Who I Am: A Memoir (24 page)

We arrived at the same moment as Alice, who had driven to and from London to score more heroin. Eric was listening to Bill Withers and J.J. Cale, laid back and mellow. The house was a quintessential Surrey mansion; Eric still lives there and I think it’s one of England’s great houses. He was his usual funny, courteous, gentle self. Two fine Weimaraner dogs loped in and out as he put logs on the fire.

Alice nodded off almost immediately. Bob, Mia and I didn’t know how to deal with heavy heroin users. All I knew was that Eric had stopped performing and found it hard to make recordings. Eric showed me the small studio in his garage, which had a Helios desk and an eight-track tape machine. It was the real deal. I offered to work with him on some tracks he had started. No one mentioned heroin or spoke of why we were there, but under the surface we all knew. And, when Bob and I left at 5 o’clock in the morning, I had two reels of tape tucked under my arm and thought perhaps we could reach Eric through music.

Towards the end of The Who’s summer tour of Europe I persuaded Eric and Alice to come over and join us in Paris, thinking it might animate Eric and get him interested in playing before big crowds again. The Who were booked at a massive daytime event, the Fête de l’Humanité, sponsored by a Communist newspaper of the same name to raise funds for the party. I didn’t realise this until I found myself on stage and saw all the red banners.

Eric and Alice, beautifully dressed, stood on the side of the stage. Even when they were high they were elegant and well-behaved, but at one point – probably because of my leaping and running around in my boiler-suit throwing imaginary hand-grenades – Eric started to laugh helplessly.

‘
You
should try to keep this fucking band moving along,’ I shouted to him over the racket.

In a single month in 1972 a number of incidents occurred that should have told me I needed to slow down. One night, when my driver Rod had become ill with gastroenteritis and had to go home, I drove the Mercedes much too fast and was chased by the local police and arrested. I spent the night in a cell, and a court case would follow. Finally, when my court case for speeding in the Mercedes came up, I lost my driving licence.

At a family dinner with friends, someone made a remark to the effect that men were all the same. I responded by swiping all Karen’s coveted china from the kitchen. I was trying to be ironic of course, but it was the behaviour of a complete jerk.

After dinner with Karen’s family in Moulsford, I became angry with our artist friend Johanna Freudenberg for nagging her partner Chris Morphet about his driving on the short drive home to Cleeve. So as soon as we got back I jumped into my Porsche and drove it into a tree on the driveway. Quite how that taught Johanna a lesson escaped even me at the time.

After a family row I called Dad a coward for being subservient to Mum. And one evening in Cleeve, when my parents had come for the weekend as guests, I railed at Mum for over an hour, until Dad interceded and they went up to bed. I sat with my brandy bottle, in tears. The next morning Johanna commented that she hadn’t known I was capable of such ‘Latin emotion’. She was being kind – I’d been an arsehole.

There had been time enough in the first part of 1972 for me to recover from the intense overwork and pressure of the first five years of The Who’s career. It didn’t happen. When I started on
Quadrophenia
in earnest I was already exhausted. The première of Lou Reizner’s orchestral
Tommy
at the Rainbow in December, which should have been a wonderful evening, became an excuse to celebrate, and to drink, and thus to fuck things up.

I had written out the interminable lyrics to ‘Sally Simpson’ in a small book to jog my memory, and, at some point in the evening, someone – mischievously or kleptomaniacally – had torn out half the pages. Or so I thought. Instead of going back to the start of the song as I performed it for the partygoers, I simply pretended to wipe my ass with the book and tossed it from the stage into the audience. As I threw the book the pages flipped in the air, and I realised I had simply stopped too soon. The words I wanted were a little farther into the book.

Much of this darkness infected my work. Our country cottage didn’t help. After sunset it became squalid and depressing. The river no longer sparkled with light and droplets of water; at night it was all freezing spray, icy wind. No wonder Jimmy the Mod in
Quadrophenia
, emerging from the chrysalis during those autumn and winter months, was such a whining little git.

Quadrophenia
isn’t a straight narrative, but rather a kind of distorted dream-view. Nik’s composite of the four members of The Who, called Tommy in
Rock Is Dead
, became Jimmy in
Quadrophenia
, and all my hero needed was a few days in which to find a way to recover from being a Who fan. I wanted everyone who listened to the album to find themselves and their own story in it, including each member of the band. If my malaise, and Jimmy’s, was spiritual, then the members of The Who were simply going to have to bite the spiritual bullet, because it seemed to me that our fans’ malaise was probably spiritual as well.

Despite the setback of
Lifehouse
, I was still convinced that we would somehow draw creative energy from our fans. We would find ourselves in them.

16

A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE

In early 1973 I made several visits to Eric Clapton’s house, but nothing had changed. Lord Harlech, Alice’s father, joined me there one day. It was tense. While Alice was out of the room, Eric told Alice’s father his fears that if he and Alice stopped using heroin their relationship might change, and he might not still feel in love with her. Harlech gently made it clear that he cared only for their lives at this point. Later he called me and proposed that to help Eric I should ask him to perform in January at a concert at the Rainbow for a charity Lord Harlech supported.

When Eric agreed in principle I began to put a band together. I turned first to Ronnie Wood, who provided positive, generous energy. We invited Jim Capaldi, Traffic’s drummer, and Steve Winwood. Rick Grech from Family, whom I adored, played bass. He introduced me to amyl nitrate in liquid form, telling me it was harmless, not a real drug at all. I hadn’t used any drugs since 1967, so my tolerance was low, and I was impressed by the simple power of having the blood supply to my brain quickened.

We started rehearsals at Ronnie Wood’s house, The Wick (a house I had always loved, and dreamt of owning). Stevie Winwood didn’t appear. Speedy Aquaye, Georgie Fame’s conga player, played along with Jim Capaldi on drums. Ron Wood played in support of Eric, mainly slide guitar. I played electric rhythm, chugging along in my usual way. Eric had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do, and we very quickly started to sound like a band. The room we rehearsed in was oval, opening through three sets of french doors to the garden and an open view of the Thames. Ronnie’s wife Krissy sat on a stool smiling like an angel, wearing a flowery dress, her blonde hair framing her schoolgirl-pretty face, which belied both her stunning figure and her mischievous spirit. She made it like a rock ’n’ roll affair that would have been perfectly appropriate in California.

With only a few days to spare before we moved to a proper theatre to do a soundcheck, there was still no sign of Stevie Winwood. I rang and threatened him with unspecified violence, and the next day he duly arrived with his Hammond organ. From then on the band took off into another level of stratus cloud. There had always been a deep connection between Eric and Stevie; they had, of course, played together in Blind Faith, and worked together intuitively.

The soundcheck was a breeze. On the night of the concert I rolled up to Ronnie Wood’s house in my Mercedes 600 limo and we all piled in. It felt like an epic event. Ronnie Lane and his partner Katie came along for the ride. Stevie rolled a joint, and I took a small puff of my first marijuana in more than five years.

The concert, on 13 January 1973, passed flawlessly, and the atmosphere was quite glorious. Everyone who attended had good things to say about it. Ron Wood played an astounding solo exchange with Eric on ‘Layla’, and we extended the song for ten minutes (it was edited for the live album release). With no leaping around, I wasn’t affected by the usual adrenaline rush I had with The Who, which allowed me to enjoy every note of the music played that evening. The stage seemed to elevate slightly as we ended.

I’d been part of the creation of a new band from the ground up. I’d known precisely how to play my part as a solid rhythm guitarist, and my contribution had been valuable. I hadn’t worked like this since the early days of The Who, and it felt very good indeed.

Once the concert was over I settled back into my boozy routine, wine at home with my family, cognac in my studio when I was composing. I returned to
Quadrophenia
, the story still incomplete, looking for a simple hook on which all the music could hang.

I began to experience a powerful comedown from the lack of amyl nitrate. I felt cold, depressed, tragic, lost and hopeless. On a dark, wet, winter weekend in the jerry-built cottage at Cleeve, with the river flooding part of the lawns, the wind howling through the badly made doors and windows, my memory pulled me back to a single night when I was 19 years old.

I had slept for a few hours under Brighton pier in 1964 with my art-school friend, the pretty, strawberry-blonde Liz Reid. We had been together for a riotous night at the Aquarium Ballroom after our gig on the night of a Mod–Rocker street battle on the seafront. Walking along the beach in the dark, under the pier, trying to stay out of the drizzling rain, we’d come across a group of Mod boys in their anoraks. They were giggling as the tide came in, getting their feet wet. We sat with them for a while. We were all coming down from taking purple hearts, the fashionable uppers of the period.

As I thought back to that night, a sense of falling and vertigo came flooding back with the flooding river outside – I felt that same sense of depression and hopelessness. But I also felt again the remembered romantic warmth of nodding off on the milk-train home in the early hours, with Liz by my side. For a short time we had both felt like Mods. There was something wonderful in all that. We also fell in love, and yet I didn’t go on another date with Liz, never again. The moment with her was frozen, exalted and would always be special.

In the house at Cleeve, the river raging outside in the blackness as I looked back, I realised I’d worked up – or down – to this moment of epiphany for quite a few months. I wasn’t actually alone: I had a wife, kids and friends asleep upstairs in the cottage. I grabbed a notebook and, anxiously and quickly, while still in this sad, lonely mood, scribbled the story featured on the inside sleeve of the original vinyl album of
Quadrophenia
.

This was the story of Jimmy, a young Mod, hopeless, stranded on a rock in the rain, wondering if he might find redemption through the recounting of his pathetic life thus far by the four members of the band he felt had once reflected him, now loved and lost, just as he had loved and lost everything else important to him as a teenage Mod.

I wanted
Quadrophenia
to be released in quadrophonic sound, four channels representing the four facets of my hero Jimmy, each channel taking the form of one member of The Who. As the recording unfolded it became clear that, technically speaking,
Quadrophenia
was going to be a complicated, audacious project. I planned to emulate Walter Carlos’s
Sonic Seasonings
album, with extraordinary soundscapes between tracks providing atmosphere for my simple story. I wanted to capture the raging sea in quadrophonic sound.

My Cleeve studio would make a terrific quadrophonic mixing suite, but it couldn’t accommodate The Who for recording. I needed a large commercial studio whose control room included a quadrophonic speaker array I could trust. Nothing like this existed in London, so we would have to do what I’d done in Cleeve, and build it ourselves. I turned to Wiggy.

Wiggy, our dedicated, technically driven, seemingly insane production manager, had started life with the band as Keith and John’s driver (a baptism by fire), had progressed to looking after lighting, and then to dealing with promoters on the road, booking hotels, making travel plans and bailing us out of jail – when he wasn’t conspiring with us in the business of getting arrested in the first place.

I explained to Wiggy that the studio at Cleeve would be fine for mixing, but that the recording room there was basically a tractor garage. He invited me to check out the road crew’s storage facility and tape archive in Thessaly Road in Battersea, which turned out to be a very large church hall full of road gear.

‘What a pity we don’t have enough time to turn this building into a studio in time to record the tracks,’ I said.

Wiggy screwed up his eyes. ‘When do you want it?’

‘Sort of … now?’ I replied apologetically.

‘Now,’ he repeated.

‘That would be good.’

Six weeks later, through Wiggy’s employment of a troop of thirty workers from an off-season circus, and with considerable help from John Alcock of Trackplan, we moved in. The large studio room was complete, massively soundproofed, lined in hardwoods, with two booths, one for grand piano, one for acoustic guitar, and another smaller corridor that doubled for guide vocal. The layout was perfect for us. I believe Ramport, as the studio was known, was the first studio in London to offer three isolation booths in this way. It meant we could record drums, bass, piano and acoustic guitar with a guide vocal simultaneously.

The sound was glorious. We hired Ronnie Lane’s mobile, and used that to record the basic tracks until the work and acoustics in our own control room were sorted out.

For
Quadrophenia
’s album sleeve I felt we needed an approach that was photographic, truly authentic in detail. Glyn Johns, who had co-produced
Who’s Next
, suggested his close friend Ethan Russell to shoot the sleeve photo for that album in 1971. Although I hadn’t personally liked that obelisk-pissing album cover, I loved Ethan and his work, and knew he was perfect for a serious photo-document about a young Mod.

Barney had come back into my life around the time Karen and I became interested in LSD and Meher Baba, back in 1967. He too became a follower of the Silent Master. From then on we saw each other often, and I regarded him as invaluable in all matters relating to The Who. On this occasion he helped put together some Mod consultants and a group of people to pose as models for the
Quadrophenia
shoot. My brother Paul and Janie – Simon’s future wife – were also in the cast. It felt like a family affair.

Recording
Quadrophenia
with The Who was a joyful experience. Not having a driving licence, I travelled to and from Ramport studio in Battersea by speedboat on the Thames. Inside the studio the walls were hung with Who trophies – gold discs, awards and souvenirs, most of which I’d never seen before. A flight case containing a full bar was always sitting by the piano booth. I drank Rémy Martin by the pint from an old-fashioned, heavy, dimpled mug, borrowed from the local pub. Keith’s drumkit faced the huge window between the studio and control room, John was set up to his right and me to his left – just as we appeared on stage. When Roger was present he occupied a vocal booth next to the control room.

The studio was filled with exotic instruments we rarely played: marimbas, glockenspiels, xylophones, vibraphones, gongs, drumkits and tympani. (Keith knocked them all over in the finale of the album.) There was also a Hammond organ, electric pianos, a beautiful Bösendorfer piano, guitars, amplifiers and all kinds of strange things. Wiggy had purchased them from Manny’s Music Store in New York City, and charged them to a touring account.

The control room – completed in June, about a month after we began recording – was graced with brand new Studer tape machines, 16-track, 8-track and twin stereo machines. Every add-on gadget deemed necessary was present in triplicate. We had a gorgeous, eccentric, blue Helios desk,
de rigueur
in rock at that time. Instead of the usual two (or at the most four) large monitor speakers our control room had
twelve
JBL 4320s! Four pairs at the front, two pairs at the back. The sound level was monstrous.

There was a button on the desk that said ‘Do Not Press’. The button had no purpose other than to create shock and was potentially the stuff of heart-attack. If pressed, a nuclear explosion shuddered the room at a reading of about 138db. The effect would send most normal folk to the floor in tears.

Ironically, because of the UK miners’ strikes, triggered by mining disasters and poor working conditions, there were massive strikes while we were recording the
Quadrophenia
album in 1973, and we had to work with a government-imposed three-day working week meant to preserve energy.

After a couple of weeks’ preparation the Ramport recording began in earnest on 22 June. Kit pretended to be the album’s producer for the first several weeks. Showing up smashed, usually extremely late, he sometimes brought delicious but unwanted food from the trendy South Kensington restaurant AD8, in which he had shares. He scribbled his usual incomprehensible notes on tape boxes, and for a while prevented our engineer Ron Nevison doing his job properly.

By the end of the second week I had had enough. Kit had been distracting the recording process, erasing tapes while I was out of the room, and I just snapped. Close to punching Kit, I sacked him instead. For weeks afterwards we were visited by irritated heroin dealers trying to find him.

Ramport started to take on a new life. I loved working there. Wiggy and Keith always managed to hire gorgeous, sexy women to help run the studio. Three local girls sat at the desk behind the control-room window, watching us play, wide-eyed and impressed. There was no better audience.

When John started work on the brass parts, he gathered for the purpose at least twenty or thirty magnificent trumpets, horns and valve trombones. He could play all of them, writing out his parts on manuscript paper like an orthodox composer, and working through the recording meticulously until his lips started to go numb. He was wonderful to work with, disciplined, funny and inspired. What he arranged and played on a whole variety of exotic brass instruments fitted my own synthesiser and strings arrangements perfectly. The Who members still had that one all-important facility when we were making music: we listened to each other.

The rule we established during recording was that energetic musical rage would be used throughout. We didn’t need throwaway tracks for light relief, we didn’t need light and shade, irony or humour. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extraordinary range of human emotion: withering sadness, self-pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage and frustration, joy and triumph.

The angst of those teenage years in which we all feel misunderstood is easy to make fun of, but it’s real, and it brings my hero Jimmy to the brink of suicide. When, at the end of the album version of the
Quadrophenia
story, Jimmy steals a boat and takes it out to a rock in the middle of the sea, his anguished but jubilant cry, ‘Love reign o’er me’, suggests that he has finally been able to integrate his multiple selves. Even as author and composer I realised I had no right to decide whether or not Jimmy should end his own life. I let Jimmy decide for himself.