While ‘I’m a Boy’ was being prepared for release as the band’s new single, Karen and I took a holiday to Caesarea in Israel. Her miniskirts were a novelty that attracted a lot of interest, especially from the Arabs, several of whom I had to literally fight off. On one occasion I turned to help from Jewish passersby, dressed in Western clothing, who interceded before chiding me: ‘What is a young Jewish boy doing allowing such an attractive girl to dress so provocatively?’
When I got home I began to ask people what was going on in Israel. One of my legal advisors, who was interested in international affairs, described the growing tension between Israel and Egypt, as well as the emergent communist threat from China, a country with a population growing so fast, he said, that it would soon dominate the entire planet. This sparked the idea for my first opera, later entitled Rael, whose plot deals with Israel being overrun by Red China. Over the next year I developed the story, and planned to complete it as a major full-length operatic composition outside my work for The Who. I hired a Bechstein upright piano from Harrods and installed it in Karen’s bedroom in her flat in Pimlico. I wrote the first orchestrations there for Rael using a book called Orchestration by Walter Piston that I still refer to today.
After a summer of professional lunacy that included The Who’s first appearance in the beloved Palace Ballroom of my childhood, in the Isle of Man, I completed and assembled demos for a number of tracks intended for The Who’s still untitled second album. I bought a cello and played it on ‘Happy Jack’, a nonsense song I wrote about a village idiot from the Isle of Man. This is Paul McCartney’s favourite Who song – tellingly, because it was partly inspired by ‘Eleanor Rigby’, which I thought was a small masterpiece.
Happy Jack wasn’t old but he was a man
He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man
The kids all would sing he would take the wrong key
So they rode on his head on their furry donkey
But they never stopped Jack, nor the waters’ lapping
And they couldn’t distract him from the seagulls’ flapping
These are the original words, slightly altered on The Who’s version; the atmosphere of the lyric is meant to be Kafkaesque.
Kit and Chris drummed up a deal to get publishing advances for New Action, their own new music publishing house. They told me the advance was contingent on John, Keith and Roger contributing at least two original songs each to the album. I went along with the scheme, since my songwriter earnings on The Who’s hits had protected me thus far and I was happy to help. I’m pretty sure the band members never got the money – it was swallowed up in the enormous debts we all had by this time.
I explained my working method of making demos to John Entwistle, who bought himself a kit like mine and wrote and recorded his first song, ‘Whiskey Man’, in the tiny bedroom at his parents’ house in Acton that he still used as a base. I was the first person in the band he played it to. A week later John added ‘Boris the Spider’ to his list. I loved both songs. I helped Roger demo ‘See My Way’ in my Soho studio; a Buddy Holly–style piece, it was easy to work with. But this time Roger didn’t get any further than that one song, although he later wrote one more for The Who and went on to write quite a few in his solo career.
Keith got John to help him scrape together a lyric for Keith’s song ‘I Need You’, inspired by seeing The Beatles at the Ad Lib club in London, and I recorded the demo with him in Soho. It was a nightmare trying to work out the melody, as Keith’s singing was so tuneless. His second song, a rip-off from a film score banging around in his head, he merely whistled at us. We all knew we’d heard it somewhere before, but couldn’t place it at the time (it turned out to be ‘Eastern Journey’ by Tony Crombie). This became ‘Cobwebs and Strange’, a bizarre marching-band tune that was great fun to record because we actually marched around the studio while it was taped. John played trumpet, I played banjo, Keith a big bass drum and Roger the trombone – quite brilliantly, I thought. We overlaid the band over the marching track. I added penny whistles, and with Keith’s cymbals it ended up sounding like the accompaniment for a circus act.
I had been discouraged from submitting any additional material to The Who’s second album in order not to upset the necessary balance for the New Action publishing deal, so none of our recent hit singles appeared on the album. In a mad rush to fill the gaps left by this default, we added ‘Heatwave’, a Tamla song we always played on stage, but there was still a ten-minute hole. Kit came to see me at my Soho studio and I played him a few works in progress, songs about rabbits, fat people and ‘Gratis Amatis’, the opera dedicated to Kit and our beloved mutual friend the composer Lionel Bart. Kit asked whether I could put together a more serious pop-opera piece with several distinct strands, perhaps based around ‘Happy Jack’. If I could, this would fill the entire hole in one fell swoop, and the record could be released quickly.
Quick, quick, quick. ‘A Quick One’ became our new watchword and the title of the new album when it was finally released. I scribbled out some words and came up with ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’. This became known as the ‘mini-opera’, and is full of dark reflections of my childhood time with Denny.
Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconscious mind, I’m left to interpret it much like anyone else. The music begins with a fanfare: ‘dang, dang, dang, dang’. Someone has been ‘gone for nearly a year’. This could be ascribed to the dereliction of both my parents, neither of whom saw much of me while I lived with Denny. As a result, ‘your crying is a well-known sound’. That crying was mine as a five- and six-year-old, night after night, for my parents, for my friends from Acton and my freedom from Denny.
A remedy is next promised: we’ll bring your lost lover to you, ‘we’ll give him eagle’s wings, and he can fly to you’. At this point in my own story Rosie Bradley observed my suffering and quietly promised me she’d phone Dad and explain how crazily Denny was behaving, and he would surely come and rescue me. Suddenly the lyrics darken: ‘Little girl, why don’t you stop your crying? I’m gonna make you feel all right.’ This is chilling to me even today: the implicit threat of abuse unless the child cooperates with the abuser. But ‘little girl’? In my mind I was never alone when I lived with Denny – my imaginary constant friend was a twin girl who suffered every privation I suffered.
Ivor the engine driver may well represent my abuser: ‘we’ll sort it out back at my place maybe’, and ‘better be nice to an old engine driver’. Denny took in men from the bus garage and the railway station opposite her flat all the time, and I still have nightmares in which my bedroom door opens in the middle of the night and a shadowy man and woman stand watching me, the perfume of eroticism in the air.
Finally the grand orchestra takes over: ‘cello, cello, cello, cello’; a great celebration. The rescuer has arrived. In fact my reluctant rescuer was Mum, with her lover and Jimpy in tow as peacemaker. Dad was waiting at home to see whether Mum would relent, dump her lover and take him back, or fight him for custody of me. As cellos soar, the subject of the opera proclaims: ‘Do my eyes deceive me, am I back in your arms?’ I know I felt as though I had been rescued from Hell itself.
Then, there is an elucidation: ‘I missed you, and I must admit, I kissed a few …’ (Perhaps this refers to Mum’s affair.)
Most disturbing of all is the line, ‘[I] once did sit on Ivor the engine driver’s lap, and later with him had a nap.’ Then suddenly, everyone is ‘forgiven’, not once but a thousand times, over and over – as though there’s not enough forgiveness in a single line. When I sang this part live on stage, I would often become furious, thrashing at my guitar until I could thrash no more, frantically forgiving my mother, her lover, my grandmother, her lovers, and most of all myself.
During one of the October Quick One sessions I met Jimi Hendrix for the first time. He was dressed in a scruffy military jacket with brass buttons and red epaulettes. Chas Chandler, his manager, asked me to help the shy young man f
ind suitable amplifiers. I suggested either Marshall or Hiwatt (then called ‘Sound City’) and I explained the not-so-subtle differences. Jimi bought both, and later I chided myself for having recommended such powerful weapons. I had no idea when I first met him what talent he had, nor any notion of his charisma on stage. Now, of course, I’m proud to have played a small part in Jimi’s story. Kit and Chris snapped him up for Track Records – their first new signing.
Apart from ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ I wrote one song for the Quick One album, ‘Join My Gang’, which I didn’t even submit, having overfilled my quota. Instead I gave it to Paul Nicholas, a singer on Reaction who was at that time going under the pseudonym of ‘Oscar’ and who was managed by Robert Stigwood (‘Stiggy’). It’s a witty song, and I was sad it wasn’t a hit. David Bowie, then unknown, stopped me in the street in Victoria and told me he liked it, and that was before it was even released – he’d heard my demo at our music publisher’s office.
In October and November The Who toured Europe: Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany. I remember Berlin as war-scarred and still uneasy; it was at the Hilton there that Keith’s hotel-room wrecking began in earnest. He so missed Kim and suffered so much from paranoid jealousy that every night after a show he had to get out of his brain just to sleep, and seemed always at the last gasp to be full of the most dangerous anger.
In Amsterdam, after a television show there, we were walking straight from the TV studio stage towards the car taking us to our hotel when a tough-looking young man saw me passing and asked if I’d go for a drink with him. I agreed on the spot, and – while even Keith looked on shocked and concerned, shouting at me not to go – went off with the man. I had no money, no details of the show we were playing next day in The Hague and no idea who the man was, or what his intentions were.
His first question was, ‘Do you like jazz?’ As we sat together and listened to his impressive jazz collection, I quickly got drunk. After a while the evening turned into a blur. He showed me to a small bedroom alongside the room we’d been sitting in, and I fell asleep. I woke up next morning with a policeman standing over me, asking me who I was. The owner of the flat, a woman, had no idea who my host had been. After being allowed to leave, I found the railway station and boarded a train by jumping a fence. The train was full of young soldiers who took no notice of me. I could have been invisible, even dressed, as I was, in bright white clothes and a face full of stage make-up and mascara, hung over and a little scared.
9
ACID IN THE AIR
We had heard rumours throughout 1966 of a new drug called LSD that promised the most amazing experiences. It sounded scary but exciting. I got hold of some Sandoz capsules, and Karen and I and two friends from art school took a capsule each and waited to see what would happen.
When the drug kicked in, after about an hour, I felt an initial panic. Then the hump of the high took over, in which I lost all self-control and suffered hallucinations, which lasted another hour. After that I settled into something far more enjoyable. I felt like a child again, and I spent the next four or five hours rediscovering everything I took for granted: stars, moon, trees, colours, London buses. I remember being amazed at how pretty my girlfriend was. Eventually I began to put myself back together, piece by piece.
Karen and I only took one or two more acid trips together, and I only ever took four in total. The second trip began in Notting Hill. We walked from there all the way to the Roundhouse on New Year’s Eve 1966, waiting for the drug to take hold. By the time we arrived – The Who were due to perform at about three in the morning – I was coming down. My performance that night is reputed to have been destructive and angry, but I felt quite loved up, so I’m sure I was just going through my usual motions.
On 6 January 1967 I missed one of the only Who shows of my career through drug abuse, when I took my third acid trip and realised I couldn’t possibly drive 300 miles to Morecambe where we had a show. Instead I went to see the Pink Floyd play for the first time at the UFO Club. Syd Barrett was wonderful, and so were the rest of them. I fell in love with the band and the club itself, especially John Hopkins (‘Hoppy’ as he was known), who ran the club and worked the door.
I went again the following night. This time I didn’t use acid and took Eric Clapton to see Syd, who walked on stage (off his head on acid), played a single chord, and made it last about an hour using an electronic echo machine called a Binson. When he did start to play again he was truly inspiring. Roger Waters had the most incredible presence, was strikingly handsome and clearly fancied Karen. I found him a little scary. It was evident that he was going to be the principal driving force behind Pink Floyd. What no one could have known, as the band hadn’t yet made any recordings, was how glorious so much of their music would become once Syd’s more experimental influence waned.
One night a group of Mods exposed themselves to Karen and her friends as they danced, oblivious, in an acid haze. I was wearing a long psychedelic robe, and one of the Mods told me I’d let the side down. I retorted that Mod was finished; I was rather sad when, rather than argue with me, he and his mates just zipped up their flies and left.
In 1967 a mild spring brought premature blossoms to the trees in the huge private communal garden of Eccleston Square. Karen’s family had a house on the Thames’s upper reaches, and we spent Sundays there, just enjoying the passage of time, the tranquillity of the river and countryside, long walks and conversation about all manner of subjects.
The new swinging Sixties ethos – free love, girls on the pill, and everyone in our new London crowd behaving as though they were suddenly beautiful – played directly into my intense fear of being abandoned by Karen. One day I returned late after a gig to find a man talking to Karen in her bedroom. There was an air of intimacy between them, and she looked especially pretty and flushed. After I shooed him out I felt jealous and old-fashioned: everyone else was sharing their partner with whomever they fancied.
One night I listened again to the demo of ‘I Can See for Miles’. There wasn’t much more I could do to improve on it. I was ashamed of the jealousy that had inspired it, but I regarded the song as a secret weapon; when it was recorded properly and released as a Who single I believed we would flatten all opposition. Knowing we would be recording a third album fairly soon, I began to think about what kind of songs I wanted to gather.
During the winter of 1966–7 I listened to jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower, a live album of his extraordinary performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September 1966. Forest Flower, like the Beach Boys’ stereo masterpiece Pet Sounds, seemed to fit the times perfectly. Keith Jarrett was Lloyd’s pianist, and at some point on the record he starts banging the piano and picking and stroking the strings. Here, I felt, was a musician after my own heart, who played every instrument in unintended ways.
Keith Jarrett was born in the same month as me and his playing often reduces me to the kind of tears reserved for drunken solitude. I would sell my soul to play like him – and I don’t make that statement lightly. While listening to this genius I was struggling at the upright piano I’d shoehorned into Karen’s bedroom, and slowly, tortuously, beginning to find some path to self-expression on the eighty-eight black and white keys (a quantity I had often felt as a child was insufficient).
My friendship with Eric Clapton had deepened through our joint outings to pay homage to Jimi Hendrix, who was doing his first sensational gigs around London that spring. Jimi Hendrix was testing some of his first lyrical ideas at his shows. Eric’s friend, the painter and designer Martin Sharp, was helping him write songs, and Martin’s lyrics were very ambitious and poetic. Caught between two great new emerging songwriting talents, I felt challenged to evolve.
Seeing Jimi play for the first few times was also challenging for me as a guitarist. Jimi had the nimble, practised fingers of the concert violinist; he was a real virtuoso. I was reminded of Dad and his tireless practising, how much time he spent getting to a lev
el when he could play so fast that the notes turned into a blur. But with Jimi there was something else: he married the blues with the transcendent joy of psychedelia. It was as though he had discovered a new instrument in a new world of musical impressionism. He went further on stage, and appeared to be powerful and manly without any aggression.
He was a mesmerising performer, and I hesitate to describe how fantastic he was to actually see play live, because I really don’t want to make his legions of younger fans feel they’ve missed out. We all miss out on something. I missed out on Parker, Ellington and Armstrong. And if you missed Jimi playing live, you missed something very, very special. Seeing him in the flesh it became clear he was more than a great musician. He was a shaman, and it looked as if glittering coloured light emanated from the ends of his long, elegant fingers as he played. When I went to see Jimi play I didn’t do acid, smoke grass or drink, so I can accurately report that he worked miracles with the right-handed Fender Stratocaster that he played upside down (Jimi was left-handed).
After seeing Jimi live, I rarely enjoyed his recordings, which paled by comparison. The exceptions were ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Voodoo Chile’, both tracks from a later session in 1968. Eddie Kramer had engineered all of Jimi’s records, but the sessions for Electric Ladyland were the first in New York, and it was there that Jimi and Eddie began to connect in that indefinable audio ether, where Jimi’s shamanic powers would finally be allowed to express themselves on vinyl.
While I felt a bit stranded by Jimi’s psychedelic genius, I felt equally out of the loop when drugs became a political issue for those of us in the music business – Paul McCartney had gone on TV saying marijuana should be legalised, for example. It might appear that I felt threatened by talented people, or those brave enough to live a wilder life, and there’s some truth in that, but mostly I felt out of synch, a few steps behind. This feeling had been instilled in me as a young teenager when I was usually surrounded by older, more experienced young men. However, my awe of my elders was tested when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were busted for drugs.
Who I Am: A Memoir Page 10