before it was even released – he’d heard my demo at our music publisher’s office.
In October and November The Who toured Europe: Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany. I remember Berlin as war-scarred and still uneasy; it was at the Hilton there that Keith’s hotel-room wrecking began in earnest. He so missed Kim and suffered so much from paranoid jealousy that every night after a show he had to get out of his brain just to sleep, and seemed always at the last gasp to be full of the most dangerous anger.
In Amsterdam, after a television show there, we were walking straight from the TV studio stage towards the car taking us to our hotel when a tough-looking young man saw me passing and asked if I’d go for a drink with him. I agreed on the spot, and – while even Keith looked on shocked and concerned, shouting at me not to go – went off with the man. I had no money, no details of the show we were playing next day in The Hague and no idea who the man was, or what his intentions were.
His first question was, ‘Do you like jazz?’ As we sat together and listened to his impressive jazz collection, I quickly got drunk. After a while the evening turned into a blur. He showed me to a small bedroom alongside the room we’d been sitting in, and I fell asleep. I woke up next morning with a policeman standing over me, asking me who I was. The owner of the flat, a woman, had no idea who my host had been. After being allowed to leave, I found the railway station and boarded a train by jumping a fence. The train was full of young soldiers who took no notice of me. I could have been invisible, even dressed, as I was, in bright white clothes and a face full of stage make-up and mascara, hung over and a little scared.
We had heard rumours throughout 1966 of a new drug called LSD that promised the most amazing experiences. It sounded scary but exciting. I got hold of some Sandoz capsules, and Karen and I and two friends from art school took a capsule each and waited to see what would happen.
When the drug kicked in, after about an hour, I felt an initial panic. Then the hump of the high took over, in which I lost all self-control and suffered hallucinations, which lasted another hour. After that I settled into something far more enjoyable. I felt like a child again, and I spent the next four or five hours rediscovering everything I took for granted: stars, moon, trees, colours, London buses. I remember being amazed at how pretty my girlfriend was. Eventually I began to put myself back together, piece by piece.
Karen and I only took one or two more acid trips together, and I only ever took four in total. The second trip began in Notting Hill. We walked from there all the way to the Roundhouse on New Year’s Eve 1966, waiting for the drug to take hold. By the time we arrived – The Who were due to perform at about three in the morning – I was coming down. My performance that night is reputed to have been destructive and angry, but I felt quite loved up, so I’m sure I was just going through my usual motions.
On 6 January 1967 I missed one of the only Who shows of my career through drug abuse, when I took my third acid trip and realised I couldn’t possibly drive 300 miles to Morecambe where we had a show. Instead I went to see the Pink Floyd play for the first time at the UFO Club. Syd Barrett was wonderful, and so were the rest of them. I fell in love with the band and the club itself, especially John Hopkins (‘Hoppy’ as he was known), who ran the club and worked the door.
I went again the following night. This time I didn’t use acid and took Eric Clapton to see Syd, who walked on stage (off his head on acid), played a single chord, and made it last about an hour using an electronic echo machine called a Binson. When he did start to play again he was truly inspiring. Roger Waters had the most incredible presence, was strikingly handsome and clearly fancied Karen. I found him a little scary. It was evident that he was going to be the principal driving force behind Pink Floyd. What no one could have known, as the band hadn’t yet made any recordings, was how glorious so much of their music would become once Syd’s more experimental influence waned.
One night a group of Mods exposed themselves to Karen and her friends as they danced, oblivious, in an acid haze. I was wearing a long psychedelic robe, and one of the Mods told me I’d let the side down. I retorted that Mod was finished; I was rather sad when, rather than argue with me, he and his mates just zipped up their flies and left.
In 1967 a mild spring brought premature blossoms to the trees in the huge private communal garden of Eccleston Square. Karen’s family had a house on the Thames’s upper reaches, and we spent Sundays there, just enjoying the passage of time, the tranquillity of the river and countryside, long walks and conversation about all manner of subjects.
The new swinging Sixties ethos – free love, girls on the pill, and everyone in our new London crowd behaving as though they were suddenly beautiful – played directly into my intense fear of being abandoned by Karen. One day I returned late after a gig to find a man talking to Karen in her bedroom. There was an air of intimacy between them, and she looked especially pretty and flushed. After I shooed him out I felt jealous and old-fashioned: everyone else was sharing their partner with whomever they fancied.
One night I listened again to the demo of ‘I Can See for Miles’. There wasn’t much more I could do to improve on it. I was ashamed of the jealousy that had inspired it, but I regarded the song as a secret weapon; when it was recorded properly and released as a Who single I believed we would flatten all opposition. Knowing we would be recording a third album fairly soon, I began to think about what kind of songs I wanted to gather.
During the winter of 1966–7 I listened to jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower, a live album of his extraordinary performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September 1966. Forest Flower, like the Beach Boys’ stereo masterpiece Pet Sounds, seemed to fit the times perfectly. Keith Jarrett was Lloyd’s pianist, and at some point on the record he starts banging the piano and picking and stroking the strings. Here, I felt, was a musician after my own heart, who played every instrument in unintended ways.
Keith Jarrett was born in the same month as me and his playing often reduces me to the kind of tears reserved for drunken solitude. I would sell my soul to play like him – and I don’t make that statement lightly. While listening to this genius I was struggling at the upright piano I’d shoehorned into Karen’s bedroom, and slowly, tortuously, beginning to find some path to self-expression on the eighty-eight black and white keys (a quantity I had often felt as a child was insufficient).
My friendship with Eric Clapton had deepened through our joint outings to pay homage to Jimi Hendrix, who was doing his first sensational gigs around London that spring. Jimi Hendrix was testing some of his first lyrical ideas at his shows. Eric’s friend, the painter and designer Martin Sharp, was helping him write songs, and Martin’s lyrics were very ambitious and poetic. Caught between two great new emerging songwriting talents, I felt challenged to evolve.
Seeing Jimi play for the first few times was also challenging for me as a guitarist. Jimi had the nimble, practised fingers of the concert violinist; he was a real virtuoso. I was reminded of Dad and his tireless practising, how much time he spent getting to a level when he could play so fast that the notes turned into a blur. But with Jimi there was something else: he married the blues with the transcendent joy of psychedelia. It was as though he had discovered a new instrument in a new world of musical impressionism. He went further on stage, and appeared to be powerful and manly without any aggression.
He was a mesmerising performer, and I hesitate to describe how fantastic he was to actually see play live, because I really don’t want to make his legions of younger fans feel they’ve missed out. We all miss out on something. I missed out on Parker, Ellington and Armstrong. And if you missed Jimi playing live, you missed something very, very special. Seeing him in the flesh it became clear he was more than a great musician. He was a shaman, and it looked as if glittering coloured light emanated from the ends of his long, elegant fingers as he played. When I went to see Jimi play I didn’t do acid, smoke grass or drink, so I can accurately report that he worked miracles with the right-handed Fender Stratocaster that he played upside down (Jimi was left-handed).
After seeing Jimi live, I rarely enjoyed his recordings,