Pete Townshend: Who I Am. Pete Townshend

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СКАЧАТЬ date at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, which became a mainstay for us. By March we were playing seventeen or eighteen shows per month, and we kept up that busy schedule for quite some time.

      In a good week I was taking home nearly £30, which in 1963 was an absurd sum of money. By comparison my art-school grant for the whole year was £140, to be divided over three terms. With money in my pocket I was able to take a trip up to Selmer’s music shop in London’s Charing Cross Road and buy a Fender Pro Amp with a 15-inch speaker. It was loud, trebly and sexy. The salesman who talked me into it was John McLaughlin, who would become a jazz-fusion guitar legend.

      Early in spring 1963 I got to know Richard Barnes, whom everyone called Barney. He became a lifelong friend, ally and The Who’s principal authorised biographer. We hit it off quickly and I loved his dry, barbed humour. My awkwardness and self-absorption made me slow to learn from those around me, but Barney was forgiving of this – and every other – defect. I also knew that Barney was aware of my very real musical talent, perhaps even more than I was.

      I suffered my first desperate hangover after our drummer Doug introduced me to serial beer drinking at one of our regular gig nights at the White Hart pub. After this I began to show off a little at college, carrying a quarter bottle of whisky around in the back pocket of my Levi’s. Still, I knew that in almost every respect I was lagging behind my peers. The other boys in the band had steady girlfriends, even wives. I had occasional snogs in the back of the band’s van, but my attempts at more serious sexual experiments met with frustration.

      My college friends Nick Bartlett and Barney came to see The Detours for the first time at a gig on 29 March at a college in London. They seemed impressed. Barney had a steady girlfriend, Jan, who was very pretty, her dark hair cut in a mid-length bob, her eyes made even more dramatic with Egyptian-style kohl eyeliner. It was she who first mentioned the success of a band called The Rolling Stones. On behalf of The Detours, who were too busy to watch other bands, Barney and Jan began to investigate the music scene beyond our insular pub circuit.

      There was a lot to explore, although it turned out that the Stones were at the top of the local heap. Ealing had been the birthplace of British R&B a year before. Alexis Korner, father of the genre, had begun a regular gig at the basement Ealing Club, with the legendary Cyril Davies on blues harmonica. Brian Jones sat in from time to time, playing slide guitar. Jack Bruce played upright bass, while Mick Jagger sang Chuck Berry songs. By autumn 1962 The Rolling Stones had evolved into the band we know today, and had taken over the weekly Ealing Club R&B date. Occasionally we local art students would catch sight of them wandering around before the gig. By 1963 rumours about the Stones had become legend; there was no doubt in our minds that – The Beatles aside – this was the band to watch.

      In the spring of 1963 two photography students started putting 7-inch R&B singles onto the jukebox in Sid’s café opposite the college. One stood out: ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and the MGs. I must have played it fifty times, and I finally arranged a version for lead guitar rather than organ, which The Detours added to its repertoire. On 17 May 1963 the band played at the Carnival Ballroom at the Park Hotel in Hanwell, which was near Ealing, so all my college chums turned out. Some pretty girls from the fashion school stood at the front of the stage, pretending to scream at me like Beatles fans; they were teasing, but everyone was impressed, especially when we played the slightly funkier R&B tunes I’d managed to sneak into our otherwise catholic repertoire.

      This was a formative moment for me. My friends from college could see the band I had been so reluctant to talk about; John, Roger and Doug could see my art-school friends, and how broad-based my fellowship was there. I was still uncomfortable that some of the songs we played were chart hits by The Beatles, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Johnny Kidd and Buddy Holly. But I also knew we played enough R&B material to attract interest from some of the more discerning college musos.

      Sixty shows later, Commercial Entertainments booked us to play at St Mary’s Ballroom, Putney, several times. We supported Johnny Kidd and The Pirates once. They were a truly tight band, achieving a powerhouse sound with just lead and bass guitars and drums. We decided to go the same way, Roger allowing me to take over lead guitar so he could concentrate entirely on singing. He sold me his Epiphone solid-body guitar. Working from my Chet Atkins study pieces I began to master The Pirates’ rockabilly fingerpicking technique played by Mickey Green. I started playing a mix of rhythm and lead – what came to be called power chords – often with a jangling open string added to give the sound more colour.

      We also met our future engineer and producer Glyn Johns. He sang with The Presidents, who were popular at the venue, and was very positive about our new stripped-down line-up. Roger met his first wife Jackie at that gig, and started seeing her regularly. I dated her shapely best friend for a while. When I first got my hands inside her blouse I thought I’d gone to heaven. One day we tried to have sex. She took me to her cousin’s house where her uncle had been doing some decorating. I was wearing my best Mod outfit, with a special new pair of suede desert boots. I lay on top of her as she fiddled with my trousers, but suddenly I felt my feet go cold – literally. I’d put both of my precious new boots into a bucket of wallpaper paste.

      Jackie became pregnant in the winter, and Roger married her in March 1964, five months before their first son Simon was born. Nick was seeing Liz Reid, a pretty, blonde Scottish girl from fashion school. A few months before, he had gone out with a stunning Irish girl, also from fashion school. She had just ended a relationship so we went out as a foursome to eat Chinese food. On a tube train home that night she whispered in my ear that she wanted to sleep with me, and then, outside Ealing Common station, we smoked pot; for me it was the first time. I remember feeling I had discovered something quite important, but wasn’t precisely certain what it was.

      At home in my bedroom, Nick and Liz lay together on my bed in the dark. I was on the floor with the Irish girl. This was my first genuine sexual encounter, so the rock ’n’ roll components of sex and drugs arrived simultaneously for me. My orgasm came in seconds. The next morning, in Sid’s café, I overheard the Irish girl a few tables away laughing good-naturedly about my sexual inexperience, but I didn’t care. Skill didn’t matter, there was plenty of time for that. I had arrived at last.

I wanted to be a sculptor, but Ealing Art College lost its diploma status for Fine Arts and Sculpture, and my parents were concerned I might emerge from college without any qualification. The band still felt like a side-project to me, so I considered moving to another college. I was particularly interested in kinetic sculpture: installations combining vibrant colour, lighting, TV screens and complex, coded music. All this, I imagined, would be interactive, brought to life by the computers that Roy Ascott talked about.¹ However, I knew I would miss my friends if I left Ealing, and so, with Barney, I decided to switch to Graphic Design.

      Everything changed when I met Tom Wright, the stepson of an American Air Force officer stationed nearby. It turned out that he and his best friend Cam had been the ones responsible for adding R&B singles to the café jukebox. They were notorious for having introduced marijuana in their circle, and for their enormous record collection. One of their buddies had heard me playing blues guitar in the classroom one day and ran to bring Tom to hear me.

      I had already bought a number of blues albums of my own – by Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. I had heard Chuck Berry, but only his pop-chart stuff. Tom and Cam had albums by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, Snooks Eaglin and other blues artists entirely new to me. As long as I’d play my guitar sometimes, they’d let me come back. Every album was a revelation, but the real richness of their collection was on its fringes: Mose Allison sat alongside Joan Baez; Ray Charles alongside Bo Diddley; Jimmy Smith alongside Julie London.

      The mainstay of the collection was Jimmy Reed. They had every recording he’d ever made, and ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘Shame, Shame, СКАЧАТЬ