Pete Townshend - Pete Townshend - Who I Am

The Who were banned from Holiday Inns for life.

We stopped in Las Vegas on the way home. It was Herman’s nineteenth birthday. While trapped there in the searing heat I wrote a few lyrics and recorded three demos on a little Wollensack tape rig. These were ‘Tattoo’, ‘Boats Are Coming In’ and ‘Touring Inside US’ (directly quoting an early Beach Boys song, ‘Surfing USA’); ‘Tattoo’ was inspired by recent events on the road: were we men, or were we something else?

In Gold Star studios we finished ‘I Can See for Miles’, which we then played, along with ‘My Generation’, on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour . For televisual effect, Keith set off an oversized theatrical charge of gunpowder, blowing up the entire band in front of a panic-stricken Bette Davis and a sweetly concerned Mickey Rooney. My hair caught fire and my hearing was never the same. Keith was such a twat sometimes, even if he did make this TV show a significant moment in pop history.

I was looking forward to returning home to Karen, a new flat and a new studio back in London. But because the entire summer had been used up so profligately, we had to catch up, which meant The Who planned to go straight back into the studio. And because these sessions needed to be paid for, we’d have to play lots of British shows at the same time. We committed to a package tour with a bunch of current British pop groups with UK chart hits, as though we’d learned nothing at all touring with Herman’s Hermits. We topped a bill of artists who all believed they should be topping the bill: Traffic, The Herd, Marmalade and The Tremeloes, all of whom would have legions of female fans screaming for them outside in the street every night.

Would anyone scream for The Who?

How the blazes would I know? I was still deaf.

***

The day we got back in September, Chris Stamp asked me to meet him at the Track Records offices in Old Compton Street, where he presented me with the proposed track-list for the new album. I was taken aback. We had ‘I Can See for Miles’, ‘Rael’, ‘Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands’, ‘Our Love Was’, ‘I Can’t Reach You’, ‘Glittering Girl’, ‘Relax’ and a song by John called ‘Someone’s Coming’; ‘Summertime Blues’ could be put on the list as we had recorded it on tour. But there was little else of consequence, and only ‘I Can See for Miles’ seemed a potential chart song.

I had written very little on tour, having come to depend so much on writing in my home studio. I told Chris I didn’t feel we were ready to release; we needed more songs, and I needed more time away from Keith and Holiday Inns to write them. Chris was unusually adamant: this was what we would be releasing. Suddenly I saw that he was now running a record label with a schedule to fill, as well as managing a band. He had, in some sense, gone over to the other side.

I took a little time to consider our dilemma. I’d written a couple of songs that weren’t on Chris’s track-list. I’d demoed ‘Tattoo’ in my hotel room in Las Vegas during our three-day vacation, and a song called ‘Odorono’, named after a deodorant stick. ‘Odorono’ led us to the most perfect pop idea of all time: we would make our next record a vehicle for advertising. When we called Kit to explain, he was as excited as we were. I suggested we link the gaps between songs with jingles like those on commercial pirate radio.

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