‘I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.’
Aldous Huxley describes his first LSD trip, 1954
‘It was a paradoxical fact that the beautiful aspirations of the hippies and the spiritual music that grew from them were in a large part funded by criminal connections.’
Track Records’ artist Arthur Brown, 2012
‘The Who didn’t really do peace and love.’
Roger Daltrey, 2008
As a ten-year-old, Pete Townshend often joined his parents and The Squadronaires on Sunday nights at the Norwich Playhouse. Performing on the same bill was the singer Frankie Vaughan, whose big-band number ‘Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl’ was a hit in 1955. Vaughan had been performing in variety shows since he was a teenager and, at twenty-eight, was an experienced song-and-dance act. He sang, he danced and he rarely stopped smiling.
‘He was the original bump-and-grind man,’ said Townshend, who watched as Vaughan charmed his female audience with his smooth patter and permanent grin. When Vaughan performed his biggest hit he punctuated the lyric by kicking out his leg to a chorus of approving screams. ‘I remember saying to my friend Jimpy, “You’ve got to come and see him,”’ Townshend told the BBC. ‘“He does this thing where he kicks his leg and all the girls all go mad.”’
Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl’ and its high-kicking routine were guaranteed to get the girls swooning, until one night at the Norwich Playhouse in the early 1960s when it didn’t. ‘He did the kick, and there was absolute silence,’ Townshend recalled. ‘All the girls had their arms crossed.’ Townshend approached the singer after the show and innocently asked him what had gone wrong. Vaughan dolefully explained that the girls sitting in silence were there to see Mark Wynter, a handsome pop singer fifteen years Vaughan’s junior, and that the girls were his fanclub. ‘That was when the era changed,’ said Townshend. ‘Suddenly the old music didn’t work anymore.’
It was Pete Townshend’s first taste of a fickle audience and the speed with which a singer could fall out of fashion. The Who in December 1966 were hardly Frankie Vaughan, and Jimi Hendrix wasn’t Mark Wynter. But, despite their inauspicious first meeting at IBC Studios, Townshend had good reason to feel threatened.
Born Johnny Allen Hendrix in Seattle, Washington, twenty-four years earlier, Hendrix had left the US parachute regiments and become a musician for hire, working the chitlin’ circuit, where black artists performed during the era of racial segregation. Hendrix had worked with the sibling soul group the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, he of the ‘music to make your liver quiver and your bladder splatter’, and husband-and-wife duo Ike and Tina Turner. He was leading his own ensemble, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, when The Animals’ bass guitarist Chas Chandler came across him in New York.
It was Keith Richards’ girlfriend, former Ealing art college student and model Linda Keith, who’d tipped off Chandler about Hendrix. The Rolling Stones were on an American tour when Linda met Hendrix. Keith Richards was apparently so jealous that he contacted Linda’s father to tell him his daughter was going off the rails. Hendrix hadn’t even set foot in England but he was already unsettling the Ealing blues set.
The Animals’ tour manager Terry McVay recalled his and Chandler’s first sighting to Hendrix biographer John McDermott in 1992: ‘This guy was playing the guitar backwards, upside down and making all these strange noises … Chas Chandler asked me, “What did you think?” I said, “I haven’t a clue what he’s doing but I think it’s great.”’ After much negotiation, Chandler agreed to act as Hendrix’s manager, brought him to London in September 1966, and began casting around for a backing group.
John Entwistle was approached for the bass player’s job but turned it down out of loyalty to The Who. Instead, the role went to a twenty-two year-old guitarist named Noel Redding, who, after hearing Hendrix play, quickly agreed to switch to bass. The next recruit was drummer Mitch Mitchell, a one-time Marshall’s music shop Saturday boy who’d auditioned for The Who after Doug Sandom’s departure. The fact that Mitchell played around the beat, just like Keith Moon, but, unlike Moon, was a jazz-trained musician, were further thorns in The Who’s side.
Calling themselves the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the trio played a series of warm-up gigs on the continent. But Hendrix couldn’t stop himself turning up to show off and jam at various London clubs. Hendrix was part African-American, part Cherokee Native American and part Irish. As a black man with an untamed Afro hairstyle, buckskin suit and a guitar, which he played upside down on account of being left-handed, he was impossible to ignore. Crucially, he wasn’t a white English ex-grammar schoolboy playing a white English ex-grammar schoolboy’s interpretation of the blues.
Hendrix wasn’t a purist; he was putting his own spin on the genre. He knew his Howlin’ Wolf and his Robert Johnson, but his speed and fluidity, and his use of effects pedals and feedback was a challenge to Clapton, Jeff Beck and even Pete Townshend, who’d always distanced himself from his virtuoso peers. Hendrix was wilder and freer in his playing and more overtly sexual onstage. ‘He made Jagger look like Shirley Temple,’ wrote the Observer’s George Melly.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience were formally launched with a press reception and performance at the Bag O’ Nails on 25 November. Like the Sex Pistols’ notorious 100 Club gig ten years later, the list of people who claim to have seen Hendrix at the Bag O’ Nails and elsewhere in London that winter grows with each passing year. It includes John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and one Farrokh Bulsara, another musically inclined Ealing art student who’d turn himself into Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury five years later.
The gathered pop stars and pop-stars-in-waiting watched as Hendrix deconstructed Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, sending the music spinning off into different directions, and played the guitar behind his head, between his legs and with his teeth. Many of his fellow guitarists emerged from the Bag O’ Nails wondering whether they’d just become obsolete. ‘Hendrix is a one-man guitar explosion,’ gushed New Musical Express.
As well as Hendrix’s innate showmanship and musical ability, Townshend had another reason to feel intimidated. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were obsessed with Hendrix, and Stamp was soon calling him ‘the black Bob Dylan’. Within weeks of Hendrix’s arrival, the pair had persuaded Chas Chandler to sign him to their new label, Track Records. The inspirations for Track were Robert Stigwood’s and Andrew Loog Oldham’s independent labels, Reaction and Immediate. Just as Lambert and Stamp had talked their way into managing a band, they’d now talked their way into launching a record company.
Lambert later told journalists that he’d studied the way washing powder manufacturers marketed their products, based on the theory that a box of washing powder was roughly the same size as a box of records; comparing a musical group to a mundane household product was a very pop-art approach to business. Once he’d completed his research, Lambert announced his intentions to Polydor Records and the hustling began.
Polydor were an affiliate of the German classical label Deutsche Grammophon, whose roster included the easy-listening bandleaders James Last and Bert Kaempfert. These middle-aged men in pastel knitwear sold millions of records, but not to teenagers. Polydor’s new managing director, former EMI executive Roland Rennie, was given the task of dragging the company into the modern age.
Like the other major labels, Polydor were wary of independents that might weaken their hold on the industry. But Rennie had seen the powers-that-be at EMI struggle to keep pace with the market and was receptive to new ideas. Knowing this, Lambert and Stamp proposed that Polydor invest in and distribute Track Records, whose hip new artists would, in turn, bolster Polydor’s credibility. Rennie was impressed by what he later called ‘these two lunatics’. ‘They wanted a label,’ he said in 2011. ‘Was it ego? I don’t know, but it worked, and I didn’t have anybody with their nous. They were there for the money but they knew all the angles.’
In fact, Polydor wanted Jimi Hendrix, but Lambert got there first. Kit said he sketched out the terms of a deal with Chas Chandler on the back of a drinks coaster at the Scotch of St James. What partly swung the deal in Track’s favour was Lambert’s promise of a £1,000 advance and an appearance on Ready Steady Go!. Hendrix made his UK TV debut on 16 December, two weeks before the show went off air.
The Experience’s debut single was released on the same day as their Ready Steady Go! appearance, and was an electrified cover of ‘Hey Joe’, a folk song about a man who shoots his cheating girlfriend. Even Pete Townshend hadn’t gone that far in a Who song. In the end, ‘Hey Joe’ was issued on Polydor, as the Track deal was still being finalised. But by landing Hendrix, Lambert had showed Polydor what he was capable of. In the late Chas Chandler’s wonderful but possibly apocryphal account, Kit bribed Polydor’s pressing plant operators into producing extra copies of the single rather than more of a rival act’s new forty-five. ‘Hey Joe’ was selling well, but Lambert wanted to ensure there were enough copies in the shops to keep it selling. The single eventually peaked at Number 6, and its success convinced Roland Rennie to commit to the new label. From now on, the Jimi Hendrix Experience would be a Track Records act.
The Who’s records would also now be released on Track, on the understanding that the group would share in the label’s success and profits, and that its members would act as talent scouts. The problem was: The Who’s managers had now become The Who’s record company, which could and would lead to a conflict of interest. Moreover, Stamp and Lambert had just scored a hit single with a new artist every bit as outrageous as The Who. Any band in The Who’s position would have felt threatened, even more so considering they’d spent most of the past six months trying not to split up.
On 21 December, The Who played the opening night of boxer Billy Walker’s east London nightclub, the Upper Cut. As soon as the gig was over, Townshend, Entwistle and Daltrey raced into London to catch the Jimi Hendrix Experience at Blaises. Eric Clapton had been upset to see Hendrix using what he believed was his trademark, a wah-wah pedal. ‘If I’d started using a wah-wah pedal Eric would never have spoken to me again,’ said Townshend. But as an outsider Hendrix was oblivious to this code of honour. Outside Blaises, Jeff Beck warned Townshend that he’d just seen Hendrix performing Pete’s stage trick and ramming his guitar against his amp. ‘But when he started to play, something changed,’ admitted Townshend. ‘Colours changed, everything changed.’
At the time, though, the admiration was still tempered by jealousy. John Challis was using Townshend’s Wardour Street home studio to record a soundtrack for a college graduation film – ‘about bikers who go ice skating at Alexandra Palace’ – and had enlisted Townshend to play bass and drums. One day, John arrived at the flat to be told that Pete hadn’t returned from the night before. When Townshend did appear, Challis could tell something was amiss: ‘Pete looked a bit distraught. He said, “I went out last night and heard this guitar player who was just too fucking good. He shouldn’t be allowed.”’
A month later, Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood hired Covent Garden’s Saville Theatre for a series of Sunday night gigs. The Who were booked to headline with Hendrix in support. ‘Kit had just signed Jimi to Track and put him on backing us up,’ said Townshend. ‘I couldn’t really believe it. I thought, “Jesus Christ, what’s going to happen?”’
The Who watched as the Hendrix trio powered through a forty-five-minute set that included a loose and thunderous version of The Troggs’ hit single ‘Wild Thing’. Towards the end of the show, Hendrix thrust his Fender Stratocaster against his Marshall amp. The guitar howled, the audience roared. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Cream witnessed it all from the VIP seats. ‘Hendrix took all my ideas and flung them back at me with knobs on,’ said Townshend.
Brian Epstein threw an after-show party, but the mood among some of his guests was subdued. When Chris Stamp spotted the three members of Cream gathered in a huddle, whispering about what they’d just seen, he couldn’t resist a joke. ‘Don’t worry boys!’ he supposedly shouted, ‘there will always be work for good white guitarists!’
The demise of Ready Steady Go! and the rise of Hendrix were sobering reminders of how a slower-moving pop group could easily become tomorrow’s Frankie Vaughan. The Who were changing, but into what? Nobody, including the band, was sure. ‘A lot of our contemporaries had something we didn’t have – a continuity, an identity,’ said Townshend. ‘They seemed to know who they were, whereas The Who were a band that were trying to find themselves, partly because what had united us was a lack of identity. We’d invested a sense of identity in the audience, but the audience was changing.’
‘The Who were in a void,’ confirms fan Max Ker-Seymer. ‘I’d gone to the Windsor festival in the summer of 1966 and it was all Cream, Cream, Cream. Then suddenly Jimi Hendrix was around. When The Who were an R&B band they were great, but they hadn’t gone anywhere, they seemed to be losing their edge. Now everyone was talking about psychedelia.’
‘Psychedelia’, the new buzzword, had first been used in the late 1950s by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who’d researched the use of mind-altering drugs as a treatment for schizophrenia. Osmond had coined the term from two Greek words, broadly translated as ‘psyche’, meaning ‘mind’ and ‘delos’ meaning ‘clear’ or ‘manifest’.
By late 1966, the term was being used to describe pop music that evoked a mind-altering state, specifically that triggered by the use of the hallucinogenic LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide (nicknamed ‘acid’) had been created in 1938. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Berne, and trying to create a product to treat respiratory and circulation problems. During his research, he synthesised a new compound from ergotamine, a chemical derived from a fungus found on rye.
After Hofmann synthesised the drug for a second time he accidentally absorbed some through his skin. ‘At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterised by an extremely stimulated imagination,’ he wrote. ‘In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed, I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with an intense, kaleidoscopic change of colours.’ Hofmann had experienced the first LSD ‘trip’.
In 1947, Sandoz began manufacturing LSD as a drug for treating psychiatric patients. Meanwhile, in America, the CIA initiated a research programme, and began administering LSD to military personnel and prisoners in the hope that it could be used as a truth serum or as a chemical weapon. Even an infinitesimal amount administered orally or absorbed through the skin had a profound effect. The morning after taking his second trip, Hofmann felt as if he was looking at ‘a world that was newly created’. Inevitably, LSD’s ability to ‘open’ the mind, to help attain a state of higher consciousness and alter the way in which the user viewed the world, inspired many to use the drug recreationally.
In 1960, the American psychology lecturer Timothy Leary set up a programme at Harvard University to analyse the effect of hallucinogens. Michael Hollingshead, an Englishman working for the Institute of British-American Cultural Exchange, introduced Leary to LSD a year later. Leary believed he’d had a spiritual reawakening and described LSD as ‘the centre of life’. Hollingshead returned to Britain in the summer of 1965 on a mission to preach what he called ‘the psychedelic gospel’.
With the help of some rich bohemian friends, Hollingshead established the World Psychedelic Centre in London at a flat in Pont Street, Mayfair. Its manifesto was ‘spiritual and emotional development through the use of LSD’. Hollingshead, like Leary, was convinced that the drug would revolutionise the world. Over the next few months, numerous actors, poets and writers arrived at Pont Street to experiment with LSD in a controlled environment.
The Mayfair flat’s living-room floor was scattered with pillows, there was incense burning, gentle music playing and a slide projector showing soothing images on the wall. Hollingshead, in his role as psychedelic high priest, dispensed the sacrament, read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the Buddhist text regarded as the LSD users’ manual), and assisted his guests on their voyage of discovery. His usual clientele were soon joined by the likes of Eric Clapton, Donovan, Paul McCartney and art dealer Robert Fraser. Some came to take LSD; others simply to observe.
LSD infiltrated the music industry throughout 1965 and 1966. John Lennon and George Harrison were introduced to the drug by their dentist, who dosed their coffee at a dinner party without telling them first. The pair spent a disorientating night in London, where they imagined that the Ad-Lib club was on fire and that Harrison’s house had turned into a submarine. Lennon reported feeling ‘stunned for a month or two’ afterwards, but was soon taking acid regularly.
If mod music and fashions had been about neat, clean lines, then psychedelia saw those lines becoming multicoloured, blurred and wavy. LSD’s shimmering after-effects could be heard in much of the music The Beatles made from Rubber Soul onwards. It was the difference between ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘She Said She Said’, a piece they’d composed after a particularly intense acid trip in the summer of 1965.
The Animals’ lead singer Eric Burdon was typical of the LSD evangelists now preaching to the pop community. This tough Geordie rhythm-and-blues fan took a trip and became an instant convert: ‘I talked with Buddha. I saw the crucifixion of Christ. I talked with God. I saw myself at the age of a hundred and three.’ Burdon felt as if he’d been handed the secret of life. He wasn’t alone. ‘After acid, you walked around bulging with new perceptions,’ wrote The Who’s friend and journalist Nik Cohn. ‘You thought you’d been someplace nobody else had ever seen.’
In typical Who fashion, though, the group contained conflicting views about the drug. While some users treated LSD with great reverence, others, including Keith Moon, did not. When Moon arrived to collect Kim and their newborn daughter from hospital, he’d been coming down from an acid trip and had no idea who his wife was. The drummer’s quest for oblivion outweighed any desire for a spiritual reawakening. He took LSD for the same reason he took pills or drank to excess: to obliterate himself.
Although Entwistle often joined Moon on his quest for annihilation, LSD wasn’t to his liking. Daltrey, meanwhile, regarded it as another dangerous distraction for bandmates who were already dangerously distracted. Daltrey wanted to remain in control, and LSD involved letting go. ‘Acid never interested me,’ he told the author. ‘I let the others do it, and I was the escort. I was the one that had to shepherd them about.’
Pete Townshend, meanwhile, was soon fascinated by the drug, and particularly its effect on music. Hendrix’s flamboyant guitar playing and peacock image were colourful and psychedelic. But Hendrix’s music was still grounded in the blues. New groups were emerging, however, that made music that had little to do with Howlin’ Wolf, and everything to do with LSD. Townshend was intrigued by what he was hearing.
Among these groups was the Pink Floyd, whose vocalist and guitarist Syd Barrett and bass guitarist Roger Waters had grown up in Cambridge, but were now living in London. The Pink Floyd’s entourage included a number of other Cambridge émigrés, some of whom had taken over a spacious flat at 101 Cromwell Road, South Kensington. Before long, 101 was rivalling Hollingshead’s Pont Street apartment as a rendezvous for the bohemian set. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful were among the pop stars who visited the dark womb-like flat where phials of LSD were kept in the refrigerator and droplets dispensed on the tongue from a pipette.
Syd Barrett was now taking LSD regularly, often at Cromwell Road, and the Pink Floyd gradually swapped their repertoire of blues covers for elongated jams, including their signature song, a rambling instrumental entitled ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. Although these lengthy improvisations reflected the distortion of time experienced during an acid trip, there was another, more prosaic, reason: most of the Pink Floyd were rudimentary musicians and Barrett knew he would never play guitar like Eric Clapton. Instead, he took his inspiration from The Who. ‘It was the noises that Pete Townshend was making – squeaks and feedback – that influenced Syd,’ said Roger Waters. ‘So we started making strange noises instead of the blues.’
The Who and the Pink Floyd’s worlds intersected on New Year’s Eve 1966 when both groups played Psychedelicamania, a ‘Giant Freak-Out All-Night Rave’ at the Roundhouse in Camden, north London. Artist and former Ealing lecturer Gustav Metzger also appeared on the bill, demonstrating light projections, where heat-sensitive liquid crystals were placed between glass slides inside a projector, to provide a visual accompaniment to the music. Although Townshend smashed his guitar at the end of the show, he did so despite feeling, in his words, ‘quite loved-up’.
The reason was that he’d taken LSD earlier with artist Michael English and walked the five miles from English’s house in Notting Hill to Camden. Unlike Eric Burdon, he didn’t talk to God or Buddha or see Jesus Christ. Instead, as he wrote later, ‘I rediscovered everything I took for granted – stars, moons trees, colours, London buses.’
Townshend believed he knew why the drug was so popular with musicians. ‘It makes you part of the audience,’ he told International Times, a newspaper dedicated to covering the emergent counter-culture. ‘You take it, you sit back and there’s no work, and off you go. It’s twenty-four hours of touring.’
Before long, London’s LSD set were gravitating towards a fashionable new club, UFO, which had been set up partly to fund International Times. Its founders were John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, a Cambridge-educated physicist who’d discovered sex, drugs, jazz and politics, and was now an arbiter of London’s underground scene, and Joe Boyd, a Harvard-educated American who’d moved to London to set up a wing of Elektra Records.
UFO had developed out of a series of ‘happenings’ held in London venues throughout 1966, where the Pink Floyd and their friendly rivals, the Soft Machine, played their non-blues on the same bill as poets, jugglers, performance artists and Gustav Metzger. By January 1967, UFO had become a Friday night fixture at an Irish dance hall beneath the Gala Berkeley cinema on Tottenham Court Road. ‘There was nowhere more alternative, counter-culture or psychedelic in the UK than the London UFO club,’ recalls Richard Barnes. ‘On an average night about twenty per cent of the audience would be on LSD trips.’
UFO soon became a place where musicians, writers, artists and hip pop fans could take hallucinogenic drugs, dance wildly or lie on the edge of the dance floor observing the liquid light show, as the LSD took effect and the world became warm and fuzzy. ‘The first thing that hit me on arrival was the smell of incense, with trippy lights shining on the stairs,’ recalls DJ, promoter and former mod Jeff Dexter. ‘Inside you could hardly make out any detail, the place was bathed in moving coloured light and all the faces seemed to melt into one.’
In between the bands, the DJs played a mix of sounds and music. ‘Anything from Bach to The Beatles, or the Mothers of Invention to The Mar-Keys,’ says Dexter. But the lighting gantry at the far end of the club also projected Chinese animations and art-house films such as Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou on to the walls.
Townshend paid UFO a visit and was very impressed. A year earlier The Who had played Leicester Art College, where student Richard Stanley had projected his home-made films on to the band while they performed. UFO’s organisers and clientele were bubbling over with ideas and had created a multi-sensory experience. ‘There seemed to be no separation between the music and the audience,’ says Dexter. ‘The bands, audience or dancers had all become part of a people show, melting into one swirling kinetic mass.’ In some ways, it was an extension of the ideas espoused on Roy Ascott’s groundcourse; a fuller realisation of what Townshend had hoped to achieve with The Who.
One night, Townshend ducked out of playing a gig in Morecambe, Lancashire, after taking acid, and went with Karen Astley to see the Pink Floyd at UFO. Karen and a couple of friends, including Michael English’s girlfriend Angela Brown, had formed their own company, Hem and Fringe, and were designing clothes for the new ‘hippie’ fashion boutiques such as Hung on You and Granny Takes a Trip, which were now filling the spaces where the mod shops had once traded.
Karen arrived at UFO in one of her own creations, a dress that Townshend said ‘looked as if it had been made from a cake wrapper … and no knickers and no bra’. The couple soon found themselves surrounded by incredulous mods who’d come to the club to stare at the audience: ‘They were going up to her and literally touching her up while she was dancing and she didn’t know they were doing it,’ recalled Townshend. ‘I was just totally lost.’
Onstage, the liquid lightshow created distorted images as the Pink Floyd produced their Who-influenced squeaks and feedback. Townshend’s paranoia worsened, and he was now convinced that Roger Waters was going to run off with Karen, ‘whom he openly fancied’. Joe Boyd later wrote in his 2007 memoir, White Bicycle: Making Music in the 1960s of seeing The Who’s guitarist crouched beside the stage, telling everybody that he was terrified Waters was ‘going to swallow him’. For Townshend, it was an early indication of the pitfalls of this new so-called wonder drug.
The mods that surrounded Townshend and his girlfriend that night were a flashback to what was now becoming The Who’s past. Just months earlier, the group had been given an armed escort out of the Goldhawk, after watching as a member of the audience was beaten senseless. There were no fights, bloodshed or sawn-off shotguns at UFO. It was a contrast that The Who’s devoted fan, ‘Irish’ Jack, became aware of when he turned up at the club one night.
By the spring of 1967, all the old mod venues were closing down, and Jack felt lost. Walking into UFO, he was shocked to see his old hero wearing a woolly Afghan coat and a necklace. Townshend was just as surprised at what his number-one fan was wearing: ‘He said, “Jack, You’re still a mod.”’ Jack suggested they go to the pub across the road but Townshend refused. Instead, he stayed by the club’s macrobiotic food stall, watching Karen serving soft drinks to tripping customers. ‘The mods seemed like these little grey figures lost in this world of colour and Pink Floyd and inventive music,’ said Townshend.
After another heady Friday night, Townshend and a group of friends, including UFO’s macrobiotic stallholder Craig Sams, were walking through Victoria when a car pulled up alongside them. A head emerged through the open window and a voice rang out: ‘Hi! Pete Townshend, I think your last album was fucking great!’ No sooner were the words out, when the fan vomited copiously down the side of the car. As Sams told Days in the Life author Jonathon Green: ‘Suddenly, you realised the huge distance between where we were going, into spiritual realms, and fifteen pints of lager, which is where a lot of the mods had gone.’
Townshend was aware of the distance, but wasn’t wholly convinced that drugs would lead him to any such spiritual realm. ‘I remember thinking, this is not going to do it for me,’ he said. ‘The mods are not going to do it for me, drugs are not going do it for me, I need something else.’ Townshend would discover that something else through one of his UFO connections, just not yet.
The man who would help guide Townshend towards what he was looking for was Mike McInnerney, then working as an art editor at International Times. McInnerney and Michael English also designed posters for UFO and other underground happenings. English would go on to form Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, a design partnership with Nigel Waymouth, co-owner of the hippie fashion emporium Granny Takes a Trip. Between the three of them, their work would become a visual shorthand for the UK psychedelic era.
Before long, Karen Astley’s image was being used on a poster for UFO, and she and Townshend had become close friends with Mike McInnerney and his girlfriend, Kate Lambert. Over the next few months, Townshend would spend many evenings with the UFO and IT crowd, often at Karen’s basement flat in Ebury Street or McInnerney’s apartment above the Shaftesbury Theatre in London’s West End. ‘It’s hard to overstate how important people’s flats were back then,’ says Mike McInnerney now, ‘because they were secure zones where you could take drugs. We found ourselves going round to each other’s places all the time. They were little havens.’
An elite social set was forming, one marked by a suspicion of those who didn’t use narcotics. ‘It was Michael English who coined the phrase “the greys” for those who weren’t doing it,’ says McInnerney. ‘It was an awful term, so divisive, so tribal. But I suppose it was a natural outcome of the things that made up the scene – all these people going round to each other’s flats and spending so much time taking drugs together.’
This need for a safe haven was understandable. In April 1966, the World Psychedelic Centre closed after the police found heroin on the premises. In the same month, the Pink Floyd’s roadie Russell Page and a New Zealand film-maker and 101 Cromwell Road resident John Esam stood trial at the Old Bailey for possession of LSD. It was a landmark case, as the drug was still legal. Instead, the prosecution argued that ergotamine was outlawed under the British Poisons act, and that the pair should be tried for dealing a poisonous substance. After a lengthy trial, in which Albert Hofmann was called as a witness, the case was dismissed.
Scare stories about LSD were now regularly appearing in the tabloid press. The Daily Mirror warned that Britain could soon follow America, a nation where, it said, ‘a third of all college students were experimenting with LSD’, and cited the case of two students found eating tree bark while under its influence. In the spring of 1966, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins announced that possession of LSD without a medical prescription would shortly be made illegal.
Proof that LSD was no longer a secret between pop stars came with the Christmas 1966 issue of Private Eye. The magazine included a free comedy record, ‘Psychedelic Baby’, in which the singer, Whispering Jim Narg, urged the listener to ‘dip your lump of sugar in the LSD’ and ‘suck the blotting paper’. It was common practice to take LSD on a lump of sugar or blotting paper, and ‘Whispering Jim’ was Peter Cook’s comedy partner Dudley Moore, an acquaintance of the same dentist that had turned John Lennon and George Harrison on to acid.
Stories about pop stars taking drugs were pursued and peddled with gusto by the press. The News of the World weighed in with an exposé of a party thrown by the Moody Blues at their communal house near Richmond Park. Pete Townshend and Cream’s Ginger Baker were named as LSD users. As Townshend had admitted to taking drugs on A Whole Scene Going, this was hardly a revelation.
In their quest for more salacious gossip, however, the newspaper sent an undercover journalist to Blaises, where he gleaned some admission of drug taking from the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones. Unfortunately, the quote was credited to Mick Jagger, who was in Italy at the time. Although the paper acknowledged their mistake, Jagger’s announcement that he was going to sue the News of the World made them all the more determined than ever to bring him down.
On Sunday 19 February 1967, the News of the World had their revenge. Acting on a tip-off from the paper, the police raided Keith Richards’ country house, Redlands, in West Wittering, Sussex. Richards and his guests, including Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Robert Fraser, had all taken LSD. When Richards heard a knock on the door and peered through the window to investigate he was convinced there was ‘a whole lot of dwarves outside wearing the same clothes’.
To the visiting constabulary, the scene at Redlands must have seemed impossibly exotic. There was Marianne draped over Jagger on a couch and naked except for a fur rug; Robert Fraser’s gallery assistant Christopher Gibbs floating around, wearing a pair of Eastern silk pyjamas, and Fraser’s manservant Mohammed, clad in a traditional Moroccan djellaba, serving tea. There was loud music playing, and the smell of dope and incense lingered in the air.
The police searched the house and catalogued anything they considered suspicious. While this included some illegal substances, it also extended to Chinese joss sticks, Earl Grey tea leaves and sachets of shampoo that Richards had collected from American hotels. The policemen had never seen products packaged like this in Britain, and tore the sachets in the hope that they might contain drugs.
The raid failed to produce the bountiful haul the News of the World had hoped for, but, according to the police they had enough to make arrests. Richards was charged for allowing cannabis to be smoked on his property, Jagger for possession of amphetamine tablets legally purchased in Italy, and Fraser for amphetamines and heroin. One of the other guests, a mysterious American nicknamed ‘the Acid King’, who’d been supplying several pop stars with LSD, was found with a few grains of cannabis resin. Oddly, his attaché case containing LSD, cocaine and dope was never searched by the police, and he left the country soon after.
Shortly before the ‘dwarves’ came knocking, Keith Richards’ hi-fi had been blasting out Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and The Who’s A Quick One LPs. With the whole of what Townshend called ‘the artistic elite’ now in the firing line, what better time, then, for The Who to leave the country.
On 22 March, The Who arrived in New York to play their first American concerts. ‘Happy Jack’ was about to be released in the US, and Chris Stamp had convinced Decca that the trip was vital to its promotion. The Who had just signed a three-year deal with a new UK agent, Kennedy Enterprises, who, in turn, had negotiated a deal for The Who in the US with Premier Talent, whose young booker Frank Barsalona had worked on The Beatles and the Stones’ first American dates.
The Who had another good reason for leaving the UK. Track Records had just released their debut single: ‘Purple Haze’, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It was a great swirling psychedelic pop song and would soon become a top-five hit. But Hendrix hadn’t broken America. Not yet. The Who saw their chance. ‘America was musically naive,’ said Roger Daltrey. ‘It was like this ripe field ready for ploughing’
Townshend had been to New York twice to see Allen Klein. But for his bandmates, this was a world that only existed in films. Once they arrived in the bustling city, with its yellow cabs and skyscrapers, an awestruck Moon and Entwistle behaved as if their childhood selves had stepped through the screens at the Wembley Regal or Acton Gaumont cinemas and on to the set of a movie.
Chris Stamp had booked The Who into the upmarket Drake Hotel on Park Avenue, but quickly regretted his decision. After hitting the local clubs, Moon and Entwistle returned to the Drake with an entourage of hangers-on only too happy to order lobster, oysters and champagne on The Who’s tab. In the space of four days, the pair helped run up a $4,000 room-service bill. Stamp intervened and moved the party to the less expensive Gorham Hotel, where Moon, apparently, smashed up his suite.
The Who were booked to play nine shows at the RKO 58th Street Theater, as part of the ‘Music in the Fifth Dimension’ season. The event was hosted by Murray ‘The K’ Kaufman, a New York DJ, who billed himself as ‘the Fifth Beatle’ and had the wig to prove it. Robert Stigwood agreed to let Kaufman have The Who and Cream for a cut price of $7,500. Townshend turned up at a press launch for the event wearing a jacket decorated with flashing light bulbs, and drolly told reporters that it was psychedelic and ‘meant to blow your mind’. Townshend agreed to scores of interviews, where he repeatedly explained that The Who had come to America to ‘leave a wound’.
At some point during the trip, Townshend agreed to record a radio recruitment ad for the US Air Force, with ‘Happy Jack’ as its soundtrack (‘You too can fly the skies, reach for the moon and touch the stars in the United States Air Force …’). It was an extraordinarily misguided idea. ‘Young Americans were being blown to bits in Vietnam and I, a naive English twit, came prancing over,’ he admitted. ‘And I really didn’t give a fuck about what was happening to the American young men. I really didn’t.’
The Who made their violent intentions known at the first rehearsal in New York. At home, they’d been trying to phase out their destructive stage act, but they knew it would help them to stand out in America. ‘The Who came out and looked incredible,’ recalled Track Records’ publicist Nancy Lewis. ‘Townshend had on his Union Jack coat, and they just did a twenty-minute set, and at the end destroyed all their instruments and blew up smoke bombs. It absolutely freaked people out.’ Backstage, The Who were told that their designated four-song set had just been cut to two. ‘One and a half minutes of “My Generation”, one and a half of “Substitute”,’ said Keith Moon. ‘Then smash your fucking instruments – and off.’
Despite the hip-sounding name, Music in the Fifth Dimension was a traditional variety show. The rest of the line-up included ‘In the Midnight Hour’ singer Wilson Pickett, the vocal harmony quartet the Young Rascals, a fashion show presided over by Kaufman’s wife, and a comedy trio, the Hardly Worth-It Players, whose shtick included Bob Dylan and Beatles impressions.
The show started at 10 a.m.. Each act performed their routine, returned to the dressing room and waited until it was time to come out again, repeating the act as many as five times until late evening. It was conveyor-belt entertainment. Schools were closed for the spring vacation, and gangs of thirteen and fourteen year olds were free to hang around the theatre until they grew bored of the music, the jokes or Murray Kaufman’s deathless patter.
Each day, The Who would appear onstage for a few frantic minutes, create mayhem, disappear and then do it all over again. ‘Bobby Pridden was backstage permanently gluing guitars together,’ recalled Daltrey. But it worked. Mrs Kaufman’s fashion parade and even Cream’s virtuoso hard pop couldn’t compete with Townshend throwing his Fender Stratocaster into the air and watching it smash on the ground, or Moon sending his bass drum barrelling across the stage, to a soundtrack of screaming amplifiers and exploding smoke bombs. After a while, the audience started arriving when the theatre doors opened, and staying for the rest of the day. ‘They stayed because they liked the music they were hearing,’ said Townshend. ‘And they wanted to hear it again and again.’
Naturally, The Who didn’t go unnoticed by the other acts on the bill. Heather Taylor was a six-foot redheaded fashion model, who had grown up in Hammersmith before moving with her family to America. Heather was appearing in Kaufman’s wife’s fashion show, when she was introduced to the visiting Brits. Heather already knew several pop musicians, including The Monkees’ Davy Jones, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix, and had soon caught Daltrey’s eye. The pair would meet up again in London, and begin a relationship that would eventually lead to marriage.
As the days wore on and the boredom set in, The Who’s appetite for mischief increased. Murray The K’s self-importance and ridiculous Beatle wig did not go unnoticed. When Kaufman told the band never to touch his personal microphone, Daltrey’s eyes lit up. By the end of the run, the singer had smashed eighteen microphones after bouncing them off the stage, the amps and Moon’s cymbals. For the final show, Cream and The Who planned to have an egg-and-flour fight onstage, but Kaufman heard about the plot and threatened not to pay them. Instead, a food battle ensued in the dressing room, which promptly flooded after Townshend left the shower running.
However, all that violence in front of impressionable teenagers paid off. The Who’s ‘Happy Jack’ single reached Number 24, their highest placing in America yet. The album A Quick One, retitled Happy Jack and with the single in place of ‘Heat Wave’, received a belated American release and made it to Number 67. The Who had dealt a wound, albeit a minor one.
Back in England, the band grabbed a couple of days’ precious recording time in London’s Ryemuse Studios. Townshend was already telling journalists about his planned ‘rock opera’. Now that Hendrix had stolen his stage act and the Pink Floyd were creating a new kind of pop music, he needed to think big. ‘[The opera] takes place in the year 1999, when China is about to take over the world,’ declared Townshend in January 1967. ‘The hero loses his wife and decides to go and live in this tiny country, which is about to be overrun by Chinese. The hero goes through hundreds of situations and there is music for each.’
Townshend’s operatic ambitions would soon be put on hold, though. Less than a week after returning from America, The Who set off on a twelve-date German tour. Their support act was Simon Napier-Bell’s protégés, an arty mod-pop group called John’s Children. The group’s new lead singer Mark Feld was the outspoken young mod who had featured in 1962’s Town magazine article. Since then, Feld had remodelled himself as a Dylan-style folk singer and changed his name to Marc Bolan. Napier-Bell sensed that ‘the little elvin vampire’ had something, but wasn’t sure what it was. While trying to work it out, he suggested Bolan join John’s Children, who’d just sacked their guitarist and been dropped by Columbia Records.
Inevitably, The Who’s success had led to imitators. After losing The Who, Shel Talmy had found the similarly agitated sounding The Creation, whose recent B-side, ‘Biff Bang Pow’, had a pop-art title and a riff similar to ‘My Generation’. John’s Children were also inspired by The Who, as was Bolan, whom Townshend had previously mistaken for a rent boy at the Scene.
Columbia objected to John’s Children’s wanting to call their next single, ‘Not the Sort of Girl (You’d Like to Take to Bed)’, but Kit Lambert didn’t, and thought they’d be perfect for Track Records. Although thrilled at being asked to join the tour, the band and Simon Napier-Bell knew that they needed to upstage the headliners. The two groups and their similarly attention-seeking managers would prove a volatile combination.
At Townshend’s suggestion, Lambert had invited film student Richard Stanley and Stanley’s art school friend, photographer Chris Morphet, to join the tour. Morphet’s group, The Contacts, had once shared the bill with The Who in Leicester. Morphet and Stanley were now studying at the Royal College of Art, and were hired by Lambert to shoot a promotional film and take pictures of the tour. ‘In theory, we were being paid,’ says Morphet now. ‘But things were so much more casual back then.’ Richard Stanley still has a letter from Lambert, ‘Half a page of scribble promising us £10 a day out of which we will pay our own hotel bill.’ But it was the thrill of touring with The Who, not the money, that ensured they were on the first plane to Germany.
The first date was at Nuremberg’s Meistersingerhalle, a concert venue razed to the ground by the RAF during the Second World War, but since rebuilt and now being used by the local symphony orchestra. None of this mattered to Simon Napier-Bell, who persuaded John’s Children to smash a chair during their set. This simple act of destruction provoked a domino effect, and the audience were soon recreating the RAF’s devastation and destroying the concert hall’s seating.
After the show, the German promoter demanded that Lambert pay for the damages, but he flatly refused. Instead, Lambert put on his best upper-class accent and dismissed the man as an ‘inefficient little hun’. When the promoter followed Kit into the street and carried on berating him, Lambert seized his briefcase, which promptly flew open sending two hundred thousand Deutschmarks, The Who’s fee, fluttering into the air.
Napier-Bell could only admire Lambert’s nerve as he ignored the cash floating away and marched off into the nearest bar, with the promoter close to tears behind him. Once inside, Kit insisted that he pay The Who their fee in full, regardless of the damages to the venue or the fact that Lambert had just lost most of their money in the street. Napier-Bell recounted the incident in his 1983 memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: ‘Kit seemed completely unaware that he was himself in any way responsible for the promoter’s behaviour.’ Astonishingly, he returned the next morning with The Who’s fee in full.
Two days later, John’s Children went one better than a broken chair and slashed open several hotel pillows onstage, covering the Herford Jaguar Club with duck feathers. They followed this by smashing up their drum kit, attacking each other and jumping into the audience. It was staged violence guaranteed to get a reaction, but The Who were unimpressed and told Lambert to throw the group off the tour. Kit refused, knowing his own group would have behaved the same way if they’d been the support act.
‘The only members of The Who with a true sense of humour were John and Keith,’ said former John’s Children vocalist Andy Ellison. ‘And Roger really didn’t like us at all.’ As such, the mood in The Who camp became extremely tense, even by their usual tense standards. When a mob of youths swarmed around The Who’s car outside a venue in Düsseldorf, Roger Daltrey cracked. ‘It all got very nasty,’ he told the author in 2008. ‘Keith Moon went to get out of the car and this bloke booted the door. I got out and did four of them.’ Despite Daltrey’s beating, the youths later invaded the stage as The Who played. Roger squared up to them, again, and Keith hit one of his assailants over the head with a cymbal.
Lambert’s way of coping with the stress of the tour was to take drugs and have sex, ideally at the same time and as often as possible. Kit was now fond of reminding his charges that their excessive behaviour was nothing new. ‘He was always saying to us, “You fucking rock ’n’ roll people think you’ve done all this first,”’ Townshend recalled. Thereafter Lambert would gleefully regale them with stories of how Constant’s classical music peers used heroin and cocaine, and how he’d once caught his father having sex with Margot Fonteyn in a lift at the back of a theatre.
In Düsseldorf, Lambert struck gold and found a gay brothel in which he could acquire pills – and narrowly escaped a beating after making a quick getaway without paying for his boy or his drugs. But Kit couldn’t blot out his problems forever. In Ludwigshafen, the crowd rioted after John’s Children’s stage act. Lambert now had no choice but to do as The Who asked, and John’s Children were sent home. In a letter to his girlfriend, Marc Bolan described the headliners as ‘a drag’ and claimed his group were out-playing them every night.
For Richard Stanley and Chris Morphet, the German tour was an eye-opening experience. Once again, Stanley became aware of Townshend’s ‘absolute curiosity’ about the world. ‘Early on in the tour Pete told us this story that he’d been put under hypnosis by a society dentist,’ he says. ‘This meant that he’d been programmed to always give the very best performance ever, no matter what happened. And Pete said he always felt that he had never been taken out of this hypnosis, and that he’d been given a trigger, which would always work, presumably a guitar.’
Stanley laughs at the story now and suggests that Townshend’s imagination was getting the better of him. But in an Indian restaurant in Ludwigshafen, he and Chris Morphet listened spellbound as the guitarist discussed his recent LSD experiences. ‘Pete was saying how it had been for him “really really really big!” That was his exact description,’ says Stanley. ‘He was trying to describe the visual effect of being on the drug, and this Indian restaurant had flock wallpaper, that had that typical three-dimensional effect, and that was something he used to describe it. What the Germans sat near us must have thought I have no idea, but Chris and I were gobsmacked.’
Despite Townshend’s profound LSD experience and talk of futuristic rock operas, The Who’s next single, was a consummate but simple pop song. ‘Pictures of Lily’, The Who’s first Track Records release, appeared in April, and was, said John Entwistle, ‘a song about wanking’. ‘It’s all about a boy who can’t sleep so his dad gives him some dirty pictures to look at,’ explained Townshend. ‘Then he falls in love with the girl in the pictures, which is too bad, because she’s dead.’ Later, he said that the inspiration came from pictures of Edward VII’s mistress, the popular First World War pin-up Lillie Langtry, which he’d seen pinned to the wall in Karen Astley’s bedroom.
The Who had recorded and mixed the song between Ryemuse, Pye and IBC Studios before going to Germany. At IBC, Brian Carroll witnessed Kit Lambert’s approach to record production while overseeing the final cut. ‘I did “Substitute”, “Happy Jack” and “Pictures of Lily”,’ says Carroll, ‘and Kit would come into the control room to supervise.’ Lambert asked the cutting engineer how loud he could make the record. Carroll told him that if the meter on the volume-control indicator went into the red then the track would distort. ‘So Kit said, “I want it in the red.”’ Carroll refused, but Lambert insisted: ‘Go into the red! Go into the red!’ In the end, he obliged: ‘I had a little speaker in the room like you’d have in a radio. So we’d played The Who’s songs through that, because Kit needed to know what they’d sound like on the radio. He loved what he heard.’
Like ‘The Kids Are Alright’ and ‘I’m a Boy’, The Who explored the themes of sex and death with a breezy melody, rudely interrupted by Moon’s busy drumming and Townshend’s jagged power chords. The song took a sharp left turn with the inclusion of a short French horn solo, which Daltrey said was meant to sound like a First World War siren; a warning, perhaps, to the troops to stop masturbating as the Kaiser’s army was on the move. ‘I was insecure about “Pictures of Lily”,’ said Daltrey, who was convinced at the time and even years later that his vocals revealed that insecurity. He liked the song but thought it was a rip-off of The Kinks and that Ray Davies would have sung it more affectingly. He was wrong.
‘Pictures of Lily’ was released on 22 April 1967, five weeks after the Pink Floyd’s debut single, ‘Arnold Layne’, a song about a fetishist who stole women’s underwear from washing lines. There were clear comparisons to be drawn between the two: both sets of lyrics had a sexual undercurrent; both groups featured guitarists who’d been to art school (in Barrett’s case, Cambridge and Camberwell), and didn’t play with their eyes closed and their heads thrown back like Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. Both songs also landed their bands in trouble. American radio stations refused to play ‘Pictures of Lily’, and Radio London banned ‘Arnold Layne’. The Floyd single only reached Number 20; The Who Number 4, still one position lower than Hendrix’s infuriating ‘Purple Haze’.
‘Arnold Layne’ was pop music, but looser and stranger. Townshend understood why: ‘LSD had released groups, like Pink Floyd, from the chains of aping black rhythm and blues to break into a new world of “we do what we want”. LSD made music European.’ He admired what the Pink Floyd were doing, but wasn’t sure The Who could do the same. ‘I couldn’t see how to write about LSD, purple skies and free love,’ he revealed. ‘But something dangerous and new was happening in music and I wanted to be part of it.’
If there was one event that embodied Pete Townshend’s new, dangerous musical world it was the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, held in north London’s opulent Alexandra Palace. The ‘free speech benefit’ concert on 29 April was a fundraiser for International Times, which had just been raided on a trumped-up obscenity charge. The event featured psychedelic light shows, the Pink Floyd, art films, poetry readings, a fibreglass tent in which one could smoke banana skins, and performance artist Yoko Ono reprising her act at New York’s Carnegie Hall in which she invited the audience to cut off her clothes.
Between seven and ten thousand people are said to have attended the event. Among them were John Lennon, Pete Townshend and Kit Lambert. The latter quickly discovered that peace and love would only get him so far. After Lambert was turned away for not having a ticket, he was given a black eye by one of the doormen when he refused to leave.
Surviving photographs and grainy film footage of the event now have an eerie quality about them. In some clips, the dawn light can be seen streaming through the Palace’s vast windows, illuminating a ghostly parade of shell-shocked young people, dancing, staring, sliding down a fairground-style helter-skelter in the middle of the room, wandering aimlessly, or scaling the scaffolding tower at the far end of the hall.
Among the groups playing that night were Track Records’ latest signing, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Their frontman, Brown, was a theatrical singer whose act involved African voodoo costumes, Japanese kabuki face paint and a crown filled with petrol, which occasionally set his hair on fire. He was a tireless showman.
‘Pete Townshend told Kit Lambert about us,’ Brown says now. ‘His angle was, “You should come and see this piece of performance art.”’ Brown admired The Who – ‘They were like Andy Warhol coming into pop’ – and was impressed when Townshend picked him up for a business meeting in his Lincoln Continental. Brown’s old friend John Fenton had been managing the band, but Fenton agreed to Lambert and Stamp taking over their management in exchange for the pair paying off his telephone bill.
Yet, despite being impressed by their energy, charm and ideas, Brown slowly became aware that Lambert and Stamp weren’t entirely masters of their own destiny. ‘I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to end up with a hatchet in my head,’ he says, only half-joking. ‘But the money behind Track Records came from New York from connections of a certain nature.’
Andrew Loog Oldham once described New York music publisher and manager Pete Kameron, who died in 2008, as ‘the kind of guy that gets presidents elected’. In the 1950s, Kameron co-founded a jazz and folk label and moved into song publishing, before arriving in London in the early 1960s.
‘He was a very shrewd businessman,’ says John Fenton now. ‘This guy set up a publishing company and he had the rights to a lot of famous jazz and blues numbers. He came over to England, saw all this talent in the sixties and picked a few people out. It’s a shadowy story but he mentored several people and I was one of them, and we all fell for it big time.’ By 1967, Kameron had taken over the European wing of Essex Music, with whom Stamp had cut a publishing deal for The Who. ‘Pete Kameron was the power behind Track,’ Fenton adds. ‘He was Chris Stamp’s puppet master. He pulled the strings.’
On one occasion when Arthur Brown refused to go along with one of his managers’ ideas, he was taken for a walk by what he calls ‘one of the American gentlemen behind Track’: ‘We were by the River Thames, and he said, “Arthur, I was brought up on the street, and we had this ethic – ‘If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do’ … Well, see that water, Arthur, and think of concrete boots.” There was no blustering, no knives, he just looked me straight in the eye when he said it.’
In the summer of 1967, Lambert moved Track’s headquarters from Chesterfield Gardens to 58 Old Compton Street. ‘In the early days, there was an air of power and sustainable expansion about Track Records,’ says Arthur Brown, before offering a vivid, fanciful description of their new HQ: ‘You’d never seen an office with so many criminals in in your life – an eclectic mixture of intellectuals, artists, businessmen, models, actors, English crime lords and American Jewish mafia.
‘The Who might be ambling in or out or, in the case of Keith Moon, running up and down the stairs chortling merrily at the top of his pirate voice,’ he adds. ‘Hendrix might be there. Kit might be haranguing Polydor Records on the phone, and Terence Stamp might be holding forth about being on the frontlines when the revolution came. Tea was made, joints were smoked, and cannabis tincture was administered medicinally.’
While Brown wrote songs for his debut album, Townshend shared his latest ideas for a rock opera: ‘He was considering calling it “Rael”, and it was about China,’ recalls Brown. ‘Unlike the French, a lot of the English youth were not thinking about politics. So I thought that was incredibly forward thinking.’ Townshend’s story had evolved over the past few months. In this latest version Israel was invaded by China, whose population was now expanding so fast they were taking over the world. Townshend wanted to produce the opera outside of The Who, and even considered Brown for the lead role.
However, as with ‘Quads’, the composer was brought back to earth by the demands of being in The Who. Track Records wanted another Who album. The band had been recording sporadically since March, but there was no direction to be found in the material they’d produced so far: a jingle for a Coca-Cola TV ad, John Entwistle’s aptly titled instrumental ‘Sodding About’, a souped-up version of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ …
Alongside these oddities were some superior Townshend compositions, however, one of which he’d originally demoed around the time of A Quick One. ‘I Can See for Miles’ was a song Townshend regarded as ‘a secret weapon’, a composition that could be called upon at a time when The Who needed something extra special. Kit Lambert decided that time was now.
In late May, The Who booked into CBS Studios on Bond Street and cut versions of three songs: ‘I Can See for Miles’, ‘Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand’ and ‘Armenia City in the Sky’, the last written by Townshend’s chauffeur and fellow songwriter, John ‘Speedy’ Keen. ‘Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand’ was another of what John Entwistle called ‘The Who’s wanking songs’, an homage to a girl whose shaky hands made her irresistible to men. But both ‘Armenia City in the Sky’ and ‘I Can See for Miles’ suggested ‘the LSD and purple skies’ Townshend insisted he could never write about.
The former had a dense, droning intro that mirrored the sensation of hearing music while coming up on LSD. ‘I Can See for Miles’ suggested an acid trip, but also a gathering thunderstorm or an air raid, with Townshend’s siren-like guitar flashing back to a time of gasmasks and bomb shelters. Townshend later described the song as ‘Wagnerian’, but its lyrics didn’t shout and scream and threaten suicide like ‘My Generation’. Instead, it was a quietly menacing song about frustration and the power of aspiration, and arguably the best song Townshend had written so far.
‘“I Can See for Miles” already sounded like the finished song when Pete played us his demo,’ says Mike Ross-Trevor, the engineer at the CBS Studios session. ‘I remember thinking how strange this was compared to other bands’ demos. That song already sounded beautiful.’
Ross-Trevor spent three days at CBS, with Kit Lambert beside him in the control room. ‘Pete knew exactly what he wanted, but Kit was technically producing, always asking for “more compression on the drums” and things like that.’ When he wasn’t giving orders in the control room, Lambert lectured the band about taxation laws and money. ‘He was having all these discussions with the guys about which countries to put their money in and how much they could save. I wasn’t surprised that they were having that conversation, but I was surprised that they were having it in front of other people.’
The Who were easy enough to work with, but their engineer was always conscious of where Keith Moon was at any given moment in time. ‘Keith was completely crazy,’ he sighs. ‘I’ve always felt there might have been something wrong with him, like a mental disorder. I actually found it scary to be in a room with him. You felt insecure, always worrying what he was going to do next.’
On the last day of the session and with the recording complete, Moon was letting off steam on the drums, when he suddenly fell backwards off his stool: ‘There was a concrete floor in the booth and he hit the ground with real force. He just lay there. He couldn’t move.’
Moon was taken to hospital. There was no permanent damage, but he was diagnosed with a hernia, caused by throwing his drums around at an Oxford College ball gig the night before. The Who scouted around for an understudy. John’s Children’s Chris Townson was one of two drummers hired to fill in. Townson experienced a baptism of fire: before the gig he was jeered at by youths who mistook him for Keith Moon; at the end, the roadies let off a smoke bomb under his drum stool as payback for John’s Children’s antics in Germany.
By the second week in June, Moon was back behind the kit. With another trip to America pending, The Who needed their regular drummer, even one who’d just had his stomach stapled and had been ordered by his doctor to rest. Once again, The Who couldn’t have chosen a better time to leave the country: Townshend’s counter-culture friends were being arrested and The Beatles had just made the greatest record of their career.
On 13 May, Mike McInnerney married his girlfriend, Kate. The couple held their reception in Hyde Park. Karen Astley designed the wedding outfits, UFO’s Craig Sams served macrobiotic food and a West Indian steel band provided the music. The police arrived to break up the party, as it was illegal to play music without a licence, but the new Mrs McInnerney talked them round. Photos of the colourful, peaceful hippie wedding made the newspapers.
‘There was a shot on the front page of the Sunday Times, with Kate, this diminutive girl, in her wedding outfit, persuading these three really tall policemen,’ says McInnerney. ‘It’s so nice, a perfect kind of picture.’ The goodwill didn’t last long. On 1 June, McInnerney’s best man, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, was sentenced to nine months in jail for possession of a miniscule amount of marijuana.
The party at UFO was soon to end as well. A News of the World reporter visited the club and claimed to have witnessed all manner of debauchery. The newspaper’s subsequent story was as ill informed as its headline: ‘I SAW COUPLES INJECTING REEFERS!’ But a week later, the ballroom’s owner told Joe Boyd that UFO was no longer welcome on the premises. Boyd moved the club to the Roundhouse, but by October it had closed for good.
John Lennon had paid the original UFO a visit shortly before it closed, and had brought with him a test pressing of The Beatles’ new LP, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Everyone stopped and listened. Pete Townshend had first become aware of the huge leap The Beatles were making when Brian Epstein played him their yet-to-be-released single ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, in February. ‘It was utterly bizarre, creative, strange and different,’ he said. ‘It was the moment The Beatles became truly anarchic in the studio.’
With Sgt. Pepper The Beatles had put a marker in the ground, but it was hard to imagine how anyone else, including The Beatles themselves, could better it. Songs such as ‘A Day in the Life’ had an unparalleled breadth and vision. The rest of the album was filled with wondrous, imaginative sounds and what Pete Townshend called ‘atmosphere, essence, shadow and romance’. This extended to the collage-style cover, designed by Peter Blake and his wife, the artist Jann Haworth. Here, The Beatles appeared alongside images of more than sixty famous and infamous people, including the occultist Aleister Crowley, the underground writer William Burroughs and the comic actors Laurel and Hardy. The days when it was simply enough to stick a photograph of the group on an LP cover were over. Sgt. Pepper was a musical and visual statement.
Timothy Leary apparently played the LP and was convinced his mission to turn on the world was complete. You could hear the drug in much of the music. Lennon had taken LSD while recording the record. Two weeks after the album’s release Paul McCartney admitted in Life magazine that he’d also used the drug. It was a brave statement to make with Hoppy in jail, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards facing a possible prison sentence.
Sgt. Pepper provided the soundtrack to The Who’s return trip to America in June. They flew into Detroit for a couple of warm-up gigs before heading to California. The Who were due to play two nights at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. When promoter Bill Graham told them they were expected to play two one-hour sets of different material, the band panicked, and Chris Stamp had to borrow a record player so the group could re-learn their own songs.
The Fillmore was an impressive auditorium with a state-of-the-art PA, and was located in the Haight-Ashbury district, the very heart of San Francisco’s hippie quarter. A sprawling community of musicians, artists, poets, students and LSD disciples populated the area. It was home to the likes of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, folk and blues bands who’d fallen for The Beatles and the Stones, discovered dope and acid and were now feeding those influences into their music.
The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream had been inspired by an event in January when more than ten thousand people had gathered at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for a ‘Human Be-in’. The Grateful Dead played, Timothy Leary preached his psychedelic gospel and the police watched in amazement as nobody got drunk, robbed or stabbed. Meanwhile, the University Of California, in neighbouring Berkeley, was a hotbed of political activity – and with good reason. In 1966, the US government had sent over 400,000 young men to fight in Vietnam. Anti-war sentiment was escalating. But by the time The Who arrived it was already apparent that what Townshend described as ‘peace and love – those borrowed second-hand catchphrases’ weren’t going to change the US government’s mind. Meanwhile, Haight-Ashbury had become a tourist trap, a place for the ‘greys’ to gawp and giggle at the brightly dressed hippies selling beads and tie-dyed T-shirts.
Rolling Stone magazine’s John Mendelsohn watched The Who’s show at the Fillmore, and was shocked by Moon’s ‘enormous, maniacal bug eyes’, Daltrey’s ‘ultra-bouffant orange hair’ and the ‘comically gangly’ Townshend. Yet by the end he was impressed with the ‘thundering, pulverising music … and superhuman feats of stamina, strength and even grace.’
Days later, on 18 June, The Who brought their thundering, pulverising music to the Monterey International Pop Music Festival at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, California. Among the festival’s organisers were promoter Lou Adler, John Phillips of the harmony group the Mamas and the Papas and The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor. It was the first high-profile pop music festival and would pave the way for Woodstock two years later.
The organisers had pledged their profits to charity, and the band were all asked to perform for free. As the event was being filmed for a documentary movie, the organisers argued that the publicity would be as good as, if not better than any fee. Most accepted, albeit grudgingly, except the Indian composer and sitar player Ravi Shankar who pocketed $3,000 for his afternoon performance.
As The Who had only just dented the US market, Chris Stamp agreed to them playing for nothing. Stamp had just had his hair permed to look like Jimi Hendrix, had also discovered LSD and was now swept up in what he later called ‘love and communication … and all that shit.’ But he was still compos mentis enough to know that this was a good opportunity for The Who. The other acts on the bill included Country Joe and the Fish; Jefferson Airplane; and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring singer Janis Joplin; and Scott McKenzie, whose hit ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ had become an anthem for what critics were now calling ‘the summer of love’. The stage was wide open for a loud, aggressive group from England.
The Who were due to play on Sunday evening, and arrived the day before. Townshend watched Otis Redding work his magic on Saturday night, but America’s take on psychedelia left him cold. ‘The effect of LSD on American music just made it crap, with very, very few exceptions,’ he complained. ‘I think the only reason Jimi Hendrix was so fabulous is because he came here [Britain]. If he’d tried to develop himself in San Francisco he would have ended up sounding like Country Joe and the Fish.’
If ever The Who had the opportunity to leave a wound it was now. However, they weren’t the only Track Records act on the bill. ‘The Who paid my fare home,’ says Keith Altham, who covered the festival for New Musical Express, ‘but Jimi Hendrix paid for my flight out.’ To add to the frisson, The Who and Hendrix were both due to play on Sunday evening.
By then, as many 80,000 had either passed through the gates into the Monterey Fairgrounds or congregated outside in the hope of seeing and hearing something, anything. The festival had attracted unprecedented media coverage, with more than a thousand journalists besieging Derek Taylor’s press tent. Poised in the audience were record company executives ready to snap up the next big underground group, including CBS mogul Clive Davis, who’d recently signed Donovan. After Monterey, Davis would sign Janis Joplin, turning Big Brother and the Holding Company into a US chart act. Behind the scenes, visiting Rolling Stone Brian Jones was heard whispering, ‘They might think this is the age of free love but it is not free and it is not love.’
Backstage, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer turned chemist, Owsley Stanley was distributing free LSD trips and Brian Jones was drifting around dressed like a Regency prince, but looking, as Keith Richards once said, ‘like a ghost about to leave a séance’. Daltrey recalls Jones joining him, Janis Joplin, the Mamas and the Papas’ Mama Cass and Jimi Hendrix for a loose jam session in the dressing room under the stage.
‘Jimi was playing “Sgt. Pepper …” on his guitar,’ said Daltrey. ‘But, and this was the amazing thing, he was playing all the parts. He would go from a bit of orchestration, to a vocal part, to a solo – the whole thing on one guitar.’ The others stood and watched, accompanying Hendrix by beating out a rhythm on anything close to hand.
Others remember it differently. John Entwistle said that roadie Neville Chesters, who was now working for Jimi, had warned him earlier that ‘Hendrix was going to go on first and steal our act.’ Townshend recalled arguing with Hendrix about who would play first, as neither wanted to follow the other. At one point Hendrix stood on a stool in front of him to show off on the guitar, as if to say, ‘Don’t fuck with me you little shit.’ In the end, John Phillips suggested they toss a coin. Townshend won.
The Animals’ Eric Burdon, his Newcastle accent softened by California, or drugs, or both, introduced The Who as ‘a group that will destroy you completely in more ways than one’. Behind him, the band crashed into ‘Substitute’ followed by Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’. It was hard to imagine anything more removed from the Mamas and the Papas’ passive ‘California Dreamin” or anything else the audience had witnessed that weekend.
The Who tore through ‘Pictures of Lily’, ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’, ‘Happy Jack’ and ‘My Generation’. Instead of peace, love and flowers, they offered wanking, pervert train drivers, adolescent turmoil and Pete Townshend hacking away at the stage with his guitar, like a lumberjack trying to dismember a log with a blunt axe. Watching their performance in the film Monterey Pop, you can hear the gasps from the audience as stagehands rush on to try and salvage the broken equipment. Ravi Shankar watched the performance and was apparently appalled by what he saw as a ‘lack of respect for their music and their instruments’.
There was also an air of English decadence about The Who at Monterey. In their paisley jackets, Edwardian ruffles and puffed sleeves, the group looked like a gang of marauding dandies. In 2005, Keith Altham recalled that Moon had accessorised his outfit with a necklace made from human teeth. Even Daltrey, who’d rarely worn targets and chevrons in the pop-art days, had joined the revolution. The cape draped around his shoulders was an explosion of red, brown and burnt-orange hues, described in New Musical Express as ‘a heavily embroidered psychedelic shawl’. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. ‘It was a tablecloth I bought in Shepherd’s Bush market,’ Daltrey admitted. ‘But it did the job.’
Later, Brian Jones introduced Jimi Hendrix onstage as ‘the most exciting guitarist I’ve ever heard’. Townshend watched the set with Mama Cass: ‘He started doing this stuff with his guitar, she turned around to me, and said, “He’s stealing your act.” And I said, “No, he’s doing my act.”’
Although Townshend has since achieved a Zen-like calm on the subject of Hendrix, Daltrey still sounds defensive. ‘I always have to defend The Who when people start raving about Hendrix at Monterey, and what he was doing,’ he said. ‘It was totally nicked from The Who. Pete was doing that down the Railway Hotel.’
Daltrey was right, at least until Hendrix sprayed his guitar with lighter fluid, set it on fire and tossed the charred remains into the audience. Hendrix had just invented a new act. Keith Altham remembers running into a subdued Townshend at San Francisco airport the following day, and being warned not to write just about Jimi. ‘Hendrix triumphed at Monterey,’ Altham points out, ‘but it was The Who that had drawn first blood.’
On the plane home, Keith Moon thought it would be a good idea to take the acid Owsley Stanley had given him backstage. Townshend, believing that it was better for Moon not to trip alone, decided to do the same. He split a pill, swallowed one half, but soon wished he hadn’t. Stanley’s LSD was a new compound, known in Haight-Ashbury as STP. It was considerably stronger and its effects longer-lasting than the LSD Townshend was used to.
While Moon seemed untroubled by the drug, Townshend found the experience horrifying. When an air hostess appeared to turn into a pig and, in his mind’s eye, began scurrying up the aisle, Townshend tried to force himself back to reality. But it was too much. In every account of the trip Townshend insists that he had an out-of-body experience, and ended up floating by the ceiling of the plane watching himself and his bandmates below. Over the next few hours, he would ‘return’ to his body, only for the fear and hallucinations to begin again. The trip lasted for sixteen hours instead of the usual ten and was a harrowing experience.
Back in England, it took more than two weeks for Townshend’s world to come back into focus. His belief that ‘the drugs are not going do it for me, I need something else’ was truer than ever – he would never take LSD again. The Who’s summer of love was over before it had even begun.