harder grind than promised in the heady days when Peter Meaden was telling us we’d be huge overnight. We passed one BBC radio audition but failed another, and also failed an audition for a recording contract with EMI. Our heavy-handed style confused a lot of older people, including record executives, and we mainly played covers of R&B material. The record labels wanted bands that wrote their own songs.
The Who kept working, trying and failing to get a guitar-smashing moment into the national newspapers. The Decca Records audition was our most encouraging. Kit’s friend Russ Conway, the popular boogie-woogie TV pianist and principal investor in Kit and Chris’s management company, arranged the audition and persuaded A&R man John Burgess to take us seriously. Kit and Chris later confided that we would have passed the audition had we played original compositions. Knowing I could write songs, they encouraged me to come up with some new material that might suit the band.
This was the most critical challenge I had ever faced. I isolated myself in the kitchen of the flat in Ealing where I kept my tape machine, listening to a few records over and over again: Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’; Charlie Mingus’s ‘Better Get It in Your Soul’ from Mingus Ah Um (I loved Mingus and was obsessed with Charlie Parker and Bebop); John Lee Hooker’s ‘Devil’s Jump’; and ‘Green Onions’ (although my record was nearly worn out). I tried to divine what it was I was actually feeling as a result of this musical immersion. One notion kept coming into my head: I can’t explain. I can’t explain. This would be the title of my second song, and I was already doing something I would often do in the future: writing songs about music.
Got a feeling inside, I can’t explain
A certain kind, I can’t explain
Feel hot and cold, I can’t explain
Down in my soul, I can’t explain
At the time I was still using a clunky old domestic tape recorder to record my songs, which I used to put down a simple demo. Barney listened to it when he got home from college and liked it. I remember him describing it as Bob Dylan with a hint of Mose Allison.
Kit and Chris, through a friend of their glamorous personal assistant, Anya Butler, met with the producer of The Kinks’ recent chart hits, Shel Talmy, who had his own label deal with Decca in the USA. He agreed to hear us.
I ran back to my tape machine and listened to The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ – not that I really needed to, it was on the radio all the time. I tightened up ‘I Can’t Explain’ and changed the lyrics so they were about love, not music. I tried to make it sound as much like The Kinks as I could so that Shel would like it. I already had the title for the song that would follow it: ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, words I had scribbled on a piece of paper while listening to Charlie Parker.
We played Shel Talmy the revised ‘I Can’t Explain’ and he booked us a session at Pye studios to record it. Shel also brought in some additional musicians, which Kit had warned me he might do. Keith jovially told the session drummer who appeared to ‘scarper’, and he did. Because Shel wasn’t sure I could play a solo, he had asked his favorite session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to sit in. And because our band had rehearsed the song with backing vocals in Beach Boys style, but not very skilfully, Shel arranged for three male session singers, The Ivy League, to chirp away in our place.
Shel Talmy got a good sound, tight and commercial, and although there was no guitar feedback I was willing to compromise to get a hit. We wouldn’t know if the gamble would pay off until after the New Year.
In November, Kit and Chris secured us a residency on Tuesday nights at the Marquee Club, a jazz and blues venue in Soho, and mounted an inspired campaign to make sure our first evening didn’t fail. In one of my art notebooks Kit and Chris found some doodling they liked for a Who logo, incorporating the Mars symbol I’d used in my design for The Detours van years before. We had already done a number of photo sessions for various magazines, but Kit and Chris organised their own, and the photographer took a solo picture of me swinging my arm.
A graphic designer friend from Ealing made the ‘Maximum R&B’ poster now legendary in collectable Who paraphernalia, and Kit and Chris had it plastered all over central London. They went further: along with a general card for hand-out, they printed up 150 special invitations to join ‘The 100 Faces’, an elite hand-picked group of Mods, with free entry to the first few weeks of our residency. Again, for some reason, only my face was featured, not one of our prettier boys.
Kit hired Chris’s school friend Mike Shaw to act as our production manager. He became the only person ever to pass through The Who camp that no one will ever say a bad word about. He was a joy. He ran around all our gigs finding the coolest-looking Mod boys and handing them cards. Our attendance was about 90 per cent male, but a few girls were in the front row at the Marquee in the early days. Attendance started slowly, but built up very quickly to a packed house.
That winter playing our regular gig at the Marquee became an event I looked forward to. I remember wearing a chamois jacket, carrying a Rickenbacker guitar, coming up from the bowels of the earth at Piccadilly Circus train station feeling as though there was nothing else I’d rather be doing. I was an R&B musician with a date to play. It was a great adventure, and I was full of ideas. In my notebooks I was designing Pop Art T-shirts, using medals and chevrons and the Union Flag to decorate jackets I intended to wear. At the Marquee I felt, like many in our audience, that Mod had become more than a look. It had become a voice, and The Who was its main outlet.
A magazine photographer visiting our flat one day for a shoot had to climb up a stepladder to get his equipment out of the knee-deep rubbish that filled the room, trash now invisible to Barney and me. After the photo was taken Kit quietly took me aside and explained that he and Chris had obtained a very smart residence and office in Eaton Place in Belgravia, and felt I should move there. I worried a little that I might appear to be moving in to sleep with Kit, but the next morning I said goodbye to a stunned Barney and moved into the exquisitely tidy bedroom – adjacent through glass doors to Kit’s – in a high-ceiling first-floor flat in a Georgian building in what is still the poshest street in London. I taped up some nifty Pop Art images cut from magazines, set up a record player and lived like a prince.
Chris, it emerged, didn’t have a bedroom in the flat, and Kit never attempted to seduce me, to my disappointment, although I probably wouldn’t have responded. Happily, though, Anya did seduce me. I was 19, she was 30, and the sex was gloriously educational. While sending me into ecstasy with her long, sharp fingernails, she told me she had spurned the advances of all three other members of the band.
Kit and Chris asked their friend Jane, wife of Kit’s old army friend Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall, to run a fan club for us. She became known as ‘Jane Who’, collected letters for us and kept a mailing list. Jane gave mail addressed to me unopened, and thinking that one day I might write this book I decided to leave one of those letters sealed until the day I finished it.1
For a time I lived under Kit’s nose quite blissfully. I felt completely safe, protected, adored, cherished and valued, although I was still smoking a lot of grass, which I think Kit disapproved of. One evening I decided to conduct an experiment. Instead of my usual ritual of listening to music stoned, I began to listen to some of my choicest records while drinking good Scotch whisky. As I listened and drank, I wrote down what was going on in my head:
I begin to feel afraid. Childhood self-pity arises. Music is inside me. Am not afraid to let it in. Finding new perceptive levels. I’m underwater, not going too deep. Going to write with eyes closed. Swimming with the fish. Unexplainable emotion now. Death.
My demons were still with me, but I was learning how to use them to fuel my creative process.
Roger