Who I Am: A Memoir

by Pete Townshend

Overview

From the voice of a generation:

...smashed his first guitar onstage, in 1964, by accident.
...heard the voice of God on a vibrating bed in rural Illinois.
...invented the Marshall stack, feedback, and the concept album.
...stole his windmill guitar-playing from Keith Richards.
...detached from his body in an airplane, on LSD, and nearly died.
...has some explaining to do.
...is the most literary and literate musician of the last fifty years.
...planned to write his memoir when he was 21.
...published this book at 67.

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, Pete 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:	9780062127259
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/06/2013
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	154,181
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Pete Townshend is the legendary lead guitarist and principal songwriter for The Who, one of the most influential rock-and-roll bands of all time. He is one of Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. He resides in West London, where he was raised.

Read an Excerpt

Who I Am

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By Peter Townshend

HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright © 2012 Peter Townshend
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-212724-2

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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...)

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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.

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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

Editorial Reviews

"Intensely intimate…candid to the point of self-laceration…[Townshend’s] tone is less lofty than anyone would have expected, just as this book is more honest than any fan would have hoped."

(Four 1/2 Stars!) - Rolling Stone

Mr. Townshend’s self-portrait is raw and unsparing...as intimate and as painful as a therapy session, while chronicling the history of the band as it took shape in the Mod scene in 1960s London and became the very embodiment of adolescent rebellion and loud, anarchic rock ‘n’ roll.

Michiko Kakutani

Unusually frank and moving…[Who I Am] isn’t one of those rock memoirs that puts the what before the why. His past is a puzzle Mr. Townshend is sweating to decipher.

The Guardian (UK)

Intensely intimate…candid to the point of self-laceration…[Townshend’s] tone is less lofty than anyone would have expected, just as this book is more honest than any fan would have hoped.

Rolling Stone (Four 1/2 Stars!)

"Unusually frank and moving…[Who I Am] isn’t one of those rock memoirs that puts the what before the why. His past is a puzzle Mr. Townshend is sweating to decipher."

The Guardian(UK)

Intensely intimate…candid to the point of self-laceration…[Townshend’s] tone is less lofty than anyone would have expected, just as this book is more honest than any fan would have hoped.

Rolling Stone

In the works since at least 1997, Peter Townshend's autobiography finally arrived last year. It's not that the famed singer/songwriter/guitarist of The Who ever suffered from writer's block; in fact, this multi-talented music legend has keyboarded novels, short story collections, plays, essays, articles, and more; but Who I Am is special; being the quintessential statement of who he is. His riveting account of being raised by his grandmother as the orphaned-at- home son of two musicians is only the beginning of a story that throttles us forward with jarring specificity through several decades of rock history, complete with cameos of famous musicians living and dead, and reflections on his own life in and out of music. Completely unghosted, this 600-page autobiography was a bestseller in hardcover and promises to be the same in trade paperback and NOOK Book.

Townshend—principal songwriter and guitarist for boundary-pushing, hard-living British rock band The Who—lays his life bare in this candid and entertaining autobiography, reflecting on both his personal life and his career as the brains behind one of rock’s most successful and influential groups. Townshend details the band’s early years as a trendy 1960s Mod outfit, the creative and commercial peaks of the 1970s, and the changes forced by the sudden deaths of drummer Keith Moon (in 1978) and bassist John Entwistle (in 2002). But he also gets personal, tracing his troubled youth, a difficult and affair-ridden marriage, relationships with family members and bandmates, various scandals and legal troubles, and decades-long struggles with alcohol and overwork. Townshend covers a lot of ground and is admirably forthcoming in addressing controversies and personal mistakes, but there is frustratingly little insight into his creative process or songwriting and recording methods. Verdict The lack of perspective into the influential musician’s blending of experimental artistry and raw rock ’n’ roll power will frustrate some readers, but Townshend’s long-awaited memoir is easily recommended to anyone interested in this true rock icon’s amazing journey.—Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Library Journal

The soul-searching of a deeply conflicted rock star will likely draw a mixed response from readers. As the creative force driving the Who, one of the most explosive and ambitious rock bands in history, guitarist/composer Townshend (Horse's Neck, 1985) has shown himself offstage to be an uncommonly articulate and reflective musical celebrity. For those who want to go deep into his psyche, from the Dickensian childhood in which he believed he was sexually abused (and was unquestionably mistreated) through the marital fidelity that he tried to sustain and the depression, anxiety attacks, alcoholism and other conditions he has successfully battled, Townshend bares his soul and is tougher on himself than most readers are likely to be. (Even those readers aware of the scandal in regard to his accessing child pornography are likely to agree that it was a careless mistake.) Along the way, he lets Who fans know just what inspired and influenced audacious achievements such as Tommy and intriguing hits such as "I Can See for Miles" and "Pictures of Lily." He's remarkably generous in the credit he gives other musicians, particularly the Kinks' Ray Davies and a whole lot of jazz artists (he idolizes pianist Keith Jarrett). Yet the narrative falls surprisingly flat in its surfeit of details (on houses, boats and much younger women who seemed to attract and torture him mainly because of their beauty), while adding little understanding to the unique dynamics of the Who. Jimi Hendrix comes alive in these pages, but ex-wife Karen Townshend does not. Regarding the "odd couple" relationship he has sustained with singer Roger Daltrey, Townshend doesn't seem to understand it any better than readers will. Fans will find plenty of revelation; others may be overwhelmed or just confused.

Kirkus Reviews

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