New Musical Express, 5th November 1977

WHO TELLS ALL by Pete Townshend

    Today, reading throught it before sending it in for publication, there is much I am tempted to add or expand on. There is a strong temptation to bring everything up to date, but then The WHO's last tour did that. The future of course is an open book.
    The sections in italics are merely pieces of writing that I have found that I wrote during the months I cover in the article. I often sit at a typewriter and knock out stream-of-consciousness stuff, it helps clear the head, but often brings forth ideas for songs and so on.
    They were written sometimes on scraps of paper at dead of night, sometimes at the lunch table with the kids on my lap, sometimes in hotel rooms while filming or performing.
    Due to the fact that they were never written to be published, they are somewhat obscure, but they are minimally edited and therefore telling a state of mind and degree of intoxicated desperation.
    I used to be a highly talkative person to the Rock Press, and have missed my contact with the writers I spent time with. Silence, however, is habit forming, and I am glad to be able to look back objectively to such an emotive period of my life with the band and try to say it right.
    What I never expected was such sympathy and understanding from writers whom I continually put off when they asked for interviews or even just a chat. I have lost contact with many journalist friends because I have been scared to speak.
    It's not important; this article helps bring things up to date. perhaps in the future I can get used to working my jaws again instead of my fingers. Fingers that would be better occupied playing guitar or tickling children.

PETE TOWNSHEND'S BACK PAGES BEGIN OVER THE PAGE

    February 1, 1977

    TODAY I RECIEVED a letter from a neighbour. She says I must forgive her for ignoring me, but it's because of her religion. She knows I have a crush on her. I'm not sure who she is, but I might well have a crush on her if I did; she wrote a parallel letter to my wife saying the same thing. Irritating.

I have to look.
I have to go further.
Things as they are should be acceptable, but not when I feel this burning inside.
I must learn to accept things the way they are.
I take the rough with the smooth and I take the high life offered to me with delight, but become obsessive.
I have reached a point of departure.
Not from the people around me I love, but from other things that I am so attatched to that I can no longer understand them. Like a cripple's hunchback, my posessions are on my shoulders; heavy but out of sight.
Let me be clear; someone said, "I can't see the wood for the trees".
I say I can't see the path for the walking.
I don't object to walking, mind you. I enjoy the ups and downs. I pay, and I pray.
I met a man the other day who had given up everything and gone on the road. He was full of a kind of "light". But how long will it last?
When the thrill of the discovery of life's real value is found, realised, and then digested, what remains? More life. More experiance. More illusion.
What is important to me? I would have thought it was obvious. I love my wife, my children, my work, and the people it pleases, my Master, my home, the fields in the morning air, the fish in the river, the faces of strangers.
All this is good. But what now?
What now?

    Yesterday was Meher Baba's "Armatithi". Followers of this great Master to whom I remain committed celebrate this anniversary of his passing in 1969. I saw a film of his entombment in the afternoon and felt a most powerful feeling of his presence throughout the whole day.
    It is incredible to me, as I'm sure it is to so many witnesses of my day to day behaviour, that I still feel so moved by Meher Baba's words, photographs and films.
    After following him for nearly nine years I have fallen deeply into the rhythm of focussing all my reflections on life through a lens formed of experiances I have had under his spiritual umbrella.
    That letter and the film; as two extremes they seem to indicate the incredible paradoxes and conflicts that surround me.
    My neighbour felt I was cheating myself in believing that I was "too old". The dear soul told me I was still attractive to women. Well there is always someone isn't there? She had read some critical article in some Rock sheet and I suppose they rehashed my psychotic ramblings of a year or two ago, complaining as I did that I felt I was a hypocrite standing on stage talking about "My generation" to thirteen-year-old kids.
    Not exactly a sexual hangup though. Is it?
    The most amazing thing of all is that my head has surfaced, some distance from the shoreline of past paranoia, in an ocean of immeasurable possibilities. I feel strong and secure, and for the first time able to talk about what happened to The Who, (or at least The Who through my eyes), back in '74/'75.
    If I try to imagine where my head was two years ago I come up with a rather strange vision. Paranoia does not adequately describe the feelings I had. I suppose we all in The Who were to a degree paranoic toward one another, but my trouble was also manifestly spiritual. I felt I had let myself down morally and artistically.
    I felt quite genuinely to be a hypocrite. Someone who gets a letter practically every day praising him as well-nigh a saint, but still attempts to act like an adolescent is asking for trouble I suppose.

I have to look
Perhaps if I leave everything behind and let go.
But what the hell will THAT achieve? I don't feel like running away from life. I LOVE life.
Perhaps though I only love it because it is good to me, I don't know.
Of course! THAT is the key. I love life because it is good to me. So perhaps the key is to chase nightmares, to find trouble, to dare life to show me something more horrifying than my imagination can concieve.
I'll chase nightmares. I'll search out storms!
Life, listen to me . . .
I'm going to test you . . .

    THE WHO'S FANS had seen the trouble with me by late '74, pulled out the rotten tooth with a merciful jerk more appropriate to a nineteenth-century barber-shop than the modern age, and carried on almost regardless.

I WAS in one of those shallow sleeps, when dreams are as clear as day, but each scene in the unfolding reverie is also strangely dark. Like the harsh clear picture of nature visable a few minutes before a thunderstorm. I gazed at an ocean scene, thinking to myself, "I am dreaming, I control my movements through my sleeping adventures."
    In a dream within a dream I awoke for a minute, I looked around the room. Everything was as it should be, the chair in it's usual place, with my previous day's clothing strewn over its back. The dead television gazed at me quietly; the window blind was pulled right down, the bathroom light still on, towels on the floor damp and tangled.
     I closed my eyes again. I became aware of a strange feeling. Not of an impending nightmare, or even the experiance of unease, even though the whole scene seemed set for troubling vision. On the contrary, a sense of elation overcame me, I snuggled my weary head into my pillow like a child, and smiled at the strong buzz of contentment that flooded my mind.
    At that moment I heard something distant that seemed to reflect my heady , almost orgasmic, feelings of pleasure. years before I had experimented with a tape recording of dozens of piano performances, all swooping and glittering over the entire chromatic scale. I then mixed them all together as one, and the result was an almost unidentifiable sound, but of great beauty and mystery. A sound like waves crashing, or distant wind over a summit, but musical; in fact on occasion a glimpse of detail within the deluge manifested, and piano could be clearly heard.
    In my dream I became aware that this new, remote sound I heard had simularities to my experimental work. It sounded like a breath gently being sighed away, but the listeners ear seemed inside the mouth of a lion as it were. Listen to your own breath. breathe out in a quiet place and hear the beauty and complexity of the sound. The slightest change in the shape of your mouth chamber, the tiniest movement of your lips, and the breath becomes a song or a word. A thousand harmonics are thrown up like glittering reflections on the surface of a sunlit bay. In the mystic's 'Om', is contained every sound and every sound within a sound. Every ingrediant that contributes to the source of the primordial desire even to make a sound is contained in that one word.
    So this is the train of thought that I, in my dream, was taking. I was still aware of the fact that I was asleep; it seemed unimportant. The new sound grew louder, came apparently closer. Then the miracle surpassed itself, the beauty of the sounds became transcendentally glorious. It's simplicity on the surface only disguised a secret ingredient that I felt in itself must contain all things. Like the drops in the Ocean, minute and unlimited, but when combined they make up the powerful, infinate majesty of the Ocean itself.
    The ecstacy that this roaring, singing, cascading sound threw me into almost defied description. But while swooning under its import and unparalelled attractiveness I still had the presence of mind, perhaps brought on by the fact that I am a musician, to analyse and discover what this incredible music was. I remember laying on my side, my mouth set in the grin of an idiot who had just discovered gold, but has no idea how much lies in his new claim.
    If I could only break down this sound I could remake it for the world to hear, I could make a relaity of this, the outer limit of my unleashed and unfettered musical imagination; glorious celestial music of only dreams.
    I began to listen more carefully. I tried to ignore the hypnotic sweetness of the sound, almost like a hungry man trying to eat a piece of cheese to appease his starvation, and at the same time compose a thesis on the relative distinction between say, Double Gloucester and Caerphilly.
    I wrecklessly plunged deeply into the music. It became slightly more coarse as I became submerged. It was, indeed, like diving into the sea. The feelings of the sharp cool water is always a shock when one has spent maybe an hour gazing languidly at the sunny surface of the waves breaking on the beach. I could still hear the rippling and the soaring of the incomparable sigh, and yet I was now in it, of it. I delved even more deeply into the secret. What was the essential ingredient of this music? What was the fundamental element that created this fantastic sound?
    For a few minutes I was lost in my search. I forgot to listen quite so intently to the music, and began turning over in my mind the various possibilities and alternatives. Was it a million pianos? Perhaps the sound of a heavenly choir? That was it! The heart of this sound was the human voice, there could be no question of it. I plunged headlong, further into the chasm of this incorporeal symphony. It was apparently simplifying as I thrust inward. Then, in a second the whole world seemed to turn inside out. As I recognised the unit elements of this superficially wondeful noise, my skin crawled. I could not beleive what I heard. As I tore myself away I felt I left sections of myself behind caught up in the cacophonous dirge. I tried to wake myself, but only succeeded in breaking through a superficial level, no longer a dream within a dream, merely a nightmare. A game, a ghastly trick perpetrated on me by my own mind. A vitiated and distorted ploy of my ego to stunt trust in nature's beauty, to kill my appetite for the constant search for the One within the many, the many within the One. For the sound which I was hearing was the Niagran roar of a billion humans screaming. Now, I really awoke. Ironically the room looked just as it had in the dream. Nothing had changed. My body was soaking wet, sweat seeped from every pore.
    Fear lay under the surface of my skin like a disease. I leapt from my bed, clutching a small bead on a string that I knew had been touched by the Master, and prayed for protection. I felt enough comfort to clear my head and allow me to draw a reactive conclusion.
    I know, that of all things on earth, nothing is so inherently evil, so contemptuous, so vile, so conniving, so worthless . . . as my own imagination.

    QUADROPHENIA (The Who's last major album with a contrived theme, released in 1973) tried to describe the utopian secrets of the eternal youth of each Who member. We get our life extensions from our audience; however far down we go as individuals, there will always be rent to pay, so always an audience. When there's an audience there's salvation.

    I SPENT the last three days talking about Punk Rock. I'm sure I invented it, and yet it's left me behind. If anything was ever a refutation of time my constant self-inflicted adolescence must be.
    Chris Stamp told me they banged their heads through ceilings, swore at one another and if a fight broke out, though "breaking out" is hardly the termto be used in this context, one became the agressor, one the victim. The crowd was one, the fighters played out roles.
    Damage, damage, damage. It's a great way to shake society's value system. It makes others disown their children. It makes school teachers puke.
    High rise blocks and slums in Glasgow. I don't need to have lived in them to know the facts. I see the faces beaming up at me as I destroy my £500 guitar. Why should they, poor bastards, dig that? They enjoy the destruction because they despise phony values; the heavy price on the scrap of timber called a musical instrument. It's so far beyond their reach it might as well not exist.
    The crucifixion is what these people stand for. They humiliate themselves and their peers and care nothing for any acolade. These stars are true stars, they are part of an audience of stars.
"On the dance floor broken glass; the bloody faces slowly pass
The numbered seats in empty rows; it all belongs to me you know".
    Where am I in space that I should care so much about the lonely sould in tiny square bedrooms a hundred feet up in the air in cities all over the world?
    I am with them. I want nothing more than to go with them to their desperate hell, because that lonliness they suffer is soon to be over. Deep inside they know.
    I prayed for it, and yet it's too late for me to truly participate. I feel like an engineer.
    Just let me . . . WATCH

    WHEN I SIT and listen to "Punk And The Godfather" on "Quadrophenia" I come closer to the core of the problem. Where was my head two years ago? I was the Godfather. (When I met two of the Sex Pistols recently I was appropriately in a raging, explosive mood, but I recognised their hungry, triumph pursuant expressions and began to preach).

    I was the aging daddy of Punk Rock in '73. I was bearing a Standard I could barely hold up anymore. My cheeks were stuffed, not with cotton wool in the Brando-Mafioso image, but with the scores of uppers I had taken with a sneer and failed to swallow.
    Anyone reading this who hasn't heard The Who on stage, or hasn't listened to "Quadrophenia" might as well put it down until they have. I don't want to bore you folks. Because now I have come to the pompous bit. My ego suitably boosted by reading things I have said when I was only 19.
    On the last tour of the States and Canada we did with The Who in the Fall of '76, a lot of things came to a "glorious" head in Toronto, the last show of the tour. The road crew had thrown a party for us and it had been the first party I had been to for at least five years which meant anything to me.
    I don't go to a lot of parties as a rule, but I'm glad that I made this one. I suddenly realised that behind every Who show are people who care as much as, or more than, we do. It enabled me, talking to the individuals who help get the show together, to remember that audiences care too.
    If ever I sit in an audience, one of the things that make it enjoyable for me is that I spend a lot of energy WILLING it to be the best thing I have ever seen. I get to see some great concerts that way. Ask and Who fan if they care how well The Who are playing in any particular tour, on any singular date. The Who don't come into it as performers exactly, but their response to the audience's energy is vital.

THERE IS no worse a squandering, than wasted improvidence. This man had consumed time in a way that only God Himself could ever hold a candle to, but had he learned anything? He belongs to God, as we all do. Deny that he is then God's folly and what do you do? You refute God Humself. That argument is for cosy firesides. No, this was God's work. The devil is after all only a figment of Gid's imagination. And so this remarkable fool believed himself to be a figment of a figment. A dream within a dream. he believed he had an imagination that could not be shaken by the actual imagination that brought forth his very own being.
Such impudence.
Such unwitting humour.
Life could easily be able to continue the provision of sideshows in this one's circus. Perhaps his endless dream could be shattered this time.
Maybe this little man's time had really come.

    SO TWO years ago, when I felt down, when I felt empty, tired and defeated, the audience of Who freaks carried on regardless. At the time I was very bitter about this.

    I remember at Madison Square Garden, having come out of total seclusion in my studio after preparing mind-bending and complex tracks for the Tommy film, that when my drunken legs gave way under me as I tried to do a basic cliche leap and shuffle, a few loving fans got up a chant . . . "Jump! Jump! Jump!" Brings tears to your eyes doesn't it? It did mine anyway. Such loyalty.
    As the general rule of the day in show business was, "When in or out of trouble - drink", I drank some more.
    Drinking around The Who is the greatest thing gutter-level life can offer. The bawdiness of the humour, the sheer decadence of the amount put away, the incredible release emotionally of violent outbursts against innocent hotel room sofas, thir stapled-down upholstery with crawling patterns; all these paremeters count to get a body through a lot of trouble. The fault lies in the fact that at then end of the orgy the real cancer still lies untackled deep in the heart.
    I remember when The Who were recording "Who By Numbers", Keith's courageous attempts to head of his alcoholism moved me to stop drinking too. I stopped overnight. The results were quite interesting. My hair started to fall out.
    Another remarkable side effect was that I carried on drinking without my knowledge. This story can only carry credence if we are able to believe the observations of the people around us when we were recording, they were probably twice as drunk as I. Apparently, at the end of one session which I had gotten through by pulling incessantly at a total of about 20 cans of Coke, I wished everyone goodnight, walked up to the makeshift bar set up on an amplifier flight case at the back of the studio and drank down a bottle of vodka. I just don't remember doing that.
    I got very scared by memory blackouts . . . As scared as I ever had on bad LSD trips eight years before. Once in the back of my own car I sort of "came to". keith and John were with me, we were probably going to a club, but although I knew who they were, I didn't recognise either my car or my driver who had been working for me for about two months. The shock that hit me as the pieces fell into place was even more frightening than the black holes in my head I felt as the memory lapse began. Eight drug-free years and yet still this mental demise.
    On another occasion at the "tabk-you" concert we gave the extras in the Tommy film in Portsmouth, I signed several managerial and recording contracts, in a complete black fog. The only event I remember is quietly screaming for help as I asked John Entwistle if it had ever happened to him.

I DECIDED on a voyage. On a ship, or even a raft, anything
I would be alone. Me and my thoughts versus the world of so-called reality.
The sea was calm when I set off, those I left behind waved goodbye as though for the last time. I laughed actually. I suppose it was rather unkind, but I hoped their morbid tears were portentous in a way. I don't really want to win again, but I expect I will.
The waves crashed around me. The weather was very, very bad. But green faced though I was, I felt inside this was an adventure. As my little craft was tossed about by the green, foam-topped crests, I laughed between gulps for air. I choked as I smiled between spewing grimaces. I felt warm in the breast of a storm compassionate enough to make me know it cared about me so much it could scare me.

    I ENJOYED DOING the Tommy film. I liked the opportunity to rework some of the music and bring it up to date sound wise, and I genuinely admired and respected Ken Russell.

    Ken is stimulating company, but is an obsessional worker, and being sympathetic to this strange condition I suppose I allowed myself to work beyond my real capabilities.
    Walking off stage after a Who concert we each feel like super-humans. It is easy to mistake this very genuine and natural energy high for inate stamina or some God-given talent for an endless adrenalin supply.
    During about the second week of the actual filing (April '74) six weeks having been spent preparing sound tracks before shooting, I declared to Bill Curbishly, our new manager, that I would never work on the road with The Who again. I think I even might have said that I felt The Who were finished. I was really mixing up my two professions, as writer and music director on the film, and as performer with The Who. I think I perhaps blamed The Who's live work for bringing me to such a low emotional abyss. In retrospect I know that it is only from The Who's live concerts that I get energy freely for doing practically nothing. I play guitar, I jump and dance, and come off stronger than when I went on.
    I might interpose a thought here for those of you who are wondering how someone who is self-confessedly "committed" to Meher Baba can neatly substitute so obviously a worldly source of Love energy for the normal run-of-the-mill devotional feedback loops we all read about in Cosmopolitan and expect balding ascetics to practice.
    Shouldn't I really be standing on my head, or muttering mantric rhythms, or at least praying?
    Give me your indulgence for a few more paragraphs and I think I will be able to show that I do get energy from Meher baba, but it's a different kind.
    After the total downward spiral I underwent during the making of Tommy, and after living with the desperate fear of further humiliation of the Madison Square Garden variety, I did a few interviews with the London-based Rock press.
    My final undoing was to see a face I knew and imagine that it belonged to someone caring more about me as a person than a Rock performer. I should have never expected that. What, in a nutshell, happened was that I blurted out my fears, my depressions and woe; blaming the group to a couple of writers whose sympathies were, to put it mildly, a little to the left wing of Rock journalism.
    The results were catastrophic in print. Roger was understandably outraged and retaliated to my abject misery in his own interviews published a few weeks later.
    "I knocked Townshend out with one punch."
    I think I was already dead before the punch connected.

"I am scared . . ."
A Jack on the street puts his foot on my shoe and asks for help. I give him nothing, and go back to my hotel room.
"The water engulfs me . . ."
I am tired, but I still desperately need the placation of a smutty magazine.
"I hang to the mast . . ."
I feel secure as I lay and make love to myself, needing no-one.
"I am driven below, the wind is shrieking . . ."
A dream overtakes me, so foul it can only be a New York nightmare.
"As I lay on my bunk the water seeps in . . . dripping . . ."
I wake up and switch on the light, it's Sunday, there's nowhere to go even here.
"I am still very scared . . ."
I'm feeling so hungry, Christ I must get some food somewhere.
"But the fear is feeding me . . ."
I put on my phony fur collar coat and go out on the street, the lift operator gives me a dirty look . . . in his eyes I'm probably looking for hook.
"Perhaps if I turn the boat to the wind . . . ?"
The street is deserted, the cabs pass me by, they wouldn't even stop if I needed one.
"I'm drifting, I don't know my position . . ."
I walk, the street feels good. New York is real. No question.
"I must not be simply swept away . . ."
I see a light in the distance, it's hard to believe, it's an open Deli!
"Not after all this time at sea . . ."
Only in beautiful New York could such an Oasis be possible.
"Suddenly I hear the crunch of rocks underneath the boat . . ."
I cross the street, and sure enough they're open; they're making a delivery. Ice Cream I think.
"I am thrown off the bunk into a threshing, ice cold, saline puddle . . ."
I open the door, inside a cheery German Jew is slicing meat, He smiles, and says, 'Up early my friend, what can I do for you?'
"The boat lists heavily to port, my shoes float away from me . . ."
Grape Nuts, Yoghurt (In New York there's 'Dannon'; the best!) and some Swiss Cheese. I am spluttering with delight as I order.
"I struggle out onto the deck, it is dark, but I can see the cliff top . . ."
With everything in brown paper bag I walk home. New York, I love you.
"Maybe I can swim for another hour, maybe two . . ."
I find my frozen-toed way back to the warm depths of the Hotel lobby and make for the elevator, in my mind I am already back in my room, a little music on the tape machine, and eating a sweet breakfast like no-one ever knew.
"I jump into the water, it is unbelievably cold . . ."
Up twenty-two floors, turn left, fourteen yards, second door on the right. Turn key, enter suite. Ignore note under door.
"I am under water . . . I can't find the way up . . ."

    I FEEL now, although we were both, to an extent manipulated by a skilful and oportunist reporting chain, that the derision handed out to me by Roger for my weaknesses and indulgence did me a lot of good.

    It hurt me at the time, but when you're so far down, so the saying goes, even the gutter looks like up. I had, after all, been derisive of Roger many times in print.
    Roger went on to work on another Ken Russell film called Lisztomania, which I managed to avoid. I got my head down to try to write a bit for the coming album ("Who By Numbers") and came up with some realoty tinged with bitterness. It was hard for me to admit that I knew as I was actually composing that what was happening to me was an exorcism. Suicide notes tend to flush out the trouble felt by the potential ledge-jumpers, revealing the fact that once the truth is out, there's no need to leap.
    I also felt curiously mixed up about my state of mind. "Slip Kid" came acrossas almost a warning to young kids getting into music that it would hurt them - it was almost parental in its assumed wisdom. "Blue Red and Grey" was a ukelele ditty with John Entwistle adding brass band to the misty middle distance. It was about nothing at all; it reminded me of an old "Smiley Smile" Beach Boys number. "A Hand Or A Face" was cynical and tried to cut down the growing dependance I had on mysticism and psychic phenomena. All the songs were different, some more aggressive than others, but they were all negative in direction somehow. I felt empty.
    Recording the album seemed to take me nowhere. Roger was angry with the world at the time, Keith seemed as impetuous as ever, on the wagon one minute, off it the next. John was obviously gathering strength throughout the whole period; the great thing about it being that he seemed to know that we were going to need him in the coming year more than ever before.
    Glyn Johns who was producing our album was going through the most fantastic traumas at home with his marriage. I felt partly responsible because The Who recording schedule had, as usual, dragged on and onsweeping all individuals and their needs aside in its bow wave. Glyn worked harder on "Who By Numbers" than I've ever seen him toil. He had to, not because the tracks were weak, or the music poor, though I'l admit it's not a definitive Who album, but because the group were all so useless. We played cricket between takes, or went to the pub. I personally had never done that before. I felt detatched from my own songs, from the whole record; though I did discover some terrific sportsmen in our road crew.
    After we finished recording in August '75 we had a month off. I decided to try to get some spiritual energy from friends in the USA. For a few years I had toyed with the idea of opening a London house dedicated to Meher Baba. In the eight years I had followed him up to '74 I had donated only coppers to the work of the various foundations set up around the world to carry out the Mastsr's wishes and decided it was about time I put myself on the line. The Who as a group had set up a strong Charitable Trust of it's own which appeased to an extent the feeling I had that Meher Baba would rather have seen me give to the poor than to the establishemnt of yet another so-called 'spiritual centre'.
    My family, in particular of course, my wife, had suffered a lot from my pathetic behaviour of the eariler year, but they would naturally be by my side on any trip other than Who tours. So they came with me, or rather I went with them, to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina where Meher Baba had set up a retreat in the '50s. I intended to travel on after a couple of weeks to spend a full month living under the wing of Murshida Duce in California.
    Murshida Duce is the appointed head of the Sufi movement in the States as reoriented under Meher Baba's directives. She is used to recognising and helping her initiates with emotinal problems and had compassionately invited me to come anytime to be with her family when she had visited England in October '74.
    I was genuinely not prepared for the unfolding that transpired in that six weeks. My mind was clouded with the idea of trying to run a "Centre" for Avatar Meher Baba; the difficulties I would have trying to deal with people's whims and complaints; but most of all with the hypocricy of trying to do such a contentiously idealistic thing while enjoying the kind of life I had been living.

I COME to in a kind of trance; the woman with me is my wife, she is quite uniquely beautiful. Her profile is serene and encouraging. I look down at myself and I'm dressed rather peculiarly. My face is hairless and my jacket waisted with a 15-inch inverted pleat at the back. My shoes are scratched and worn. My collar feels too tight, I glance in a mirror as we walk to the restaraunt, is that the so-called 'me'?
Children? Where are the children? I was sure that I would have beautiful sparkling children. Where are they? Settle for now.
We walk into the long elegant room and wat to be seated. The head waiter acknowledges our hand gestures in French. It is Paris.
The woman is smiling with an exhilerated jubilance to fit a queen. I glance along the room at nearby tables. They are all staring at her, entranced. The head waiter suggests we drink Beaujolais Villages, slightly chilled. It costs nothing, there are wines on the menu that cost a $100, but he suggests this simple fare. When it is delivered we understand. The warmth of perfection that accompanies such instants is immeasurable. The way the silken cloth clings to her body revealing not only the perfection of her form, but also the eccentricities; the faults (if it is possible to call them so).
We eat, the food is superb; why, why is everything so right? Is Paris really a dream? In our room, the blinds are wound down, the sparkling white sheets revealed in a triangle; the maid had prepared the beds.
How does this fit in? I remember dingy dancehalls, fish and chips and little cheap cars that break down miles from home.
I stare into the future. Nothing that I have ever dreamed of has failed me. So I stare knowing this, that what I see will be. It's not clairvoyance so much as fatal determination, and yet I know that ne day my luck must inevitably run out.
What am I doing with this superb woman? What am I doing?

    BEFORE I left England I had written Roger a note telling him that I felt there had been a lot of unneccessary strife between us, and that I hoped I could earn his respect again

    From New York on the first leg of our trip to California I wrote to him again, (he was on the road, promoting his new album "Ride A Rock Horse"). I told him I would support him in whatever he did. It felt a strange thing to say.

IN LIFE there is always a time to write. A time when windows fly open and girls call your name in a whisper in your inner ear. A time when complete, savage life stories are discussed primly on television programmes about paperbacks. A time when children play peacefully for hours and in spending the quiteside constructively in conversation we remember, in isolation, how poorly we treat our friends with lack of attention.
If it is really possible to believe that what has happened has happened, then what cannot be? If a man can reach and touch and take and win, why can't God be reachable within?
The events that have engulfed me are ridiculous. My life in futility is a triumph. My bliss and pain and paranoia are interminably pursued, and yet fulfilling. Simple in their sweetness. I have faith in the humility of anger and frustration in the young, in the wonder of birth and revolution.
Faith in all this blossoming from a downward spiral. Things aren't really getting better. Why should they? Who am I to expect that?
Nevertheless, friends are protective. Each soul trying to shield me from the next. How I bless them, how do I earn their love and forgiveness so easily?
These endless questions. They look pretty poor on paper. They flash through my mind quite genuinely though. I promise I feel touched by your attention. I am knocked out cold by the thought that you are even reading this at the moment. It isn't phony humility, I don't know you, yet you read me and my words without a chance of feedback. You paid a few dollars for the dubious honour of listening to me carp over a glass of wine. I wish you were here, whoever you are.

    I HAD ALWAYS been the helmsman of The Who. Roger and the others, (and by 'others' I don't mean to demean Keith or John's role, or that of our management) always had plenty to say in the group's affairs, but because I wrote the majority of the songs they were inexorably tied up by my feelings, emotions and directions.

    A good friend of mine in new York gave me some advice when I tried to explain that I felt the problems in The Who were mainly about me and Roger, not the myriad of managerial and contractual problems that seemed so manifestly cancerous. I was counselled quite simply: "Let Roger win".
    The statement is not as cruel or derisorily flippant as it sounds. This person knew The Who and its history, and cared about all of us deeply. What was offered as advice was that I should demonstrate to Roger that I meant what I said in my letters by not hanging on to past grievances or differences. Most of all though, I should bow to the changing status quo within the group that had been created by the fans' new identification with Roger as the front man of The Who rather than me as its mouthpiece (as it had been in the past).
    John and Keith are probably chewing my photo right now. I know what always irritates them most is when a journalist describes them as "Pete Townshend's puppets"! If The Who has been a tyranny in the past, it's been a rule by runaway horse. Roger has always seen The Who in a more objective light than me; as things stand today the balance within the group as a result of his more active role in its creative direction has brought me closer to Keith and John than ever before, as well as to himself.
    However, were it not for the latent litigious situation between The Who and its old management team Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp I would probably ramble on about it all at great length. Let it just be said, perhaps bacause I am Taurus, perhaps because I am sentimental, I had resisted Roger in his justifiable revolution against our managers for many years. That had never helped our relationships one iota. Incidentally, the groups's subsequent split with Pete Rudge's New York based Sir Productions was an amicable one, but again Rudge and I found time to cry in our beer over lost partnerships. (We often shared a cell after the frequent Who hotel debacles). As for Kit and Chris my feelings now can be summed up concisely; I miss them.
    Against this backdrop of good intentions I set off in August 1975 to Myrtle Beach. As my wife, my two little daughters and a few friends who travelled with us crossed the threshold onto Meher Baba's home ground, we were all staggered at the impact of the Love that literally filled the air.

WAKE UP! Wake up!
A drinker? This one drinks like a Gemini should.
All today and none tommorrow.
In her sleep her beauty is profound because it reveals that beauty springs from spiritual innocence.
The moment it becomes distorted, blame only agressive impurity that has touched the heart.
The sullied, acrid smoke in this case, though I have to date made hardly a dent in the perfection of my love's crystal profile, is sparked by me and thoughtless action. How can it affect her? Is that just? It affects her because I love her and cherish her; she in her integrity is not in control of her own destiny. She has chosen that I should take the wheel and collides with whatever I encounter.

    WHEN YOU hold out an empty cup to God, and demand that He fill it with wine, He fills it faster than you can ever drink. Then you know that the fault lies in your own incapacity to recieve His Infinite Love, rather than His capacity to give it.

    I loosly quote Hafiz here of course, but this is what I felt was happening. Even my youngest daughter Aminta, three years old, became starry eyed with the atmosphere that poured from the trees. I wouldn't say that the warm reception given us by the residents of the Myrtle Beach retreat was not enjoyed and appreciated, but it paled in significance when compared to the welcome we felt in the buzzing dragon-flies, the near distant sound of the Ocean, and the massaging humidity of the warm afternoon.
    We spent an unbelievable ten days. I talked to the older devotees of Meher Baba about my plans for a new place in London and they were naturally encouraging. The sun shone, the children enjoyed themselves, we relaxed and relished rejuvination at the Master's command. The fears that I had that I would be strong enough to see through the imminent testing rehearsals and tour with The Who receded.
    Despite the strength I felt growing within me, I think I can speak for our whole group when I say I felt exhausted by Myrtle Beach. God's endlessly present love isn't to be taken lightly. It's great to be forgiven, but it hurts to admit you were wrong in the first place. I realised that I would not be reaping such fantastic emotional and mental rewards had I not been in pretty bad shape; a condition I had no-one to blame for but myself.
    We travelled then to California.

"I look out through your bloodshot eyes and I ask you, does this really matter?
I am here, and I wait constantly as your hair falls over the typewriter keys."
I don't want to die . . . !
"Death is not all what I expect, I want surrender, surely that is simple enough."
I am suffocating in your love . . . help me somebody! I am drowning!
"They say that to drown in the depths is really to ascend."
Beloved God, why do you sometimes bring me close to tears?
"Because I am your own heart, you might well be bored with me. I am you.
And I have known, and lived, and died with you . . . for a billion years".

    IN CALIFORNIA we were well looked after, taken in to the bosom of the Sufi family there, provided with a furnished house, picnics, swimming pool, outings to State Parks, camping trips to the Sierras and all kinds of straight-laced relaxation.

    You are probably as mystified as I am to where the spiritually beneficial work was being done in this kind of programme, but spirit was what was needed, and spirit was what I got, even if it didn't fit preconcieved notions. Murshida Duce is a remarkable woman. She heads a group of about 300 initiates all committed to total honesty and respect of her authority. She was Meher Baba's sanction as the legitimate Murshid along with "in lone" decree from her own deceased Murshid, Murshida Martin. Murshida Martin herself took over under the instructions of the famous Inayat Khan, a spiritual teacher and Master musician whose books on Sufism present a poetic system for modern life.
    About this time Murshida was overseeing the printing of her own book How A Master Works, full of spiritual anecdotes about her work for 40 years under Avatar Meher baba. It is an astounding achievement which later took me about a year to fully digest! There is much in it to interest everybody, not just people studying metaphysics.
    "Sufism Reoriented" today focuses its initiates on developing their devotion to Meher Baba. Meher Baba gave an explicit charter to Murshida Duce and it is under the limitations of this charter that she works today.
    I am not a Sufi initiate, but her spontaneous help in my life has always touched me. I felt it extraordinary that she was clearly comfortable with me. She is a rather grand lady in late years, more accustomed I used to think in her own youth to formal dinners, and cocktail parties for her husband's work as an oil man in the '40s and '50s. In fact she is not so easily pigeon-holed.
    I get this same buzz from all of Meher Baba's older devotees; they are in tune with today, and understand that all the outbursts of youth, the subsequent depressions of middle age ocurring when the explosion is proved futile, the experimentation with drugs, the violence and the recriminatory generation gap are all based in spiritual desperation, not in the rather more fashionable diagnoses rooted in Society.
    On arrival in california I went for a talk with her, to gossip, to bring her up to date on events at home, to ask her advice about the colour of the walls at the newly planned Baba house in London. Instead to my amazement, I sat and poured out my very soul. I couldn't have anticipated this happening for a second. She sat and listened as I told her every grizzly detail; the paranoia, the drunken orgies, the financial chaos, the indulgent self-analysis, (continued herein I'm afraid) and of course the dreamy hopes for the future.
    Without batting an eyelid she listened to stuff that was making me recoil myself, then went on to talk a little about her own youth, her life with her husband, the trouble some of her students were having at the time. In short she got me right in perspective.
    At the end of this month with her, we packed her bags, said our farewells and headed home. My wife and the kids to school, me to rehearsals with the band. Keith later told me I had walked into the rehearsal hall smiling, he related this because he had found it remarkable. Something positive had happened to me.
    Back in England I got hold of a building for the London Meher Baba house, and one morning, early, sat thinking about the past year. I thought about the incredibly circuitous route I had taken to bring me to that point in October 1975, a new british Who tour ahead of us. I got to where I ended up. Having taken energy, freely given, from just about every source I could lay my hands on, being strong again, and feeling fairly certain that I could now Rock and Roll right into my grave. I decided that I could dare ask for just one more directive.
    I raised my eyes to the heavens, my future meher baba house looming up as a great potential encroachment on my time with the band, and asked the old man, "What conclusions do I draw from all this, Baba? Where do I put this love you've given me?"
    The answer came out of the sky, in a voice that to me, was in a fantastic sense audible: "KEEP PLAYING THE GUITAR WITH THE WHO UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE."

WHERE AM I and what am I? I kneel at the foot of a picture of my Master, I plead forgiveness, but in dreams I gloat. The superb and beautiful creatures that have lain at my feet. What am I? I look in the mirror and don't see much. Am I purely a fraud? Fall in all you cynics, but how about your own admirers?
The people that I observe fall at my feet, but why?
I think I know. The ego floods away from me like the crutch snatched from a cripple. But the feeling is not bad; they love me for what I could be, not for what I am.
When I screamed for God to smash me down, I didn't expect for a minute that He really would

    IT'S NOW 6.00 am. I thought about taking an early walk byt the river, but it's freezing outside. Fresh snow is falling.

    They say another Ice Age is looming up in the distance, that the sea will flood continents, that earthquakes will split the world in two.
    Yet I can't help but feel strangely optimistic.

POSTSCRIPT     PETE TOWNSHEND has just released a joint album with Ronnie Lane, ex-Faces bass player. The album is called "Rough Mix" and is the closest Pete feels he will get to a solo album for many years as he is now working on new material for the next Who album. Release date is set for June.     PETE HAS also appeared on and supervised a limited edition album produced by Meher Baba Oceanic, the English Baba group he refers to in the article. It is called "With Love", contains three tracks from Pete of distinctly unusual approach and others by Lane, Billy Nicholls, Medicine Head and Pete Banks. It is available, as is any information about Avatar meher baba or the English Meher baba group, from MEHER BABA OCEANIC, c/o 280, Kew Rd., Richmond, Surrey. Price £3.50.     FOR DETAILS of Murshida Duce's book How A Master Works contact SUFISM REORIENTED, 1300, Boulevard Way, Walnut Creek, Ca. 94595. Price $17.95.     YOU CAN write to Pete or The Who at Trinifold Ltd. 112, Wardour St., London, W1.

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***