Who I Am: A Memoir (13 page)

We sat across the table from each other, ate good food, drank a bottle of good wine and decided to be content – for the time being – to pretend.

11

AMAZING JOURNEY

A subtle shift in the way Karen and I were relating to one another made me take stock quite seriously. If I was ever going to be a husband and father, not just play at it, I needed to ensure that The Who survived the changes buffeting the pop industry. I might have to be less serious about art, and more pragmatic about how to sell records in millions. I also felt an acute sense of responsibility and duty to my band members and our crew, who unlike me didn’t have a songwriting income to fall back on. My job was to come up with the hits, and recently I had failed to produce them.

Still, I believed that everything I had done to this point – every smashed guitar, every silly outfit, every ambitious arty notion set aside or hijacked, every beautiful girl I had refused to respond to for muddled reasons of pride, low self-worth, morality or loyalty to Karen, every crazy experiment undertaken for sexual pleasure or amusement – had conspired to position me for a major offensive on the pop industry. I also believed The Who’s audience would enjoy longer works, although I knew this meant I’d have to battle with record companies, PR people, press, promoters and our managers, all of whom would try to persuade me to continue to keep things simple and cost-effective.

The Who had worked ceaselessly for almost four years. We had enjoyed a number of hit singles. I had delved deeply into my personal history and produced a new kind of song that seemed like shallow pop on the surface, but below could be full of dark psychosis or ironic menace. I had become adept at connecting pop songs together in strings. Still, The Who needed a large collection of such songs if we were to rise in the music business at a time when the audience was expanding its collective consciousness, and the album was taking over from the pop single.

I have tended to reinforce the view that I started to write what eventually became
Tommy
out of pure desperation. That’s only partly true. I did know that aiming to serve the young men in our audience wasn’t going to work any more, which worried me. But having been in California recently, I also knew that pop audiences would begin spiritual searching, as I had. I could write stories and clearly see theatrical dramas in my imagination. Whether I could realise them was still to be tested. But I began thinking about a project that I wouldn’t allow anyone to divert.

Karen and I had become good friends with bass player Ronnie Lane and his girlfriend Susie. Ronnie’s chief sidekick was his colleague in The Small Faces, Steve Marriott. Ronnie liked the same music as I did; he liked to drink, and smoke a little grass; he was funny, sincere, artistic, creative, gifted and down-to-earth. In some respects he was a typical London East Ender, just as I was a typical West Londoner. We got on well, argued a lot, laughed a lot, could even cry together sometimes; it was a modern male relationship. He was also the first friend who listened to my interest in Meher Baba without sniggering.

I was reticent about diving into the Meher Baba community too deeply at first, and Karen seemed to stand back too. She was still part of the London hippy scene, in light of which the Meher Baba network seemed rather small and odd. Even our little gatherings for Meher Baba were eccentric, with our host Mike McInnerney still at his desk painting under a single light bulb while his wife Katie played Van Morrison records and cooked slushy nettle stew. There were cats everywhere and I sneezed my way through our long friendship with the McInnerneys. Still, I was powerfully struck by the feeling that everyone I met in connection with Meher Baba seemed to have been someone I knew from some other lifetime, from some mysterious other place directly connected with my own inner life.

Meher Baba was born in 1894 and was still alive, living in Ahmednagar in India, where one of my teenage heroes, Spike Milligan, had grown up. That coincidence seemed a good sign. Meher Baba was born of Persian parents. At 19 he met an old woman called Hazrat Babajan, reputed to be one of the five ‘Perfect Masters’. Her kiss on his forehead unlocked the young man’s destiny and he became God-realised. When I first heard this story I remember thinking that the much-imitated but inimitable English comedian Tommy Cooper would have said: ‘God realised! Just like that!’ I found the story hard to fathom.

In 1925 Meher Baba decided to stop speaking, although he continued to communicate using an alphabet board and sign language, as well as through essays, books and poetry. From 1931 onwards he made dozens of trips to the West, founding groups, projects and missions, especially in America, a country he claimed would be the spiritual melting pot of the future.

In the Thirties, on one of his first visits to England, Meher Baba had visited the mother of Delia DeLeon, a young actress and one of his first British disciples, at the Star and Garter Hotel in Richmond where she was resident. The hotel has an uninterrupted view of the entire flood plain between Ham and Isleworth, with Windsor Castle visible in the far distance. Meher Baba stood on a balcony looking at the view for a long time. When he came inside, Delia asked him what he had been looking at. He said he had been planning his spiritual work for the next 200 years.

Until 1967 Delia had been holding together a group of followers who called themselves lovers of the Master, with occasional gatherings at the Poetry Society, many of whose members were despairing of politics in the 1930s, and had begun to look to the East for alternatives to imperialism and its wars. When Michael McInnerney brought a delegation of enquiring young people to a meeting, Delia, at 66, suddenly knew why her master of thirty-five years had insisted she stay put in Britain and await his directions.

People who follow Meher Baba speak of recognising his face, or feeling some deep connection to him. For me the chemistry was with those who already followed him. They seemed to be unusually good people, politically and socially. Delia told me that Tom Hopkinson, editor of
Picture Post
, Britain’s equivalent of
Life
magazine, followed the Master. This was important to me. I had grown up with
Picture Post
, and I knew Tom’s integrity was solid. Finding rational, intelligent people open to spiritual ideas gave me the confidence to tackle head-on what The Who’s audience might best respond to. And I could do so without feeling like a hippy. I put a copy of Charles Purdom’s
The God Man
in my bag as I packed for the short Australia and New Zealand tour The Who and Small Faces had planned for January 1968.

When I was handed my ticket to Sydney at Heathrow I saw it was tourist class, and turned around to catch a taxi home. We had been promised first-class seats. John Wolff (known as Wiggy), our production manager, chased after me, persuading me that we’d all hang together and the flight would be a piece of cake. It was Wiggy’s job to get us to the shows; not his fault, but the flight was shocking, with four long stops along the way. When we arrived, shattered after thirty-six hours of travel, we were surprised to meet an aggressive group of journalists who put us through an inquisition. Roger had taken to wearing a large crucifix at the time, and one of the reporters, clearly drunk, thought this was religious hypocrisy. I was challenged for looking unkempt. ‘Couldn’t you even brush your hair to meet your young fans?’ There were no young fans anywhere in sight, just these arsehole hacks, fresh from a long stint at the bar.

It was a shock for which we could have been prepared: artists far more conventional than we had suffered a similar fate. The shows proved to be as difficult as our shoddy, half-baked trips to Sweden. We had our big amplifiers and guitars this time, but not the big PA system we used in Britain to get Roger’s vocals across. The sound wasn’t good. When we began to smash equipment the technicians at each venue seemed completely unprepared, and the newspapers began a ferocious campaign of ridicule.

We didn’t really care. The halls were almost sold to capacity, and we were having fun. I was enjoying hanging out with Ronnie Lane. Steve Marriott found a ravishing girl called Rosie, and when I chatted with her she asked me what I was interested in at the time. When I told her I had decided to become a follower of an almost unknown Indian teacher called Meher Baba, she said, ‘Oh, yes. I follow him, too.’ She reached into a pocket and gave me a little button bearing his image.

I was stunned. I had no idea Meher Baba had made several visits to Australia – it turned out there were several well-established centres there. It seemed too extraordinary to be coincidence, and cemented two jetlagged ideas in my mind: that I had made the right choice in Meher Baba and the wrong choice in Karen, for here before me was a very sexy girl who shared my new spiritual enthusiasm precisely. Unsurprisingly, we ended up sleeping together. I was very affected by Rosie and wrote a song about her (that I never played for her) called ‘Sensation’.

She overwhelms as she approaches

Makes your lungs hold breath inside

Lovers break caresses for her

Love enhanced when she’s gone by

Who fans will recognise the lyric: I adapted it with a gender switch for use in
Tommy
.

On a flight from Sydney to Melbourne the flight attendant was uncomfortable dealing with us, and when the coffee trolley passed down the aisle she didn’t serve any of the band. When English singer Paul Jones complained, she said she thought we had our own refreshments, pointing to the Australian musician sitting next to me happily drinking his own beer. When Jones wasn’t mollified, she ran to complain to the pilot, who emerged looking angry and determined. Naturally he took her side, telling us that as soon as the plane landed we would be thrown off and arrested.

The truth didn’t make a good enough rock ’n’ roll story, so in the media retelling I became a leading figure in the events on the plane. In fact I first piped up when we were held by the police after landing; I challenged them to arrest us or let us go. They let us go. A few days later we were handed a telegram from the Australian Prime Minister himself, informing us that because of our misbehaviour he was withholding our tour receipts against damages. He also requested that we never again return to Australia.

The news of our ‘misbehaviour’ preceded us to New Zealand, where the hotel manager in Wellington warned us on arrival that he wouldn’t stand any nonsense. Refused room service, or even a bowl, I ate the breakfast cereal I purchased from the corner shop out of the sink.

There were lighter moments. Steve Marriott had a birthday party and decided to do a Keith Moon and throw a TV set off his balcony. It landed on the pavement just as a police car drove by. The police came directly to our room, and we opened the door thinking we were done for. To our astonishment they were very cheery, didn’t even mention the TV set, wished Steve a happy birthday and left us a case of beer so we ‘wouldn’t think the Kiwis were as inhospitable as them miserable Ozzies’.

When we prepared to leave New Zealand for Hawaii, Rosie broke down. ‘Everyone leaves me behind when they go home.’ I was unhappy too, although distracted by her use of the word ‘everyone’. When I got home I decided that in keeping with our new agreement – we had pledged to be absolutely honest at the very least – I must tell Karen what had happened. On some level I probably hoped it would send her a message that I wouldn’t make a good husband, and that maybe we should both make other plans.

When I asked Karen if I could speak to her about something very important, she arranged herself in the Soo Choo Mandarin Throne, a grand wicker throne from Liberty’s, one of the very first bits of furniture we had purchased together for our new home. She sat with legs crossed, looking very regal indeed, not to mention formidable. As I began to mumble, she picked something up from her lap. It was a letter. I knew immediately it was from Rosie. In an instant Karen had trumped my intended admission with her own forgiveness. There was no great moratorium, no dramatic declarations or intimidation. Implicit in the tense exchange that followed was the expectation that we’d now stop pretending and get married.

It may appear that I agreed to marry Karen out of guilt, but in fact it was important for me to ground myself in the reality of my life in London. Australia was a long way away. I had been a fool. My future wife was beautiful and smart, and we had a good life together. This didn’t diminish the pleasure of my dalliance with an exotic girl on the other side of the world, but I was home now, looking at Karen, and I felt damned lucky to have her.

I felt certain that radio stations in the States would adore
The Who Sell Out
– it was, after all, a tribute to their power and influence. But Joe Bogart, director of WMCA, New York’s biggest radio station, called our album ‘disgusting’ and said he had ‘grave doubts anyone would play it’. It seemed I’d got it wrong once again.

Burying myself in work, I brought my brothers Paul and Simon to my studio – they were both anxious to be musicians – and recorded them. I also recorded a little gem of a song in the style of Brian Wilson in
Smiley Smile
called ‘Going Fishing’, suggesting that even a bream can impart useful wisdom if only we would listen. I was going a bit soft. I went greyhound racing with Chris Morphet, taking me back to my childhood with Dad at White City. In the warm glow of domesticity I wrote two songs, ‘Dogs’ and ‘Welcome’, the latter about the value of friends. When I played the demo to Richard Stanley, who was lodging with us for a few weeks, he thought I was using the song to invite him to partake in a
ménage à trois
.

The Who were in and out of studio sessions in the first months of 1968, Kit pushing as usual to cobble something together out of thin air. I went along with it, but I was secretly planning to sweep all this nonsense aside – and soon.

We toured America again at the end of February, by bus. In my notebook I wrote my first plan for what would become
Tommy
. Our first shows were in California and I went a few days early to meet Rick Chapman, who ran Meher Baba Information out of Berkeley; he drove me to our first show in San Jose in his massive old 1959 Lincoln Continental. En route he explained that Meher Baba had counted marijuana among those drugs he wished sincere followers to stop abusing, so I began to wean myself off it.