More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Laurel and Hardy were the funniest people on the planet.
But when we played our first few shows in real Mod strongholds, like the Aquarium at Brighton, or The Scene Club, where pep pills and beautifully dressed young rent-boys were openly for sale, our Mod garb combined with that aggressive noise allied us to a very powerful new idea in pop culture: the elegant, disciplined, well-to-do, sharply dressed, dangerously androgynous yobbo.
There were few artists that all four of us respected and enjoyed, and the Everly Brothers were among them.
Mick is the only man I’ve ever seriously wanted to fuck.
But with Jimi there was something else: he married the blues with the transcendent joy of psychedelia.
Jimi Hendrix’s appearance in my world sharpened my musical need to establish some rightful territory. In some ways Jimi’s performances did borrow from mine – the feedback, the distortion, the guitar theatrics – but his artistic genius lay in how he created a sound all his own: Psychedelic Soul, or what I’ll call ‘Blues Impressionism’.
Wasn’t it enough that I had helped discover guitar feedback? I had certainly invented the power chord. With Ray Davies I had introduced the suspended chord into UK pop.
On this tour we listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and not much else. The shockwave it caused challenged all comers; no one believed The Beatles would ever top it, or would even bother to try. For me Sgt. Pepper and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds redefined music in the twentieth century: atmosphere, essence, shadow and romance were combined in ways that could be discovered again and again.
I loved smoking a little grass and listening to my two favourite albums, Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, and every time I listened I heard something new, but I wish I could say I heard something important.
In New York I hung out one night with my friend Danny Fields at his flat. I was deeply tired but couldn’t sleep, so Danny gave me a pill, probably a Mandrax, a sedative-hypnotic drug. I woke in the night, still in a trance, with Danny’s hands all over my body, but I didn’t fight him off. I enjoyed what he did, though I didn’t let him actually fuck
me.
I wanted to be someone who felt at ease with an unconventional sexual life, and I realised I was probably bisexual; there was nothing to be ashamed of in this – John Lennon had reputedly spoken to mutual friends of his own experiments – but I still felt uncomfortable and hypocritical: I wasn’t gay enough to feel at ease with my homoerotic feelings.
I had delved deeply into my personal history and produced a new kind of song that seemed like shallow pop on the surface, but below could be full of dark psychosis or ironic menace.
Live at Leeds had made us realise just how potent we were as live musicians and performers. The Who were a unit, a machine, a force of nature.
I couldn’t explain to anyone what I felt. I was still experiencing manic-depressive anxiety attacks, hearing voices and music, seeing visions. The only medication that helped was alcohol.
unbeknownst to me narcotics had breached The Who from top to bottom. Everyone in our management team was anaesthetised or high;
In July, at a happy party at Keith’s wonderfully eccentric house in Chertsey, we launched the new album. Lifehouse became the pathetically titled Who’s Next. The album cover was, in my opinion, a joke in bad taste. On the front we stood next to an obelisk against which we had been pissing. On the back we were all pissed in a dressing room after a show. The sleeve almost stank of urine. I was utterly confounded when so many fans and friends I respected loved the title and the sleeve design.
With Rod driving, I could also safely go out with friends and get drunk. I sat in the back like a twat, drinking cognac, dictating replies to fan mail and playing music loudly. Sometimes, to make it clear a yobbo rock star was in the car, not a financial potentate, dictator or pope, I lowered the window and stuck out my Doc Marten boot.
The Who were carriers for our fans. Live shows gave us a sense of being filled and refuelled; we carried that energy from our fans and used it to power our performance. Without live shows we lost our entire sense of function.
When you’re part of a gang you soon find the parts of you that don’t fit.
This is the first mention of what would become the working title for Quadrophenia (with the ‘z’ dropped). In this first sketch there is no elaboration of the setting that became so fundamental later on, but already I saw my new hero as a Mod. He goes through a series of temptations. He realises what the four facets of his character bring out in him. The good, the bad, the romantic and the insane come together.
Quadrophenia isn’t a straight narrative, but rather a kind of distorted dream-view.
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 Mod’s multiple personality were, in a sense, all to be found in me, and I had always known it.
As mythic, absurd and exaggerated as the film may have been in some ways, the denouement remained true to the album and centred on the spiritual benefits of growing up in troubled circumstances.
I found Ken Russell bombastic, energetic, funny, tireless and inspiring. He had an obsessive eye for detail and planning that I now realise every great film director needs, together with the ability to adapt to fluctuating circumstances.
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.
They threatened Keith, and he laughed at them, inviting them to come out and ride around in his car. I wasn’t so brave. I went with him one evening and met Billy Idol. I thought he was pretty scary, and he made me want to act tough myself.
We went to the Speakeasy that night where I met two of the Sex Pistols, and started to preach at them, raging about money. Until the very end, I thought Paul Cook, their drummer, was Johnny Rotten. I wasn’t even that drunk, just angry about our submission to Klein.
After the wonder of the demos, recording the Who Are You album was no fun.
The Quadrophenia movie was going into production: Johnny Rotten and I had met, got drunk, become friends and talked about him playing the lead, but we both agreed he shouldn’t try to play a tidy little Mod.
Chris Chappel, who worked for Bill Curbishley, escorted me to see U2, The Clash and Bruce Springsteen. Chris was a young, hip dude, a massive Clash fan, and his enthusiasm was infectious. I thought The Clash were spectacular. They were charming to me when we met, and Joe Strummer clearly had a heart of gold. His work for political causes, especially anti-racist ones, was inspiring.
Chris had just completed the first Pretenders album with Chrissie Hynde. Chrissie had an extraordinary and unusual voice with a huge dynamic range, and Chris worked with her intensely, doing quite a lot of ‘comping’ – recording a number of vocal tracks, and then choosing, isolating and combining the best parts.
How did the lines ‘It’s only teenage wasteland’ and ‘They’re all wasted’ at the end of ‘Baba O’Riley’ fit with the rows of bodies outside? Why couldn’t we have been trusted to know what had happened? The answer was obvious. And I’m sure that if I had been in Bill’s shoes I wouldn’t have told the band either.
I mishandled the press, trying to be ironic in an interview with Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone: I railed at the rock industry for being so stupid it couldn’t keep its audiences alive. We made another mistake when we decided to continue our tour. We should have stayed in Cincinnati for at least a few days to show our respect, which we genuinely felt, for those who had died and their families. Instead, we automatically followed the dictum that the show must go on, and flew to Buffalo to perform the very next day.
David Gilmour’s rendition of ‘Comfortably Numb’ will remain with me for my entire life. Roger Waters was spine-chilling, as usual, a towering and formidable presence.
From that moment on, Wiggy and I were drug-buddies. There is no tighter compact of friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.
Even so, at the end of the tour the petty cash drawn by Wiggy on my behalf for cocaine was $40,000.
The Who, whether it was as band, brand or gang, Roger was the unquestionable leader. I controlled a lot of what we did because I wrote most of the songs, and by doing so greatly influenced the direction of the band’s music, but Roger was the leader, and always had been.
I had decided to mix spoken word and free verse with the lyrics. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Stevie van Zandt called out the chords. There is nothing quite like playing guitar with Bruce Springsteen on ‘Born to Run’, a hymn to breaking free. My role was to enforce the guitar part with Little Stevie by my side, while Bruce made that special connection with his audience.
One night I performed with Taj Mahal, who name-checked me as an ally and supporter whenever I went to see him play. It was a joy.
invited Mum to come and stay in the cottage there. She had drinking problems of her own, and had isolated herself in the villa in Menorca I’d bought for her and Dad many years before. I
I went to the local bookshop in Wallingford and bought Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. I took long walks while Mum cooked food I couldn’t eat – usually strange Spanish fish dishes – and did endless crosswords in the puzzle magazine she bought in the village when I wasn’t reading.
The odour was nauseating.
As Christmas approached I began freebasing cocaine.
John has gone. I truly loved him so much. He was the best, oldest, most supportive friend I ever had. He is utterly irreplaceable. Could I have intervened and saved him? Pointless now to speculate. John was an alkie, an addict, and an obsessive compulsive – one more wonderful human being who has gone astray.
My plan was to run a story on my website illustrating that online banks, browser companies and big-time pornographers were all complicit in taking money for indecent imagery of children. I used my Barclaycard once on a site with a button that (rather ridiculously) said ‘Click here for child-porn.’ The charge was $7, which I immediately cancelled, not wanting even this small charge to benefit banks and credit-card companies that allowed the transaction in the first place. I also selected a site I was certain was a sting – in that way I wouldn’t be passing money to criminals – and kept a careful
...more
