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WHO'S NEXT
Deluxe liner notes.
by Pete Townshend 

The Who’s Next album offers a tantalizing puzzle to certain people. A kind of Gordian knot.†
The abandoned Lifehouse project of 1971 is the focus of this interest. Music gathered together from various recording sessions made around the time promises to clarify matters but actually adds to the disarray. John Atkins has researched faithfully and generously to elucidate Lifehouse. It sounds like the Brabazon aeroplane of the'50: magnificent in concept and appearance but too big to get off ground.

I could often sell crazy or grandiose plans, but I seemed to lack the ability to properly communicate
to others how the end-product would look. This is partly to do with the way I write and formulate ideas; I tend not to start on paper. With song-writing, this is not a great problem, I simply make demo recordings. But when on Lifehouse I first started to grapple with screen-writing I ran into trouble. Kit Lambert had always helped me obtain from my coworkers the necessary act of faith required to see a project through. With Lifehouse he was missing.

Recently, Kit’s management partner, Chris Stamp told me a story that perhaps explains why Kit defected. Immediately after completing the Tommy recording in 1969 Kit put the finishing touches to a Tommy film-script which he had been drafting (without my involvement, but based on my own story) during the recording sessions in 1968. He and Chris took me to a restaurant and presented me with the script for approval; they had the nod from Universal to make a film based on the story. I would not even look at the script. As the primary composer I could block any such project. I don’t think Kit realised how close the Tommy story was to me, I was incapable of letting it go. To be honest I was probably drunk, a meal with Kit was always an occasion for great wine. I certainly can’t remember the occasion. I imagine I did not want my managers swanning off to Hollywood leaving me and the band to flog the album around the world. Looking back- however obdurate and childish I appeared -I’m sure I was afraid to lose their companionship as well. I lost Kit in any case. His response was dejection, frustration and a sense that I was being disloyal and ungrateful and eventually moved to New York.

No one apart from Kit Lambert and myself is really able to explain how we worked togther. Although an inspired and brilliant man Kit lacked the truly genetic creative process- born of ‘60s British art-school Pop music- that I practiced. Separately we were merely babbling ad-men, together we were serene Wagnerian genius. I probably carried on writing believe he would function as he always had, and he me explain to the willing but befuddled people around me what I was on about. He had do it with Tommy, and I expected him to do it again with Lifehouse. The international success of Tommy in 1969 and 1970 got in the way for a long time, but eventually it succeeded in trawling together something of a ragbag of paper and an extraordinary collection of new song that was intended to be the Lifehouse film.

I don’t think there was any confusion at a at this point. Lifehouse was to be a film, written by me, directed by A. N. Other, possibly Kit himself. I showed Kit and Chris the film script, and they seemed interested, but they seemed to do very little to help me apart from introducing me to Frank Dunlop, then artistic director of The Young Vic theatre. (I was already a fan the theatre.) I felt lost at the time but under stand today that it must have been impossible for Kit to undertake the necessary editing and refining of my naive film-script when only a short time before I had thrown back in his ft his own rather clever script of Tommy. The story side of Lifehouse failed because I had never developed a proper craft. I believed in genius, symbiosis and miracles. I needed Kit.

The Lifehouse idea really was very simple: it was a portentous science-fiction film with Utopian spiritual messages into which were to be grafted uplifting scenes from a real Who concert. 1 was selling a simple credo: whatever happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world. The whole project started to get blurred after the impromptu press- conference called in January 1971 by Frank who was really confused about what I was trying to do. (Frank explained years later that Kit had told him we were really working on Tommy, not Lifehouse. Or that both stories were one and the same. I suspect now that Universal Pictures were equally deluded.) I described what I now know to be the workshop process I intended to pursue to ‘demo’ the project to the other band members. Everyone around me thought I’d gone mad and reading transcripts of what I’d said I’m not surprised. At least 90% of those around me were the press: my insanity was public knowledge.

At that time I missed Kit Lambert more than at any other time in my life. I’d dug myself in too deep. I didn’t know then why he would not come to my rescue, I knew he could understand what I took to be the Kindergarten notions that underlay the Lifehouse film-script, and even if no one else understood, they would trust the pair of us to come through as we had with Tommy. I dealt with my feelings of isolation in the usual way and drank lots of brandy.

The good part of all this is that after the unpremeditated humiliation of the press conference I slowly let the bubble burst. I had set in motion a lot of experimental work that took time to dwindle away through lack of money I thought had been promised by Universal. But in the end I slowly let the whole thing go. It was a relief. We played some Who standards to invited guests and once to a small handful of unruly sub-teenagers Frank invited

off the street, and it felt and sounded good. Later we heard recordings made by Andy Johns on the mobile I had forgotten was still outside the Young Vic and we were impressed with ourselves. The Who were still a good rock band. I was not suicidally depressed or anything, but I was very humbled and drinking more heavily than usual. Later Kit called me from New York where he was working at the new Record Plant producing Labelle (Patti Labelle and Nona Hendryx’s group). He said we should go to New York for two weeks and record the tracks with him. I remember being sceptical. Kit had been doing hard drugs (the rumour was that he had become a heroin addict). But he convinced me that he would co-produce with jack Adams—a solid engineer I had worked with myself in New York. I felt as happy at that moment as I am capable of being.

The New York sessions were great fun. We were the first band to use the revolutionary new Studio One — an early Westlake design — which opened during our sessions. It was a great experience but very stressful. I remember drinking heavily and Kit was out of control. At one point during a kicking jam session at the end of ‘Getting In Tune’ he ran out holding a little sign that said DON’T STOP’ Of course by the time we’d all read his aristocratic but illegible scrawl we’d lost the magic. He was also disappearing to shoot up all the time. It soon became clear that other people in the team (including Keith Moon) were using hard drugs too. I just drank bottle after bottle of brandy as usual probably imagining I was showing great self- restraint. I asked for a group meeting at the Navarro Hotel next day. As I walked into Kit’s room I heard him raging to his assistant Anja Butler: “Townshend has blocked me at every front. I will not allow him to block me this time...”. Something inside me snapped. I suppose it was hearing this man that I loved so much calling me by my surname, and with such anger. Perhaps I deserved it, but it devastated me. During the subsequent meeting, as Kit stamped around the room pontificating and cajoling,shouting and laughing, I began to have what I now know to be a classic New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack Grade One.

Everyone in the room transmogrified into  huge frogs, and I slowly moved toward the open tenth floor window with the intention of jumping out. Anja spotted me and gently took my arm. There is no question in my mind that she saved my life. I was by that time a kook.
Home to London we went and-as the pliable, defeated (but very well rehearsed) anaethetised basket-cases we had all become by this time-were easily processed in the Glyn Johns Hit-Machine of the day. At least I was. I think I procrastinated less than usual and Glyn and I hit off a long friendship and working partnership that amazed everyone who thought that two such hot-heads wouldn’t last an hour in the studio together.
With that I now think it would help to lay down the context of the recording sessions at the time. There were just four sessions in all.

1. The 1970/71 demo sessions at my home studio (and of course John Entwistle’s) that produced two reels of songs which related directly or loosely to the film-script I had written, or were intended as padding to be replaced by experimental music produced during the Young Vic workshop (original examples of which can be heard on Psychederelict, my 1993 CD-play).

2. The Winter 1971 live recordings of the morale-restoring reality-facing performances at  the Young Vic.

3. The Spring 1971 New York sessions, which fell into two parts: a two day warm-up in Studio Two with Felix Pappalardi at the desk and Leslie West on guitar; the four-day session proper in brand new Studio One with Jack Adams at or under the desk, Kit on the bathroom ceiling and me in the Rémy Martin bottle.

4. The boozy Stargroves and subsequent highly disciplined and sober Olympic sessions of Summer 1971 with Glyn Johns which produced the final album we all know and love.

Lifehouse is far from abandoned. In staging Tommy, Psychederelict and The Iron Man in 1993 I learned some of the dramatic writing and stagecraft skills I need to go forward. Lifehouse-perhaps combined with Psychodereliet-will probably emerge as a kind of musical or newfangled opera rather than as a film. But I assure you it will make sense to you, just as in my mind it always has. Critics will probably call it naive. I hope so. I wrote it when I was a child.

Pete Townshend, Sunday, May 7, 1995

† Gor •di•an knot\ Àg˘rd-Ò-fin-\ n (1611) 1: a knot tied by Gordius king of Phrygia, held to be capable of being untied only by the future ruler of Asia, and cut by Alexander the Great with his sword. 2: an intricate problem; esp a problem insoluble in its own terms.
© Copyright 1989 Merriam- Webster Inc.