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Overview
One of rock music's most intelligent and literary performers, Pete Townshend—guitarist, songwriter, editor—tells his closest-held stories about the origins of the preeminent twentieth-century band The Who, his own career as an artist and performer, and his restless life in and out of the public eye in this candid autobiography, Who I Am.
With eloquence, fierce intelligence, and brutal honesty, Townshend has written a deeply personal book that also stands as a primary source for popular music's greatest epoch. Readers will be confronted by a man laying bare who he is, an artist who has asked for nearly sixty years: Who are you?
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780062127242 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 10/08/2012 |
Pages: | 544 |
Sales rank: | 1,176,916 |
Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Who I Am
By Peter Townshend
HarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © 2012 Peter TownshendAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-212724-2
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I WAS THERE
It's extraordinary, magical, surreal, watching them all dance to my feedback guitar solos; in the audience my art school chums stand straight backed among the slouching West and North London Mods, that army of teenagers who have arrived astride their fabulous scooters in short hair and good shoes, hopped up on pills. I can't speak for what's in the heads of my fellow band mates, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon or John Entwistle. Usually I'd be feeling like a loner, even in the middle of the band, but tonight, in June 1964, at The Who's first show at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, West London, I am invincible.
We're playing R&B: 'Smokestack Lightning', 'I'm a Man', 'Road Runner' and other heavy classics. I scrape the howling Rickenbacker guitar up and down my microphone stand, then flip the special switch I recently fitted so the guitar sputters and sprays the front row with bullets of sound. I violently thrust my guitar into the air – and feel a terrible shudder as the sound goes from a roar to a rattling growl; I look up to see my guitar's broken head as I pull it away from the hole I've punched in the low ceiling.
It is at this moment that I make a split-second decision – and in a mad frenzy I thrust the damaged guitar up into the ceiling over and over again. What had been a clean break becomes a splintered mess. I hold the guitar up to the crowd triumphantly. I haven't smashed it: I've sculpted it for them. I throw the shattered guitar carelessly to the ground, pick up my brand-new Rickenbacker twelve-string and continue the show.
That Tuesday night I stumbled upon something more powerful than words, far more emotive than my white-boy attempts to play the blues. And in response I received the full-throated salute of the crowd. A week or so later, at the same venue, I ran out of guitars and toppled the stack of Marshall amplifiers. Not one to be upstaged, our drummer Keith Moon joined in by kicking over his drum kit. Roger started to scrape his microphone on Keith's cracked cymbals. Some people viewed the destruction as a gimmick, but I knew the world was changing and a message was being conveyed. The old, conventional way of making music would never be the same.
I had no idea what the first smashing of my guitar would lead to, but I had a good idea where it all came from. As the son of a clarinettist and saxophonist in the Squadronaires, the prototypical British Swing band, I had been nourished by my love for that music, a love I would betray for a new passion: rock 'n' roll, the music that came to destroy it.
I am British. I am a Londoner. I was born in West London just as the devastating Second World War came to a close. As a working artist I have been significantly shaped by these three facts, just as the lives of my grandparents and parents were shaped by the darkness of war. I was brought up in a period when war still cast shadows, though in my life the weather changed so rapidly it was impossible to know what was in store. War had been a real threat or a fact for three generations of my family. In 1945 popular music had a serious purpose: to defy post-war depression and revitalize the romantic and hopeful aspirations of an exhausted people. My infancy was steeped in awareness of the mystery and romance of my father's music, which was so important to him and Mum that it seemed the centre of the universe. There was laughter and optimism; the war was over. The musics Dad played was called Swing. It was what people wanted to hear.
I was there.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Who I Am by Peter Townshend. Copyright © 2012 by Peter Townshend. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Act One: War Music
1 I Was There 3
2 It's a Boy! 6
3 You Didn't See It 26
4 A Teenage Kind of Vengeance 49
5 The Detours 62
6 The Who 86
7 I Can't Explain 113
8 Substitoot 130
9 Acid in the Air 151
10 God Checks In to a Holiday Inn 175
11 Amazing Journey 199
12 Tommy: The Myths, The Music, The Mud 226
Act Two: A Really Desperate Man
13 Lifehouse and Loneliness 277
14 The Land Between 304
15 Carriers 334
16 A Beggar, a Hypocrite 351
17 Be Careful What You Pray For 374
18 The Undertaker 398
19 Growing Into My Skin 416
20 Rock Star Fuckup 451
Act Three: Playing to the Gods
21 The Last Drink 489
22 Still Loony 526
23 Iron Man 559
24 Psychoderelict 589
25 Relapse 607
26 Noodling 627
27 A New Home 644
28 Letter to My Eight-year-old Self 665
29 Black Days, White Knights 694
30 Trilby's Piano 703
31 Intermezzo 714
32 Who I Am 721
Appendix A Fan Letter from 1967 725
Coda 728
Acknowledgements 730
Picture Credits 740