Who I Am: A Memoir (5 page)

My college friends Nick Bartlett and Barney came to see The Detours for the first time at a gig on 29 March at a college in London. They seemed impressed. Barney had a steady girlfriend, Jan, who was very pretty, her dark hair cut in a mid-length bob, her eyes made even more dramatic with Egyptian-style kohl eyeliner. It was she who first mentioned the success of a band called The Rolling Stones. On behalf of The Detours, who were too busy to watch other bands, Barney and Jan began to investigate the music scene beyond our insular pub circuit.

There was a lot to explore, although it turned out that the Stones were at the top of the local heap. Ealing had been the birthplace of British R&B a year before. Alexis Korner, father of the genre, had begun a regular gig at the basement Ealing Club, with the legendary Cyril Davies on blues harmonica. Brian Jones sat in from time to time, playing slide guitar. Jack Bruce played upright bass, while Mick Jagger sang Chuck Berry songs. By autumn 1962 The Rolling Stones had evolved into the band we know today, and had taken over the weekly Ealing Club R&B date. Occasionally we local art students would catch sight of them wandering around before the gig. By 1963 rumours about the Stones had become legend; there was no doubt in our minds that – The Beatles aside – this was the band to watch.

In the spring of 1963 two photography students started putting 7-inch R&B singles onto the jukebox in Sid’s café opposite the college. One stood out: ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and the MGs. I must have played it fifty times, and I finally arranged a version for lead guitar rather than organ, which The Detours added to its repertoire. On 17 May 1963 the band played at the Carnival Ballroom at the Park Hotel in Hanwell, which was near Ealing, so all my college chums turned out. Some pretty girls from the fashion school stood at the front of the stage, pretending to scream at me like Beatles fans; they were teasing, but everyone was impressed, especially when we played the slightly funkier R&B tunes I’d managed to sneak into our otherwise catholic repertoire.

This was a formative moment for me. My friends from college could see the band I had been so reluctant to talk about; John, Roger and Doug could see my art-school friends, and how broad-based my fellowship was there. I was still uncomfortable that some of the songs we played were chart hits by The Beatles, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Johnny Kidd and Buddy Holly. But I also knew we played enough R&B material to attract interest from some of the more discerning college musos.

Sixty shows later, Commercial Entertainments booked us to play at St Mary’s Ballroom, Putney, several times. We supported Johnny Kidd and The Pirates once. They were a truly tight band, achieving a powerhouse sound with just lead and bass guitars and drums. We decided to go the same way, Roger allowing me to take over lead guitar so he could concentrate entirely on singing. He sold me his Epiphone solid-body guitar. Working from my Chet Atkins study pieces I began to master The Pirates’ rockabilly fingerpicking technique played by Mickey Green. I started playing a mix of rhythm and lead – what came to be called power chords – often with a jangling open string added to give the sound more colour.

We also met our future engineer and producer Glyn Johns. He sang with The Presidents, who were popular at the venue, and was very positive about our new stripped-down line-up. Roger met his first wife Jackie at that gig, and started seeing her regularly. I dated her shapely best friend for a while. When I first got my hands inside her blouse I thought I’d gone to heaven. One day we tried to have sex. She took me to her cousin’s house where her uncle had been doing some decorating. I was wearing my best Mod outfit, with a special new pair of suede desert boots. I lay on top of her as she fiddled with my trousers, but suddenly I felt my feet go cold – literally. I’d put both of my precious new boots into a bucket of wallpaper paste.

Jackie became pregnant in the winter, and Roger married her in March 1964, five months before their first son Simon was born. Nick was seeing Liz Reid, a pretty, blonde Scottish girl from fashion school. A few months before, he had gone out with a stunning Irish girl, also from fashion school. She had just ended a relationship so we went out as a foursome to eat Chinese food. On a tube train home that night she whispered in my ear that she wanted to sleep with me, and then, outside Ealing Common station, we smoked pot; for me it was the first time. I remember feeling I had discovered something quite important, but wasn’t precisely certain what it was.

At home in my bedroom, Nick and Liz lay together on my bed in the dark. I was on the floor with the Irish girl. This was my first genuine sexual encounter, so the rock ’n’ roll components of sex and drugs arrived simultaneously for me. My orgasm came in seconds. The next morning, in Sid’s café, I overheard the Irish girl a few tables away laughing good-naturedly about my sexual inexperience, but I didn’t care. Skill didn’t matter, there was plenty of time for that. I had arrived at last.

I wanted to be a sculptor, but Ealing Art College lost its diploma status for Fine Arts and Sculpture, and my parents were concerned I might emerge from college without any qualification. The band still felt like a side-project to me, so I considered moving to another college. I was particularly interested in kinetic sculpture: installations combining vibrant colour, lighting, TV screens and complex, coded music. All this, I imagined, would be interactive, brought to life by the computers that Roy Ascott talked about.
*
However, I knew I would miss my friends if I left Ealing, and so, with Barney, I decided to switch to Graphic Design.

Everything changed when I met Tom Wright, the stepson of an American Air Force officer stationed nearby. It turned out that he and his best friend Cam had been the ones responsible for adding R&B singles to the café jukebox. They were notorious for having introduced marijuana in their circle, and for their enormous record collection. One of their buddies had heard me playing blues guitar in the classroom one day and ran to bring Tom to hear me.

I had already bought a number of blues albums of my own – by Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. I had heard Chuck Berry, but only his pop-chart stuff. Tom and Cam had albums by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, Snooks Eaglin and other blues artists entirely new to me. As long as I’d play my guitar sometimes, they’d let me come back. Every album was a revelation, but the real richness of their collection was on its fringes: Mose Allison sat alongside Joan Baez; Ray Charles alongside Bo Diddley; Jimmy Smith alongside Julie London.

The mainstay of the collection was Jimmy Reed. They had every recording he’d ever made, and ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’, big R&B hits in the US in the late Fifties but unheard in the UK. Simple riffs supported basic lyrics provided by his wife. Steady low bass, chugging rhythms and shrill harmonica solos set the scene for Reed’s whining, wavering, old man’s voice. But there was something absolutely unforgettable about the music, especially when you listened to several albums in series, a little stoned.

I was also drawn to the jazzier side of R&B, especially at first. I had grown up with Ella, Frank, the Duke and the Count, so I liked Ray Charles, Jimmy Smith and Mose Allison. But I couldn’t play keyboards, had no access to one and was still a fairly rudimentary guitar player. But you didn’t have to be fast or clever to play R&B guitar blues. You had to be prepared to really listen, and ultimately really feel the music. This seemed less absurd for a young middle-class white boy in 1963 than it does today, so I proceeded without difficulty to learn to play the blues, especially rhythmic blues. I loved emulating Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker and Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, and I started to develop my own rhythmic style based on a fusion of theirs.

If I felt torn, I’m sure the other members of the band felt the same. They had regular jobs. Doug was a bricklayer and a father. Roger worked in a factory that cut tinplate for specialist equipment boxes and recording studio racks. John worked at the local tax office. I was an art student – and I was also becoming a recreational drug user, smoking several times a week. Lately Roger needed to bully me out of bed to get me to gigs. I was often very sarcastic about the music the band members wanted to play, and Doug had to come to my rescue a couple of times when Roger and I nearly came to blows over the musical direction of the group. I kept pushing because I felt that if we didn’t change we’d never appear cool to my art-school friends. On the other hand, the chart-type songs I was trying my hand at writing for us to perform were really quite corny.

We recorded my first song, ‘It Was You’, in late 1963 at the home studio of Barry Gray, who wrote music for children’s TV puppet series like
Thunderbirds
and
Fireball XL5
. Dick James, The Beatles’ co-publisher at the time, heard ‘It Was You’ and signed me to his company.

I was a guy who thought love would pass him by.

Then I met you and now I realise

It was you, who set my heart a-beating.

I never knew, love would come with our meeting.

The song was recorded by The Naturals, a Merseybeat-style band (actually from Essex), and a couple of other groups. It wasn’t a hit, but the fact that it was published at all gave me tremendous confidence. I felt I now had a right to speak up about the band’s musical direction, and even get bossy about it. Roger was definitely in charge, but there was a new tension between us. We were both really keen to make it and had our own ideas about how to do so. Still, we developed a grudging respect for one another that would last a lifetime.

On top of our daily work schedule we were doing gigs every couple of days, sometimes several in a row. Our audience was mainly Mods. A few venues, like the Notre Dame Church Hall in Soho and the Glenlyn Ballroom in Forest Hill, were true Mod strongholds where fashion leaders, called Faces, displayed new outfits and dances like fashion models. Roger and I were probably hipper to what was going on than most because his sister Gillian and her boyfriend were still so solidly in the Mod front line. There were some lovely Irish Mod girls who went to the Goldhawk, the historic music venue in Shepherd’s Bush. I managed, on occasion, to even keep my feet out of paste buckets.

Tom and Cam were caught dealing pot, and deported, leaving their entire record collection behind in our care. I finally moved into my own place with Barney as my roommate, where we set ourselves up as Tom and Cam’s heirs. For the first fortnight that we shared the flat Barney and I thought we were doing very well looking after ourselves, but it turned out later that the landlord had let Mum in every day to tidy up, vacuum, do the laundry and washing up. She still liked to have a protective, maternal role in my life in a way that, as a young, independent man who had flown the nest, I wasn’t willing to acknowledge. I may not have even wanted her to clean up after me, but of course ‘at least I’d get my washing done’.

Jimmy Reed played constantly, and some great girls began to show up. If Roger had had difficulty controlling me when I lived at home with my parents, he was in big trouble now. All I wanted to do was get stoned, listen to records, play my guitar and wait for the doorbell to ring. After a hard day at college I would often decide to forget the band altogether, and if Roger had been less forceful I would have stayed home in my cloud of pot smoke.

We were scheduled to support The Rolling Stones in Putney at the end of December 1963 and I was prepared to be cynical; without hearing them play, I’d decided their reputation must be based on their hairstyles. Instead I was blown away. Our producer, Glyn Johns, introduced me to Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, who were courteous and charming. From the side of the stage I watched them play and became an instant and lifelong fan. Mick was mysteriously attractive and sexually provocative, possibly the first such talisman since Elvis. As Keith Richards waited for the curtain to open he limbered up by swinging his arm like a windmill. A few weeks later we supported them again at Glenlyn Ballroom, and when I noticed that Keith didn’t use the windmill trick again I decided to adopt it.

A band called The Yardbirds, with Eric Clapton playing lead, was hot, and Roger had seen a rehearsal of a band called The Trident, whose guitar player he raved about – young Jeff Beck. In both cases we had real competition right in our back yard.

In February we supported The Kinks for the first time at the Goldhawk. They all had long hair, funny outfits, frock coats and frilly shirts, but the Mod girls screamed at them just the same. Their music was powerful, and Dave Davies’s guitar playing was special indeed. I tried some of my new feedback tricks that night and it turned out he was doing the same. Ray Davies was almost as appealing as Mick Jagger, and for the same reasons: he was delicate, slightly androgynous and very sexy. The Kinks were playing quite a few of the same R&B songs that we did, and they somehow managed to be poetic, wistful, witty, wry and furiously petulant all at once. Along with the Stones, I will always regard them as a primary influence.

That February, John Entwistle heard that another band was also called The Detours, so we came back to Sunnyside Road after a local show and brainstormed band names for hours. Barney suggested The Who; I suggested The Hair. For a while I hung on to my choice (could I have somehow had an intuition that the word ‘Hair’ was going to launch a million hippies a few years later?). Then, on Valentine’s Day 1964 we made our choice.

We became The Who.

6

THE WHO

In 1964 I began playing guitar the way I was always meant to play it. The sound I had favoured until then borrowed liberally from American prodigy Steve Cropper’s guitar solo on ‘Green Onions’ – a cold, deeply menacing, sexual riff. This, I suppose, is how I imagined myself at eighteen. Now, at the flick of a switch the central pickup, which I had set close enough to the strings to almost touch them on my modified Rickenbacker 345S guitar, cut in to boost the signal 100 per cent. The guitar, with a semi-acoustic body I had ‘tuned’ by damping the sound holes with newspaper, began to resonate.

By April I was so tired and distracted at school that the lecturer running the Graphic Design course at Ealing, a big-shot ad-man, asked about my health. In my second year of Graphic Design, my fourth year at college, I was, according to him, producing good work. I told him my work with the band was exhausting me.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, how much do you earn?’

When I told him around 30 quid a week, he was stunned. At nineteen I made more money than he did. He suggested I might be better off pursuing the band, which was the beginning of the end. After gigs I found it harder and harder to get up the next morning for class, and at some point before the summer break of 1964 I stopped going to college at all.

My musical self-certainty drove me blindly forward. I felt I was hauling a band behind me that was ill-suited to the ideas drummed into me at college, but it was a better vehicle than the conventional life of a graphic designer. I wasn’t trying to play beautiful music, I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single absolute of our frail existence – one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Crisis less than two years before had proved that.

On stage I stood on the tips of my toes, arms outstretched, swooping like a plane. As I raised the stuttering guitar above my head, I felt I was holding up the bloodied standard of endless centuries of mindless war. Explosions. Trenches. Bodies. The eerie screaming of the wind. I had made my choice, for now. It would be music.

The time had also come when we realised we had to work full-time as musicians or we would be unable to compete with the likes of the Stones, The Beatles and The Kinks. Moonlighting was no longer enough. It had become essential, too, that we get our sound right.

I sought the wisdom of Jim Marshall, who would become the inventor of the Marshall stack, the high-powered amplifier systems used by most heavy-rock guitarists since the mid-Sixties. Jim ran his music shop in West Ealing. John Entwistle, one of Marshall’s first customers, was very happy with his new cabinet of four 12-inch speakers intended for bass guitar. I was less thrilled. John, already very loud, was now too loud. I bought a speaker cabinet and powered it with a Fender Bassman head. John bought a second speaker cabinet to stay ahead of me. I quickly caught up with two Fender amplifiers, the Bassman and a Pro-Amp driving two Marshall four-by-twelve speaker cabinets. John and I were in a musical arms race.

I was the first electric guitar player on our circuit to use two amplifiers at the same time, and I only heard much later that my then hero Steve Cropper of Booker T and the MGs sometimes recorded with two amplifiers back to back. The distortion factors introduced by each amplifier became much more complex and rich when fed back reciprocally. I had also begun to pile one Marshall speaker on top of the other to emulate the conditions at the Oldfield Hotel hall where I had first put a speaker on a piano in very close proximity to where I stood playing the guitar, creating feedback. This configuration is what later became known as the Marshall stack. I remember Jim trying to talk me out of it at first, telling me they could topple over and kill someone. The first cabinets I had were clipped together with heavy luggage clips he provided. Over a period of months I persuaded Jim and his team to make his amplifier not just louder but also brighter sounding, and capable of more distortion when pressed hard.

In rock ’n’ roll the electric guitar was becoming the primary melodic instrument, performing the role of the saxophone in jazz and dance music, and the violin in Klezmer. I began using feedback more creatively; sometimes my guitar solo would simply be a long, grinding howl full of evolving harmonics and whistles. But in its enormity I discovered something euphoric, a sound full of movement and cascading melody. This is something that later exponents of electric guitar feedback explored far better, especially Jimi Hendrix.

Oddly, I felt some shame too during these droning moments, but not for any self-indulgent act of musical desecration. In truth I had no idea what the origin could be of all the contradictory emotions I felt when creating these warlike sounds. Something was bubbling up from my subconscious mind.

Jim Marshall had struggled to impress his father, a boxer, and failed. By one of those strange quirks of fate, on the occasion of Jim’s last performance as a drummer my dad was playing with him in a small orchestra Jim had put together. Jim’s father arrived drunk, and began to taunt his son from the floor. Suddenly Jim lost his temper, flew at his father and beat him badly, even though the older man was much more powerful. Jim never played the drums professionally again.

I was experimenting all the time, trying to find new ways to play my guitar on stage, inspired directly by Malcolm Cecil. He had demonstrated unusual ways of playing his double bass, in one case breaking a string, then being challenged by being given a woodsaw which he bravely used to cut through the rest of the strings, damaging the surface of his instrument. I fell upon my Rickenbacker with all manner of scraping, banging, bending and wrenching, which resulted in howling acoustic feedback. Encouraged too by the work of Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of auto-destructive art, I secretly planned to completely destroy my guitar if the moment seemed right.

The Who still seemed like a temporary, disposable part of my private plan. We would chop away at our own legs. Certainly, R&B on its own didn’t seem to me enough of a new idea; it was just the emerging bandwagon predicted by the music papers. On stage I was becoming increasingly anarchic and narcissistic; film of the period shows me spending more time moving my hips than fingering notes. But I also copied neat solos by Kenny Burrell, the jazz guitarist. Had I studied properly and practised more conventionally in these years, I would have become a more proficient guitar player and less of a showman.

During this period I often looked effeminate. Since I’d never really had a steady girlfriend, rumours went round that I might be gay. In some ways I felt happy with this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive and courageous; in any case one’s sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood. I myself had no interest in appearing attractive, much less sexual, on stage; in the end all the disturbing experiences of my childhood went into my composing.

One day a girl came to claim all the albums that belonged to Cam, bringing a letter from him confirming that this was his wish. It affected our collection badly. A little later we received instructions from Tom to package his albums and send them to him in Ibiza. These back-to-back losses were difficult to deal with. Suffering from music withdrawal, I began to collect albums myself, replacing all I could find, but many were rare. Barney and I discovered Bob Dylan, and listened intently to his first two albums. There was something extraordinary there, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

Barney and I had been living in total squalor, and then we lost the lease to the flat altogether. Mum, always alert to a way to fix things for other people, discovered that the tenant in the apartment immediately above the Townshend homestead at Woodgrange Avenue was leaving. She secured the lease and Barney and I moved in. It was a splendid, rambling place. The rent was £8 a week, and we had five wonderful rooms, a bathroom and kitchen. I began drawing elaborate, ambitious plans to develop the place into art rooms, a recording studio and recreation rooms. But it was hard snapping out of our squalid living habits. We didn’t purchase a single item of furniture and slept on single mattresses on the floor. We discovered an extremely heavy material in sheet-board form that we intended to use to soundproof one of the rooms and we filled one entire room with it, but never even started any of our schemes.

We continued to get stoned and listen to records in bed, allowing the detritus of our existence to pile up until we could persuade someone else to tidy up for us. Newspapers, food cans, cigarette butts and dirty coffee cups littered the room we slept in and used to entertain visitors. When hungry I simply went downstairs and took food from my parents’ cupboards. People came and went – art-school mates, girls we knew, and occasionally a compliant waif-fan from a show. I was still quite shy, and although no girl complained when we did have sex, I never really felt on a par with the other guys in the band who seemed such old hands.

I developed quite an unpleasant streak at this time (I have this on good authority from my friends). I became increasingly critical and cynical, and in arguments often twisted the facts to fit my brief. I adored Barney, but he too was growing cynical. Perhaps we were smoking too much grass. I remember the apartment we shared shrouded in a grey pall. The stuff we were buying was certainly getting stronger.

Doug Sandom’s sister-in-law Rose found us a benefactor in Helmut Gorden, a single man who wanted some excitement in his life. He became our manager, bought us a van and introduced us to some major agents who booked us shows here and there. Otherwise we continued to play the local pub circuit in our immediate neighbourhood. Unknown to us, Commercial Entertainments, who had promoted most of these local shows, had decided to put The Who under contract, but my parents had refused to sign anything on my behalf.

Helmut Gorden managed to get us an audition with Fontana Records, not knowing that Jack Baverstock, chief of the company at the time, was one of Mum’s closest friends. She put in a word for us. Fontana’s A&R man, Chris Parmienter, heard us play in a rehearsal room and liked us, but he felt our new drummer, Doug Sandom, was too old.

Seeing our chance at a record deal fading, I cold-bloodedly announced to the band that I felt sure Doug would want to stand down. Doug was deeply hurt by this, especially because, unknown to me, he had defended me against my being thrown out of the band a few months earlier when another auditioning agent said I was gangly, noisy and ugly. Doug did stand down, with some dignity, so we got our break. It is one of the actions of my career I most regret. Doug had always been a friend and mentor to me, not to mention he was the first person to get me really drunk.

We tried a few new drummers, including Mitch Mitchell, who went on to play with Jimi Hendrix. But Keith Moon appeared one day at one of our regular dates at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, and as soon as he began to play we knew we’d found the missing link. He told us his favourite drummer was Buddy Rich, but he also liked British bandleader Eric Delaney, who used twin bass drums. He failed to mention until much later that he was an obsessive fan of Californian surf music, but the band he was playing with was called The Beachcombers, so we should have guessed.

Keith had been taking lessons from Carlo Little, the drummer with Screaming Lord Sutch, who was a performer from the previous wave of novelty bands on the small gig circuit. An eccentric player, Keith seemed to be showing off all the time, pointing his sticks up in the air and leaning over the drums, face thrust forward as if to be nearer the front of the stage. But he was loud and strong. Slowly, too, we realised that his fluid style hid a real talent for listening and following, not just laying down a beat.

Roger tried to befriend Keith, but Keith kept his distance. He also seemed to see Roger’s success in pulling girls at our gigs as a challenge. They sometimes chased the same girls in those early days, and it was never clear to me who was winning. I wasn’t sure how Keith felt about me in the first few months he was in the band, nor whether he’d support my arty manifesto; time would tell. Keith’s main pal in the band became John. They were hysterically funny together, and shared an apartment for a while. Roger and I got the impression they did almost everything together, including having sex with girls. It must have been mayhem.

Despite the pain I had caused by my disloyalty to Doug, it became clear that with Keith Moon in the band and a new record deal we had a real chance at a career in music. I had already written a couple of decent songs, and was using an old tape recorder to write new ones in the style of Bob Dylan. Through a friend of Helmut Gorden we met Peter Meaden, a publicist who seemed to know all the teenybopper magazine editors. Peter was much impressed by the antics of Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who had a tough henchman who acted as his protector and sometimes enforcer. So Meaden found one of his own in a chap we came to know as Phil the Greek, who was sharply dressed and good-looking, with a vicious streak. He and I became quite good friends.

What Peter Meaden did do for us was to enact a thesis Barney and I had already gleaned at art school: every new product, including every new band, needed an image if it was to succeed. That is, we needed an identifiable style: outfit, haircut, and if possible a new way of making music. Barney, his girlfriend Jan and I talked late into the night about how to capitalise on this extraordinary time; we were smart, and we had a band that might make good if we got things right. Barney and Jan seemed almost as excited as I was about the prospect of The Who breaking big.

Peter Meaden also emphasised the importance of the Mod movement for us. That was the style and image he wanted us to embrace. Meaden was one of the authors and architects of the new vocabulary used by Mods, and I was eager to learn the lingo – beyond the little I’d learned when I was dating Carol Daltrey. Musically I felt I was already on course. Barney and Jan had both constantly urged me to develop my sound and guitar solos, and to utilise all the wildest, most pretentious ideas from our old Ealing art-school lectures.