because I was young, but really alive, unencumbered by tradition, property and responsibility.
The Who played a string of summer shows, some at seaside towns, which brought back happy childhood memories of Dad’s band. We were invited to play in Sweden, where Chris thought we could perform without our usual equipment, but this proved an insane notion. Borrowing gear from our support bands, some who could hardly speak English, and trying to explain to them that we were expected by the audience to smash their gear to pieces just didn’t work. It was a frustrating tour. The Swedish press seemed to be really looking forward to some smashed guitars and were vocal in their disappointment.
We returned to Sweden again for three shows in October, and in an unfortunate recurrence of bad luck our gear got misrouted and we repeated lacklustre shows with borrowed gear. Keith, John and I took a lot of pep pills on this trip, prompting constant, mindless chattering, and in Denmark, worn down by our hyperactivity, Roger finally complained. When Keith challenged him, Roger lashed out with his fists, bloodying Keith’s nose, turning what would have been a minor spat into a melodrama.
One significant thing about this outburst was Keith’s response. Instead of responding with humiliation, he seemed to sober up. It was clear he was about to establish a boundary that Roger could never cross again.
Keith and John said they didn’t want to work with Roger any more, but after a long period of uncertainty Chris met with Roger and asked him to never use his fighting skills to win an argument again. Roger agreed, so Keith and John decided to put the matter behind them.
***
Home from Sweden we recorded the final version of ‘My Generation’. Kit had heard my first demo, a version that was very much inspired by Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’, a song we later introduced into our stage repertoire. The vocal on my demo was laid back in imitation of Mose, casual and confident. Kit hadn’t really seen the promise in the song, but Chris persuaded me to try a second demo with a heavier guitar riff. Then Kit chimed in, observing that the music was rather repetitive and needed several modulations – changes of key – to bring it to life.
This worried me a little, partly because I saw Ray Davies as a master of the art of modulation and I didn’t want to be accused of copying him. Chris picked up on a stutter on my vocal on the second demo, so I played him John Lee Hooker’s ‘Stuttering Blues’. Roger had been experimenting with stuttering on stage ever since Sonny Boy Williamson Jr had joined us on harmonica at our first Marquee dates; Sonny Boy used a stutter rhythmically when he sang. Before I completed the third demo we experimented until the stutter became exaggerated and obvious. On this final demo we also created space for an Entwistle bass solo. John was becoming the outstanding bass revolutionary of the day, and I wanted to provide him with a vehicle for his incredible playing.
I was listening to a lot of new music. London was full of specialist record shops, and I visited them all. A high point that summer was the UK release of Miles Davis’s live concert from Carnegie Hall, 1964, featuring his wonderful rendering of ‘My Funny Valentine’. This led me to Miles’s Sketches of Spain. I also found Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, and listened to some Wagner operas for the first time. Best of all, I found two great albums by the Everly Brothers. One was called Rock and Soul, the other Rhythm and Blues. Noting the shift to R&B and soul music among groups in the British invasion of the USA, the Everly Brothers, whose superb stream of hit singles I’d grown up with in the late Fifties and early Sixties, had gone into the studio with their own incredible session musicians from Los Angeles and Nashville to show us how it could best be done.
The Everly Brothers played a number of R&B classics, but it was their original material – or the very obscure material they introduced as covers – that I thought exceptional. ‘Love Is Strange’ is an eerie bluegrass song that the Everlys transformed into a driving showcase for jangling electric guitars and nasal vocals. The Everlys’ composition ‘Man with Money’ is also a magnificent song. Their interpretation of Roy Orbison’s ‘Love Hurts’ was excellent too. Roger, John and Keith loved the new tracks as much as I did, so we incorporated all three of these songs into our repertoire. There were few artists that all four of us respected and enjoyed, and the Everly Brothers were among them.
I lost contact with Barney. I missed him and my other art school friends, but I assumed my separation from them would be brief. I still imagined the band would have a short career and then implode, at which time I could go back to my studies, installations and future life as an artist. Suddenly, putting things into perspective for us all, our beloved production manager Mike Shaw fell asleep at the wheel of a minivan while delivering stage lights to one of Kit and Chris’s other bands up north. The accident broke his neck and he was paralysed from the shoulders down.
I went with Chris’s personal assistant, Patricia Locke, to see Mike at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Despite having no feeling below the neck Mike insisted that he needed to feel Patricia’s breasts, which she bravely tried to facilitate, and Mike bravely tried to follow through. His sense of humour and appreciation of the absurd would sustain Mike through many difficult years of adjustment. But the effect of his disablement on The Who, and on Kit and Chris, was terrible. He was truly adored by all of us, and none of us had encountered such difficulty until then.
On 2 November, at a celebratory return gig at the Marquee, we played the three Everly songs, along with the final version of ‘My Generation’, live for the first time, just after its release.
I was twenty. Many of my old friends were married; some even had children. But I still lacked the courage to pursue girls and risk rejection.
Keith, John and I bought a 1936 Packard V12 hearse for £30, drove it home from Swindon and parked it outside my flat. At some point it disappeared. I feared it had been stolen, but when I reported this the police told me it had been towed away. Someone important had complained about it.
Out of nowhere I received a call from a man who wanted to buy the Packard. It emerged it had been impounded at the request of the Queen Mother. She had to pass it every day, and complained that it reminded her of her late husband’s funeral. The bill to recover the car was over £200, an absurdly large sum of money, but the buyer offered to pay the fee in return for ownership. I agreed, and resentfully dedicated ‘My Generation’ to the Queen Mother.
I purchased a 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II. I knew nothing about the car, but I loved it – black and low-slung, a two-door coupé that looked like an overgrown Thunderbird. I had no idea that both Elvis and Sinatra had owned and loved the same car. Shortly after I bought it the front end collapsed, but my affection for the car was undiminished.
The Who played ‘My Generation’ on Top of the Pops on 11 November. Two days later we flew to Paris, performing to a glittering crowd at La Locomotive, buoyed by glamorous French film stars. The single was at No. 4 in the charts when, on 27 November, Karen Astley, my Ealing Art College friend who had kissed me goodnight, rang me. We had a long, funny, magical conversation and decided to start seeing each other. I liked feeling like an artist again.
With a hit single and all that TV exposure, The Who were in high demand. I remember Kit bringing Mick Jagger to Chesham Place and playing him ‘Magic Bus’, which I was working on at the time. Although Mick was a friend, I was concerned by the thought that Kit might be collaborating with our most serious competition. I was also suspicious he was having a sexual dalliance with Mick, and felt a little jealous.
Mick is the only man I’ve ever seriously wanted to fuck. He was wearing loose pyjama-style pants without underwear; as he leaned back I couldn’t help noticing the lines of his cock laying against the inside of his leg, long and plump. Mick was clearly very well-endowed. It reminded me of a photograph I’d seen of Rudy Valentino similarly displaying his equipment. In the band we all started to arrange our parts in such a way, especially on stage or in photographs.
A legal dispute was brewing between Kit and Chris and Shel Talmy. It turned out that Shel’s deal with Decca Records was itself a sub-licensing deal, so the royalty he paid through to us was paltry. The row seemed to threaten our entire career and I became quite fidgety, not knowing what was going on.
On top of this