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uk First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Pete Townshend 2012 Permission to reproduce extracts from letters is gratefully acknowledged to Roger Daltrey, Bill Curbishley and Jackie Curbishley. Melody Maker extracts on pages 205 and 211 IPC Media/IPC+ Syndication While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book. Pete Townshend asserts the moral right to be identied as the author of this work A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library HB ISBN 978-0-00-746603-0 TPB ISBN 978-0-00-746604-7 EB ISBN 978-0-00-746687-0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

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16 A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE

In early 1973 I made several visits to Eric Claptons house, but nothing had changed. Lord Harlech, Alices father, joined me there one day. It was tense. While Alice was out of the room, Eric told Alices 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 rst to Ronnie Wood, who provided positive, generous energy. We invited Jim Capaldi, Trafcs 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 hadnt 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 Woods house, The Wick (a house I had always loved, and dreamt of owning). Stevie Winwood didnt appear. Speedy Aquaye, Georgie Fames 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

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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. Ronnies wife Krissy sat on a stool smiling like an angel, wearing a owery dress, her blonde hair framing her schoolgirl-pretty face, which belied both her stunning gure 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 Woods 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 rst marijuana in more than ve years. The concert, on 13 January 1973, passed awlessly, 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 wasnt 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. Id been part of the creation of a new band from the ground up. Id known precisely how to play my part as a solid rhythm

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guitarist, and my contribution had been valuable. I hadnt 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 ooding 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 ModRocker street battle on the seafront. Walking along the beach in the dark, under the pier, trying to stay out of the drizzling rain, wed 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 ooding back with the ooding 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 didnt go on another date with Liz, never again. The moment with her was frozen, exalted and would always be special.

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In the house at Cleeve, the river raging outside in the blackness as I looked back, I realised Id worked up or down to this moment of epiphany for quite a few months. I wasnt 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 nd redemption through the recounting of his pathetic life thus far by the four members of the band he felt had once reected 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 Carloss 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 terric quadrophonic mixing suite, but it couldnt 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 Id 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 Johns driver (a baptism by re), had progressed to

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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 wasnt conspiring with us in the business of getting arrested in the rst place. I explained to Wiggy that the studio at Cleeve would be ne for mixing, but that the recording room there was basically a tractor garage. He invited me to check out the road crews 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 dont 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 Wiggys 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 rst 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 Lanes mobile, and used that to record the basic tracks until the work and acoustics in our own control room were sorted out. For Quadrophenias album sleeve I felt we needed an approach that was photographic, truly authentic in detail. Glyn Johns, who had co-produced Whos Next, suggested his close friend Ethan Russell to shoot the sleeve photo for that

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album in 1971. Although I hadnt 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 Simons 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 Id never seen before. A ight case containing a full bar was always sitting by the piano booth. I drank Rmy Martin by the pint from an old-fashioned, heavy, dimpled mug, borrowed from the local pub. Keiths 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 lled with exotic instruments we rarely played: marimbas, glockenspiels, xylophones, vibraphones, gongs, drumkits and tympani. (Keith knocked them all over in the nale of the album.) There was also a Hammond organ, electric pianos, a beautiful Bsendorfer piano, guitars, ampliers and all kinds of strange things. Wiggy had purchased them from Mannys Music Store in New York City, and charged them to a touring account.

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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 oor 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 governmentimposed 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 albums producer for the rst 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 nd him.

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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 magnicent 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 tted 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 didnt need throwaway tracks for light relief, we didnt 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 its 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 oer me, suggests that he has nally 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.

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Studio recording was completed by 1 August. Mixing began at my studio in a barn two days later. I was excited by this move, and looked forward to creating the soundscapes I felt would transform the music wed just recorded into a stunning sonic journey. When nished it would provide us with a rockopera piece cohesive enough to replace even improve on Tommy as the backbone of our stage show. I spent part of the summer recording sound effects: rain, storms, thunder, trains, trafc and of course the sea. I also commissioned a radio announcer to cover the Mods and Rockers battles on the beaches, and recorded myself walking along a beach singing the rst few lines of Sea and Sand to use as a prelude. Taping birds taking off on the river was a major coup, and I had a lucky moment as I approached a gaggle of geese in my punt. This kind of sound design is almost as fullling to me as composing music. Mixing ran from 3 August to 12 September. There were a few short breaks for business, family (as it was the holiday season) and catching up on the quadrophonic technology I hoped would allow me to do a quad remix once wed completed the stereo. This was the most intensely creative and demanding studio work I had ever done. Thus far, by mid-September 1973, every part of my evolving plan for Quadrophenia had unfolded gloriously. Apart from Keiths occasional antics the band had supported me, given me creative space and done the most extraordinary work in the studio. All we needed was a month and we might have nished things properly. Instead, I was shocked to read in the press that the UK release date of the double album was less than a month away, on 13 October, with the rst tour date a little more than two weeks later. I still had to complete the quadrophonic mixes that I estimated would take about a month. And Id gured that the rest

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of the work we had to do mastering the stereo album in Los Angeles, mastering a quadrophonic version, preparing quadrophonic backing tapes for our stage rehearsals, rehearsing and getting the show on the road would take us through the winter. Id imagined we would probably tour the album in spring 1974, but the idiots at Track couldnt bear to miss the lucrative Christmas selling period, and forced the premature release date. I should say, in their defence, that the idiots at Track were as deeply in the red nancially as The Who by this time, so their decision was probably necessary to keep the company aoat. Building Ramport studio had cost 330,000 at the time of opening (nearly ten times that at todays standards). Roger was on edge. He had been harbouring grave doubts about our managers honesty.* The heavy spending of his fellow band members, and Wiggy for the new studio was driving Roger crazy. Tension was building for me, too. When I rushed from Cleeve to Shepperton with stage tapes that had taken fortyeight hours to prepare, having had no sleep at all, and Roger announced he had waited long enough and was about to go home, I ipped. It wasnt Rogers fault, but I lashed out at him, trying to give him the Abbie Hoffman treatment with the neck of the guitar, while a lm crew recorded for posterity every move we made. Roger responded by knocking me out. Some observers claim I arrived drunk. Yes, Bob and I had celebrated nishing the stage tapes with a brandy in my limo, but on this occasion it would have been mainly exhaustion and frustration, not booze, that was ailing me.

* * *

* I may have sacked Kit as a record producer but he was still The Whos manager and we were still on Track records, the label owned by Kit and Chris.

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Critical reaction to Quadrophenias October 1973 release was relatively muted compared with the raging success of Tommy, but over the years it has come to be seen as superior to Tommy both musically and conceptually, and as my redemption after the collapse of Lifehouse.* The album sleeve note ends this way:
So thats why Im here, the bleeding boat drifted off and Im stuck here in the pissing rain with my life ashing before me. Only it isnt ashing, its crawling. Slowly. Now its just the bare bones of what I am. A tough guy, a helpless dancer. A romantic: is it me for a moment? A bloody lunatic. Ill even carry your bags. A beggar, a hypocrite, love reign over me. Schizophrenic? Im Bleeding Quadrophenic.

Roger was the helpless dancer; John, the romantic; Keith, the bloody lunatic; and I, needless to say, was the beggar/hypocrite. But the four aspects of Jimmy the Mods multiple personality were, in a sense, all to be found in me, and I had always known it. I had spent money creating a quadrophonic PA system similar to that used at the time by Pink Floyd. Again Roger was concerned about the cost, being particularly attuned to the nancial chaos that surrounded us. We all had a longstanding gripe with Kit and Chris over the fact that seven years previously we had allowed our recording contract to be vested with
* Commercially it reached the highest position of any Who album in the States at No. 2 and in the long term has achieved the recognition I hoped for it. IGN, for instance, placed Quadrophenia at No. 1 in their list of the greatest classic rock albums of all time.

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Track (instead of directly with Polydor). We had thought that we would be partners or shareholders: this never happened. Jimi Hendrix was their biggest signing by far, but Id brought them two No. 1 artists in Arthur Brown and Thunderclap Newman, and had received no royalties. I was also covering some of Keiths day-to-day expenses by lending him money that I clawed back in band meetings with accountants that he rarely attended. Kit and Chris didnt try to hide their troubles, or their addictions at the time. They had hired two managerial second-in-commands in Peter Rudge (who went on to manage the Stones ofce in New York for a while) and Bill Curbishley, a childhood friend of Chriss. Keith himself had massive personal problems at this time. We all knew he was crazy about his wife Kim, so it was hard to work out what he was doing, bringing girls in and out of the studio, behaving as though we were on the road. Meanwhile my best friend Barney had taken to spending a lot of time at Tara House, ostensibly to hang out with Keith, but Barney had fallen in love with Kim. When Kim left the family home in October to le for divorce, Barney sought out my advice. He wanted my permission to pursue her he was terribly torn between loyalty to the band and his new passion for Kim. I pleaded with him not to be a party to the break-up, as it would mean my having to choose between him and Keith. Barney gave himself some time to consider my plea, and missed his moment. Kim went to stay with Ian McLagan (Mac) from The Faces. A week later Kim and Mac were an item. They ed somewhere together, leaving Keith to make death threats while Barney went back to Jan. Not for the rst time it occurred to me that I had to look no farther than life right around me to nd the makings of a rock opera at least of a rock soap opera. I listened to Keith on the nished Quadrophenia album. His playing was great, but I worried about him: he had lost his

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