This subdued re-entry into singledom certainly didn’t stampede into the Top Ten – suggesting The Who’s days as a singles band might be numbered. Townshend would persevere, though, issuing their best run of non-album singles since ‘I Can See for Miles’ – ‘Let’s See Action’, ‘Join Together’ and ‘Relay’ – in rapid succession. None of them were exactly box-office, certainly not in the US, where they wanted something more; that is, more like Tommy. Such failures only fed Townshend’s inner doubts, reinvoking the pre-Tommy paranoia that he might have lost his touch, and pushing him to ever more grandiose alternatives while the rest of the band watched and wondered:
John Entwistle: All those [early Seventies singles] represent [Pete] trying to talk to the kids in general. Pete was trying to get the same feel that ‘My Generation’ had, but it didn’t really work. You see, they weren’t pointed at the latest generation – they were pointed at ours, which had already grown up. That was the time when Townshend honestly thought that he was losing his ‘feel’ and that he could no longer communicate. [1976]
Ironically, the biggest single success in this confused period was a brutally truncated version of an album track (‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’). The true state of Townshend’s psyche, however, was not to be found on that FM-friendly A-side, but rather on its nakedly honest B-side, ‘I Don’t Even Know Myself’, a song left over from an earlier, abandoned EP. Here was a song Townshend had been working on for a while. Back in May 1970 he had informed Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott that the song was his way of ‘kinda blaming the world because you’re fucked up . . . I think that the Self is an enemy that’s got to be kicked out the fucking way so that you can really get down to it.’ In the same interview, Townshend confessed that he was now trying to avoid writing in such a personal style, and that ‘The Seeker’ ‘started off as being very much me, and then stopped being very much me . . . The whole thing is that, as soon as you discover that songs are personal, you reject them.’
There was one wholly personal song written that autumn he was smart enough not to reject or second-guess, instead making it part of the abstract Lifehouse concept. ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, with its unmistakeable anti-drug reference, ‘If I swallow anything evil / Stick a finger down my throat . . .’, was the song of a smiling self-assassin bottling up a lot of angst. Not that Townshend was the only member of The Who to feel frustrated by the need to reinforce their hard-won (if fully deserved) reputation as the greatest live rock band in the world.
In a band dominated by Townshend’s ever twinkling muse, John Entwistle had never really been allowed the requisite outlet for his own songwriting, and now he was starting to write more and more first-rate material, which he worried might go to waste. Unlike George Harrison, whose sudden (and ultimately fleeting) metamorphosis into a songwriter who could hold his own with Lennon and McCartney had precipitated the Fab Four’s demise, Entwistle didn’t want to quit The Who. But he did want to find a forum for some of the sickest pop songs this side of Tom Lehrer, even if he was unabashed about the worldview he espoused in song: ‘My whole idea of the world is sick. What do you expect from ten years in The Who? I write macabre songs.’
With their own UK record label, in the form of Track Records, and an American label, MCA, desperate for any Who-related product, Entwistle duly got the green light to begin a debut solo album in November 1970. The songs, some of which were two years old, had been bubbling up inside the bassist until, as he told Record Mirror in May 1971: ‘I had to do the album or I’d have gone out of my head. There was so much bottled up inside me that I had to let it out.’
Yet anyone expecting a soul-searching examination of the inner life of the Ox soon found out Smash Your Head Against the Wall was nothing of the sort. Although it had plentiful visions of ‘heaven and hell’ – including a reworking of the fabled The Who set-opener of the same name, and a hilarious song sung from the devil’s point of view, directed at all the damned souls coming his way (‘You’re Mine’) – Entwistle was inclined to make a joke of life, the universe and everything. If the music was heavy, the lyrics verged on the Swiftian. Even the cover contained its own secret sick joke, Entwistle’s death-mask face being transposed against an X-ray of the lungs of a terminal heart patient. The album was still well received by those who got the joke(s).
Townshend, on the other hand, was finding life less of a joke. And more like a concept. He had been toying with his next concept throughout the whole eighteen-month period the band spent turning Tommy into a self-contained one-hour performance piece20. As Townshend recalled at the end of the Seventies, ‘Virtually as soon as we finished recording [Tommy] I was thinking of other things: Rock is Dead, Long Live Rock – an early version of Quadrophenia; Lifehouse; maybe developing “Rael” from The Who Sell Out; just searching for something which we could get away with.’
By autumn 1970 he had locked on a project called Lifehouse that would be a film, an album and a series of ‘spontaneous’ performances. Townshend had always been a proselytizer for the affirmative potential inherent in pop music, but with Lifehouse he clearly decided he would deliver something that was genuinely ‘a reflection of spiritual awareness’ to The Who’s audience. Not surprisingly, given his predisposition and advocacy of Meher Baba, there was a touch of messianism in the language he used. He even suggested in print that only The Who could do this:
Pete Townshend: We’re waiting for the follow-up to Tommy, for the follow-up to ‘My Generation’, for the rock revolution. We’re waiting for rock . . . to indicate a direction . . . We’ve got to shake ourselves up, musically, and do something new and we’re the only group in a position, financially and idealistically, to pioneer a new form of performance . . . We have that high enough ideal. [1971]
Lifehouse’s origins went back to a premise that originally underlay Tommy, but which had been barely developed during its transition from Amazing Journey to artefact. He had mentioned the idea to US critic Paul Nelson when Tommy was taking shape: ‘The first channel of vibrations through [the kid]’s ears is the word Tommy, which completely blows his mind . . . and throws him right off the course of what he was on to before, which was very basically one note.’ In September 1970 he expanded on the ‘one note’ idea in the second of a series of monthly columns he had begun writing for Melody Maker:
Here’s the idea, there’s a note, a musical note, that builds the basis of existence somehow. Mystics would agree, saying that of course it is OM, but I am talking about a MUSICAL note . . . This note pervades everything, it’s an extremely wide note, more of a hiss than a note as we normally know them. The hiss of the air, of activity, of the wind and of the breathing of someone near. You can always hear it . . . I think everybody hears the same note or noise. It’s an amazing thing to think of any common ground between all men that isn’t directly a reflection of spiritual awareness. The hearing of this note is physical, very physical.
From hereon the Melody Maker column, which lasted until April 1971, would chart the transition of Lifehouse from inchoate concept to full-blown The Who project. It was a part of the process; and of Townshend’s ongoing attempts to maintain a dialogue between artist and audience, the veritable crux of Lifehouse – even if the audience was supposed to be wiped out by ‘this note [that] pervades everything’. An October 1970 interview in Disc saw him explaining how this note ‘basically creates complete devastation. And when everything is destroyed, only the real note, the true note that they have been looking for is left. Of course, there is no one left to hear it.’
In fact, the whole original Lifehouse concept was circular. The new suite of songs would open with ‘Pure and Easy’ (‘There once was a note, pure and easy . . .’), and conclude with ‘The Song is Over’, segueing back into ‘Pure and Easy’ as the forces of totalitarianism burst in upon this ‘illegal concert, which they were trying to track down and stamp out . . . [But] when they finally break in, the concert has reached such a height that the audience are about to disappear.’ It was a rather a
pocalyptic conclusion to a story bearing a close resemblance to the part of Corinthians describing the so-called Rapture. Again he was writing songs with a sense of mission, one which would have made Peter Green proud – to make music itself the new religion:
Man must let go his control over music as art or media fodder and allow it freedom. Allow it to become the mirror of a mass rather than the tool of an individual. Natural balance is the key. I will make music that will start off this process. My compositions will not be my thoughts, however, they will be the thoughts of the young, and the thoughts of the masses. Each man will become a piece of music, he will hear it for himself, see every aspect of his life reflected in terms of those around him, in terms of the Infinite Scheme. When he becomes aware of the natural harmony that exists between himself as part of creation he will find it simple to adjust and LIVE in harmony . . . We can live in harmony only when Nature is allowed to incorporate us into her symphony. Listen hard, for your note is here. It might be a chord or a dischord. Maybe a hiss or a pulse. High or low, sharp or soft, fast or slow. One thing is certain. If it is truly your own note, your own song, it will fit into the scheme. Mine will fit yours, and yours will fit his, his will fit others . . .
For the first time, though, Townshend failed to take the rest of The Who with him on this amazing journey. Daltrey says he ‘got the gist of something important – that was – if you ever found the meaning of life it would be a musical note – it’s a great idea, but Pete had fifty billion others . . . And that was always the problem with Pete.’ When in a less forgiving mood, Daltrey would bluntly describe ‘the narrative thread of [Lifehouse as] about as exciting as a fucking whelk race!’ Even Townshend duly admitted that the dystopian aspect of Lifehouse, set in a future ‘when rock & roll didn’t exist’, was ‘very derivative of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, and a lot of stuff [which] has now been covered by Clockwork Orange’. But it was the ‘one note’ aspect of the story that really disturbed Daltrey. And it was not just The Who singer who thought Townshend was going off the deep end. Kit Lambert, his key supporter on the Tommy project, was lukewarm; Chris Stamp was simply baffled; and producer Glyn Johns was adamant – it didn’t make sense:
Pete Townshend: Just before Glyn programmed Who’s Next, he took me out to a pub [and] said, ‘Pete, tell me just once more about this Lifehouse.’ I thought, Oh God! So I told him the story. And he sat there thinking. I thought he was going to say, ‘Now I get it!’ And instead he said, ‘I don’t understand a fucking word that you said.’ [2000]
Having invested his whole (well-)being in the project, Townshend teetered on the very brink of a real breakdown. As he openly admitted to his close friend Richard Barnes after the fact: ‘I think for a while I lost touch with reality. The self-control required to prevent my total nervous breakdown was absolutely unbelievable . . . I’d spend a week explaining something to somebody and it’d be all very clear to me, then they’d go, “Right. Okay. Now can you explain it again?” There were about fifty people involved, and I [simply] didn’t have the stamina to see it through.’ In November 1971, eight months after finally acceding to the abandonment of Lifehouse as Tommy’s successor, he described in almost confessional terms the dispiriting outcome to a West Coast journalist:
Pete Townshend: It sort of ended up me against the world . . . In that particular case, I had one idea about what the group should be doing, and the group had another idea . . . I really felt [Lifehouse] was a follow up [to Tommy] – the film, the album, the event, the disappearing theatre. The kind of thing I want to do still: the definitive rock movie . . . Roger got incredibly irritable, ’cause he felt I was trying to commandeer the group . . . And I was progressively getting worse [and worse]. I mean, I started to hallucinate . . . And I thought I must be getting schizophrenic. So in the end, about half way through the recording with Glyn, I just phoned up Chris Stamp . . . and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to knock it on the head. Let’s just put out an album, otherwise I really will go crazy And I would have done; no doubt about it . . . One time, when we were recording in New York at the Record Plant, I thought I was . . . standing in the middle of the room vomiting, vomiting, vomiting all over everybody. [1971]
In the same interview he also elliptically alluded to another occasion when he was ‘sitting in a room, and everybody in the room . . . suddenly turn[ed] into frogs’; though he did not expand on the incident any further. And though he would periodically refer to suffering ‘the first nervous breakdown of my life’ at this point, it was not until he wrote a 1995 article for the Richmond Review – reproduced in the ‘Deluxe’ 2003 Who’s Next CD reissue – that he admitted he had been on the verge of ending it all; and that when he began seeing frogs, it was in the middle of a meeting with Lambert to discuss the film of the album of the gig, and he was having a full-on mental meltdown:
‘During [a 1971] meeting [in New York about Lifehouse], as Kit stamped around the room pontificating and cajoling, shouting and laughing, I began to have what I now know to be a classic New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack Grade One. Everyone in the room transmogrified into huge frogs, and I slowly moved towards the open tenth-floor window with the intention of jumping out. Anya spotted me and gently took my arm . . . She saved my life. I was by that time a kook.’
A chastened Townshend duly returned to London with a tape of six Lifehouse tracks the band had recorded at Record Plant in New York with Leslie West (of Mountain) on rhythm guitar. Initially, he was convinced ‘they were all great, like a new Who’ – and there was one instance, the firing-on-all-cylinders ‘Love Ain’t for Keeping’, where he was right. But Glyn Johns convinced him it would be even better if he came to Olympic studios in Barnes. So, as Townshend recalls, ‘We went to Olympic and we suddenly realized that it wasn’t Kit or the Record Plant at all, but The Who who had discovered another facet . . . [And when] we heard the tapes we’d done in the States [we decided] they weren’t really very good.’ Thoroughly disillusioned with the whole Lifehouse saga – though continuing to write songs for a possible resurrection21 – he let Johns do his worst with the Olympic tapes. The result was Who’s Next, The Who’s finest set of songs and most consistent-selling album:
Pete Townshend: We left Glyn to compile the album . . . So Glyn played us the album the way he thought it should be, and we said, ‘Great, put it out.’ . . . My biggest disappointment with Who’s Next was ‘Baba O’Riley’. It was a long, nine-minute instrumental, and I kept cutting it and cutting it and cutting it; until eventually I cut all the length out of it and turned it into a rock song, [after I] shoved some words on it. [1971]
The words he shoved on to ‘Baba O’Riley’ actually came from another Lifehouse song, ‘Teenage Wasteland’, his first song of teen-angst to be told from the vantage point of adulthood. It was a good way to bookend an album destined to end with ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. The other ‘new’ Townshend song added to the equation at Olympic was ‘Bargain’, a sarcastic swipe at those, himself included, who had agreed to the bargain of the century by which Lifehouse became Who’s Next (‘I got to lose me to find you / I gotta give up all I had’). That sense of self-loathing would receive yet more column-inches on Townshend’s next concept album.
Meanwhile, as he informed Zigzag at the time, he didn’t feel he had delivered the ‘natural successor’ to Tommy that Lifehouse, in his fevered imagination, really could have been: ‘A lot of people are waiting for the next Who album, which should really be some event in and around The Who; which is a logical next step from Tommy, which Who’s Next wasn’t. Who’s Next wasn’t a logical step in anyone’s language. Who’s Next was a stepping stone.’ The following year he called it ‘a compromise album’ to Penny Valentine. By then, he had started on, and abandoned, a ‘part-fiction rock documentary’ called Rock is Dead: Long Live Rock, the next stepping stone on the long road to Quadrophenia.
The respite gave John Entwistle the opportunity to turn his hand again to songs of twisted Englishness, and this time he really locked on an aspec
t of the English psyche only hinted at in the songs of his more esteemed peers: the fool for love, the cuckold, the sexual inadequate. The 1972 Whistle Rymes [sic] was so morbid that if Townshend had actually thrown himself out of the ten-storey window in New York, it might have merely served as another song-idea for the bassist’s macabre muse.
Over the ten songs that constitute Whistle Rymes, Entwistle evenly divided his concerns between peeping toms (‘The Window Shopper’), like-minded perverts (‘Now I Was Just Being Friendly’, ‘Apron Strings’) and suicidal chumps who have discovered their true position in life (‘I Feel Better’, ‘Thinkin’ It Over’ and ‘I Found Out’). With Peter Frampton lending a hand between bands, the result was Entwistle’s most thoroughly realized, elegiacally twisted album; and American fans seemed to love it. The album racked up quite respectable sales Stateside (175,000). The English public were more lukewarm, perhaps because, as one Sounds reviewer put it, Entwistle had finally revealed himself to be ‘a colourful eccentric waiting to flash’.
*
The real irony was that for all Townshend’s regular championing of The Kinks, it was Entwistle who had produced an album which closely accorded with Ray Davies’ own warped worldview Whistle Rymes and The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies – issued a year apart – were not only perfect period-pieces, they were entirely of a piece (with Richard Thompson’s Henry the Human Fly there to do the arbitrating). They even sold similar numbers in the States, their main target audience22. For Davies, though, there had been excess baggage to dump in the record-company dept., a couple of ‘novelty’ hit singles to write, long nights spent listening to bad English country ‘covers’ bands and two full tours of the US experiencing the real thing, before he felt ready to make a ‘whole LP . . . about a person . . . thrown into an environment . . . [that meant he] went through depressions, nervous breakdowns’.
All the Madmen Page 16