Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

I think it is clear by now that I took my role as a godfather seriously. Perhaps too much so. The vows one is asked to take in the baptism service (and Harry was a Catholic) were of a religious rather than spiritual nature. But it was in the matter of Walter’s spiritual state that I felt most responsible. I wanted him to be fulfilled, to be happy, and to be able to bear with equanimity the frustration and difficult times when creativity was not free-flowing. I guessed Harry knew I would be better at this stuff than he would. Yet I wanted to offer practical help too. Walter had attempted to musicalize the written soundscape descriptions. As he played a few chords on the piano and sang some plaintive phrases, it became clear that he hadn’t gotten very far with it. As a composer he couldn’t capture what he heard in his head, what he had so eloquently and poetically described on paper.

“Walter,” I said, “this is very interesting, but you need someone to remind you how to write music again.” I laughed, trying to reduce the impact of my negative review. “You need a kick up your musical arse! I hope you don’t mind me saying this.”

Walter smiled and shook his head. “You’re right,” he confessed. “I’m trying my best. I seem to have lost the knack. Or maybe this is just too big a task for me?”

I decided to ask Crow to visit Walter, as there was no one more down-to-earth, more practical. No one was better than Crow at kicking musical arse.

Despite the fact that Walter was no longer performing at Dingwalls, I continued to go, and quite often. I had many friends there, and Frank Lovelace still managed Crow’s new band.

I couldn’t really work out whether Frank was a villain or really cared about music. I knew that like me he loved the company of the women at the bar. Selena was sometimes around, still beautiful, mad as ever, and very entertaining. Crow’s wife Agneta would sometimes be there too, and she always had charming and becoming Swedish girlfriends in tow, but on this occasion she was absent.

Crow’s band was terrific, and true to his R&B thesis to the letter. Walter was missed, but Crow was a strong front man and his singing and guitar playing were cohesive and convincing.

I loved talking to Crow. He never seemed to change. That evening he came to sit with me and brought me a Coke.

“So Walter’s maze is finished.” He smiled. “Does he still have his head in a plastic bucket?”

Selena saw us and came to join us, having overheard Crow’s last question.

“Playing the harmonica,” she said with a laugh. “He loves the sound inside that bucket. Louis told me he started doing that when he was boy, didn’t you, sweetie?” She looked at me. “He used to say it made him feel as though he had a microphone and a bit of reverb.”

“How is your work going, Selena?” Crow’s question surprised me. Was he really interested in her strange world?

“I am starting to bear the ravages of healing a few too many of my friends, including your fabulous wife, Crow. She had arthritis, you know. I fixed it.”

“You did,” accepted Crow.

“And there are those who ask for healing but the problem I can see is that they have entities living within them like parasites.”

Crow laughed. “Fuck off, Selena! Agneta doesn’t have parasites.” He got up and stalked off.

Selena looked at me, her arms spread out. “Did I say Agneta had parasites?” She pulled an incredulous face. “I said I helped her arthritis.”

My impression was that Crow had become more narrow-minded than ever in fifteen years. He was so hard to talk to about anything other than music, and even on that subject he was a fanatic and a pedant. Some might say that he was more focused; Crow was brilliant, especially if working with younger musicians where his historian’s view of music from the late fifties to the mid sixties always found a willing ear and added context and effective constraint to otherwise undisciplined young minds. On his own, driving his own small band, his playing just got tighter and tighter, his repertoire narrower and narrower, until in the end, his longish scraggy hair going suddenly gray within a single month, he was a happy anachronism. He used a regular introduction that his fans had come to anticipate with glee. Here’s one some of you may not have heard. He would then launch into “Susie Q,” or “Cathy’s Clown,” or some other classic well known even to someone who had recently walked out of a jungle in Borneo.

I called Crow the next day at two in the afternoon and he was obviously still in bed and hungover.

“Hey, Lou,” he said, hiccupping. “What d’you want?”

I heard a female grunt in the background. I was pretty sure it was Selena. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

“I want to speak to you about Walter,” I said. “Who’s that with you?”

“Mind your own fucking business,” he cackled. “It’s Selena of course. Like a rat up a pipe.”

He later confessed that Agneta had left him without warning a week before to marry her boss at the bank where she worked. Selena had offered “healing.” My guess was that she and Crow would surely become an item, but their sex life might be frustrated by Selena’s dream of getting Walter into bed.

In fact, I suppose I’d better admit it, at the time it really annoyed me, Selena sleeping with Crow. I was jealous, or envious, or something. Selena always gave me a bit of a hard time, I felt.

“Anyway, about Walter.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He has started to write again.” I sensed this might not be a smooth negotiation. I wanted Crow to look at what Walter was doing. “It isn’t quite music, not yet. It’s descriptions of music, and sound. I think it could be the basis of something pretty amazing. It could be really cool.”

Crow wheezed as he lit a cigarette, and started drawling with no preamble.

“In your day, Louis, back when you were at art school in the sixties—with the benefit of grass—everything probably felt cool in music, everything seemed new and fresh. It was all flooding over from America: R&B, Tamla Motown, New Orleans, Memphis, Bob Dylan. You probably called music ‘sounds,’ like the Yanks.”

“True.” I laughed. “It seemed to carry some kind of message.”

Crow gasped between puffs of smoke.

“Who cares about a message? Sounds. It’s a good word. Sounds are all I want. Cool sounds. Simple sounds.”

I could sense him pulling himself up, leaning back against the bedhead to allow him to give more force to what followed.

“How arrogant does a fucking pub rock star need to be to believe they can carry a message to the audience?”

He was probably referring as much to the Hansons and their work in the revived Hero Ground Zero, whose latest album had been the bestseller of the year. But perhaps he was also digging at Siobhan’s futile attempts, fifteen years back, to refine what Walter had been doing in the heyday of the Stand.

“Sounds,” he barked. “That’s all it is. It’s all it ever was.”

I explained that Walter was hearing sounds, real sounds, amazing sounds. He was reflecting the anxiety of the people around him.

“In a way he is composing,” I went on. “But it’s just written descriptions at the moment, and very rough music demos. He’s hearing a grand mixture of sounds. He’s writing a kind of score, or libretto if you like. He calls them soundscapes.”

“This is even worse.” Crow laughed, breaking into a broken smoker’s cough. “It sounds like he thinks he’s fucking Stockhausen.”

I knew that the kind of sounds Crow was talking about were not like Walter’s sounds, but I was determined to get him to go and see his old friend.