Pete Townshend: Who I Am. Pete Townshend

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СКАЧАТЬ quite shy, and although no girl complained when we did have sex, I never really felt on a par with the other guys in the band who seemed such old hands.

      I developed quite an unpleasant streak at this time (I have this on good authority from my friends). I became increasingly critical and cynical, and in arguments often twisted the facts to fit my brief. I adored Barney, but he too was growing cynical. Perhaps we were smoking too much grass. I remember the apartment we shared shrouded in a grey pall. The stuff we were buying was certainly getting stronger.

      Doug Sandom’s sister-in-law Rose found us a benefactor in Helmut Gorden, a single man who wanted some excitement in his life. He became our manager, bought us a van and introduced us to some major agents who booked us shows here and there. Otherwise we continued to play the local pub circuit in our immediate neighbourhood. Unknown to us, Commercial Entertainments, who had promoted most of these local shows, had decided to put The Who under contract, but my parents had refused to sign anything on my behalf.

      Helmut Gorden managed to get us an audition with Fontana Records, not knowing that Jack Baverstock, chief of the company at the time, was one of Mum’s closest friends. She put in a word for us. Fontana’s A&R man, Chris Parmienter, heard us play in a rehearsal room and liked us, but he felt our new drummer, Doug Sandom, was too old.

      Seeing our chance at a record deal fading, I cold-bloodedly announced to the band that I felt sure Doug would want to stand down. Doug was deeply hurt by this, especially because, unknown to me, he had defended me against my being thrown out of the band a few months earlier when another auditioning agent said I was gangly, noisy and ugly. Doug did stand down, with some dignity, so we got our break. It is one of the actions of my career I most regret. Doug had always been a friend and mentor to me, not to mention he was the first person to get me really drunk.

      We tried a few new drummers, including Mitch Mitchell, who went on to play with Jimi Hendrix. But Keith Moon appeared one day at one of our regular dates at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, and as soon as he began to play we knew we’d found the missing link. He told us his favourite drummer was Buddy Rich, but he also liked British bandleader Eric Delaney, who used twin bass drums. He failed to mention until much later that he was an obsessive fan of Californian surf music, but the band he was playing with was called The Beachcombers, so we should have guessed.

      Keith had been taking lessons from Carlo Little, the drummer with Screaming Lord Sutch, who was a performer from the previous wave of novelty bands on the small gig circuit. An eccentric player, Keith seemed to be showing off all the time, pointing his sticks up in the air and leaning over the drums, face thrust forward as if to be nearer the front of the stage. But he was loud and strong. Slowly, too, we realised that his fluid style hid a real talent for listening and following, not just laying down a beat.

      Roger tried to befriend Keith, but Keith kept his distance. He also seemed to see Roger’s success in pulling girls at our gigs as a challenge. They sometimes chased the same girls in those early days, and it was never clear to me who was winning. I wasn’t sure how Keith felt about me in the first few months he was in the band, nor whether he’d support my arty manifesto; time would tell. Keith’s main pal in the band became John. They were hysterically funny together, and shared an apartment for a while. Roger and I got the impression they did almost everything together, including having sex with girls. It must have been mayhem.

      Despite the pain I had caused by my disloyalty to Doug, it became clear that with Keith Moon in the band and a new record deal we had a real chance at a career in music. I had already written a couple of decent songs, and was using an old tape recorder to write new ones in the style of Bob Dylan. Through a friend of Helmut Gorden we met Peter Meaden, a publicist who seemed to know all the teenybopper magazine editors. Peter was much impressed by the antics of Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who had a tough henchman who acted as his protector and sometimes enforcer. So Meaden found one of his own in a chap we came to know as Phil the Greek, who was sharply dressed and good-looking, with a vicious streak. He and I became quite good friends.

      What Peter Meaden did do for us was to enact a thesis Barney and I had already gleaned at art school: every new product, including every new band, needed an image if it was to succeed. That is, we needed an identifiable style: outfit, haircut, and if possible a new way of making music. Barney, his girlfriend Jan and I talked late into the night about how to capitalise on this extraordinary time; we were smart, and we had a band that might make good if we got things right. Barney and Jan seemed almost as excited as I was about the prospect of The Who breaking big.

      Peter Meaden also emphasised the importance of the Mod movement for us. That was the style and image he wanted us to embrace. Meaden was one of the authors and architects of the new vocabulary used by Mods, and I was eager to learn the lingo – beyond the little I’d learned when I was dating Carol Daltrey. Musically I felt I was already on course. Barney and Jan had both constantly urged me to develop my sound and guitar solos, and to utilise all the wildest, most pretentious ideas from our old Ealing art-school lectures.

      John Entwistle, always uneasy with being merely a bass player, began to open up his sound as well. He already played louder than most other bass players, but now he began to play with more harmonics. When he later discovered wire-wound bass strings, his sound evolved into the one we recognise today, but even at this time his playing was expressive and creative, almost a second lead instrument. As I developed my sound, so did John, and it is now much clearer to the world what he did to advance the craft of electric bass guitar playing, especially in his development of special strings. We each occupied a specific part of the sonic spectrum, and although we occasionally attempted to dominate each other, the end result was that John’s sound perfectly complemented my own.

      Against John’s loquacious bass lines and Keith’s liquid drumming I fell back further into using powerful, slab chords. My solos were often simply howling feedback, or stabbing noises, but never quite loud enough to suit me. One day in 1964 Jim Marshall delivered me an amplifier system I was reasonably happy with, a 45-watt amp that had a crisp American sound, but when you turned it up it screamed like a Spitfire, that essential British war machine – sleek, simple, undefeatable. I bought two, and used one to drive each of my speaker stacks of eight 12-inch speakers.

      Now not only was my sound unique, it was so loud it shook most of the small halls in which we performed. Jim had no idea his amplifier design would make him rich, and I had no idea it would make me strong.

      Despite my interest in songwriting, Peter Meaden decided he was going to write the two songs we would record for our first experience in a studio, the Fontana session. He had already persuaded us that The Who was a tacky, gimmicky name; it sounded uncool, so we were to record as The High Numbers. ‘Numbers’ was the term used for a Mod subgroup of lieutenants that rated below the fashion-leading ‘Faces’ (among whom Peter Meaden no doubt saw himself as a major player), but above the ‘Tickets’, the ordinary kids on the dance floor.

      What was happening in the Mod movement was based on trendsetting fashion statements and dance moves by local Faces that were immediately copied by the rest of the kids in any particular locale. Meaden wanted to help that transmission along with coded messages in our songs. His idea fit so neatly into what I’d been taught at art college that I readily agreed to allow him to go ahead. We went to the home of Guy Stevens, a Face and the leading DJ at the exclusive Soho Scene Club, the most fashionable Mod stronghold in London. Guy lent Peter a couple of then rare R&B records that we all liked, and Peter borrowed liberally from them, replacing the lyrics with his own.

      At the time we were getting most of our inspiration from growling R&B songs by Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf. Peter’s two songs were cool enough, but had very little of that driving R&B beat with its hard-edged guitar sound. Guitar feedback, a staple of our live shows, was entirely absent from the two sides Peter had written. On ‘Zoot Suit’, which was based on ‘Misery’ by The Dynamics, I play weedy jazz guitar, demonstrating that СКАЧАТЬ