All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Where he found the energy, not even he can say. Writing about these months, in 2009, Townshend tried to convey the sheer scale of the task: ‘In [Ramport] studio, I used old-fashioned methods, big studio drums sounds, layered violins (that I played myself), John Entwistle’s powerful brass choirs, banjos, backing voices, bells, and of course sound effects. All that and electric guitars. I gathered all those strands . . . Why do you think most . . . rock artists, find it so hard ever to create art as successfully as their younger selves? [Because] making good art in the rock business . . . requires tremendous energy and youthful persistence.’ It also required that rare ‘combination of unbelievable grandiosity and shaky self-esteem’ that would be Townshend’s personal analysis of his psychological make-up in 1972–73. Torn between these dualities, and feeding on ‘tremendous resentments’ as the process dragged on for months, Townshend again began to fear for his own sanity. In the end it all came together, though, allowing him to then make light of the experience:

  Pete Townshend: The problem with The Who is that if I try to draw more out of their image and their history and out of rock than rock can sustain, you end up with a situation where there’s nothing left that hasn’t been milked or soiled; any emotion that hasn’t been buggered about with; any mountain that hasn’t been climbed by some plastic, made-up geezer who climbs up to the top and says, ‘I’ve seen God, and He’s a pig.’ [1973]

  Naturally, the other members of The Who were determined to impose themselves on the process. As Townshend later wrote: As soon as the band started laying down backing tracks at Battersea, it didn’t feel like the Quadrophenia that I thought was going to come out. It was much heavier, much more brutal.’ One of the early casualties at the sessions was ‘Joker James’, which was left unfinished for six years, as was ‘Four Faces’. Yet still Townshend worried that the ablum lacked the spontaneity of earlier Lambert-produced Who sessions. That still-lingering sense of failure began to consume him even as he put the finishing touches to his most fully realized work:

  Pete Townshend: The thing about Quadrophenia was that it was far too self-conscious . . . It was as if I’d given myself a brief and said ‘Now come up to that’, and attempted to write spontaneously within it. There are only a few spontaneous songs there, and I think they stand out like jewels in coal – stuff like ‘Cut My Hair’ and ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’; you get the odd ones. But take a number like ‘Punk and the Godfather’, which is technically very good and very crisp, and ‘5.15’ is another one – they’re deliberately oblique. [1974]

  That frisson of frustration soon spilled over into open conflict with his fiercest critic – Daltrey. Recalling the increasingly fraught process in 2009, Townshend described how ‘towards the end of recording, Roger lost patience with me. I had kept all the cards to my chest, and he wanted to see the release of a Who album not a Pete Townshend indulgence. He insisted the faces of each band-member should be on the front cover.’

  The drama did not end there. Matters came to a head during rehearsals for the two tours – UK and US – they’d already booked for November/December, without being entirely sure the album would be in the shops. Townshend, who was still self-medicating with Courvoisier, was not about to let his vision of the piece be distorted by Daltrey’s sniping. And he was still thinking in terms of making it into a film one of these days. As Daltrey remembers it, he turned up to one rehearsal to find Townshend had hired a film crew, though they never actually managed to shoot anything:

  Roger Daltrey: We’d just finished ‘Dr Jimmy’, and I was really giving it something. I was like, ‘Are you gonna sit on your fucking equipment? When you gonna start fucking filming?’ Pete by this time had already drunk at least one bottle of brandy, if not two, and he came over and said, ‘Shut the fuck up, they’ll film when I tell them to.’ [1996]

  Daltrey decked him with one punch. When Townshend came round, he ‘saw Roger looking at me, really, really, frightened. He was afraid that he’d killed me.’ But if Daltrey’s fist wasn’t about to kill the man, Townshend’s insane work-rate just might. That workload was so overwhelming that, in his own words, ‘I not only wrote and recorded [Quadrophenia] in 1973, I also built two quadraphonic recording studios, did a huge tour, helped Eric Clapton and his girlfriend Alice get off heroin, began to set up the Tommy movie contacts for the following year and wrote a number of songs for the next Who album.’ And throughout it all, he was a raging drunk.

  For him, the madness was becoming as real as the search for redemption. That moment when the work would stand revealed couldn’t come soon enough. Rather than waiting for the album to make the record racks and receive its plaudits (actually, initial reviews would be decidedly mixed), the first shows, in the north of England, took place a full week before the album appeared in all its lavish but delayed splendour (the insertion of a forty-page photo essay by Ethan Russell, of snapshots depicting Jimmy’s monotonous existence, held up its release).

  At the third show in Manchester, Townshend prefaced the performance of an already-abbreviated Quadrophenia by saying: ‘Now we’d like to do something from the forthcoming album. We’re still finding our way with it. We were expecting the album to be out and in your possession by now, but of course it isn’t. This album doesn’t need too much explanation ’cause it’s about everybody here, I’m sure . . . It’s about a young screwed-up, frustrated, idiotic teenager.’ Daltrey was not convinced – and nor were sections of the audience. As the band began touring the piece, their singing mouthpiece felt that the storyline needed explication. Townshend did not:

  Pete Townshend: Roger and I have different ideas about Quadrophenia . . . we get different things out of it. I think the story-line isn’t so complicated it bears much explaining. A kid sits on a rock and remembers the things that have happened in the last few days . . . The story, after all, is just a peg to hang ideas on. When Roger gets too literal about the story, I have to cut in. [1973]

  The Who singer was still complaining about the experience some two years later: ‘It’s hopeless trying to play people unfamiliar material. It’s like the worst thing any band can do. Even if it’s vaguely familiar.’ Townshend, on the other hand, was not so convinced that this was the real problem, at least not in the States, where they arrived to find that their extravagant double-album was already number two in the charts. The real problem was not onstage, where the taped parts usually worked and Daltrey’s attempts at a between-song narrative were soon judiciously trimmed, but out in the cavernous cattle-barns that passed for US arenas (and still do). The audience out front had changed. And Townshend knew it, noting as much at tour’s end:

  Pete Townshend: Quadrophenia has been getting blamed for our troubles this tour, but I don’t think that anymore. I think the audience has changed. We’ve been so self-involved the last two years we’ve missed . . . the changed experience of the audience. It wasn’t till we got here to the US that we found out such acts as Alice Cooper have not only come, but gone . . . There was a time when an audience would come to a concert and be satisfied with the myth of The Who. [1973]

  It was precisely ‘the myth of The Who’, and of rock itself, that was starting to get in the way. The days when bands could debut unreleased, or barely released, works was fast passing, even as that supreme example, Dark Side of the Moon, was storming every chart in the whole wide world. Nostalgia was becoming the order of the day. And it wasn’t only in those acoustical graveyards that Americans called arenas where concert-goers were starting to voice their displeasure at the conceit, nay cheek, of some rock performers for whom hubris was a Greek starter.

  The night after The Who departed Manchester, after the third and fourth performances of the as-yet-unreleased Quadrophenia, many of the same souls trundled down to the Palace Theatre for the first night of Neil Young’s UK tour, expecting to see the man who produced the previous year’s rich Harvest33. Instead, they got to see the truculent troubadour debut – in its entirety – his unreleased, never-really-realized Tonight’s t
he Night. Most attendees left impressed, but only by the support-act that night, the largely unknown Eagles. Townshend himself, for all his concerns about a shifting demographic among concert-goers, soon came to believe he had been wrong to take the band down the same path:

  Pete Townshend: With Quadrophenia we did tour too soon. Quadrophenia was an extremely slow album . . . [And] we [simply] weren’t prepared to work to gain our audiences’ reactions. We wanted it instant and pat, and the way to do that is to go on and play something that they recognize . . . Roger thought that Quadrophenia wouldn’t stand up unless you explained the story [on stage] . . . It was done sincerely, but I found it embarrassing . . . The whole thing was a disaster. Roger ended up hating Quadrophenia – probably ’cause it had bitten back. [1978]

  Their three-week US tour did not start any more auspiciously than the UK tour. On opening night, 20 November at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Keith Moon collapsed onstage during ‘Magic Bus’, and a young fan from the audience took over on drums for the encore. The official story, that one of his drinks had been spiked with an animal tranquilizer, merely masked Moon’s ongoing penchant for excess, which was already starting to take its toll, and would kill him within five years. An oft-bootlegged radio broadcast from a December show in Largo was disappointingly undynamic, and remains unreleased.

  They did, however, manage to give Quadrophenia a fitting swansong, performing a steaming one-hour version at their last gig of the year, at the Edmonton Sundown on 23 December, with Townshend tilting at windmill after windmill as the band gave Jimmy one glorious send-off. But by 18 May 1974, barely six months after the album’s release, The Who’s one-off stadium-show at Charlton FC featured just four songs from Quadrophenia (‘5.15’, ‘Drowned’, ‘Bell Boy’ and ‘Doctor Jimmy’). Already Townshend, peering at 60,000 hometown fans from the bottom of a whisky glass, had convinced himself Quadrophenia was another brave, grand failure – even as its reputation grew and grew in those dorm rooms where Ziggy Stardust was first introduced to Muswell Hillbillies, and the more well-versed musos drew a straight line between Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Dark Side of the Moon (a process made a great deal easier by the December 1973 release of the first two Floyd albums as the cheap-o double, A Nice Pair).

  Pete’s friend and band biographer Richard Barnes believes that ‘the fact Quadrophenia didn’t have the success he would have liked really affected Townshend. I saw him a few months later, when he was working on [the film of] Tommy, and he was in a pretty depressed state. It was years until he ever attempted anything else so musically ambitious.’ So much for moving forward. The next few Who albums – and the terrific Townshend-Lane long-player, Rough Mix (1976) – would be strictly collections of songs, good, bad and indifferent, by the oldest angry young man on the street.

  In this, too, Townshend was anticipating the coming punk revolution. Like the increasingly influential English music press, he had decided it was time to put away grand conceits. Although there was still a vanguard of determined English prog-rockers – Jethro Tull, ELP, Yes and Genesis, to name (and shame) the chief culprits – who believed they could yet pull off the great English concept album – and in Genesis’s case, almost did – the fall of 1973 saw the curtain coming down on the heyday of English album-length song-cycles as a reliable barometer of the mental health of its rock artists. Now, it was just a case of counting up the casualties.

  7. 1974–75: The Act Of (Self-)Preservation

  I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego, and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s [The Psychedelic Experience] . . . and I destroyed myself . . . I destroyed my ego and I didn’t believe I could do anything.

  – John Lennon to Jann Wenner, 1970

  Q: ‘Why do rock stars tend to have premonitions of doom?’ David Bowie: ‘’Cause they’re pretty nutty to be doing it in the first place. We’ve got pretty tangled minds. Very messed up people.’

  – David Bowie on The Dick Cavett Show, 5 December 1974

  I’ve always thought of going back to a place where you can drink tea and sit on the carpet. I’ve been fortunate enough to do that.

  – Syd Barrett to Michael Watts, 1971

  Q: Did you have an unhappy childhood?

  Ray Davies: That’s a novel.

  Q: Could we have the first chapter?

  Ray Davies: You know, I’m still only five years old. I’m trying to convince this person at the weekends that I’m still five and that’s all I want to be. I don’t want to be any more because as things are I’m able to communicate on a very basic level. I know what food I like to eat. I’ve got two pairs of shoes – one for on and one for off stage and when they wear out I buy another pair. I’m reasonably all right. I’ve got enough tea bags and maybe I can start writing again, which would be a good thing.

  – interview in NME, 20 October 1973

  At the end of 1973, those in English rock’s upper echelons who had survived the 1960s’ psychedelic onslaught with their marbles intact – and these could loosely be said to include Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, David Bowie and Roger Waters – had lucrative careers to cushion the realization, voiced by the primal-scream Lennon on The Plastic Ono Band, that the dream was over. But if the concept album was on life-support, there was still at least one hardy soul from the beat boom-years who wished to pump oxygen into its ravaged body.

  Unfortunately for Ray Davies, as for so many from his generation of English songwriters, ‘nothing was ever the same after 1973’ – the conclusion he came to at the end of his 1994 autobiography. Yet there was never any question he would keep writing and producing, come what may. For, as he also confessed partway through X-Ray, ‘Anyone who says that creativity comes from divine inspiration is certainly wrong, particularly in my case. I wasn’t writing songs for my wife, my unborn child, God or country, I was writing to stay sane.’

  By the mid-Seventies, though, it had become a case of never mind the quality, fulfil the contract. The years 1973 through 1976, during which The Kinks ran down the options on that RCA deal, fleetingly promised new vistas for the band, but they all ran aground on Davies’ obsession with making the songs fit the concept, not the other way round, as had been the case – and the benchmark of his achievement – in the years 1968 through 1971. Meanwhile the themes had become oh so familiar – the fear of failure, the spectre of the past, the worry that the rest of humanity would realize he was just as fucked-up as them:

  Ray Davies: You can get the most sophisticated man in the world, and if he’s hung up about his feet, nothing will change it. He’ll go to university, he’ll become a nuclear scientist, he’ll fly to the moon, land on the moon – and the moonman will say, ‘Hey you’ve got big feet!’ And he’ll be back at school, because that’s what they said to him at school. [1977]

  Of all those ideas for an ongoing series of concept albums, it was Preservation Act, spread over three albums and released in two parts across 1973 and 1974, which consumed Davies in the immediate aftermath of White City. But eighteen months later, when he finished the increasingly ill-conceived concept-piece, it was clear that his heart was no longer in it. When he thought about it, he decided that he had ‘spent . . . five years – storing up ideas for Preservation [Act], and The Village Green Preservation Society was like a rough sketch’. What he failed to realize was that, despite having worked himself into (and out of) another breakdown, in this particular instance the rough sketch was a rich tapestry and the full-blown version a rank xerox. Although he would return to the songs on VGPS repeatedly, those from Preservation Act would rarely be preserved in the memories and/or collections of rock fans.

  But still he would not be dissuaded. Before 1975 was out, he had another song-cycle to peddle – and this one cracked the US Top Fifty. The theme of Soap Opera was again a familiar one: ‘It is about mental illness.’ When he found it hard to come up with anything new to say he excused his mindset in somewhat familiar terms: ‘It’s very difficult if you’ve been brought up t
o be factory fodder to then find that people are interested in what you have to say. Always [this], what am I? Who am I?’ When that album also failed to find favour at home, he decided to return to his school days for the vaguely embarrassing Schoolboys in Disgrace (1976). Something deep inside continued sending him back to those days when life was simple – and sweet:

  Ray Davies: I’ll tell you when it was good. When I was walking down the road with Michelle Gross, whose dad owned the sweetshop. She was about a foot taller than I was and she had her arm around me and I said, ‘God, if I can stay with this girl forever I can have all the sweets I ever want.’ That was when it was good. [1989]

  Hence, Pete Townshend’s mid-Seventies swipe at his songwriting mentor: ‘He writes like an old man who is forever looking back on his life.’ And still more Kinks records kept trundling off the presses. Even a switch of label, to Clive Davis’s Arista, did not seem to slow Ray Davies down. But try as he might, he could not shake the sense that he was not like everybody else, that he would never belong. He was set apart, kept apart from those he was trying to reach. And even as he hurtled towards his next breakdown, he knew that no matter how many therapists they sent him along to – and the first words of the doctor who treated him after White City were, ‘Tomorrow you will have some analysis’ – only the songs could ever unlock the boy inside: