Who I Am: A Memoir (20 page)

The next morning I rolled over to face the sunshine streaming through thin motel curtains. My heart pounded: there was a shadow at the window. Someone was there. No. A body. Someone, some insane fool, had actually hanged themselves right outside my room. I could picture the rope tied to the canopy frame above my door, the lolling head, the torso, legs, feet. I watched tensely and saw no movement through the curtains except for a flickering shadow – the gentle, almost imperceptible sway of a body in the breeze. This, I thought, is what happens when you fuck with basic morality, even in your dreams. I leapt from the bed, grabbed the phone and dialled the front desk. ‘Something terrible, terrible’, was all I could say.

When I heard the motel manager’s footsteps approaching my door, I nervously opened it and peeked out across to the window.

Keith? Kit?

It was my freshly tie-dyed boiler-suit stuffed with newspaper, complete with a large grinning Halloween pumpkin head and a pair of orange work boots.

Benefits from our new fame didn’t follow us everywhere. In Memphis we were thrown off a plane and threatened with arrest. The pilot had emerged from his cockpit red-faced to demand who had used the ‘b— word’. I put up my hand – I’d told Pete Rudge that
Live at Leeds
was going down a bomb, and the young flight attendant had overheard me and misunderstood the British meaning of the word. She was in tears.

A few days later we were in Cleveland with our friends Joe Walsh and the James Gang, who supported us for five shows in June and July. My old friend Tom Wright, from art-school days, travelled from Detroit for the Cincinnati shows. I have a cassette recording of the entire evening, with Joe Walsh and me playing acoustic guitars together, exchanging songs and getting very drunk.

In Columbia, Maryland, I arranged to buy a sleek-looking Dodge Travco 28-foot motorhome, and ship it back to Britain. I called Karen and told her about it, promising we could afford it, and that I’d find somewhere to park it in our narrow suburban street. She loved the idea.

After the Columbia show one of John’s groupie frolickers attached herself to me; in a boozy haze I didn’t tell her to scram. In fact my heart revved with anticipation and ambivalence. We talked for a while in my room and it became clear she was well read and smart. I could have asked her – gently and kindly, of course – to leave, but I didn’t. After she took off her clothes and I took her in my arms, I quietly called her the devil. What could she have thought I meant by that?

A week later I was back home. I had demanded a two-week break from touring, and Karen had found a holiday cottage for rent on an island called Osea, in the Blackwater Estuary of Essex. All the properties on the island, including ours, were sadly run-down, and the weather was vile. Towser, our spaniel, ran into the sea and grabbed a heavy piece of driftwood that was far too big for him; unwilling to let go, he began drowning, so I had to dive in and save him. In the process I swallowed a small jellyfish; the water was full of them.

The cottage had no TV or radio; it was so cold that we huddled together, making love passionately but with chattering teeth, like Russian peasants in a Tolstoy novel; Karen said our second daughter Minta was conceived there, probably helped along by jellyfish protein.

Although this time was supposed to be a break, I had given myself a creative mission during the holiday to set Meher Baba’s Universal Prayer to music. I succeeded, and it felt like a cosmic sign. One other job I had brought with me on holiday was journalistic. Ray Coleman,
Melody Maker
’s editor, had commissioned me to write fortnightly articles about music and anything else that interested me. I had enjoyed reviewing a few records in 1969, praising the début albums of Mott the Hoople and King Crimson. I had also taken to writing letters to the music papers whenever something niggled me. ‘Pete! You’ve been writing letters again!’ Ronnie Lane would say; Keith Richards sent a handwritten scrawl asking if we could be pen pals.

My first
Melody Maker
article, written during the Osea holiday, was published shortly after. ‘I’m beginning my first page of this bulky journal in particularly strange surroundings … far away from the sounds of London’s traffic and Keith Moon, on an island in the Blackwater estuary called Osea.’ I went on with an unabashed plug for my buddy Joe Walsh, and the James Gang.

Why was I doing this at all? I had a day job in a band, and my free time was almost entirely packed. I was supporting the Meher Baba Association and attending meetings; developing Trackplan, a company I formed with record producer John Alcock to build home studios for my pop-star buddies; I was recording an album with Thunderclap Newman; and involved in a film cooperative called Tattooist, writing their film music and even delivering a lecture for one of them at an art college. But when The Who were between engagements I was incapable of slowing down and spending time at home. I was a workaholic, running away from the present, and probably the past, because something about my life made me uneasy – I was myself a really desperate man.

At a time when I could have been supremely happy I was feeling ashamed about being an adulterer, and oddly guilty about my professional success.

Writing for
Melody Maker
I was at least being honest about one of my principal defects: I loved the sound of my own prattling. But it was more than just that. In his manifesto for the Ealing Art College Ground Course, Roy Ascott had used the word ‘feedback’ in a creative context. Feedback, he said, could be seen as the way an artist might evolve and deepen a creative project by observing the reactions of those who viewed your work or took part in it. With
Tommy
the feedback system began with Kit, and included Richard Stanley and Mike McInnerney. Even before my bandmates had fixed on the real picture behind
Tommy
and helped to make it happen, I had brainstormed with two smart, open-minded journalists,
Rolling Stone
magazine’s Jann Wenner and John Mendelsohn.

Through my 1970
Melody Maker
articles I hoped to do this again, but with clearer focus. The feedback I had enjoyed with Jann and John would be replaced by feedback from Who fans who would read my brainstorms and get involved. I would reproduce their responses in the
Melody Maker
articles, and a fertile creative loop would establish itself that would feed The Who its next big breakfast.

In all of this I overlooked one important fact. If I couldn’t share my ideas too soon with the guys in the band, because they were so resistant to grappling with my awkward, often intensely secretive creative process, how did I expect our fans to help me? The journalists I’d worked with were used to brainstorming and creative risk-taking. They had closed the circle when The Who went on to do so many spectacular live performances of
Tommy
, underscoring my original aims, giving me a feeling that I had known where I was heading all along with
Tommy
, when in fact it had been a leap into the unknown. I could reach Who fans through
Melody Maker
, but how would they reach me back?

I conceived the idea of
Lifehouse
in August 1970 in my big new camper bus, in which I stayed for a few days after playing the third Isle of Wight Festival. Although the complete story didn’t come together for another year, it was essentially one of a dystopia, a nightmare global scenario, a modern retelling of Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
. My hero in
Lifehouse
would be a good man, an advanced soul who would make a bad mistake and suffer the karmic repercussions. In the dark future I visualised in
Lifehouse
, humanity would survive inevitable ecological disaster by living in air-filtered seclusion in pod-like suits, kept amused and distracted by sophisticated programming delivered to them by the government. As with
Tommy
, people’s isolation would, in my story, prove the medium for their ultimate transcendence.

In my draft, I touched on some of the major anxieties of the times. When the Earth’s ecosystem collapsed, its inhabitants would have to drastically reduce their demands on the resources of the world. Only through submission to a police state would we survive. The allied governments of the world would join forces to demand that ordinary folk accept a long enough period of hibernation in the care of computers, in order to allow the planet to recover.

What would make forced hibernation, plugged into a mainframe called the Grid,
*
bearable? Only virtual experience, piped in through digital technology. What would free people from this forced hibernation? Live music and the Lifehouse. Rock music would be quickly identified by the controllers of the Grid as problematical. Because of its potential to awaken the dormant masses, rock music would be strictly banned.

A group of renegades and nerds would set up a rock concert, experimenting with complex feedback systems between the audience and the musicians, and hack into the Grid. People from everywhere would be drawn to the Lifehouse, where each person would sing their own unique song to produce the music of the spheres, a sublime harmony that would become what I called ‘the one perfect note’. When the authorities stormed the Lifehouse, everyone would have disappeared into a kind of musical nirvana.

The Mysticism of Sound
, a book written in the 1920s by Inayat Khan, a musician who became a Sufi spiritual teacher, was my inspiration for the story’s musical solution. The core of my idea was that we could all hear this music – and compose it – if only we would truly listen.

The idea of dystopian bleakness that could only be redeemed by creative fantasy
†
resonated with me at a deep, personal, psychological level. I knew there was a manic-depressive element to my personality, a seasonal swing in my psyche between periods of emotional bleakness (forced hibernation) and the dynamic creative activity (the Lifehouse) that served to pull me out of the void. I had always relied on my imagination and creativity to see me through the lowest points, the darkest days of my childhood, and later at school, art college and the early days with The Who. I had come to rely on this mechanism to fly me out of danger and depression, like the air-sea rescue of a drowning man.

Before I could complete the story The Who were back on the road, playing a ten-day tour of Europe. The first show was in Munich, where during the improvisational part of ‘My Generation’ I started experimenting with completely new guitar work. I wanted to take the band into deeper musical terrain, and all three of my bandmates struggled to find a way into what I was doing. During the rest of the shows on this tour, and a set that followed in the UK, I continued to push hard to create mesmeric arpeggio effects on my guitar, leading into uplifting heavy riffs. Bob Pridden became like a third hand for me. He set up a series of complex fluttering echo effects, and by listening very carefully to what I played he introduced these at perfectly chosen moments.

The sound I heard on stage was wonderful, soaring, stratospheric, intoxicating. One otherwise appreciative reviewer remarked that my freeform work went off at too many tangents, but musical tangents were precisely what I was trying to explore.

In my second
Melody Maker
piece, published a few weeks after the Isle of Wight festival, I began my creative feedback experiment.

Here’s the idea, there’s a note, a musical note that forms the basis of existence somehow. Mystics would say it is OM, but I am talking about a MUSICAL note. […] Do you hear it? I think you must, particularly the allegedly musical lot who read
Melody Maker
. Probably all musicians or music lovers, i.e.: people with trained ears waggle waggle. They all hear it. Musicians have to learn to listen before they can begin to learn to play. I think it’s the hardest part, the listening part. Probably why so many people involved in music are attracted to pot smoking, it helps one to listen.
‡

Earlier that year I had given a lecture at Winchester Art College about the use of tape machines by non-musicians. In the audience was Brian Eno, the experimental musician, who cites the lecture as the moment he realised he could make music even though he wasn’t a musician. I wanted to go further. Encouraging our audience to become part of what I did as a composer and songwriter, and to contribute to the sound we produced on stage, was an important part of the second phase of my idea. I believed synthesisers would make it possible for non-musicians to express their creativity, but first I needed to be completely hands-on about them myself, as a layman.

I commissioned one of the first small synthesisers from a British company called EMS. Before the machine (the ‘Putney’) was delivered, I was given its manual, which became a vitally important resource. It opened with a simple description of how sound is made, how it travels through the air and how it is reproduced electronically. Clear diagrams made the basic physics behind musical sound easier for me to grasp. In my notes I envisaged the practical integration of synthesisers into the regular rock-band format.

I imagined The Who playing along with rhythmic synthesiser sounds, or pre-prepared backing tracks on tape. By now musicians knew how to overdub in a recording studio, that is, play along with pre-recorded music, but in the live arena drummers were used to defining the tempo and pace of any particular song. In my home studio I played Keith a few synthesiser-chopped rhythmic demo backing tracks. It was a revelation how well and comfortably Keith was able to play along, and I realised this was how he had always played drums with The Who, following, rather than leading, the tempo set by John and myself.

As The Who dragged around Europe, trying to amuse ourselves with absurd displays of rock-star mischief, I was becoming increasingly determined to create something truly spectacular for the band’s next project. It took me three days to write
Lifehouse
, from 28 to 30 September 1970. I scratched out a summary that would guide me and sent a copy to Chris;
§
I needed to explain the general idea behind
Lifehouse
, especially to Chris, so I also produced a comprehensive breakdown of what I felt we needed to bring the story to life. I described the sound systems we’d need, how we would record work in progress, the musical instruments required, how to collect the data needed to reflect each audience member musically and how filming might be handled.