Who I Am: A Memoir (28 page)

Something about her made me feel at ease. ‘Do you need a cab?’

‘Keith shipped me in from South Carolina, honey. That’s a thousand miles away.’

I thought it might be a little nearer than that, but I didn’t argue. As usual I felt lost in America, with no real idea of where I was unless I was by the sea.

‘Can I get you a room here?’

Suddenly she stood up, shook her hair, appeared to recover her composure completely, smiled at me, took my hand and led me towards the lift.

‘Better yet,’ she said, ‘I’ll come and stay with you.’

So started a friendship that lasted for more than fifteen years. Donna Parker was, like me, a devoted Kinks fan and a Ray Davies disciple.

‘Got anything to drink?’ She was circling the room like a panther.

‘I don’t drink,’ I replied. ‘At least, not at the moment. I could get you something.’

She asked for J&B and coke. I found two bottles and added ice from a machine in the corridor. She was funny, sexy and smart, flicking through my copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
in the knowing manner of someone who is obviously well read.

She made a pass at me and I demurred, trying to prove I was above all that. If I had been drinking I would have succumbed. She smiled at me very sweetly, lay down on one of the room’s twin beds and quickly fell asleep with her clothes on. I spent the entire night with a raging erection, willing myself not to reach out and touch her quite fabulous body. In the morning she spent a long time in the bathroom. I could hardly believe the transformation.

‘Yes, honey,’ she drawled, hand on hips like Marilyn Monroe and doing a breathless impression. ‘I do scrub up well, don’t I?’

She’d carried a short flowery dress in her little bag, nipped tightly at the waist. Her legs were spectacular.

‘Give me your address,’ I said. ‘I want to see you again.’ In the lobby I recklessly gave her my home address – and $150 for the flight home. The desk clerk made a face as though he smelled rotten eggs.

‘It’s not what you think,’ I told him. ‘We just talked.’

Donna looked at me askance.

‘Talked?’ She put her arm in mine and started to walk me out, then turned to the desk clerk and shouted, ‘I fucked him five times until he cried for his momma!’

It made me feel like a rock star.

During our US tour Keith visibly darkened. He was often funny, but there was a new edge. And his cocktail of drugs had grown more complex. His minder, Pete Butler (nicknamed ‘Dougal’), had no influence over him whatsoever.

One day in December 1975, somewhere in the Midwest, Keith let it be known he was throwing himself a dinner party. Dougal telephoned each of us ceremoniously, inviting us to Keith’s birthday gathering. Keith’s birthday was in August, and when I mentioned this I was told this was a special gathering for a good friend of his who had missed the day itself.

A room in the hotel had been set aside for the dinner, with a stunning display of mixed flowers at the centre of the table. One by one we arrived and took our seats. There was excellent wine and champagne already in buckets and a low buzz of anticipatory chit-chat. Suddenly Wiggy stood up.

‘Here he is! Happy birthday, Keith.’

Keith was dressed in an absurdly grand outfit: a smoking jacket, black velvet slippers, a white shirt with large black scarf. He was wearing several very expensive-looking rings and chains with gold medallions.

‘What lovely flowers,’ he said graciously. ‘Thank you, Dougal.’ He picked a single bloom from the display and ate it. He’d made a habit of this gag, but it was always very funny.

‘Dearest fans!’ He bowed as he addressed us, speaking in a very posh English accent. ‘How lovely of you to gather like this. Come, darling …’ He ushered a very pretty blonde girl of about seventeen to an empty seat.

‘My dearest friend Kathy, an actress hoping to make it big in Hollywood, has her birthday on nearly the same day as my own. So this is a joint celebration.’

At least you could tell when Keith was lying. I smiled at him, but he gazed back at me coolly. Keith turned back to Kathy, poured her wine, settled her chair, showed her the menu and whispered advice to her about what she might choose to eat. She behaved like a spoiled starlet in an old movie. The rest of us talked among ourselves. I relaxed a little after the excellent meal, took up my usual role as Keith’s straight man and tapped my glass to propose a toast.

‘I’d like to propose a toast,’ I said loudly. The table had become noisy with much raucous laughter. ‘To Keith! To Kathy! On their birthdays, many happy returns!’

The assembly eventually stood and repeated the salutation. Keith rose with mock modesty and gestured for everyone to be seated. He surveyed the expectant room, holding his glass, and said, ‘I have a second announcement to make. I am leaving the band, leaving The Who.’

We all thought Keith was trying to be amusing, but he went on quite seriously. ‘I have been offered a part in a new film by Marty Scorsese, and I have instructed my agent to accept.’

He sat down, turned to Kathy and whispered to her conspiratorially. She was giggling. I suddenly felt Keith was taking the joke too far.

‘Keith, we’re in the middle of a tour …’

As soon as I said the words, I felt stupid.

Keith turned to me. ‘I will fulfil my obligations to this tour,’ he continued, ‘and then it’s over. I would ask you to raise your glasses to me, and wish me luck.’

Kathy, unaware of the gravity of the situation, merrily raised her glass and gazed up at Keith adoringly. She lowered it when she realised that no one else intended to join the toast. I was incensed.

‘What next?’ I demanded. ‘You eat another flower?’ My cynical emphasis was on the word ‘flower’, but I gestured to Kathy.

‘No!’ Keith was quite calm. ‘
You
eat a flower.’ He gestured at the display.

I wasn’t going to refuse this challenge. I took a bloom from the display, put it in my mouth and started to chew. Everyone watched me for a few moments, then lost interest. Keith stood judging me; he was an expert flower-eater after all.

My throat suddenly began to burn, then swell up, and my breathing became constricted before turning into a kind of noisy death-wheeze. I was allergic to whatever I had put in my mouth, and starting to suffocate. No one seemed to have taken it in but Keith. Suddenly he leapt across the table and looked straight into my face.

‘What’s happening?’

‘I’m fucking choking,’ I gasped.

‘Stay calm,’ he said. ‘Just stay calm. Someone call an ambulance. He’s in trouble.’

Everyone jumped to their feet, and some people scattered to get help, but before it arrived my throat began to open up a little.

‘It’s OK,’ I wheezed. ‘My throat swelled up, but it seems to be going down again. Fuck! That was scary.’ I looked up at Keith. I could see the very real concern on his face.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

Keith settled on his haunches in front of me, watching me recover, making sure I was OK, tears in his eyes. It was suddenly obvious how much he adored me and was frightened for me. He looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he stood up and addressed the room.

‘Champagne!’ he shouted, with his usual panache. ‘Dom Perignon. 1924.’

‘Keith,’ I spluttered. ‘We don’t want to celebrate you leaving The Who.’

‘I was winding you up, mate. Trying to impress the lovely Kathy here. Actually, she didn’t know who The Who are. Silly bint only knows about Hollywood.’

Kathy looked from face to face incredulously, as if to say: ‘Are these people crazy?’

19

GROWING INTO MY SKIN

‘I think I’ve fallen in love.’

I was talking with Murshida Duce, head of the Sufi movement in California. The girl I thought I’d fallen in love with was Donna Parker. I described what had happened, and Murshida said it was just an infatuation. I knew what she meant, but that wasn’t how it felt. I was nuts about Donna, and we hadn’t even had sex.

I had taken my alcohol problems to what I felt was a higher authority by going for help to the Meher Baba family in Myrtle Beach and California, and it had worked for me. I had cut down my drinking almost to nothing. Murshida Duce had introduced me to Dr Wong, a Chinese herbalist who prescribed me his special tea, tailor-made to my needs, brewed from herbs and plants he gathered in the mountains in China. The first day I drank a cup I felt like Superman. I will never know what was in it, but I drank that tea before every show for the next year, and whenever I got a fresh batch I performed with additional energy and drive. My stage work at the end of 1975 was, according to most reviews, exemplary, fuelled by Dr Wong tea rather than cognac. Keith’s woes, however, continued.

During the second leg of our
Who by Numbers
US tour, in Boston on 9 March 1976, Keith collapsed after two songs. It was very worrying. Our fans reacted badly, and smashed part of the building and some subway trains. Our first New York show at Madison Square Garden was scheduled for the next day, but Keith was still ill. This wasn’t a long tour, but several additional last-minute difficulties on the road caused shows to be shuffled.

Bob Pridden had managed to hike up the level of the two sidefill speaker stacks on either side of the stage that helped fill in Roger’s vocals and allow him to hear himself above John’s thundering new bass rig. Suddenly, perhaps as Roger whirled the mike, the sidefills screamed for about five seconds, bringing me to my knees with pain. The accidental noise had taken me completely by surprise. My left ear had stopped functioning. After a few days it recovered some function, but, already damaged by Keith’s explosion on
the Smothers Brothers’ show
, it would never be the same.

In San Francisco for two days at Bill Graham’s Winterland, a venue I adored, Dr Wong sent me a supply of his tea freshly brewed. On both nights I was like a jumping bean. Towards the end of the show, with me endlessly jamming and inventing new riffs with seemingly limitless energy, leaping and smiling, Keith pleaded for me to stop. He was exhausted. Keith was playing with flashes of the old genius, but something was seriously wrong.

Babajan
, the 25-foot Skaggerak speedboat I’d used for
Quadrophenia
commuting, was now owned by Dad and still lived on a mooring opposite my house in Twickenham. The mooring was rented to me by Bill Sims, a man of the tides, patient and slow-moving. He owned licences to moorings all the way from Eel Pie Island down to Syon Reach, about three miles of river.

I asked Bill about a strange property I’d seen from my trips on the river. It looked as though it had been built in the Fifties, brick, with three double wooden doors opening to the river, obviously not in use.

‘It’s mine,’ he replied. ‘I built it on the site of the old family business, near the old Syon ferry crossing, and we had our racing boat company there once.’

‘What do you plan to do with it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What will happen to it?’

‘Nothing.’

He didn’t seem to want to be drawn out, but after a long pause he went on. ‘I built it as a place for me and my wife to live. We’ve got our little place and she loves it here, but I wanted more light. So I built the boathouse, planning to build the skiffs downstairs. We were supposed to live on the top floor. One of the best spots on the river.’

‘What happened?’

‘She didn’t wanna move.’

‘Ah.’

Every time I saw Bill I’d bring it up, pretending to clean my rubber boat while he pretended to be preparing lengths of rope and chain.

‘Bill,’ I’d say, offhand. ‘Do you think you’ll ever sell the boathouse?’

‘Nah.’

A while later I’d bring it up again.

‘Bill, how much do you reckon the boathouse is worth?’

‘Priceless, innit?’ He’d take off his working-man’s cap, crumple it, uncrumple it, put it back on his head, revolve it a few times. ‘Unobstructed view of the Old Deer Park, fabulous view of the river down to Syon Reach. You can see up river to Richmond Hill, the old lock. Lovely.’

‘Hmmm.’

Bill was skilfully whetting my appetite. I had no idea what I might do with such a building; I hadn’t even looked inside it. Nor had I any cash to spare: my own building project in Cleeve was sucking me dry.

One day I asked him to show me around. The lower floor had been designed with quite a low ceiling for the construction of rowing sculls. The upper floor had no staircase, so we climbed a ladder. There were a few rooms laid out in logical fashion for a large apartment, and a huge oversize terrace area overlooking the river. It was breathtaking. But it was a shell – walls and concrete floors – no windows, electricity or plumbing.

‘I’ll give you £40,000 for it,’ I said the next time we met.

‘Nah, don’t really wanna sell it.’

I increased my offer a number of times, but I never really expected Bill to sell it to me. Even so, he gave me permission to go and look inside any time I wanted, and told me where the access key was hidden. One week I went back to the building and stood outside. I took a coin bearing Meher Baba’s face and tossed it in the air, covering it as it landed.

‘Baba,’ I said aloud. ‘If you want this building for your work, I’ll try to buy it.’

I looked at the coin. It was heads. I tossed it again, and again. It was heads every time. The next morning I walked over the Eel Pie Island footbridge.

‘Bill,’ I said briskly, ‘I want to buy the boathouse. I’ll give you £75,000 for it. If you don’t accept it I’ll never mention it again.’

‘Yah,’ he said, in exactly the same flat tone he’d been saying ‘Nah’ up until then. ‘I’ll sell it for that.’

My idea was to convert the boathouse into the Meher Baba Oceanic Centre, which would combine meeting facilities and overnight lodging for Baba followers with film dubbing and editing facilities, a cinema and a recording studio. Meher Baba’s sister Mani was encouraging, but warned me that when Baba was finished with centres that opened in his name they crashed suddenly. Adi K. Irani, who had been Meher Baba’s secretary for many years, had a mischievous sense of humour, and seemed to have my measure. His catchphrase for me was apposite. ‘Peter Townshend,’ he would say whenever he saw me, arms outstretched. ‘Where are you, what are you, who are you?’

As my comic hero Spike Milligan said, the hard questions first.

We received many small items, signed books and photographs, all intended to decorate and enhance the Oceanic Centre when it opened. I was going to concentrate on films for the centre, because Meher Baba had said they would be the main source of spiritual inspiration in the future. I began sending out invitations – to Barney, Ronnie Lane and Aunt Trilby, to whom I owed so much.

Shortly after the Oceanic opening Ronnie decided he couldn’t work any longer with Rod Stewart in The Faces. He quit, immediately hit money troubles and came to ask me to produce an album for him. I suggested we do an album together, in parallel, with Glyn producing if he agreed. Glyn did agree, and Bill Curbishley put together a deal for us. The album wasn’t intended to touch on our mutual commitment to Meher Baba; we just wanted to go into the studio and see what happened.

I knew the music wouldn’t take long to record, and that I would enjoy it; Ronnie was my best friend at the time.

The whirlwind leg of the US tour kicked off in August 1976 in Maryland. I had fallen off the wagon during festivities in the opening week of Meher Baba Oceanic. By the time we played Miami I managed the show itself sober, but afterwards I knocked back a full beaker of Rémy Martin while chatting to journalist and drinking buddy Chris Charlesworth, who had come to congratulate me. I was in a philosophical mood. It was the first show we’d done for years that was badly undersold, and I told Chris we had played for the people who weren’t there.

Keith’s tempos were sliding, and some of his most ambitious drum fills were falling short, but he managed to play OK. It was a shock to discover that after the show he had collapsed at his hotel, and would be hospitalised for eight days. He returned, drinking a bottle of Rémy a day on top of his medication.

Anxious about Keith, who had been so good to me in my hour of need, I asked Meg Patterson if she could help him the way she had Eric, and deal with the effects of withdrawal. After the tour Meg introduced Keith to her husband George, whose notion of counselling was to bring the recovering addict’s attention to Jesus. Keith led George, a sincere, brilliant man in many ways, on a merry chase. He managed to convince George that he, Keith, was possessed by two demonic entities, Mr and Mrs Patel. I recognised the mischievous charade immediately: Keith grew up in Wembley, in a neighbourhood where almost every single Indian family was called Patel. George wasn’t gullible, but Keith ran rings around him.

Roger was demanding a bigger say in what he sang. His recent successful solo work had given him a new level of confidence and expressiveness as an artist, and although he wasn’t always co-writing with the songwriters on his solo albums he was always full of ideas, and they listened to him. He became far more discriminating and choosy about what he wanted to sing with The Who. There was no longer a Stamp or Lambert to cajole him and convince him to trust my process, which meant that where once I might have spent three months writing songs for a new album I now needed about a year, as I had with
Quadrophenia
.

During the September lull of our US tour, before the final leg in October, I commissioned the completion of
Ahmednagar Queen
, a partly built 47-foot motor boat from W. Bates & Son at Chertsey. It was wooden, low-profile, with a removable ‘flying bridge’ so it could go under low bridges all the way to the upper reaches of the Thames. I wanted it around my new house at Cleeve, as well as in Cornwall in the summer, and was hoping it would be ready in time for a Cornwall holiday with Karen and the family.

While I waited I bought a small sailing boat to learn in, and sailed it from Falmouth over the mouth of the River Fal to St Mawes in bad weather. A journey of about two miles, it felt to me at the time as if I had crossed the Atlantic. Mum and Dad joined us for a few days and I took Dad out sailing. He found it hard to move around the tiny boat as we tacked, and slipped a couple of times; for the first time I realised he was getting old. He was just sixty.

By contrast my father-in-law Ted Astley had done a bit of sailing in his time, so when we went out together we sailed out into the broadest part of the River Fal itself, and I was the uncomfortable passenger with Ted on the tiller. He was a determined ‘beater’, pinching into the wind whenever he could; a lot of my time in the boat with him I was wet and cold, but I learned to sail.

The
Who by Numbers
US tour had one final leg to complete. Joan Baez attended one show, and as a fan of hers from art college I wanted to know how she liked us. She had one comment: ‘It was very loud.’ I felt like telling her she sounded like a nun, but exercised better judgement. My buddy San Francisco photographer Jim Marshall told me that day that he was in love with her, and always had been. I could see how that could happen. When I first heard Joan Baez in 1962 it was alongside Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, before Dylan, and she held her own. She was a beautiful, tough, talented woman, with a message and a brain. And if she said so, then we were very loud.

Keith seemed fit again, and played brilliantly. The reviews were good, and the atmosphere was wonderful. Roger was looking Woodstockian, all fringe jacket and long hair. John was playing astoundingly well, coming up with a whole set of new finger tricks he’d obviously spent the summer practising. His usual minder Mick Bratby wasn’t with him on this trip, and there was a rumour that Mick had conducted a secret affair with John’s wife after spilling the beans about John’s own dalliances on the road.

The last show of the tour, in October at the Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, was a triumph: we were astounded at how we had bounced back. John and I agreed that we had rarely played better. At a party after the show provided by our road-crew, I danced with a stunning girl and took her back to my hotel. The sex was purely carnal: delightful and basic. I was growing into my skin. I was a hard man, a rocker, strutting the next day through the airport in high-heeled Frye boots that elevated me to six foot three; my puffy blue Maple Leaf Gardens ice-hockey jacket gave me the chest of a football player. I had never felt so omnipotent.

Yet I was dreading going home. I couldn’t face what I imagined would await me on my return – piles of charity requests, imploring letters from budding musicians, communications from Meher Baba followers, either complaining they hadn’t been treated right at Oceanic or hoping I would fund their various projects. There was huge pressure to do interviews, and if I did I was afraid that what I said could disturb The Who’s new equilibrium. And would Karen see the guilt in my eyes?

Of course I had set myself up for failure; I could never be the right kind of Meher Baba follower, not if I continued to work in rock. Yet rock was where I was meant to be: it was the place where I had to take on board whatever spiritual lesson it was I had been put on the planet to learn.

The recording of
Rough Mix
with Ronnie is now a blur, but I remember some special moments. I played live guitar with a large string orchestra for the first time, my father-in-law Ted Astley arranging and conducting on ‘Street in the City’. I was surprised at the respect given me by the orchestral musicians. Playing with Charlie Watts on ‘My Baby Gives It Away’ was also very cool, making me aware that his jazz-influenced style was essential to the Stones’ success, the hi-hat always trailing the beat a little to create that vital swing.