Who I Am: A Memoir (15 page)

A few weeks later Chip brought us down to earth. Due to the poor condition of railway track all over the USA, our trains would only be able to travel an average of 4 mph. A grand tour would take us several years at that rate. Not to mention that the idea of being trapped on a slow-moving train for several months with Keith Moon blowing up its one and only toilet and throwing things out of windows and Keith Richards scoring smack from passing Hell’s Angels didn’t appeal to either Mick or me. The thought of all of that mayhem being filmed was an added disincentive.

‘I think maybe we should drop this idea,’ said Mick.

‘Maybe we could do, like, a gig or something?’ I was groping.

‘A TV show,’ said Mick. ‘That’s what we’ll do.’

On 9 December, the day before the TV shoot,
‡
we met at the Londonderry House Hotel to talk about the show. Mick was still driving everything; Keith Richards was looking green but cool, having recently started using heroin every day; Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts were sanguine as ever. Brian Jones was absent. The director was to be our friend Michael Lindsay Hogg. The sound was to be recorded by Glyn Johns.

On the bill were Eric Clapton, John and Yoko, Jethro Tull and – most exciting to me – Taj Mahal, whose first album I had been listening to constantly on the last tour. An unexpected pleasure was that Marianne Faithfull was going to sing a song. The only drawback – and a very sad one – was the arrival of Brian Jones. I hadn’t seen him for a year or more. His eyes were bloodshot and he was in tears, wilting under the effect of an elaborate cocktail of uppers and downers.

During the first day of filming on 10 December Yoko was brilliant, screaming with John in the Dirty Mac Band, her role as an artistic irritant not unlike my own auto-destructive work with The Who. However, to sceptics we would both appear quite daft for a number of years more. The Who’s performance of ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’ was very sprightly; we went on mid-afternoon. But the Stones had to work hard to bring their set to life. They started very late, by which time their fans had been shipped home. By now Brian was a heap of misery and futility. I’d heard Mick and Keith saying that they were worried about him, and Brian himself told me about some muddled plans for retiring from the band; he was thinking of going to Tangier to record musicians there.

As the Stones struggled I enlisted our road crew as a stand-in audience, all of us drinking brandy to keep interested. We were at it until four in the morning; even Marianne looked worse for wear by the end of the shoot. Everyone did – except Mick. He had just spent several months filming
Performance
, the dark, forbidding London fairy tale, with lighting cameraman Nic Roeg and director Donald Cammell. Making that film had had a profound effect on everyone involved, and Mick had clearly grown in some indefinable way. He looked devilish, his hair dyed black, and he was entirely focused on the cameras, looking deeply through the lens to those he knew would one day watch him. His performance is still extraordinary to see; he never loses concentration for a second.

Allen Klein wandered the studio. He was still deeply immersed in the Stones’ affairs and had produced the event. When he came over and asked whether I was making any money yet, I felt a flicker of rage. Yes, I had once turned to him for help, but still his question crossed a line. He said he was always ready to help. Annoyed, I told him that although I wasn’t making money I would never turn to him. He had The Beatles and the Stones, but he would never get The Who.

12

TOMMY: THE MYTHS, THE MUSIC, THE MUD

Myths have grown up around the recording of
Tommy
. One is that we spent a lot of time in the studio discussing my ideas, trying to help me solve problems. This happened occasionally, but not often. Roger remembers it this way, but perhaps that’s because as a singer he was often waiting for long periods for us to complete tracks on which he could sing. Keith said we all pulled together as a group to make
Tommy
happen. As a band that’s true, but there were plenty of times when I tried to explain the more personal shades of the Tommy story to my mates, and they simply weren’t interested.

Another myth is that Kit completed and guided the story around
Tommy
. He typed out what we settled on together, but only several days after the album was completed and the tracks sequenced. He did this in part to protect the dramatic copyright.
*
He also did it to create a film treatment, something I wasn’t aware of at first. Still, there’s no doubt that Kit did make many valuable suggestions – that I should write a conventional overture quoting the important musical themes in the opera (the very last piece I would write), and that the story should cover two wars rather than one, a structure Kit and I imposed on the collection of songs after the album was complete. Kit also recognised the underlying framework of
Tommy
as tightly biographical. ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’, for example, is my own story retold as a fairy tale. Being aware of this biographical aspect, Kit shrewdly brought it to my attention whenever my creative process began to meander.

The
Tommy
tracks were well engineered, with conservative, tight drum and bass sounds, and great acoustic, keyboard and vocal sounds, but the electric rhythm guitars sounded poor. I felt I had two great strengths as a studio musician. I was a good acoustic guitar player and electric rhythm guitar player. But IBC Recording Studios had no isolation booth, so when making backing tracks I couldn’t really play acoustic guitar along with Keith and John; they were too loud. Kit had persuaded me to cover any proposed acoustic part with a thin, low-volume electric guitar, which I planned to replace with a killer combination of full-bodied acoustic guitar and driving electric rhythm guitar. Unfortunately, this never happened.

Kit also had a powerful agenda involving arrangements for a symphony orchestra. Whenever he mentioned it I took him aside and challenged him; this was my creative work and I believed we should try to play every instrument ourselves. Still, I could see that in a number of songs Kit simply hadn’t left enough tracks empty for me to properly replace and implement my guitar work. We were running out of time. It was anathema to me that Kit should fill the space he had forced me to leave with an orchestra, but Chris said that Kit may have been grasping at an opportunity to impress, or snipe at, his father’s friends with an ambitious orchestral rock parody of opera.

We were strong, good-tempered most of the time and strangely optimistic in most things. The band were supportive of my ambitious plans for a rock opera and Kit was too, but he clearly believed I wasn’t going to create anything cohesive without a masterstroke he himself injected into the proceedings. It was initially Kit’s intention, one I went along with, that I perform the role of Tommy’s ‘inner’ voice, for which the
leitmotif
, ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me’, was the main refrain. To confuse things I also took the role of Narrator, and was supposed to sing, ‘Captain Walker didn’t come home’ from the ‘Overture’ as well as the role of the nurse who delivers baby Tommy and sings the entirety of ‘Amazing Journey’ and ‘Acid Queen’. (The Acid Queen is a prostitute, drug-pusher and gypsy.) I enjoyed singing this song and carried the role in all live performances with the band for years. As Tommy’s father I also sang ‘Christmas’.

Roger’s role in these initial recordings was Tommy as a young man. In these early assemblies his first appearance was ‘I’m Free’, the moment of realisation. As recording progressed he worked hard to achieve a soft, falsetto voice in which to sing Tommy’s main refrain, ‘See me, feel me’, so he could sing it instead of me, making things less confusing. (There are several versions in the
Tommy
archives of songs for which I sang the lead before Roger replaced me.) One day he pulled it off, which meant he could now sing all Tommy’s lines from childhood on, which was a crucial breakthrough.

One notion I had proposed was incorporating or adapting songs I’d first heard performed by Mose Allison: ‘Country Shack’ and ‘Eyesight to the Blind’ both include the words ‘deaf, dumb and blind’. ‘Young Man Blues’ was simply a song I’d always wished to honour as the fulcrum of my first few songs about teenage angst. Only my adaptation of ‘Eyesight to the Blind’ got on the finished album (the working title was ‘The Hawker’), but it would make Sonny Boy Williamson’s family some useful pocket money over the next thirty years.

I wanted to show the hero of
Tommy
abused by his family, by school friends and by drug-pushers. There was no moral message intended; I simply wanted to demonstrate that my hero was, by my own measure, a normal post-war child. After many frustrated attempts at dealing directly with the issue of sexual molestation, I had to give up. I kept coming back to my time as a toddler with Denny, and the creepy ‘uncle’ with the Hitler moustache, but having exposed such darkness inadvertently in ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’, a piece meant to be light-hearted, I wasn’t sure enough of myself to tackle it.

I turned to John. Could he compose a song about an ‘uncle’ Ernie abusing a boy? There didn’t need to be any actual touching, just onanistic voyeurism. He said he would try, and came up with ‘Fiddle About’. I liked it very much: it was disturbing, relentless and powerful, although I was sad that it also seemed to turn into a dark joke something I myself had found so disturbing as a child. Still, it did the job nicely, and I was relieved not to have to battle with the subject myself.

John also took on the job of writing a song for Ernie’s son Kevin, who bullies Tommy. My take on bullying was different to that on sexual abuse, but the topic was nearly as difficult for me; in various young gangs I had taken part in bullying, and found it painful to think about. Again John made ‘Cousin Kevin’ brutally comedic, but this time the music was canonic, poignant, moving and frightening.

In the last few days before assembly two more vital changes were made. One came about because I felt that my song ‘Welcome’ lacked edge. Were Tommy’s followers merely being lulled into a meditative, soothing state? Was Tommy’s welcoming house like a quiet church, or a happy, vital place that young people would truly enjoy inhabiting?

It was Keith who came up with the necessary masterstroke: Tommy’s house wouldn’t be just a house, it would be a holiday camp, a Butlins-style retreat like those I had spent many happy years in as a small child. I quickly knocked off a throwaway fragment about a holiday camp and gave Keith the well-deserved writing credit. To further confuse the roles sung by each group member, Kit used my demo on the finished album, so I briefly took the role of Uncle Ernie.

I was working in my home studio on 1 February 1969 when I got a call from Delia DeLeon to tell me that Meher Baba had ‘dropped his body’, and would I be attending a special meeting that evening at the Soho centre? The meeting was to discuss how his sudden death would affect plans for a planned mass
darshan
(public gathering) scheduled in Meher Baba’s home town, Ahmednagar, in March, which he had promised after a long period of seclusion. I explained that I would be driving to Newcastle the following day, a journey of about five hours, and couldn’t attend.

Baba had been ill so his death wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a terrible shock. I had been planning to go to India with the McInnerneys and Ronnie and Susie Lane. Karen, in her final month of pregnancy, planned to stay behind. We hadn’t been able to meet Meher Baba, but had followed him since 1967, and I was upset that now we’d missed our chance. I asked Delia what she planned to do; she said she would of course go. What about Mike and me? I wondered. Should we accompany her? Fiercely independent as ever, she scoffed: What would be the point? She may have also been thinking that Meher Baba would not actually be there to meet us, without taking into account the view of his Indian family who felt that he would still be present, even if not in his body.

Under the deadline hammer on
Tommy
we cancelled our tickets to India that morning with mixed feelings of disappointment and relief. The next day, when The Who played in Redcar, I was still numb from the Meher Baba news. Three of the road crew joined me in the Volvo for the drive back to London; it was a long journey and there was an eerie silence throughout. The following day I rang some of my friends and discovered that the planned
darshan
would go ahead. This had been Meher Baba’s express wish all along. For Mike and me it was already too late to reschedule. Meher Baba’s tomb, however, would be opened for visitors in March, through April and beyond.

The Who had spent six weeks over the past four months in and out of IBC studios recording
Tommy
. Kit brought Nik Cohn, the young record critic from the
Guardian
,
to IBC to listen on 4 February. Nik and I had become good friends (he was part of Kit and Chris’s social circle), and we’d taken to hanging out in games arcades near the Track offices in Old Compton Street playing pinball.

He was writing a pop novel called
Arfur: Teenage Pinball Queen
. One day Nik brought Arfur – the real girl who was his inspiration – to meet me. She was short, with short dark hair, pretty and rough-cut in a tight-fitting denim jacket. We would play pinball furiously and competitively and she slayed me on a machine with six sets of flippers. After our games Nik and I usually popped over to Wheeler’s oyster bar for lunch. We were terribly Sixties pop about this – pinball, oysters and house Chablis.

At the review session Nik listened to
Tommy
and said he thought the opera was pretty good, but the story was a bit po-faced and humourless.

Kit’s face tightened as he heard Nik confirm his worst fears. Why did Tommy have to be a guru? It was so old hat. I tried to explain that Tommy was actually a kind of divine musician, that he felt vibrations as music and made music in the hearts of his followers. Nik’s expression made it clear I was making things worse.

‘So you won’t give it a good review?’ I teased Nik.

‘Probably not five stars.’

‘What if Tommy was a pinball champion, and that’s the reason he gathers so many disciples?’

‘Well, in that case of course it would get five stars – and an extra ball.’

I wrote ‘Pinball Wizard’ the next day, then cut a basic demo in my home studio in a great hurry; it had acoustic guitar and vocal on one track, and an electric overdub and backing vocal on the other. The terms ‘pinball wizard’ and ‘mean pinball’ had been used by Nik whenever we played. In the next three or four weeks it was relatively simple to interpolate ‘pinball’ into a couple of other places in the sequence of
Tommy
songs, and to redo the necessary vocal lines.

I made a huge leap into the absurd when I decided that the hero would play pinball while still deaf, dumb and blind. It was daft, flawed and muddled, but also insolent, liberated and adventurous. I had no doubt whatsoever that if I had failed to deliver The Who an operatic masterpiece that would change people’s lives, with ‘Pinball Wizard’ I was giving them something almost as good: a hit.

I decided Mike McInnerney would be the first person to hear it. Mike and I had spent lots of time brainstorming about the music for
Tommy
and the way Mike’s illustrations would complement it. Meher Baba taught that life as we knew it was ‘an illusion within an illusion’, an angle Mike was developing for the album sleeve. The front cover and one of the inside panels showed a kind of latticed grid through which listeners had to pass in order to reach the music inside.

Tommy
hadn’t been intended as a pop album. My new definition of what I did was ‘rock’, and musicians and journalists were starting to use the word to describe a youth movement and an attitude as well as the favoured popular music of the day. Jann Wenner and his writers at
Rolling Stone
were already using the word to describe more than a style of music, and when
Creem
magazine emerged a little later they coined the term ‘Punk rock’ to define the entire scene that produced such disparate individuals as John Sinclair and Abbie Hoffman on the one hand, and Iggy Pop on the other.

Meher Baba had spoken about ‘God playing marbles with the Universe’, and the newly introduced pinball element echoed that in
Tommy
. Mike was thinking about a new painting for the record sleeve to depict the way that illusion deceived us into believing that what we saw was real, but he was running out of time. His illustration work in gouache was meticulous and time-consuming. He decided to create a photograph instead, and enlisted someone he knew to set it up.

The problem for us both was to work out what the function of
Tommy
would be now that Meher Baba was gone. I had never intended for
Tommy
to be a proselytising vehicle for Meher Baba, but it was certainly intended to reflect spiritual yearnings during these post-psychedelic times. Youth movements were dividing and polarising into two camps – political activists and spiritual seekers, and I saw myself in the latter. We discussed whether Baba’s name should be credited on the sleeve and agreed that it should, but merely as ‘Avatar’.

By the beginning of March we had finished. The last track we worked on was ‘The Overture’, demoed by me in a haze of exhaustion after everything else was completed.