Pete Townshend: Who I Am. Pete Townshend

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СКАЧАТЬ Design course at Ealing, a big-shot ad-man, asked about my health. In my second year of Graphic Design, my fourth year at college, I was, according to him, producing good work. I told him my work with the band was exhausting me.

      ‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Well, how much do you earn?’

      When I told him around 30 quid a week, he was stunned. At nineteen I made more money than he did. He suggested I might be better off pursuing the band, which was the beginning of the end. After gigs I found it harder and harder to get up the next morning for class, and at some point before the summer break of 1964 I stopped going to college at all.

      My musical self-certainty drove me blindly forward. I felt I was hauling a band behind me that was ill-suited to the ideas drummed into me at college, but it was a better vehicle than the conventional life of a graphic designer. I wasn’t trying to play beautiful music, I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single absolute of our frail existence – one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Crisis less than two years before had proved that.

      On stage I stood on the tips of my toes, arms outstretched, swooping like a plane. As I raised the stuttering guitar above my head, I felt I was holding up the bloodied standard of endless centuries of mindless war. Explosions. Trenches. Bodies. The eerie screaming of the wind. I had made my choice, for now. It would be music.

      The time had also come when we realised we had to work full-time as musicians or we would be unable to compete with the likes of the Stones, The Beatles and The Kinks. Moonlighting was no longer enough. It had become essential, too, that we get our sound right.

      I sought the wisdom of Jim Marshall, who would become the inventor of the Marshall stack, the high-powered amplifier systems used by most heavy-rock guitarists since the mid-Sixties. Jim ran his music shop in West Ealing. John Entwistle, one of Marshall’s first customers, was very happy with his new cabinet of four 12-inch speakers intended for bass guitar. I was less thrilled. John, already very loud, was now too loud. I bought a speaker cabinet and powered it with a Fender Bassman head. John bought a second speaker cabinet to stay ahead of me. I quickly caught up with two Fender amplifiers, the Bassman and a Pro-Amp driving two Marshall four-by-twelve speaker cabinets. John and I were in a musical arms race.

      I was the first electric guitar player on our circuit to use two amplifiers at the same time, and I only heard much later that my then hero Steve Cropper of Booker T and the MGs sometimes recorded with two amplifiers back to back. The distortion factors introduced by each amplifier became much more complex and rich when fed back reciprocally. I had also begun to pile one Marshall speaker on top of the other to emulate the conditions at the Oldfield Hotel hall where I had first put a speaker on a piano in very close proximity to where I stood playing the guitar, creating feedback. This configuration is what later became known as the Marshall stack. I remember Jim trying to talk me out of it at first, telling me they could topple over and kill someone. The first cabinets I had were clipped together with heavy luggage clips he provided. Over a period of months I persuaded Jim and his team to make his amplifier not just louder but also brighter sounding, and capable of more distortion when pressed hard.

      In rock ’n’ roll the electric guitar was becoming the primary melodic instrument, performing the role of the saxophone in jazz and dance music, and the violin in Klezmer. I began using feedback more creatively; sometimes my guitar solo would simply be a long, grinding howl full of evolving harmonics and whistles. But in its enormity I discovered something euphoric, a sound full of movement and cascading melody. This is something that later exponents of electric guitar feedback explored far better, especially Jimi Hendrix.

      Oddly, I felt some shame too during these droning moments, but not for any self-indulgent act of musical desecration. In truth I had no idea what the origin could be of all the contradictory emotions I felt when creating these warlike sounds. Something was bubbling up from my subconscious mind.

      Jim Marshall had struggled to impress his father, a boxer, and failed. By one of those strange quirks of fate, on the occasion of Jim’s last performance as a drummer my dad was playing with him in a small orchestra Jim had put together. Jim’s father arrived drunk, and began to taunt his son from the floor. Suddenly Jim lost his temper, flew at his father and beat him badly, even though the older man was much more powerful. Jim never played the drums professionally again.

      I was experimenting all the time, trying to find new ways to play my guitar on stage, inspired directly by Malcolm Cecil. He had demonstrated unusual ways of playing his double bass, in one case breaking a string, then being challenged by being given a woodsaw which he bravely used to cut through the rest of the strings, damaging the surface of his instrument. I fell upon my Rickenbacker with all manner of scraping, banging, bending and wrenching, which resulted in howling acoustic feedback. Encouraged too by the work of Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of auto-destructive art, I secretly planned to completely destroy my guitar if the moment seemed right.

      The Who still seemed like a temporary, disposable part of my private plan. We would chop away at our own legs. Certainly, R&B on its own didn’t seem to me enough of a new idea; it was just the emerging bandwagon predicted by the music papers. On stage I was becoming increasingly anarchic and narcissistic; film of the period shows me spending more time moving my hips than fingering notes. But I also copied neat solos by Kenny Burrell, the jazz guitarist. Had I studied properly and practised more conventionally in these years, I would have become a more proficient guitar player and less of a showman.

      During this period I often looked effeminate. Since I’d never really had a steady girlfriend, rumours went round that I might be gay. In some ways I felt happy with this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive and courageous; in any case one’s sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood. I myself had no interest in appearing attractive, much less sexual, on stage; in the end all the disturbing experiences of my childhood went into my composing.

      One day a girl came to claim all the albums that belonged to Cam, bringing a letter from him confirming that this was his wish. It affected our collection badly. A little later we received instructions from Tom to package his albums and send them to him in Ibiza. These back-to-back losses were difficult to deal with. Suffering from music withdrawal, I began to collect albums myself, replacing all I could find, but many were rare. Barney and I discovered Bob Dylan, and listened intently to his first two albums. There was something extraordinary there, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

      Barney and I had been living in total squalor, and then we lost the lease to the flat altogether. Mum, always alert to a way to fix things for other people, discovered that the tenant in the apartment immediately above the Townshend homestead at Woodgrange Avenue was leaving. She secured the lease and Barney and I moved in. It was a splendid, rambling place. The rent was £8 a week, and we had five wonderful rooms, a bathroom and kitchen. I began drawing elaborate, ambitious plans to develop the place into art rooms, a recording studio and recreation rooms. But it was hard snapping out of our squalid living habits. We didn’t purchase a single item of furniture and slept on single mattresses on the floor. We discovered an extremely heavy material in sheet-board form that we intended to use to soundproof one of the rooms and we filled one entire room with it, but never even started any of our schemes.

      We continued to get stoned and listen to records in bed, allowing the detritus of our existence to pile up until we could persuade someone else to tidy up for us. Newspapers, food cans, cigarette butts and dirty coffee cups littered the room we slept in and used to entertain visitors. When hungry I simply went downstairs and took food from my parents’ cupboards. People came and went – art-school mates, girls we knew, and СКАЧАТЬ