Who I Am: A Memoir (41 page)

I wouldn’t return to
Psychoderelict
, as I had started to call it, for about a year (when my Atlantic delivery date required me to cough up). Roger visited me and made one final attempt to persuade me to go back to The Who. In an early version of
Psychoderelict
the reptilian washed-up rock star Gabriel is visited by his good old buddy Ray High, whom Gabriel has left behind, and I couldn’t help feeling Roger was playing Ray High to my Gabriel. He wanted to know what my plans were for The Who in 1992, and whether I wanted to play in Australia and Japan.

I was in a financially pragmatic mood, which made Roger sad. My point was that my two solo deals were excellent, hugely lucrative, and were not performance-based – they were guarantees – and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice and blow them out the way I had the Warner Brothers deal. What Roger then offered was, on any new record deal, to let me recoup some of what I lost when I forced him to end the Warners contract in 1983. He said that he and John were prepared – if I did a new Who contract with them – to recompense me some of the one-million-dollar loss I’d suffered at that time. He was very sweet to me, and his passion for The Who was as evident as always.

That evening, as we lay in bed, Karen asked what Roger had wanted. She’d said nothing all day. I was concerned that she would be afraid I would go back on tour.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He was very kind, but I can’t help him, not now.’

‘It isn’t Roger I’m worried about,’ she replied.

In La Jolla, working on the
Tommy
musical in June 1992, I was still having manic-depressive episodes, and any time alone in my hotel room saw me climbing the walls. These had crept up on me since my son’s birth, perhaps a backswing of that terrible pendulum that had been stopped, poised, for a while for the first year of his life. I was occasionally experimenting with very small amounts of alcohol, but I believe the problem was my pain medication, which I had begun to turn to for emotional relief after the physical pain from my wrist was long gone.

So it was no surprise for me to wake up to find a diabolical gremlin literally shaking my bed. As I bounced up and down, I shouted, ‘Just fuck off, will you’, and rolled over to go back to sleep. But I could hear the chandelier tinkling, and when I sat up I realised the room was swaying. I went to the window and saw the building across the street shaking the way a large animal might dry itself upon emerging from a river crossing.

It was an earthquake.

I quickly pulled on some clothes and walked down the fourteen flights of stairs to the lobby, which was full of shocked people wandering aimlessly. It was very spooky. We were far away from the epicentre, but the hotel – built on rollers to survive extreme quakes – was still lurching back and forth, and continued to do so for much longer than I imagined the architect had intended.

Later, when I drove to the theatre, there were cracks in the road, and constant aftershocks made everything feel apocalyptic.

Back in London I was still keen to complete the work I’d started with Ted Hughes. I had contacted the Youth Coordinator at the Young Vic Theatre about the possibility of doing a version of
Iron Man
as part of their children’s programme there. They were very interested, so I started editing and pulling together all the songs as they related to my original dramatic scenario. It became clear very quickly, having done the work with Des on the ‘book’ for
Tommy
, how far I’d managed to get and what would and wouldn’t work on stage. It was also glaringly obvious that I needed a narrator. I was very keen to set Ted’s prose to music, and every line fell easily into my musical experimentations.

I was also engaged in a songwriting/recording project with my two brothers, Paul and Simon. They were both very talented, but had struggled. We decided to do a kind of
Rough Mix
together. It was an inspired idea: our voices blended together very well when we sang backing vocals, and we each had a different style of songwriting. We hoped to write together if possible, or at least collaborate in some way. I paid both my brothers an advance; I’m not sure either of them felt my heart was completely in the project, but I loved working with them, partly because I loved them so much.

In May I returned to
Psychoderelict
with a vengeance. I was now working with a much tighter story, with more humour and irony. I’d combined the two leading male characters (Ray and Gabriel), and lightened the mood of the piece. I’d introduced a specific reference to
Lifehouse
, calling it ‘Gridlife’, which felt a little contrived at first but allowed me to dip back into the reservoir of ideas and music experiments I’d accumulated.

As usual I was juggling projects, but this time it involved the development of three dramatico-musical works:
Psychoderelict
,
The Iron Man
and the La Jolla
Tommy
. I heard from Des in October 1992 that we had secured the St James Theatre on Broadway for
Tommy
. This was momentous news. He was working on
Much Ado about Nothing
at La Jolla, and I was back recording in London. When I got the schedule for the transfer of
Tommy
to Broadway, I was amazed to see that not only were we to start auditions and casting in early November 1992, but after opening in April 1993 we’d be moving quickly, two months later, to put together another company for a national tour.

I had known Liz Geier, a friend of Barney’s, since 1979. She was very tall, with a deep voice, strident personality and wonderfully dry sense of humour. There was no romance between us; I simply couldn’t get past her scepticism of me.

‘Now and Then’, on the
Psychoderelict
album, was about our first meeting and was inspired by our unhappy friendship. I’m not even sure she had ever been a true fan of mine, but something had clicked when we first met, and neither of us had been able to let go. For her, I was hard to forget because I was famous. For me, Liz was just hard to forget, especially for a man who spent a lot of time on his own in a studio feeling lonely. Suddenly, here was a real love song at last, one of the few I’d ever written, and it was about a frustrated affair.

I was eager to give Liz a copy of the song. She was working at Cafe 44, a few blocks down from the Royalton where I was staying in New York. When I’d consumed my sixth Coca-Cola I asked if she had any of that ‘alcohol-free beer’ we have in Britain. She said she did, and gave me a Rolling Rock.

It took just a few seconds for me to realise there was alcohol in my glass. I hadn’t taken a drink in public for eleven years, since October 1981.

‘This isn’t alcohol-free beer, is it?’ I held the bottle up to the light.

‘It may as well be,’ she said, laughing.

I didn’t drink any more.

An hour later I was on my knees in my hotel room praying. My prayer was not, however, for help with this accident, or to keep me away from another drink; it was to thank God for showing me what I needed to feel complete, for giving me back the only sociability medicine that had ever worked for me.

I was literally weeping with happiness. Cafe 44, Rolling Rock and Liz Geier, it seemed a match made in heaven.

25

RELAPSE

I didn’t start drinking again immediately. Indeed, I didn’t drink again for several weeks, but I knew pretty well what had happened. In the eleven years I’d stayed dry I’d read a lot of research about the way alcohol works in the brain of those who were addicted to its effects. The theory was that the 10 per cent of the population predisposed to alcohol addiction produced disproportionate amounts of endogenous neurotransmitters when they drank. I hadn’t drunk enough Rolling Rock to make myself even slightly drunk, but I’d imbibed enough for my body to flood my brain with endorphins. Maybe I wouldn’t have slipped at all had I not been tiptoeing around Liz Geier, pretending that one day she and I might suddenly work out. So no surprise here: my problem was not only that I was an addict, but also a fantasist.

The disciple who had brought me closest to Meher Baba, Delia DeLeon, died on 21 January 1993. Her funeral five days later was not at all a sad affair; it was a celebration of what Mani Irani, Meher Baba’s sister, called Delia’s ‘freedom’. Delia had always behaved as though
Tommy
was something she had played a part in bringing to fruition, and in a sense she was right. Meher Baba would always be a presiding presence over my work on
Tommy
, in whatever form.

After the wake Barney and I went to my studio barge and started to sharpen the script of
Psychoderelict
. Barney was a perfect collaborator on this project, able to keep the story light and funny, but also attest to the parts of it that were authentic and real. The
Lifehouse
strand started to feel as if it really fitted, and I added a few of the outtakes from my 1971 electronic demos. The songs Bill had found so unsatisfactory the previous year suddenly seemed to come alive when set within the body of the story, just as I’d hoped they would.

Ruth Streeting, my fictional journalist who conspires with Ray’s manager to get the ageing rock star back on the boards, does so by abusing Ray, not praising him. She knows how best to trigger him. Ray has been lost in the comforting glow of the few fawning fans who still write to him. Streeting gets him out into the world by setting him up with a seductive young fan who sends him a salacious photo at the moment he finally, after years of frustration, seems to be cracking his ‘Gridlife’ project.

This was a transparent dig at my own lingering obsession with
Lifehouse
, as well as my tendency to romantic fantasy. Barney had felt no obligation to dissuade me from parodying myself, and other old rockers, in this way. And Ray was a mix of two kinds of rock star; one part of the creative concoction – the nostalgic old trouper yearning for the good old days – was most emphatically not me.

I delivered the album to Atlantic on 27 February. Bearing in mind how unhappy Doug Morris had been with
Iron Man
I was delighted when he told me he thought
Psychoderelict
could be the biggest album of my solo career. The play-with-music form was new to him, but with
Tommy
in the neighbourhood, and rumours already afoot that the Broadway show would do well, Doug was ready to embrace
Psychoderelict
. We started putting artwork together for a sleeve, and arranged a photoshoot.

I flew in and out of New York so often that spring that my assistant Nicola finally just stayed behind to be there each time I returned. My work was very exhilarating. I could walk to Broadway if I wanted to take in the bright lights.
Tommy
had a neon sign in the big square at that time. But I was increasingly aware that my marriage to Karen contained a large element of fantasy, which meant that it could come crashing down on me at any time.

In what proved to be a serendipitous event, I missed my plane back to London and decided to stay in New York overnight. At a party thrown by Tommy Hilfiger, a blonde girl walked over to our table and sat next to me. ‘I’ve come to kiss you,’ she said.

After the party Barney suggested we go to a bar called Lucky Strike in the Village. The girl who had kissed me was with her boyfriend, a social worker teaching children with mental disabilities, a good-looking man with long dark hair. While he and I talked in the taxi downtown, his girlfriend who had wanted to kiss me (it had been a bet, she said later) looked out of the window.

Her name was Lisa Marsh, and she was a journalist working for a fashion magazine. She and her boyfriend Michael had been seeing each other for a while. I couldn’t help myself.

‘You are incredible,’ I said.

‘I am?’ It’s what incredible women always said. They rarely said,
That old line will get you nowhere …

‘Your nose is perfect. It has a bump.’

‘I do have a bumpy nose.’ She touched a flattened spot below the bridge.

‘It’s your best feature.’

‘You like my bumpy nose?’ She laughed. ‘That’s good.’

Before the evening was over, chatting back and forth, she told me she wanted to write a book. I told her I was a publisher, and we exchanged phone numbers.

Emma flew in to New York with her friend Rose on Sunday, 18 April, to hang out and see previews of the
Tommy
show. They met me in the lobby of the hotel, where I sat talking to Lisa, having given her some books. I especially wanted her to read
The Blindfold
by Siri Hustvedt. Later Emma told me that what made her suspect I had intentions towards Lisa was that I was giving her books.

Karen came to New York for the opening night of
Tommy
, sat next to me during the show, and shuddered when she heard ‘I Believe My Own Eyes’, the new song I had contributed about the breakdown of Tommy’s parents’ marriage. Afterwards, at the party, Karen was looking around anxiously. I was still just playing out a loose fantasy, but I had underestimated Karen’s intuition. She sensed something was going on.

That night we received early editions of the reviews, starting with Frank Rich, the ‘butcher of Broadway’. His review was good. Very good. Rich wrote:

‘Hope I die before I get old,’ sang the Who in ‘My Generation,’ its early hit single. A quarter-century or so later, Mr. Townshend hasn’t got old so much as grown up, into a deeper view of humanity unthinkable in the late 1960s. Far from being another of Broadway’s excursions into nostalgia,
Tommy
is the first musical in years to feel completely alive in its own moment. No wonder that for two hours it makes the world seem young.

The mood of the party quickly ratcheted up, and we were all rocking until nearly dawn. Karen left to catch an early flight home in time for Minta’s 22nd birthday, while I remained in New York to enjoy the reviews and the sight of tickets flying out of the box office. I flew back home two days later.

In the first week of May I worked with David Thacker, Artistic Director of the Young Vic, on
Iron Man
. We were working through Ted’s original text, placing my songs where they made most sense. I began to feel the play might really work. Then I was back in New York to work with George Martin and his son Giles to record the cast album of
Tommy
at the Hit Factory. Lisa came to visit at my invitation, making a face when I leaned down to embrace her after I’d smoked a cigarette. We hadn’t even kissed.

Karen knew I had started drinking again, and, in Cornwall for my 48th birthday, was trying to let me know she didn’t mind too much. She’d arranged oysters and champagne for my birthday, and for a while it seemed like she and I might be OK.

What was different about this new drinking was that I could only drink a very small amount before I felt very drunk. My tolerance, once quite beyond belief, was now very low. Before the light faded I took the dogs for a walk in the woods. At the top of the hill, when my mobile phone found a signal, I called Lisa.

She told me she planned to travel to France in August, that I had a sexy voice, that I was crazy, that I was funny, that she liked me better without a beard, that she liked talking to me, that I was stimulating. Her voice on the phone was almost better than her bumpy nose. She didn’t mention her boyfriend.

My wedding anniversary was the day after my birthday. Karen and I had been married for twenty-five years. I felt like a shit for thinking about Lisa that day, but I reminded myself that while Karen and I had endured some awful stand-offs, coldness and compromise, we had also been happy sometimes. We had had two amazing daughters together, and now a son, who was three and a half years old. Every second I’d spent with him had been a happy one. The problem was that I wasn’t rebuilding intimacy with Karen.

We talked about Joseph’s education, and Karen was keen on the posher schools in Salisbury and Wells, which might require us to move. I was willing to investigate schools and look at property, but Joseph seemed very happy in Cornwall with friends his own age, and the state schools in the area were way above the national average. We considered keeping our house in Twickenham but living permanently in Cornwall. Sailing, and boating in general, lifted my spirits, restoring me like nothing else. I loved the wide beaches, the coastal paths and the secret woodlands, but most of all Cornwall for me was about the sea.

Karen couldn’t attend the Tony Awards ceremony because Joseph’s nanny was ill. At a previous Oscars ceremony I had sat with an empty chair beside me, so this time I told Karen I wouldn’t go to the Tonys alone. There is no question that I set this up; had Karen been by my side in New York for the Tony Awards I might not have gone through with my pursuit of Lisa.

I called Lisa and asked her if her boyfriend would mind if she was my date for the ceremony. He was aware I was on a romantic mission, but he agreed. On the day of the ceremony we met at the Royalton, and I gave Lisa a small diamond brooch in the shape of a star. She persuaded me to wear leather trousers, something I’d never done in my entire life.

On the evening of the ceremony I sat in the Royalton restaurant with Des McAnuff and his wife Susie, and had a glass of wine. We were nervous. Des had been nominated for Best Director of a Musical, the two of us had been nominated for Best Book, and I was nominated for Best Score, but we had stiff competition:
Kiss of the Spider Woman
was highly regarded by ticket buyers and critics. The time came to leave for the awards ceremony, but Lisa hadn’t arrived. Then she suddenly appeared at the door of the restaurant, her hair in ringlets; she was wearing a silk trouser suit and took my breath away.

Des won Best Director; I shared the best score award with Kander and Ebb, not a bad business.
Tommy
went on to have a very impressive showing that night, as choreographer Wayne Cilento won Best Choreography, Chris Parry took Best Lighting Design and John Armone was awarded Best Scenic Design. Back at the Royalton, Lisa’s boyfriend Michael took me aside; he said I could give Lisa things he never could, and that he was backing off. The reality of what I’d set in motion hit me. Up until now I’d been flirting, but it seemed things were about to get more serious.

When the time came for the guests to leave, I imagined Lisa would stay with me, but instead she took Michael home, since he had got very drunk. If he was drowning his sorrows, he was not alone. I experienced that old familiar wound of being abandoned, and had an anxiety attack that saw me pacing the pavement outside the hotel. I was practically howling.

After commissioning Nicola to start looking for a New York apartment for me, I flew on the Atlantic corporate jet with Jann Wenner and Ahmet Ertegun to Cleveland for the groundbreaking ceremony of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The architect I.M. Pei would hold the shovel. In addition to the $500,000 donated by The Who in 1989 I had given a substantially larger personal donation.

Chuck Berry and I sparred to make the wittiest speech. When I tried to introduce myself to I.M. Pei, and get a pat on the head for having contributed so much money, he ordered me to get out of his way. Suddenly I was desperate for a drink, but none could be found.

Pychoderelict
was released a week later. I proposed a stage play with songs based on the album, and invited Barney to co-direct with Wayne Cilento, the choreographer on
Tommy
. They were already working with the lighting director Wendell Harrington, who had done the back-projections for
Tommy
, which was good news. For my show we were going to rely entirely on the back projections, using a nine-projector system controlled by computer.

Band rehearsals began at Bray studios in the UK on 26 June. Because there were no plans to do any shows in London, I decided to do an acoustic workshop of
Psychoderelict
for the press and media at the Mayfair Theatre on 3 July. I was up half the night adapting and rehearsing the songs, not all of which translated well for acoustic guitar. The three actors from the recording – Jan Ravens as the journalist Ruth Streeting, Lionel Haft as the manager and John Labanowski as Ray High – read their parts from the script and afterwards I took questions. It almost worked.

The tour kicked off on 6 July with technical rehearsals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The band was just about my perfect pick. I had two first-rate guitar players in Andy Fairweather Low and Phil Palmer, Pino Palladino on bass, Simon Phillips on drums, Rabbit on keyboards, Peter Hope-Evans on harmonica and playing court jester, and Billy Nicholls and Katie Kisoon provided backing vocals. I sang, played acoustic guitar sometimes, and despite my damaged hand, which was still healing, played some edgy Fender Telecaster solos.

The music sounded amazing. It was never too loud, I could always hear my voice and I enjoyed performing. I had decided on a ‘tripartite’ show, with some songs selected from The Who and my solo catalogues, then
Psychoderelict
, then a closing rock thrash. I had never done a two-hour show in which I not only played guitar but sang every song, but as long as I didn’t drink I would be OK.