He becomes a devotee of Meher Baba, yet loses years to cocaine and alcohol.
Instead, it almost seems he wants to undercut it, exploring his defects and contradictions: the “Angry Yobbo” guitar hooligan he plays onstage versus the introspective composer, the spiritual seeker versus the hedonistic drug addict. But he’s not concerned about preserving his rock-star myth. He dishes about sex (“Mick is the only man I’ve ever seriously wanted to fuck”) as well as drugs – there are quite a few empty glasses and smashed mirrors. Townshend provides plenty of stories about the Who’s hotel-trashing days and the insanity of Keith Moon. Those feelings of rage, shame and inadequacy never left him, even after he fought his way to the top of the music world. He turned this trauma into the 1969 breakthrough Tommy. He sees those early years as emblematic of his postwar English generation, left parentless, at the mercy of predators. Throughout the book, Townshend makes himself uncomfortably vulnerable, especially in his deeply saddening memories of childhood sexual abuse. It’s a rock god opening up his most human frailties. His long-awaited memoir is intensely intimate, candid to the point of self-lacerating.
After all his years of musical confessions, Pete Townshend still has secrets to get off his chest.
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