The Age of Anxiety

by Pete Townshend

  “Did you believe I’d done it with Rain?” he said.

  “It’s possible?”

  He shook his head.

  “You were late to it though,” I said. “Like Rain?”

  “You know more about your child’s sex life than my parents know about mine.”

  “But the girls do put out to you.”

  “Put out.” He laughed. “That sounds old-fashioned.”

  “I am that.”

  “Working in a club where we have no stage to speak of, just a raised platform, it’s the boyfriends I have to watch. They wait until I’m taking a drink between songs and walk right up to me and poke their finger in my face. It’s my bird’s birthday, they say. And she wants to hear ‘Satisfaction.’ If I hesitate they speak more quietly. Fucking play it, you cunt. Satis-fucking-faction. Play it yourself, you little shithead, I say. And before it can go any further we deafen him and he will slink away.”

  “Don’t they get you later?”

  “Crow sorts me out if they try. They have knives these days. Crow carries a fucking Beretta.”

  A shining star vibrates with the sound of a vast, shimmering, and dissonant choir. A newborn baby cries. Shattering glass. A thousand million cathedral windows in a building as high as the sky, shaken by the rumbling of an earthquake, every pane of leaded glass, every lantern, loosened, falling, at first crackling, then as the amount of glass that falls increases into an almost constant shower the noise gets louder but also softens, losing its edge. Instead a sound almost like falling water fills the air. The building itself is of glass, so when the earthquake hits it eventually takes down not just the panes of glass, but also the building, until all that is left is the occasional tinkling of another last drop of silica rain. Out of the last few small echoes of glass shards slipping—one leaning against another and sliding, breaking again—comes a long, throaty moan. It is the sound of some kind of creature perhaps, or air being forced through some sort of narrow pipe or slit. This sound transmogrifies into the blast of exhaust from an engine, revving up, then taking off. A massive tractor engine of the kind used in American trucks: noisy, throaty, hearty, off, and away.

  As this grand operatic spectacle now unfolds—I have started speaking in iambic beats of seven. The correct name (I have looked it up) is “heptameter.” As soon as there is music I become rhythmic, like someone who—here comes the beat of seven—has had a few too many and begins to swing and sway. It’s pathetic. I can’t dance. I can’t sing. But I am powerless. It must be clear by now that in this story something strange was going on inside young Walter’s mind and I am tempted to evoke it.

  It just so happened that I was present at his last performance with the band, invited by their manager Frank Lovelace. It was clear to me that Frank wanted to show off. A week before he had negotiated a huge financial deal for Walter’s latest song, “Freedom on the Road,” about the joys of life out on the road behind the wheel of a smoking, fiery rod. He’d sold it to Ford in the USA, which was bringing out a new version of its huge four-wheel-drive utility pickup truck, and the song would feature in a fifteen-million-dollar advertising campaign. It would soon be on every TV screen in the USA, and Frank expected that in years to come the song would become a staple of a long-drawn-out campaign. With each new phase of that campaign Frank would deal again and make more money for Walter and himself.

  The agency making the television commercial loved some of the cheesy erotic lines, which Walter managed to make seem genuinely sexy when he sang them onstage.

  Your turn to drive, you gotta shift the stick

  Your turn to drive, we gotta get there quick.

  This wasn’t Walter’s finest work, but it had suddenly made him a lot of money.

  Freedom on the road, I always wanna ride,

  I warn you, I’ll explode,

  If ever I’m denied.

  Politically incorrect and chauvinistic, and accepted tongue-in-cheek by the worldly R&B-loving crowd at Dingwalls, it targeted the kind of hardworking American men who used the big pickup trucks for their work. In Britain such men have white vans; equally overpowered, but more discreet.

  Walter played a great show; it seemed the usual thing, no strings, no strange vibrations on the surface that I could detect. You’ve glimpsed a description of the strange sounds and music Walter himself had started hearing in the darkness of the night, but up onstage that final evening, he signaled the imminent close of the first half of their show with one splendid frozen “stand.”

  The girls went crazy, and he played a killer harmonica solo that rocked old Dingwalls so damned hard the bottles up behind the bar began to rattle, leak, and fall.

  My godson. I felt so proud. My rich godson.

  I celebrated whatever it was that Old Nik had passed to Walter when they met a few days before.

  As Walter left the stage, announcing a short break, the crowd went wild; the applause in Dingwalls usually faded quickly, but on this occasion something very special seemed to hang in the smoky air. He pushed through the appreciative cheering crowd toward the bar where Frank and I were leaning. As he slowly approached, he looked around him and pulled out a small red silk scarf from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his face. He seemed to tower above the crowd as they parted to allow a narrow way through.

  He was, I was reminded once more, a beautiful man; he could have been a young Johnny Cash. He stood out in the crowd, yet at the same time he appeared rather ghostly. By the time he reached the bar, which was heaving with people who had beaten him to it, his wife was waiting for him holding out a beer.

  “Walter,” she said, smiling. “So talented, big Walter: Siobhan’s big man.” This was said with neither celebration nor sarcasm. She hauled him close to her possessively. Siobhan spoke loud enough for most of the gathering girls to hear as she kissed her man on both cheeks. She was a little drunk perhaps.

  She smiled with adoration, but her smile was constrained with care. Walter knew exactly what his role was in the context of that kind of event. He could do his job easily, and part of that job was acknowledging the principal currency in which rock stars were rewarded.

  Siobhan was quite stunning. Her red hair and her blue-green eyes generated a sense of presence that was almost too powerful to ignore. Some of the men near her at the bar were attempting to do just that—ignore her—and their flickering eyes had jealously flit from her pale skin and slightly lecherous smile to Walter as he had gently pushed his way from the stage through the mass of bodies toward her.

  As the two of them met and kissed, it was immediately obvious that Siobhan was older than her husband. She was just one year his senior, but she appeared to be more mature, and looked older than her thirty years, and despite Walter’s road-worn look she seemed more lived-in than he did. In her, the aging signified a successful decline to greater beauty, if decline is truly how it could be described. In him that night, the beginning of aging seemed rather sad, because his weary face seemed to signify an even wearier spirit.

  In another life—more rock ’n’ roll than rhythm and blues—his partner would have been younger, prettier, sillier, and at such a time would have been throwing herself at him, laughing, giggling, kissing him, and flirting as though she were meeting him for the first time. Siobhan had never behaved like a trophy wife. She had never worked at it.

  I sensed that as she watched her husband drink thirstily she found herself struggling to concentrate, to stay with him in the rather seedy rock ’n’ roll surroundings in which they found themselves. Was she thinking, not yet aware that she was now married to a very rich young man, that he had sold his bloody soul to the ridiculous Dingwalls circus?

  And was her greatest sudden fear that he might take her soul with his?

  Perhaps, after her father, she was wondering how she would survive yet another self-obsessed man?

  I saw the moment when Walter noticed her eyes harden and her mouth narrow. He had told me he knew that she disapproved of what he loved doing so much in the
band.

  He moved toward her and spoke loud enough for me to hear. “Darling girl, you don’t have to be here. Give me one more kiss, then go on home if you like. I’ll see you later.”

  Siobhan smiled even more widely, and suddenly seemed sincere. “It’s the Bushmills,” she complained. “I order it because I’m from Waterford. I knock it back. I don’t have the stomach for it. But it makes me feel very good. I’m fine. Really, my lover, I’m fine.”

  There was something evasive about Walter’s expression. I learned later that he hadn’t yet told Siobhan about Frank Lovelace’s deal and what it would mean for them, and that he’d been putting off telling her as he feared it would drive a wedge between them.

  I also later learned that Walter had been told, just a few minutes before he walked onstage that night, that as well as the licensing deal to Ford, Frank had sold his entire catalog of songs outright plus everything he might write in the next five years for on the way to five million pounds. After Frank’s commission, legal fees, and tax, that would leave a clear two million quid for Walter.

  While Siobhan and Walter whispered to each other, Frank Lovelace and I moved away along the bar, to where Crow and the Hansons were waiting. They clearly sensed something was up. And Frank now explained to them all about Walter’s windfall. “You guys will make money too from the use of the band’s recording in the TV commercials,” bragged Frank. “This really is win-win, guys.”

  Crow’s usually frozen expression cracked, and he looked shaken.

  “Holy shit!” As Crow voiced his shock, his wife Agneta looked confused. He turned to her. “This is bullshit. This is not in the fucking manifesto. We aren’t the fucking Who. We don’t fucking well sell out. Tell Ford they can’t have the fucking music we recorded!”

  Frank stood calmly at the bar. Crow didn’t scare him. Frank drew himself up to his full height and tilted his head back so it seemed he was looking down at Crow.

  “It will be voted on by all of us,” he pointed out to Crow quietly. “In any case, if you guys don’t want your version to be used, Walter can record a new one. Why not enjoy this windfall?”

  The Hansons meanwhile were looking at each other with quizzical smiles. Leery and curious, they had just been told they were in line for a bonanza, but with no idea what it might entail. From where I stood, what I saw in their faces was a realization this might be the moment that would set them free and allow them to move on to greater things.

  Crow looked at the couple and seemed to read their thoughts. “The fucking Everly Brothers will be turning in their graves.”

  Steve Hanson cut in. He too drew himself up to his full height, and at over six feet tall he suddenly seemed imposing and even a little dangerous: “I don’t think they are actually dead, Crow. That might be your problem, thinking you control the copyright to every great song you’ve stumbled on from the halcyon days of R&B and American pop.”

  “Oh, you creep, Hanson,” sneered Crow, refusing to back down. Agneta took his arm to try to calm him. “You’ll be talking about the benefits of heavier cable for our PA speakers next, or suggesting some guitar-player mate of yours who is good at shredding, whatever the holy fuck that is. You fucking nerd.” It seemed to me that despite all this bluster, Crow was intimidated by Hanson, and was beginning to see that he was going to be overruled by Steve and his wife. It would be a first for the band, and one Crow would find difficult. To say he slunk away to a different part of the bar would not be correct. He swaggered, but he seemed hangdog and a little pitiful.

  At that moment Selena walked up.

  The resemblance between Selena and Siobhan was obvious; it was also obvious that Selena was much younger. If Siobhan looked older than her thirty years, Selena seemed to try hard to look younger than her twenty. Her hair was auburn, worn long in soft ringlets with two short plaits either side to frame her face, and she had the air of a sixties hippy about her; around her neck she wore a garland of beads and small flowers, and on her ears large loops of pink plastic. She’d told me that she believed she was an angel, divinely inspired in human form, who worked with real angels, guiding not only the spirits of the people around her, but also working in concert with the secret masters of the universe. This made her no less attractive to me or any of the men around her, and many of the women too. She was captivating, with shining blue-green eyes and a wide and luscious mouth.

  Her mother had died as she gave birth to Selena, ascending to the heavens on her wings. Why wouldn’t Selena have had a screw a little loose? In any case, I knew better than anyone that a loose screw here and there could mask a different shade of genius, and if Selena was in any way a genius, she was even more a beauty.

  She was a flirt too. According to her I myself had been subject to a few of her flirtations when she was eighteen and running from man to man excitedly at Siobhan and Walter’s wedding. But Selena had a powerful presence, and now I watched her at the bar in Dingwalls, laughing like a film star.

  In truth, we were all a little fearful of getting on her bad side. When she had been just eight years old she had killed her father Michael Collins with a kitchen knife. Many of the people around her knew the story. She had been forgiven: entirely reprieved, legally speaking, even if sanctioned morally behind her back by some of the local nuns back in Duncannon. Siobhan had been bruised, battered, and sexually abused by the drunken, foolish man. The police brought no charges, and the social workers soon stepped back. And so in my eyes, and in those of most men who stood near us at the bar that night, when she arrived we forgot Siobhan and saw only the shining, naive, sexual, and angelic light Selena emanated, and had flashing visions too of her blooded blade. The strange mélange of light and good and evil and her lack of shame made her a kind of Cleopatra in our stupid, hazy eyes.

  She started talking to Frank. As I walked over to join them, I overheard what she was saying.

  “Frank, you are number three.” She was laughing, squirming around him as though she were a pole dancer and Frank was the pole. “I have already started on Walter. If I can’t have him, I’ll steal Crow from Agneta. If I can’t have Crow, well, I’ll just have to make do with you, Frank. You’ll have me, won’t you?”

  Frank was clearly enjoying being wooed by such a pretty young woman, even if he was cast as her third contender.

  “And what if you can’t have me?” Frank looked at her, only half joking; he was starting to feel he needed to man up. “Who’s next down the list?”

  Selena was laughing, her head in the air, her hooped earrings dangling, her plaits swinging. Had I walked up at precisely the wrong moment?

  “Louis!” Selena shouted my name, smiled at me with her Hollywood teeth, and hugged me. “If Frank won’t have me, Louis will take me, won’t you? You gorgeous old bunny.”

  She tweaked my cheek. “Isn’t he handsome, Frank? Rich too!”

  I flushed as I feared she was making fun of me.

  Now Walter and Siobahn arrived at the bar, smiling and good-looking, laid-back and cool, unaware that he was top of Selena’s list of prospects. Frank and I were relegated as she turned her light on Walter.

  I’m sure Walter felt safe with Selena, safe enough—married to her older sister—to allow her to flirt sometimes, and he responded naturally and openly to her beauty, her light and her natural sexual energy. It seemed to me Siobhan usually looked on indulgently, but always registered the obvious chemistry between her husband and sister. If the attraction had been properly weighed and assessed, it would have been clear that Selena worshipped her brother-in-law, and that although Walter liked her, it was, I could see, a rather more fundamental and primal reaction he felt in her presence. She was most overtly sexual and flirtatious around him when he was working a gig, almost unconsciously playing out the role that Siobhan refused to play.

  Walter put his arms around the two of them, the sisters. He gathered them magnanimously, and they were crushed together for a moment.

  Then, as if he realized he had been clumsy, Wa
lter released them both. Siobhan looked away as though considering her exit.

  Selena was excited, playing the part of an adoring fan.

  “Walt, you’re so great, man,” she effused. “That last song attracted a hundred angels into the room. Imagine a hundred angels in this dump!” She laughed and her eyes flashed and crinkled.

  “Thank you, little sister,” Walter teased.

  “I fucking hate it when you call me that, Walter,” spat Selena. “But you should be celebrating. Frank told me about the big deal with Ford, and the rest. Selling all your old music. You could retire, darling.” She looked at Siobhan with a dark grin and added, “He could write poetry.”

  Siobhan looked grim as she fixed her husband with an intense stare. Everyone at the bar heard what she said.

  “Is this true?” She suddenly seemed less intoxicated. “Have you really let Frank sell your catalog?”

  Walter nodded. “It’s a fucking lot of money too, Siobhan.”

  “How did Selena know about all this before me? I am your fucking wife. I’m fucking fuming, to be honest.”

  Walter began to explain aspects of the deal that he himself had only just found out, that Selena seemed to know about the deal before he did. But Siobhan was looking down at the floor of the bar. A few too many drinks had softened her before, but now she was sober, in the heat of a building rage, her violent father’s genes pushing to the surface.

  “So you will leave the band?” This was more of a statement than a question.

  Walter didn’t answer, but turned away and waved at the barman for a top-up.

  Siobhan pulled him round to face her squarely and demanded an answer.

  “Will you quit the band? Will you give up this fucking shithole? Can we start a new life, work together on a poetry book or something? What about the help you promised me to write a book about Selena and me being brought up by our dad? We thought it might make a play. Bloody hell, Walter, it would be so great to get out of this…” She didn’t finish.