In the end I was caught inside the flat. The chairman of the Catenian Association, which owned and managed the house, was a decent fellow, and allowed Kit to pay the back rent so I could retrieve my possessions, including guitars and demo tapes for ‘Magic Bus’.
Despite having a hit record, I sank into a depression. To make matters worse, the Observer magazine decided to put The Who on the cover, and sent a photographer to Manchester where we were playing at the Jigsaw Club. At the time I wore the Union Jack coat I had commissioned for John, and at the Manchester hotel where the photo session was staged Chris placed me in the front of the group. From my photography classes I knew what an extreme wide-angle lens looked like, and the effect it had when thrust close to the face of a subject: the nose appears to protrude. As the camera moved closer and closer to me, I realised what the photographers intended; my nose, not small in any lens, would look enormous. I tried to muster the courage to ask them to back off, but I was too proud. Unfortunately, this photo remains one of the most enduring images of The Who from this period.
By early 1966 my first Rickenbacker 12-string and 6-string guitars were gone, leaving me with the remains of two more Rickenbacker 6-strings, two Danelectros and a Harmony. Despite my bravado, I was worried about the growing pile of broken parts, and decided to try to salvage them. I was also putting together a portable music system, a kind of precursor to the Walkman.
I listed in my notebook records or artists I wanted to hear: ‘Marvin Gaye, 1-2-3, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder’s Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert [Nina Simone], Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk Around Midnight and Brilliant Corners.’ I drew designs for revolving speakers, which I hoped to use in my stage rig, as well as designs for a complex surround-sound speaker system for my home hi-fi system. And this:
I think I will write a book. It will take a year to write. It will be about the year I am 21, which will be this year in May. I will tell the truth. I have a wish to record what I’m doing because it’s very important, and I don’t have a very close friend at the moment to whom I can reveal my worries.
By spring 1966, when the Observer magazine cover story on The Who was published, I had become disaffected towards the press. Depressed and paranoid, I had carelessly admitted taking drugs on national television, although no one seemed to mind. The Observer story itself was a puff for Kit and Chris, but the rest of us were represented as braggarts, spendthrifts, dandies and scumbags. For at least a week after the publication I lost interest in the success of The Who. This may seem childish, but the polarities of my ego – the artistic grandiosity and the desperately low self-regard – were both powerfully triggered when I held the Observer story in my hands for the first time.
I arranged a new flat for myself in Old Church Street, Chelsea, in the penthouse of a building next door to Sound Techniques recording studio, thinking the studio’s late-night rumblings would provide excellent cover for my own recording activities at home. The Thames was 100 yards away, and I regularly wandered down to contemplate the grey, swirling river. I often drove alone to the Scotch of St James nightclub, where I would sit with a Scotch and coke at a table surrounded by the likes of Brian Jones and the Walker Brothers. It wasn’t like me at all, but I was pleased to be out with people I knew. Brian and I saw one of Stevie Wonder’s first London shows there. Transported by the music, our adulation and his own adrenaline, Stevie got so excited he fell off the stage.
One night I drove a band of revellers back to Chelsea and, showing off, driving too fast in the rain, slid into a graceful skid at Hyde Park Corner, breaking an axle of my Lincoln. The party continued by taxi to my flat, where I played the National Anthem at five in the morning, and eviction loomed again.
‘Substitute’ began as a homage to Smokey Robinson by way of The Rolling Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’. (‘Substitoot’ had become a sublime buzzword since Smokey had used it in his masterpiece ‘Tracks of My Tears’.) I set up my two tape machines, now stereo, in my new flat, and wrote. I heard in my own voice the tumult of a young man playing a role, uneasily, repackaging black R&B music from America, relying on gimmicky outfits, and pretending to be wild and free when in reality he needed to be looked after by his mother.
Keith and John had forged a drug-fuelled alliance with a wizened, charismatic Parisian chemist-cum-dealer. At several shows in March they had turned up red-eyed and glowing, excluding Roger and me from their decadent orbit. We also found ourselves on the outside of a conspiracy. It turned out that Keith and John were flirting with the idea of leaving The Who and writing their own songs, playing more surf-inspired music and having more fun. Being in The Who in 1966 was uncomfortable, unfulfilling and – with record-company lawsuits hitting Kit and Chris – the money was getting bad for the other three Who members. (To some extent I was protected by songwriting royalties starting to flow in; The Performing Right Society paid royalties only to songwriters.)
With my first pay cheque in April I exchanged my 1956 Lincoln Mark II for the more recent 1963 Lincoln Continental Convertible, and bought a 28-foot motorboat, which I moored on the Thames at Chiswick, close to the place where I had first heard celestial music as a child. On one of the boat’s first voyages we took wheelchair-bound Mike Shaw for a river trip.
Even before the Talmy case came to court Kit and Chris moved their offices into a space provided by Robert Stigwood (‘Stiggy’), one of Britain’s first independent record producers; there they created their own production company, New Ikon, as a step towards a record label of their own. I felt part of this new venture, and spent a lot of time designing a zippy logo for it.
‘Substitute’ was The Who’s first single not to be produced by Shel Talmy, and I was elected to produce it. Kit and Chris used Stigwood’s Reaction label to release it on 4 March. The record charted quickly. Shel responded by bringing legal action against Stigwood’s distributor, Polydor, and provided a legal affidavit claiming that he deserved the lion’s share of the royalties because he had contributed significant musical guidance. I had worked from my own demo, as had Shel, and in my own affidavit claimed that if the court compared my demos with Shel’s they would see that all the creative work had been done by me before Shel even heard the songs.
On one of The Who’s many trips away I began imagining that my fabulous new girlfriend Karen was deceiving me. Keith had been through something even more powerful in his early relationship with his wife Kim, who as a professional photographer’s model had once been pursued all the way to her home in Bournemouth by Rod Stewart. It was this kind of paranoid, unhinged thinking that spurred me to write ‘I Can See for Miles’, one of my best songs from this period. The first lyric was scribbled on the back of my affidavit in the case between Talmy and Polydor. Perhaps that’s why the song, about the viciously jealous intuitions of a cuckolded partner, adopts the tone of a legal inquisition.
***
The Talmy case came to court, and Kit and Chris lost. My demos were disallowed as evidence, and Shel was informed that his contract stood. This meant that we were still tied to Shel and the feeble royalty he paid us. I turned for guidance to Andrew Oldham, who took me for a ride down Park Lane in his stately chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. He told me he thought his friend Allen Klein might be able to exert leverage to break Shel’s grip, but to do that we might have to break with Kit and Chris. Klein wasn’t yet involved with The Beatles, but he was the Stones’ US publisher and managed the great Sam Cooke.
Allen Klein sent me a first-class ticket to New York, and in June I flew there in secret to meet him. Klein came to pick me up in his Lincoln Continental, exactly like the one I’d just bought, down to the colour. He made it clear