Who I Am by Pete Townshend

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Well, this book was a gigantic disappointment! I got it after seeing The Who on their 50th Anniversary Tour stopover in Atlanta. Pete was funny, engaging, a great musician and all around great guy. I’ve always admired him. I thought this would be a great book. Boy, was I wrong.

Now Keith Richards’ autobiography is the standard by which all rock autobiographies are written. It’s excellent. I thought this one could mirror that at least. It doesn’t. Instead, it’s a series of loosely collected, somewhat chronologically arranged anecdotes, some of which begin and end with one paragraph and others of which run on for pages. Pete talks about his spiritual adviser, Meher Baba — although he never met him — without giving us any idea as to why he felt so strongly about him. Pete name drops constantly, without giving us much detail on who these people are to the importance of the text. Maybe a brief explanation, but that’s it. A sentence. What the scoop on the band? Won’t get it here. I know almost nothing more about The Who now than when I started the book. I know Roger had a temper and liked to start fights when he was younger. OK. I know Keith and John were party animals. But you never really get a sense for who these men are. What their relationships are like. How they worked together. It’s very frustrating. As for Pete, he marries Karen and has two daughters. He goes on tour and tries to remain loyal, but when he gets drunk, does the groupie thing. And then feels somewhat guilty. But not very. And he constantly falls in love. Or is it lust? Pete becomes a raging alcoholic and then a raging cokehead, but eventually cleans up on the coke. He relapses on the alcohol. After 25 years of marriage to Karen, they split up and he takes a new, young lover. What were the reasons for the split up? Not really mentioned. He just said the marriage was suffering. He doesn’t really get at the meat of things in this book. It’s like when 11 people are killed in a stampede at a Cincinnati concert in 1979 — you’d think that’d be time for reflection, but they just leave town and go to the next concert. Here’s something that really irritated the shit out of me — he claimed to be broke all the damn time, but in the very next paragraph was buying a new mansion and a new yacht and a new sailboat and a new car and a new studio and all sorts of expensive equipment to go into it. I don’t know how many houses he had at one point, but it was A LOT! But he was broke. Um, yeah. Sure, Pete. He graciously decided to go on tour with the group after he had decided to shut the band down because he didn’t want the other band members to have to live in smaller houses. Classy. Here’s another thing I didn’t like — he spent half the damn book talking about albums that were utter shit while ignoring classics like Who’s Next! Who cares about some of the ones he focuses on? Iron Man? Really? An album from a book from Ted Hughes? Really? And he went on and on about Tommy. We had to learn about the 8th stage production of the show on some tiny stage in some podunk town in some small state in mid-America, like it mattered at all. When he could have been writing about more important things. Like his relationship to his bandmates. Or to Karen. Or to his daughters. Or his songs. Or something. I’m so sick of hearing about Tommy I want to puke. And then there’s the pedophilia thing, something I had forgotten. He sets it up beautifully. He starts implying early on that he starts “remembering” possible sexual abuse by his grandmother and a male friend of hers when he was a child. He relives this in therapy. He never goes into detail. It’s just implied. Then, he mentions that he meets a Russian who wants to start a Russian orphanage who he’s going to help out financially and he goes online to a search engine and types in something like Russian orphanage little boys or something like that and is all of a sudden confronted with kiddie porn. He’s horrified. He’s outraged. He wants to write an expose on kiddie porn on the Internet, so he goes about researching it. Sound stupid yet? He goes to a site and enters his credit card number to show that banks are working with kiddie porn sites, without bothering to think that now it’s HIS credit card number the feds have on file. And sure enough, he’s arrested and all ELEVEN of his computer are confiscated. And he pleads no contest. Sign of guilt? Who knows? Pedophile? Who knows? Disappointing, that’s for sure. He spends a lot of time setting this topic up and then almost no time at all once it arrives and is addressed. I wonder why. Two last things. This typifies the book to me. At the end of the book, he is writing about various things, wrapping up, and he writes about being a heroin addict. Um, what the hell??? Where did that come from? When was that ever addressed in the book? Never mentioned. Damned bizarre. The second thing — when Keith dies, he writes that Roger called him and said that Keith had did it. And that’s it. That’s all he says about Keith’s death. So I don’t know if Keith committed suicide, if he OD’d, if he died of natural causes, how this affected the band, how this affected Pete, how this affected the fans, nothing. All I know is that Pete immediately got a new drummer and got the band back out on tour which strikes me as pretty shitty. When John dies, there’s more, but not much. Pete just doesn’t put much into human relationships in this book. And it’s sad. It’s like he’s an immature, self absorbed, egomaniacal-yet-frail person who wrote a bad book which was badly edited and now here it is and it’s bitterly disappointing. I wanted to give it four stars or better, but I just can’t and I can’t recommend it either. Too bad.

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