Who I Am: A Memoir (45 page)

I also brought in the millennium by getting two dogs. Flash was a Border collie and Sally a cocker spaniel. It was a mistake to buy two pups at the same time, since this made them impossible to train. I soon found a good home for Sally and kept Flash. I still have him today.

All my older women friends insinuated that Rachel was a gold-digger. All Rachel’s older women friends suggested I was just after her body – otherwise, where was the ring? The truth was that I was deeply smitten with Rachel. The love between us was real, and deep. I gave her a ring and we pledged monogamy.

Rachel played me a couple of old demo tapes she’d made with her friend Mikey Cuthbert. They had been sixteen or seventeen, sharing a flat together and recording songs on a battered cassette Portastudio with only three working tracks. The songs were obviously the work of open, unencumbered musical minds and hearts. I encouraged her to work with Mikey again. He had a truly bluesy voice, and his own songs were eccentric. By contrast Rachel’s voice was pure in a way that reminded me of Joan Baez. I realised that if my remarks to Marvin Gaye were correct – that the voice comes from God – Rachel had a very pure spiritual system running behind that edgy, funny Southend exterior.

We started work in the studio built for me in my house by Darren Westbrook, an assistant engineer at Oceanic in its heyday. For some time I lost myself in working with Rachel, which helped me become familiar with the equipment, and reminded me of the good old days of working with Thunderclap Newman and The Small Faces in my home studio back in the late Sixties.

I began a new project called
The Boy Who Heard Music
, partly inspired by my childhood experiences, of course, but also a vehicle for yet another reappraisal of the issues raised in
Lifehouse
. Additionally, it was an attempt to create a setting for what I was now calling the Lifehouse Method – the automatic creation of tailor-made music for individuals over a web portal. I used the characters Leyla, Gabriel and Josh to draw together some of the elements of my original
Lifehouse
story,
Stella
(an unpublished play I’d written about Arthur Miller’s childhood) and
Psychoderelict
. The elements included a murder, a lunatic asylum ghost, dark sexual intrigue, jealousy, manipulation and skullduggery – and of course celebration. I wasn’t about to let the dark stuff get me discouraged.

By February 2000 www.eelpie.com, the e-commerce site, was up and running. Spike and Jon Astley remastered my first two
Scoop
albums, and we began selling stuff online. Despite my neoteric bent, my site wasn’t the first to allow downloading of free tracks. Several bands had realised the power of having their own websites, not only to sell directly to their fans but to harness fans as a phantom congregation and inform them of upcoming shows, new releases and gossip.

There was to be a concert of
Lifehouse Chronicles
at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 26 February. Rachel and Sara Lowenthal worked on their wonderful orchestral scores, and Dave Ruffy (once of The Ruts) added click-tracks (audible metronome beats) to my old
Lifehouse
demos so Jon Carin on keyboards could add drum loops. As with some of my recent solo shows of the year before, I didn’t want to use a conventional drummer.

We rehearsed in Ronnie Wood’s old snooker room in The Wick that once belonged to Sir John Mills. The atmosphere was (and still is) full of the benign ghosts of rock ’n’ roll, Pinewood and Hollywood. Keith Richards’s blood was on the ceiling, Bob Dylan had passed through, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had practically had sex on the baize. There were nine of us in the band, a mixing board, keyboard and guitar techs and two studio engineers. It was hot and cramped, but exhilarating; the house felt as empowered as it had when Woody and I had worked with Eric there back in 1973.

Our performance at Sadler’s Wells was every bit as satisfying. The sound there is perfect for acoustic music, and on some of my solo songs I felt almost as though I could have done without a microphone. The audience were quiet and respectful, something I hadn’t expected, and for which I was grateful.

Reviews of my recent efforts as solo performer, and as originator of
Lifehouse
for radio, were disappointing, but the work I’d done in 1999 had been incredibly fulfilling and nurturing for me as an artist. I felt I was creating musical installations, rather than merely conforming to the notion of what a classic rock band member should or should not do. This creative latitude was probably the reason why, when I returned to the old-style Who for what took up almost the rest of the year, I went on to do mostly good work.

More importantly, I found a way to enjoy what I was doing, and to revel in the fact that, just nine years after an accident that I thought would prevent me from playing guitar ever again, it was the electric guitar that I would rediscover as my true voice. Of course, not every fan or critic thought that was a good thing either.

So off we went – Roger, John and me – to New York for a press conference to announce that we were going to do some shows that year, and make a new record. No one among us said we were doing it for the money. None of us offered that I hadn’t really wanted to go deaf in order to save Roger and John from being forced to live in smaller houses. I tried not to even think about it.

My only hope of surviving the work ahead without drinking was to enjoy it. Roger shocked me by telling the assembled press that we planned an album for which we all would contribute songs; it would be more of a creative team effort than ever before, and that he had several songs in the pipeline, as did John. I had never successfully co-written a song in my life, at least not in a rehearsal room. There too I was going to have to make some inner changes just to get along.

With Rachel alongside me, keeping me in a good mood, The Who tour started in New York on 6 June with a charity bash at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for the Robin Hood Foundation. Gwyneth Paltrow sat on someone’s shoulders, rocking out. Rachel, not to be outdone, was wearing an absurdly expensive low-cut dress. Doug Morris was charmed enough to offer her a record contract a few days later, with the caveat that I should produce it.

The tour ran, with three good holiday breaks, until the end of November. It started in Chicago and ended at the Royal Albert Hall. All the way through I entertained myself by writing blogs on my new www.petetownshend.com website. Sometimes I put up short videos I had shot on stage, or in my dressing room. The learning curve wasn’t too steep with regard to editing, but bandwidth in hotels was still very slow, and a short video would often take all night to load. Sometimes they didn’t make it.

On 29 December, with Joseph on a sleepover, I wrote a diary entry last thing at night.

Jose and I are doing well. We went late to Kingston and bought a model car which he made for me without much fuss. It worked straight away. A paint-job today and we can race. With bigger wheels than him I believe I might win. I wonder if the small wheels are what was making his car overheat? Anyway, he is brilliant at this kind of thing.

I was happy. Things with Rachel were rich and real and nourishing for us both. My son was thriving. And we had a remote-controlled model-car race to green-flag.

Tom Critchley had moved his efforts from
Psychoderelict
to
Quadrophenia
, and managed to persuade Joe Penhall to work up a treatment for a stage version of the same. I continued producing new pieces of music for
Scoop 3
. I decided to move key staff from my house at The Wick to a new place off Richmond Green. I’d been using a small office there as my postal address and I took over the whole space. This meant I could convert the office back into a kitchen, and get myself a proper housekeeper.

My grandest plan was for what I called a Cyberorgan. I wanted a multi-keyboard console, with a full foot-pedal array and lots of pistons, switches and levers. I saw myself like Bach, driving a huge organ that could fill a cathedral with divine music. My dream was to start noodling, then push some buttons and take flight. I was hoping for more ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Eminence Front’ moments. Those Who songs, and many others, had started life with me sitting at a home organ intended for entirely different purposes. I hoped that some aspects of the Lifehouse Method might also find themselves incorporated: phrases and canons that looked after themselves, triggered by a single key or foot pedal to provide automatic background for extemporisation.

I continued to work on
The Boy Who Heard Music
. Some of the themes surfacing in the story were complicated by my desire to reflect – as in
Tommy
– on the shifting power balance for young people in the modern world, and the difficulties that might bring. I spent a good part of the year working to refine the story, improve the characters and give myself a really solid playscript to underpin a new rock opera.

The Who were a working band again. That meant that the only thing we really ever had to worry about in future was the inevitable good and bad nights that Roger would have, because the human voice isn’t something that can simply be restrung every night. Towards the end of the previous August Roger’s wife Heather was concerned that he was becoming anxious. Roger was especially fearful about cancer, the curse that had struck down his beloved sister (and my girlfriend from our teens) Carol while she was still so young: she had been just 32. His fear was later justified as he had problems with his throat during this period. Since finding this out he has been treated, his voice is now fine and he has worried a lot less.

Roger always found long tours tough. The Who at their best and worst were loud, hard-driving, played long sets, and the old hits had been written for the voice of younger men, boys in fact. He wouldn’t countenance lowering the key, so he was always battling, but that battle was part of what made his time on stage so riveting.

In the wake of 9/11 The Who performed at Madison Square Garden at the Concert for New York that Paul and Heather McCartney had conceived while grounded on their plane on the runway at Kennedy Airport, watching the distant smoke rising from the World Trade Center. As the lights went up I was stunned to see that most of the audience were in uniform; police, firefighters, paramedics, men and women, were tossing their hats in the air to ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Many of these very tough guys were weeping.

I watched Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sing an acoustic version of ‘Wild Horses’. If there was an afterlife, we had been here before. The highlight of the evening for me was James Taylor, always gentle, his approach calm and firm, his music entirely American but without any rabid patriotism. The event was full of defiance, but also sadness and camaraderie. New York would always be the most diverse, open, cosmopolitan city in the world, despite the best efforts of a handful of crazy zealots.

In the dressing room after our set Elton came in to congratulate us, and to urge me to make a new album as The Who. Our record chief Doug Morris was there, nodding. ‘You will never see anything like that ever again,’ Elton said to Doug.

George Harrison died on 1 December. It’s hard to explain how much this affected me, and everyone who knew him. He was a quiet, loving man, settled at last into a spiritual family life that all of us had wished for him. His
Traveling Wilburys
album had let each one of us – his fans – into his home via his recording studio in Friar Park out in Henley. I decided that one day I would do what George had done, and share with my fans the house and studio they had permitted me to enjoy privately thus far.

In February 2002 I resolved to exorcise whatever impotence and rage I was still feeling by rewriting
The Boy Who Heard Music
as a novella. I spent two weeks writing longhand with pen and paper. I loved doing it, and it did liberate me. Before I’d finished I heard that David Astor had died; we lost in him a great philanthropist, and I determined to try to fill some small part of the void left by his passing. The Queen Mother died around the same time, and in her case I decided it was time to forgive her for having my Packard hearse towed away when I was a teenager.

The Who now had another tour booked, and with yet another ‘best of’ album due for release,
Then and Now
, we went into Oceanic to rehearse and record at least two or three new songs to add some
now
to the
then
. My song was ‘Real Good Looking Boy’, a piano-based ballad borrowed from Elvis Presley’s hit ‘I Can’t Help (Falling in Love with You)’. Roger submitted ‘Certified Rose’, a C&W song I liked very much – it had the feeling of a Ronnie Lane song about it. John had a number of songs ready, but pretty much refused to share them. He told me privately that he couldn’t bear to have his work subjected to Roger’s critique.

The recording was rather strained. John was clearly not in good health: his hearing had gone completely, and he was wearing two powerful hearing aids even while performing. He was taking heart medication but still smoking, and drinking the occasional glass of Rémy in the middle of the day. Because he sometimes became very alert and animated, Roger and I worried he was probably using cocaine as well, but as always John played brilliantly, and wasn’t too loud. That wasn’t true of the drums, so I spent most of the rehearsal lodged in a small acoustic booth to protect my ears.

In June I was staying at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles, ready to fly to Vegas for The Who’s warm-up show at the Hard Rock. Our first big show was to be the Hollywood Bowl a few days later. Rachel and I had connected with friends Kathy Nelson and John Cusack, done some silly shopping, and were light-hearted and happy to be in California. Life was grand.

All that swiftly changed on 27 June 2002, as recorded in my diary.