is a young Jewish boy doing allowing such an attractive girl to dress so provocatively?’
When I got home I began to ask people what was going on in Israel. One of my legal advisors, who was interested in international affairs, described the growing tension between Israel and Egypt, as well as the emergent communist threat from China, a country with a population growing so fast, he said, that it would soon dominate the entire planet. This sparked the idea for my first opera, later entitled Rael, whose plot deals with Israel being overrun by Red China. Over the next year I developed the story, and planned to complete it as a major full-length operatic composition outside my work for The Who. I hired a Bechstein upright piano from Harrods and installed it in Karen’s bedroom in her flat in Pimlico. I wrote the first orchestrations there for Rael using a book called Orchestration by Walter Piston that I still refer to today.
After a summer of professional lunacy that included The Who’s first appearance in the beloved Palace Ballroom of my childhood, in the Isle of Man, I completed and assembled demos for a number of tracks intended for The Who’s still untitled second album. I bought a cello and played it on ‘Happy Jack’, a nonsense song I wrote about a village idiot from the Isle of Man. This is Paul McCartney’s favourite Who song – tellingly, because it was partly inspired by ‘Eleanor Rigby’, which I thought was a small masterpiece.
Happy Jack wasn’t old but he was a man
He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man
The kids all would sing he would take the wrong key
So they rode on his head on their furry donkey
But they never stopped Jack, nor the waters’ lapping
And they couldn’t distract him from the seagulls’ flapping
These are the original words, slightly altered on The Who’s version; the atmosphere of the lyric is meant to be Kafkaesque.
Kit and Chris drummed up a deal to get publishing advances for New Action, their own new music publishing house. They told me the advance was contingent on John, Keith and Roger contributing at least two original songs each to the album. I went along with the scheme, since my songwriter earnings on The Who’s hits had protected me thus far and I was happy to help. I’m pretty sure the band members never got the money – it was swallowed up in the enormous debts we all had by this time.
I explained my working method of making demos to John Entwistle, who bought himself a kit like mine and wrote and recorded his first song, ‘Whiskey Man’, in the tiny bedroom at his parents’ house in Acton that he still used as a base. I was the first person in the band he played it to. A week later John added ‘Boris the Spider’ to his list. I loved both songs. I helped Roger demo ‘See My Way’ in my Soho studio; a Buddy Holly-style piece, it was easy to work with. But this time Roger didn’t get any further than that one song, although he later wrote one more for The Who and went on to write quite a few in his solo career.
Keith got John to help him scrape together a lyric for Keith’s song ‘I Need You’, inspired by seeing The Beatles at the Ad Lib club in London, and I recorded the demo with him in Soho. It was a nightmare trying to work out the melody, as Keith’s singing was so tuneless. His second song, a rip-off from a film score banging around in his head, he merely whistled at us. We all knew we’d heard it somewhere before, but couldn’t place it at the time (it turned out to be ‘Eastern Journey’ by Tony Crombie). This became ‘Cobwebs and Strange’, a bizarre marching-band tune that was great fun to record because we actually marched around the studio while it was taped. John played trumpet, I played banjo, Keith a big bass drum and Roger the trombone – quite brilliantly, I thought. We overlaid the band over the marching track. I added penny whistles, and with Keith’s cymbals it ended up sounding like the accompaniment for a circus act.
I had been discouraged from submitting any additional material to The Who’s second album in order not to upset the necessary balance for the New Action publishing deal, so none of our recent hit singles appeared on the album. In a mad rush to fill the gaps left by this default, we added ‘Heatwave’, a Tamla song we always played on stage, but there was still a ten-minute hole. Kit came to see me at my Soho studio and I played him a few works in progress, songs about rabbits, fat people and ‘Gratis Amatis’, the opera dedicated to Kit and our beloved mutual friend the composer Lionel Bart. Kit asked whether I could put together a more serious pop-opera piece with several distinct strands, perhaps based around ‘Happy Jack’. If I could, this would fill the entire hole in one fell swoop, and the record could be released quickly.
Quick, quick, quick. ‘A Quick One’ became our new watchword and the title of the new album when it was finally released. I scribbled out some words and came up with ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’. This became known as the ‘mini-opera’, and is full of dark reflections of my childhood time with Denny.
Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconscious mind, I’m left to interpret it much like anyone else. The music begins with a fanfare: ‘dang, dang, dang, dang’. Someone has been ‘gone for nearly a year’. This could be ascribed to the dereliction of both my parents, neither of whom saw much of me while I lived with Denny. As a result, ‘your crying is a well-known sound’. That crying was mine as a five- and six-year-old, night after night, for my parents, for my friends from Acton and my freedom from Denny.
A remedy is next promised: we’ll bring your lost lover to you, ‘we’ll give him eagle’s wings, and he can fly to you’. At this point in my own story Rosie Bradley observed my suffering and quietly promised me she’d phone Dad and explain how crazily Denny was behaving, and he would surely come and rescue me. Suddenly the lyrics darken: ‘Little girl, why don’t you stop your crying? I’m gonna make you feel all right.’ This is chilling to me even today: the implicit threat of abuse unless the child cooperates with the abuser. But ‘little girl’? In my mind I was never alone when I lived with Denny – my imaginary constant friend was a twin girl who suffered every privation I suffered.
Ivor the engine driver may well represent my abuser: ‘we’ll sort it out back at my place maybe’, and ‘better be nice to an old engine driver’. Denny took in men from the bus garage and the railway station opposite her flat all the time, and I still have nightmares in which my bedroom door opens in the middle of the night and a shadowy man and woman stand watching me, the perfume of eroticism in the air.
Finally the grand orchestra takes over: ‘cello, cello, cello, cello’; a great celebration. The rescuer has arrived. In fact my reluctant rescuer was Mum, with her lover and Jimpy in tow as peacemaker. Dad was waiting at home to see whether Mum would relent, dump her lover and take him back, or fight him for custody of me. As cellos soar, the subject of the opera proclaims: ‘Do my eyes deceive me, am I back in your arms?’ I know I felt as though I had been rescued from Hell itself.
Then, there is an elucidation: ‘I missed you, and I must admit, I kissed a few …’ (Perhaps this refers to Mum’s affair.)
Most disturbing of all is the line, ‘[I] once did sit on Ivor the engine driver’s lap, and later with him had a nap.’ Then suddenly, everyone is ‘forgiven’, not once but a thousand times, over and over – as though there’s not enough forgiveness in a single line. When I sang this part live on stage, I would often become furious, thrashing at my guitar until I could thrash no more, frantically forgiving my mother, her lover, my grandmother, her lovers, and most of all myself.
During one of the October Quick One sessions I met Jimi Hendrix for the first time. He was dressed in a scruffy military jacket with brass buttons and red epaulettes. Chas Chandler, his manager, asked me to help the shy young man find suitable amplifiers. I suggested either Marshall or Hiwatt (then called ‘Sound City’) and I explained the not-so-subtle differences. Jimi bought both, and later I chided myself for having recommended such powerful weapons. I had no idea when I first met him what talent he had, nor any notion of his charisma on stage. Now, of course, I’m proud to have played a small part in Jimi’s story. Kit and Chris snapped him up for Track Records – their first new signing.
Apart from ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ I wrote one song for the Quick One album, ‘Join My Gang’, which I didn’t even submit, having overfilled my quota. Instead I gave it to Paul Nicholas, a singer on Reaction who was at that time going under the pseudonym of ‘Oscar’ and who was managed by Robert Stigwood (‘Stiggy’). It’s a witty song, and I was sad it wasn’t a hit. David Bowie, then unknown, stopped me in the street in Victoria and told me he liked it, and that was before it was even released – he’d heard my demo at our music publisher’s office.
In October and November The Who toured Europe: Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany. I remember Berlin as war-scarred and still uneasy; it was at the Hilton there that Keith’s hotel-room wrecking began in earnest. He so missed Kim and suffered so much from paranoid jealousy that every night after a show he had to get out of his brain just to sleep, and seemed always at the last gasp to be full of the most dangerous anger.
In Amsterdam, after a television show there, we were walking straight from the TV studio stage towards the car taking us to our hotel when a tough-looking young man saw me passing and asked if I’d go for a drink with him. I agreed on the spot, and – while even Keith looked on shocked and concerned, shouting at me not to go – went off with the man. I had no money, no details of the show we were playing next day in The Hague and no idea who the man was, or what his intentions were.
His first question was, ‘Do you like jazz?’ As we sat together and listened to his impressive jazz collection, I quickly got drunk. After a while the evening turned into a blur. He showed me to a small bedroom alongside the room we’d been sitting in, and I fell asleep. I woke up next morning with a policeman standing over me, asking me who I was. The owner of the flat, a woman, had no idea who my host had been. After being allowed to leave, I found the railway station and boarded a train by jumping a fence. The train was full of young soldiers who took no notice of me. I could have been invisible, even dressed, as I was, in bright white clothes and a face full of stage make-up and mascara, hung over and a little scared.
