pete townshend on recording quadrophenia: extract from who i am
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HarperCollinsPublishers7785 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Pete Townshend 2012
Permission to reproduce extracts from letters is gratefully acknowledgedto Roger Daltrey, Bill Curbishley and Jackie Curbishley.
Melody Maker extracts on pages 205 and 211
IPC Media/IPC+ Syndication
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrightmaterial reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publisherswould like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to
incorporate missing acknowledgements in any futureedition of this book.
Pete Townshend asserts the moral right tobe identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book isavailable from the British Library
HB ISBN 978-0-00-746603-0TPB ISBN 978-0-00-746604-7EB ISBN 978-0-00-746687-0
Printed and bound in Great Britain byClays Ltd, St Ives plc
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publishers.
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16
A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE
In early 1973 I made several visits to Eric Claptons house, butnothing had changed. Lord Harlech, Alices father, joined me
there one day. It was tense. While Alice was out of the room,
Eric told Alices father his fears that if he and Alice stopped
using heroin their relationship might change, and he might not
still feel in love with her. Harlech gently made it clear that he
cared only for their lives at this point. Later he called me and
proposed that to help Eric I should ask him to perform inJanuary at a concert at the Rainbow for a charity Lord Harlech
supported.
When Eric agreed in principle I began to put a band together.
I turned first to Ronnie Wood, who provided positive, gener-
ous energy. We invited Jim Capaldi, Traffics drummer, and
Steve Winwood. Rick Grech from Family, whom I adored,
played bass. He introduced me to amyl nitrate in liquid form,telling me it was harmless, not a real drug at all. I hadnt used
any drugs since 1967, so my tolerance was low, and I was
impressed by the simple power of having the blood supply to
my brain quickened.
We started rehearsals at Ronnie Woods house, The Wick (a
house I had always loved, and dreamt of owning). Stevie
Winwood didnt appear. Speedy Aquaye, Georgie Fames
conga player, played along with Jim Capaldi on drums. Ron
Wood played in support of Eric, mainly slide guitar. I played
electric rhythm, chugging along in my usual way. Eric had a
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244 PETE TOWNSHEND: WHO I AM
very clear idea of what he wanted to do, and we very quickly
started to sound like a band. The room we rehearsed in was
oval, opening through three sets of french doors to the gardenand an open view of the Thames. Ronnies wife Krissy sat on
a stool smiling like an angel, wearing a flowery dress, her
blonde hair framing her schoolgirl-pretty face, which belied
both her stunning figure and her mischievous spirit. She made
it like a rock n roll affair that would have been perfectly
appropriate in California.
With only a few days to spare before we moved to a propertheatre to do a soundcheck, there was still no sign of Stevie
Winwood. I rang and threatened him with unspecified
violence, and the next day he duly arrived with his Hammond
organ. From then on the band took off into another level of
stratus cloud. There had always been a deep connection
between Eric and Stevie; they had, of course, played together
in Blind Faith, and worked together intuitively.The soundcheck was a breeze. On the night of the concert I
rolled up to Ronnie Woods house in my Mercedes 600 limo
and we all piled in. It felt like an epic event. Ronnie Lane and
his partner Katie came along for the ride. Stevie rolled a joint,
and I took a small puff of my first marijuana in more than five
years.
The concert, on 13 January 1973, passed flawlessly, and theatmosphere was quite glorious. Everyone who attended had
good things to say about it. Ron Wood played an astounding
solo exchange with Eric on Layla, and we extended the song
for ten minutes (it was edited for the live album release). With
no leaping around, I wasnt affected by the usual adrenaline
rush I had with The Who, which allowed me to enjoy every
note of the music played that evening. The stage seemed to
elevate slightly as we ended.
Id been part of the creation of a new band from the ground
up. Id known precisely how to play my part as a solid rhythm
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A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE 245
guitarist, and my contribution had been valuable. I hadnt
worked like this since the early days of The Who, and it felt
very good indeed.
Once the concert was over I settled back into my boozy
routine, wine at home with my family, cognac in my studio
when I was composing. I returned to Quadrophenia, the story
still incomplete, looking for a simple hook on which all the
music could hang.
I began to experience a powerful comedown from the lack ofamyl nitrate. I felt cold, depressed, tragic, lost and hopeless. On
a dark, wet, winter weekend in the jerry-built cottage at Cleeve,
with the river flooding part of the lawns, the wind howling
through the badly made doors and windows, my memory
pulled me back to a single night when I was 19 years old.
I had slept for a few hours under Brighton pier in 1964 with
my art-school friend, the pretty, strawberry-blonde Liz Reid.We had been together for a riotous night at the Aquarium
Ballroom after our gig on the night of a ModRocker street
battle on the seafront. Walking along the beach in the dark,
under the pier, trying to stay out of the drizzling rain, wed
come across a group of Mod boys in their anoraks. They were
giggling as the tide came in, getting their feet wet. We sat with
them for a while. We were all coming down from takingpurple hearts, the fashionable uppers of the period.
As I thought back to that night, a sense of falling and vertigo
came flooding back with the flooding river outside I felt that
same sense of depression and hopelessness. But I also felt
again the remembered romantic warmth of nodding off on the
milk-train home in the early hours, with Liz by my side. For a
short time we had both felt like Mods. There was something
wonderful in all that. We also fell in love, and yet I didnt go
on another date with Liz, never again. The moment with her
was frozen, exalted and would always be special.
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246 PETE TOWNSHEND: WHO I AM
In the house at Cleeve, the river raging outside in the black-
ness as I looked back, I realised Id worked up or down to
this moment of epiphany for quite a few months. I wasntactually alone: I had a wife, kids and friends asleep upstairs in
the cottage. I grabbed a notebook and, anxiously and quickly,
while still in this sad, lonely mood, scribbled the story featured
on the inside sleeve of the original vinyl album of
Quadrophenia.
This was the story of Jimmy, a young Mod, hopeless,
stranded on a rock in the rain, wondering if he might findredemption through the recounting of his pathetic life thus far
by the four members of the band he felt had once reflected
him, now loved and lost, just as he had loved and lost every-
thing else important to him as a teenage Mod.
I wanted Quadrophenia to be released in quadrophonic sound,
four channels representing the four facets of my hero Jimmy,each channel taking the form of one member of The Who. As
the recording unfolded it became clear that, technically speak-
ing, Quadrophenia was going to be a complicated, audacious
project. I planned to emulate Walter Carloss Sonic Seasonings
album, with extraordinary soundscapes between tracks
providing atmosphere for my simple story. I wanted to capture
the raging sea in quadrophonic sound.My Cleeve studio would make a terrific quadrophonic
mixing suite, but it couldnt accommodate The Who for
recording. I needed a large commercial studio whose control
room included a quadrophonic speaker array I could trust.
Nothing like this existed in London, so we would have to do
what Id done in Cleeve, and build it ourselves. I turned to
Wiggy.
Wiggy, our dedicated, technically driven, seemingly insane
production manager, had started life with the band as Keith
and Johns driver (a baptism by fire), had progressed to
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A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE 247
looking after lighting, and then to dealing with promoters on
the road, booking hotels, making travel plans and bailing us
out of jail when he wasnt conspiring with us in the businessof getting arrested in the first place.
I explained to Wiggy that the studio at Cleeve would be fine
for mixing, but that the recording room there was basically a
tractor garage. He invited me to check out the road crews
storage facility and tape archive in Thessaly Road in Battersea,
which turned out to be a very large church hall full of road
gear.What a pity we dont have enough time to turn this build-
ing into a studio in time to record the tracks, I said.
Wiggy screwed up his eyes. When do you want it?
Sort of now? I replied apologetically.
Now, he repeated.
That would be good.
Six weeks later, through Wiggys employment of a troop ofthirty workers from an off-season circus, and with consider-
able help from John Alcock of Trackplan, we moved in. The
large studio room was complete, massively soundproofed,
lined in hardwoods, with two booths, one for grand piano,
one for acoustic guitar, and another smaller corridor that
doubled for guide vocal. The layout was perfect for us. I
believe Ramport, as the studio was known, was the first studioin London to offer three isolation booths in this way. It meant
we could record drums, bass, piano and acoustic guitar with
a guide vocal simultaneously.
The sound was glorious. We hired Ronnie Lanes mobile,
and used that to record the basic tracks until the work and
acoustics in our own control room were sorted out.
For Quadrophenias album sleeve I felt we needed an
approach that was photographic, truly authentic in detail.
Glyn Johns, who had co-produced Whos Next, suggested his
close friend Ethan Russell to shoot the sleeve photo for that
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248 PETE TOWNSHEND: WHO I AM
album in 1971. Although I hadnt personally liked that
obelisk-pissing album cover, I loved Ethan and his work, and
knew he was perfect for a serious photo-document about ayoung Mod.
Barney had come back into my life around the time Karen
and I became interested in LSD and Meher Baba, back in
1967. He too became a follower of the Silent Master. From
then on we saw each other often, and I regarded him as inval-
uable in all matters relating to The Who. On this occasion he
helped put together some Mod consultants and a group ofpeople to pose as models for the Quadrophenia shoot. My
brother Paul and Janie Simons future wife were also in the
cast. It felt like a family affair.
Recording Quadrophenia with The Who was a joyful experi-
ence. Not having a driving licence, I travelled to and from
Ramport studio in Battersea by speedboat on the Thames.Inside the studio the walls were hung with Who trophies
gold discs, awards and souvenirs, most of which Id never seen
before. A flight case containing a full bar was always sitting
by the piano booth. I drank Rmy Martin by the pint from an
old-fashioned, heavy, dimpled mug, borrowed from the local
pub. Keiths drumkit faced the huge window between the
studio and control room, John was set up to his right and meto his left just as we appeared on stage. When Roger was
present he occupied a vocal booth next to the control room.
The studio was filled with exotic instruments we rarely
played: marimbas, glockenspiels, xylophones, vibraphones,
gongs, drumkits and tympani. (Keith knocked them all over in
the finale of the album.) There was also a Hammond organ,
electric pianos, a beautiful Bsendorfer piano, guitars, ampli-
fiers and all kinds of strange things. Wiggy had purchased
them from Mannys Music Store in New York City, and
charged them to a touring account.
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A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE 249
The control room completed in June, about a month after
we began recording was graced with brand new Studer tape
machines, 16-track, 8-track and twin stereo machines. Everyadd-on gadget deemed necessary was present in triplicate. We
had a gorgeous, eccentric, blue Helios desk, de rigueur in rock
at that time. Instead of the usual two (or at the most four)
large monitor speakers our control room had twelve JBL
4320s! Four pairs at the front, two pairs at the back. The
sound level was monstrous.
There was a button on the desk that said Do Not Press.The button had no purpose other than to create shock
and was potentially the stuff of heart-attack. If pressed, a
nuclear explosion shuddered the room at a reading of about
138db. The effect would send most normal folk to the floor in
tears.
Ironically, because of the UK miners strikes, triggered by
mining disasters and poor working conditions, there weremassive strikes while we were recording the Quadrophenia
album in 1973, and we had to work with a government-
imposed three-day working week meant to preserve energy.
After a couple of weeks preparation the Ramport recording
began in earnest on 22 June. Kit pretended to be the albums
producer for the first several weeks. Showing up smashed,usually extremely late, he sometimes brought delicious but
unwanted food from the trendy South Kensington restaurant
AD8, in which he had shares. He scribbled his usual incom-
prehensible notes on tape boxes, and for a while prevented
our engineer Ron Nevison doing his job properly.
By the end of the second week I had had enough. Kit had
been distracting the recording process, erasing tapes while I
was out of the room, and I just snapped. Close to punching
Kit, I sacked him instead. For weeks afterwards we were
visited by irritated heroin dealers trying to find him.
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Ramport started to take on a new life. I loved working
there. Wiggy and Keith always managed to hire gorgeous,
sexy women to help run the studio. Three local girls sat at thedesk behind the control-room window, watching us play,
wide-eyed and impressed. There was no better audience.
When John started work on the brass parts, he gathered for
the purpose at least twenty or thirty magnificent trumpets,
horns and valve trombones. He could play all of them, writing
out his parts on manuscript paper like an orthodox composer,
and working through the recording meticulously until his lipsstarted to go numb. He was wonderful to work with, disci-
plined, funny and inspired. What he arranged and played on
a whole variety of exotic brass instruments fitted my own
synthesiser and strings arrangements perfectly. The Who
members still had that one all-important facility when we
were making music: we listened to each other.
The rule we established during recording was that energeticmusical rage would be used throughout. We didnt need
throwaway tracks for light relief, we didnt need light and
shade, irony or humour. An iconic Daltrey bellow could
convey an extraordinary range of human emotion: withering
sadness, self-pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual despera-
tion, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage
and frustration, joy and triumph.The angst of those teenage years in which we all feel misun-
derstood is easy to make fun of, but its real, and it brings my
hero Jimmy to the brink of suicide. When, at the end of the
album version of the Quadrophenia story, Jimmy steals a boat
and takes it out to a rock in the middle of the sea, his anguished
but jubilant cry, Love reign oer me, suggests that he has
finally been able to integrate his multiple selves. Even as author
and composer I realised I had no right to decide whether or
not Jimmy should end his own life. I let Jimmy decide for
himself.
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A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE 251
Studio recording was completed by 1 August. Mixing began
at my studio in a barn two days later. I was excited by this
move, and looked forward to creating the soundscapes I feltwould transform the music wed just recorded into a stunning
sonic journey. When finished it would provide us with a rock-
opera piece cohesive enough to replace even improve on
Tommy as the backbone of our stage show.
I spent part of the summer recording sound effects: rain,
storms, thunder, trains, traffic and of course the sea. I also
commissioned a radio announcer to cover the Mods andRockers battles on the beaches, and recorded myself walking
along a beach singing the first few lines of Sea and Sand to
use as a prelude. Taping birds taking off on the river was a
major coup, and I had a lucky moment as I approached a
gaggle of geese in my punt. This kind of sound design is almost
as fulfilling to me as composing music.
Mixing ran from 3 August to 12 September. There were afew short breaks for business, family (as it was the holiday
season) and catching up on the quadrophonic technology I
hoped would allow me to do a quad remix once wed
completed the stereo. This was the most intensely creative and
demanding studio work I had ever done.
Thus far, by mid-September 1973, every part of my evolvingplan for Quadrophenia had unfolded gloriously. Apart from
Keiths occasional antics the band had supported me, given me
creative space and done the most extraordinary work in the
studio. All we needed was a month and we might have finished
things properly. Instead, I was shocked to read in the press
that the UK release date of the double album was less than a
month away, on 13 October, with the first tour date a little
more than two weeks later.
I still had to complete the quadrophonic mixes that I esti-
mated would take about a month. And Id figured that the rest
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252 PETE TOWNSHEND: WHO I AM
of the work we had to do mastering the stereo album in Los
Angeles, mastering a quadrophonic version, preparing quad-
rophonic backing tapes for our stage rehearsals, rehearsingand getting the show on the road would take us through the
winter. Id imagined we would probably tour the album in
spring 1974, but the idiots at Track couldnt bear to miss the
lucrative Christmas selling period, and forced the premature
release date.
I should say, in their defence, that the idiots at Track were
as deeply in the red financially as The Who by this time, sotheir decision was probably necessary to keep the company
afloat. Building Ramport studio had cost 330,000 at the time
of opening (nearly ten times that at todays standards). Roger
was on edge. He had been harbouring grave doubts about our
managers honesty.* The heavy spending of his fellow band
members, and Wiggy for the new studio was driving Roger
crazy.Tension was building for me, too. When I rushed from
Cleeve to Shepperton with stage tapes that had taken forty-
eight hours to prepare, having had no sleep at all, and Roger
announced he had waited long enough and was about to go
home, I flipped. It wasnt Rogers fault, but I lashed out at
him, trying to give him the Abbie Hoffman treatment with the
neck of the guitar, while a film crew recorded for posterityevery move we made. Roger responded by knocking me out.
Some observers claim I arrived drunk. Yes, Bob and I had
celebrated finishing the stage tapes with a brandy in my limo,
but on this occasion it would have been mainly exhaustion
and frustration, not booze, that was ailing me.
* * *
* I may have sacked Kit as a record producer but he was still The Whos managerand we were still on Track records, the label owned by Kit and Chris.
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A BEGGAR, A HYPOCRITE 253
Critical reaction to Quadrophenias October 1973 release was
relatively muted compared with the raging success ofTommy,
but over the years it has come to be seen as superior to Tommyboth musically and conceptually, and as my redemption after
the collapse ofLifehouse.* The album sleeve note ends this
way:
So thats why Im here, the bleeding boat drifted off and Im
stuck here in the pissing rain with my life flashing before me.
Only it isnt flashing, its crawling. Slowly. Now its just thebare bones of what I am.
A tough guy, a helpless dancer.
A romantic: is it me for a moment?
A bloody lunatic. Ill even carry your bags.
A beggar, a hypocrite, love reign over me.
Schizophrenic? Im Bleeding Quadrophenic.
Roger was the helpless dancer; John, the romantic; Keith, the
bloody lunatic; and I, needless to say, was the beggar/hypo-
crite. But the four aspects of Jimmy the Mods multiple person-
ality were, in a sense, allto be found in me, and I had always
known it.
I had spent money creating a quadrophonic PA system similar
to that used at the time by Pink Floyd. Again Roger was
concerned about the cost, being particularly attuned to the
financial chaos that surrounded us. We all had a longstanding
gripe with Kit and Chris over the fact that seven years previ-
ously we had allowed our recording contract to be vested with
* Commercially it reached the highest position of any Who album in the States atNo. 2 and in the long term has achieved the recognition I hoped for it. IGN, forinstance, placed Quadrophenia at No. 1 in their list of the greatest classic rockalbums of all time.
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254 PETE TOWNSHEND: WHO I AM
Track (instead of directly with Polydor). We had thought that
we would be partners or shareholders: this never happened.
Jimi Hendrix was their biggest signing by far, but Id broughtthem two No. 1 artists in Arthur Brown and Thunderclap
Newman, and had received no royalties.
I was also covering some of Keiths day-to-day expenses by
lending him money that I clawed back in band meetings with
accountants that he rarely attended. Kit and Chris didnt try
to hide their troubles, or their addictions at the time. They had
hired two managerial second-in-commands in Peter Rudge(who went on to manage the Stones office in New York for a
while) and Bill Curbishley, a childhood friend of Chriss.
Keith himself had massive personal problems at this time.
We all knew he was crazy about his wife Kim, so it was hard
to work out what he was doing, bringing girls in and out of
the studio, behaving as though we were on the road.
Meanwhile my best friend Barney had taken to spending a lotof time at Tara House, ostensibly to hang out with Keith, but
Barney had fallen in love with Kim.
When Kim left the family home in October to file for
divorce, Barney sought out my advice. He wanted my permis-
sion to pursue her he was terribly torn between loyalty to the
band and his new passion for Kim. I pleaded with him not to
be a party to the break-up, as it would mean my having tochoose between him and Keith. Barney gave himself some time
to consider my plea, and missed his moment. Kim went to stay
with Ian McLagan (Mac) from The Faces. A week later Kim
and Mac were an item. They fled somewhere together, leaving
Keith to make death threats while Barney went back to Jan.
Not for the first time it occurred to me that I had to look no
farther than life right around me to find the makings of a rock
opera at least of a rock soap opera.
I listened to Keith on the finished Quadrophenia album. His
playing was great, but I worried about him: he had lost his
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