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Pete interview in Newsday



Ahh, "There's Something In My Food".  I'm tapping my toes already in
anticipation.
Available online at: http://www.newsday.com/features/daily/fcov0709.htm
It also contains a Who timeline which isn't too shabby for once.

The Kids are Alright
They sang 'hope I die before I get old,' but The Who is very much alive and
kicking during its 20-city reunion tour
by LETTA TAYLOR
Staff Writer

THE DEMURE MAN with the equine nose and silver stubble glances aimlessly
around his Manhattan hotel room, as if he were searching for some lost
object but can't recall what it is. He speaks softly, even dispassionately,
about his role as the chief songwriter and guitarist for the seminal British
rock band The Who. When emotion does creep into his words, it tends to be
regret.
Gone is the swagger of the brash young rocker who declared, "Hope I die
before I get old." Instead, at 55, Pete Townshend resembles another of his
lyrical characters -- the sad man behind blue eyes, adrift in a sea of
dreams, some of them empty.
Townshend is, by his own admission, at a crossroads. Formally separated from
Karen Astley, his wife of 34 years, unsure of his professional future, he is
casting about for a next step.
"I'm kind of at a weird place in my life, a watershed," volunteers one of
rock's most influential figures. "I'm thinking, 'What should I be doing
now?' And I haven't got an answer yet."
While he ponders the next big thing, Townshend has embarked on a 20-date
reunion tour with the other two surviving members of The Who, singer Roger
Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle. The band, backed by drummer Zak
Starkey -- son of Ringo Starr -- and The Who's longtime guest keyboardist
John (Rabbit) Bundrick, performs a sold-out show Sunday night, July 9, at
Jones Beach Theater.
Early reviews of the tour, which kicked off two weeks ago in Chicago,
describe a Townshend who still has fire in his loins and hurricane-force
gusts in his windmill guitar moves. But in a wide-ranging interview before
the tour began, Townshend sounds surprisingly nonchalant about reuniting the
band that formed the original triumvirate of British rock with the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones. He describes the tour not as a landmark event but as
a lark among old friends.
"It's the kind of thing that people do when they're retired, isn't it --
they go on a cruise with their golf clubs or something," Townshend says, a
wry tone creeping into the cockney accent he retains from his youth in a
working-class London neighborhood. "We're not quite retired yet, and I know
Roger's got a lot of passion about this stuff. But for me, one of the things
that's nice is that I can do it without getting heated about it, without
panicking about whether or not I'm going to find it inspiring."
It's hard to imagine Townshend not getting heated about a performance.
Before his solo acoustic endeavors of recent years, he was known for
smashing his guitars on stage as he railed against the establishment and
delved into the bittersweet angst of adolescence. But Townshend, who in his
white pullover shirt, close-cropped hair and loose gray slacks looks no more
like a rocker than he sounds, insists he considers the tour significant.
In fact, of The Who's various reunions over the years, including the band's
25th anniversary tour in 1989 and its "Quadrophenia" tour in '96-'97,
Townshend says this one is the one that matters.
"We're picking up where we left off in '81, the last year we were a creative
force," he says. "All the stuff that's happened in between has been
distraction really, and procrastination. This is a real 'Well, let's grab it
and see what's really there.' And what we know is there is the joy of one
another's company... That blood-brother stuff is very important."
Blood brothers, indeed: In The Who's early years, the brawling band members
smashed each other on stage almost as much as their instruments. But
Townshend says that in recent years, he's become increasingly aware of the
importance of his friendships with Daltrey and Entwistle, whom he's known
since grade school and has played music with since his teens. In fact,
Townshend says, his decision to do the tour was a personal gesture to
Daltrey.
"Roger came to see me and he had a bunch of complaints," Townshend recalls.
He wouldn't elaborate, except to say they were related in part to the two
men's work together over the years. Daltrey declined to be interviewed.
"He said them with such force that after a time I just broke down and I
started to cry," Townshend continues. "And he got a bit panicky and I said,
'Listen, it's not that you've hurt me or anything, it's just that you've
never spoken to me like this before; have you been thinking like this all
these years?' And he said 'Yeah, this is how I feel.'
"Under normal circumstances I probably would have stomped about and said
'There you are, the same old Roger, wants to go back to his old job and he
thinks I'm the one who can give it to him,'" Townshend says. Instead,
Townshend asked Daltrey to perform with him at two benefit concerts last
year in Chicago. From those shows the reunion tour was born.
The tour is heavy on old hits, including "Magic Bus," "Won't Get Fooled
Again," "Pinball Wizard" (from "Tommy," Townshend's masterpiece musical that
created the rock opera genre) and "Baba O'Riley" (the songwriter's paean to
his Indian spiritual leader, the late Avatar Meher Baba). But Townshend says
The Who also may compose and perform some new material on the road, and if
the songs gel, they may end up on a studio album. (The Who also has released
a double CD of live material on the Musicmaker.com Web site from the Chicago
benefit concerts.)
Townshend and Daltrey, who like Entwistle launched solo careers after The
Who disbanded in '82, are even planning to write their first song together.
Asked why the pair hasn't done so before, Townshend notes that he's never
co-written a song with anyone, explaining that until now, "the precious,
private personal space for songwriting is something that I've never really
wanted to let go of."
In the past few years, Townshend's songwriting has been so private that
although he's composed and recorded about 850 new pieces of music (his
London home, he says, is so wired that "I can send and receive e-mail or
record on a multitrack in my bathtub"), he hasn't developed any of them into
songs for mass consumption.
"I don't know what it is, I don't have that need to wrap it all up so that
you can have it," he said during a Manhattan news conference a couple of
months ago. "I don't know, maybe I'm not so interested in you."
During the interview, Townshend allows that he might also be involved in a
"procrastination against judgment," a fear that his works might be panned.
But more than critical judgment, the songwriter known for his piercing
social insights worries that his messages might no longer "reflect" the
concerns of his listeners.
For example, walking past a fast-food store recently, Townshend notices two
old women peering at their food with disgust. "And I felt like knocking on
the window and saying, 'Well, you know, this is a fast-food joint on 48th
Street and Ninth Avenue, what did you expect?' And then Bang! I got this
idea that I must write them a song, 'There's Something in My Food.' It's a
terror we have, we're worried about genetically modified food, we're worried
about being poisoned, we're worried about the fact that our food isn't good
enough, that we don't overdose on vitamins, blah, blah, blah. So I can still
reflect. But is this the right material for a song?" Townshend pauses,
looking pensive. "I don't know."
One work Townshend recently completed that clearly has its finger on today's
pulse is "Lifehouse," a rock opera he started three decades ago about life
in a digital dictatorship in which all people are jacked into an
Internet-like device called the Grid for their emotional and informational
needs.
Townshend recently released the opera's music in a six-CD box set titled
"The Lifehouse Chronicles," and the play also was broadcast to rave reviews
on the BBC; he's looking into a film version as well.
He calls it a lucky coincidence that the theme is so relevant today. "As
recently as 1985," he muses, "I did a lecture at the Royal College of Art
about the future of downloading music, and the audience walked out."
Like "Tommy," "Lifehouse" depicts music as a liberating force. But nearly
four decades into his career, Townshend appears conflicted, and at times
mournful, about what rock has done to his own life. He talks about how his
hard-living lifestyle contributed to the unraveling of his marriage. He
broods over the death of The Who's brilliant, madcap drummer, Keith Moon,
who in 1978 died of an overdose of medication he took to combat alcoholism.
He speaks in haunted tones about an incident before a Who show in Cincinnati
in 1979 in which 11 concertgoers were asphyxiated or trampled to death in a
stampede to claim undesignated seats.
"I thought that rock and roll was a different form of show business. I
thought it unlocked something different about the human spirit and about the
artistic process," he says. "And of course it didn't; it does it exactly the
same as many other art forms of entertainment."
But Townshend insists he doesn't think too much about the contradiction
between his defiant vow to die before he gets old and the fact that here he
is on tour, at the dawn of his senior years, performing "My Generation," the
song containing that line.
"I can't afford to think about it," he acknowledges with a gentle smile.
"They're irreconcilable."

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm