“I tried everything,” Townshend tells of his attempts to help his friend. “I tried giving him money, I tried starving him of money. I tried sending him into rehab. I tried sending him to a guru weirdo, voodoo doctors.”
“I was obsessed with trying to keep Keith alive. It was quite clear that he was on a downward slide, and there was very little I could do. He was a very complicated character.”
" At that time my disillusion with the future of the Who, especially because of the difficulties with Keith, was growing. Towards the end of the summer, the album Who are You was selling well enough without any tour to support it. Keith came to London from Malibu for the vernissage of the Who Exhibition "
"In August I made a serious attempt to get in touch with Keith in Malibu. Keith drank a lot and I could not keep him behind. Instead of helping him,I end it up involved in her beautiful life and I almost forgot the main reason which for I went to see him."
"We wanted him to come home. When I was back in London, Keith called me to find out if I could rent the apartment owned by Harry Nilsson near by the Playboy club in his name: he wanted to go home but he did not have the money."
"I talked to Harry:he accepted, but he was also worried. Mama Cass had died in that house. I assured him that a lightning strike does not fall in the same place twice."
Bill Wyman had an apartment in the same block and bravely sought to keep an eye on Keith. One night, Bill Wyman and Spyros Niarchos, made arrangements with keith to meet in his flat on the third floor to drink something together.
Keith, according to a rock tradition that perhaps he was about to start, employed a bodyguard. He had ordered him not to get him out of the house, so he had started doing everything he could to avoid surveillance. While enjoying a drink, he opened the window without giving the impression of what he was about to do and dropped below.
Bill and Spyros ran to the window and saw Keith leaning over a stack of mattresses he had previously piled up in the dumpster of a construction company. He got up, brushed his dress and shouted at the attentive spectators - "See you at the Play Boy Club. I take an orange juice!"
At that time, Keith was fooling the doctors, creating confusion in explaining his symptoms so as to get more pills as possible. He needed to relieve the symptoms of alcohol abstinence. But he seemed determined to remain sober.
In September '78 Roger called me in my studio. It was succinct. " He did it".That building houses a doctor's surgery today. Finish quite appropriate.
