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Pete interview outtakes



Lester Peckover was kind enough to send this to me to forward on to you.

The interview source is Total Guitar magazine . Pete was interviewed in last
month's October version of that mag [the same interview from which these
outtakes come was published in the U.S. in the Summer edition of Guitar
World Acoustic], (which included a rather poor 'transcription' of MG, which
used vanilla power chords rather that PT's open string based inversions).
The text below is the OUTTAKE material from that interview - the stuff they
did NOT print.

TOTAL GUITAR: When was the very first time you saw Hendrix perform?

TOWNSHEND: "I saw him in a club behind Piccadilly. I can't remember the
name. I think it was called 21. It was at the site of an Arab nightclub.
Then I saw him at Blazes, which is another club in Soho [The Who Concert
File has this as December 21, 1966]. And on that occasion, everybody was
there; Mick Jagger was there, Paul McCartney. I was with Eric Clapton. We
used to go around back then kind of hanging on to one another like children,
wondering what Jimi was going to come up with next. And I remember that
concert being absolutely extraordinary."

"And then after that, a couple of days after I'd met Jimi for the first time
at IBC, The Who appeared with the Experience at the Saville Theater [January
29, 1967], which was owned by Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager. I think we
opened it together. I believe The Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience were
the first rock bands to play there. And Jimi opened for us. And he had
exactly the same rig as me and he had his amplifiers in the same kind of
arrangement. And I actually felt like I'd given too much away. You know what
it was a bit like? It was like giving your enemy your weapons. I've never
recovered really from that.

I rather foolishly got involved in comparing myself to Hendrix. 'Cos it
seemed to me at the time that I was the only competition he had. There was
kind of a vanity in that. And I remember having a conversation with Eric
Clapton at the time that he could only see him and Jimi. I shared with Eric
that, fucking hell, when I first saw Jimi play, I wanted to go and kill
myself. And he said, 'Well I did too. But I didn't think that would've
affected you. I mean he wasn't in your arena.' But he was. He was someone
who was working with showmanship, which was one of the directions where rock
'n' roll was inevitably going to go. Rock 'n' roll was inevitably going to
get bigger and Jimi was one of the people that showed there was something
you could do in the curve of an arm or the movement of the tongue, the
stance of the body or a hairdo - where you combined showmanship and
stagecraft."

TOTAL GUITAR: A lot of which came to a head at the Monterey Pop Festival -
the argument over whether The Who was going to go on after the Experience or
vice versa.

TOWNSHEND: "Jimi was on acid. And he stood on a chair. And I was trying to
get him to talk to me about the fact that I didn't want The Who to follow
him onto the stage. John Phillips [singer with the Mamas and Papas and an
organizer of the Monterey Festival] was there. I don't remember if Mama Cass
was. And I was saying to Jimi, 'for fuck's sake, listen to me. I don't want
to go on after you. It's bad enough that you're here. It's bad enough that
you're gonna fuck up my life. I'm not gonna have you steal my act. That's
the only thing I've got. You're a great genius. The audience will appreciate
that. But what do I do? Let The Who go on first. I wear a Union jack jacket
and smash my guitar. Give me a break."

"And he was kind of, I thought, teasing me. But Brian Jones told me later on
that he was just fucking completely whacked on acid. So John Phillips
flipped a coin and it came down in my favor, and I said, 'Right, we go on
first'. And that has become, apocryphally, told as a story where I was
arguing with Jimi I was shouting at Jimi, yes, because he was ignoring me.
[Laughs] But I wasn't angry with him. I loved him very much. I got to know
him later on in L.A. He was hanging out there and suddenly - maybe it was a
different bunch of drugs he was using - he was very affectionate and
friendly to me. And he'd started to acknowledge some of the things that I'd
done to help his career. Such as they were.

I don't mean to imply that I'd done all that much. But the Jimi Hendrix
Experience were on Track Records [in England] which, as I said before, is
the Who's record label. And we helped them with early dates and stuff.
Obviously I was a stone supporter of his work. I was like a press machine on
his behalf."

TOTAL GUITAR: The jazz side of your influences comes across on compositions
like Sunrise [from 1967's The Who Sell Out]. The chord changes are quite
opulent, harmonically...

TOWNSHEND: "There's kind of a Mickey Baker influence there, really. He's
another guitarist I listened to - a sideman in the Stan Kenton band or
something like that. Occasionally he used to play a solo, but what was
lovely about him was his chord work. "His instruction books were great as
they showed you how to translate the normal kinds of triads and groups of
chords from the popular songs of the day into chords that had more interest
and more harmonic tension."

TOTAL GUITAR: You've said that chordal structure from the bridge to I'm A
Boy and the intro to Pinball Wizard were inspired by [English Baroque
composer] Henry Purcell.

TOWNSHEND: "Yeah. Purcell did this short piece called Symphony Upon One Note
and throughout that whole piece runs a single bowed note. I analyzed every
single chord in that piece and found ways to play them on guitar. And yeah,
I used a group of those chords in I'm A Boy."

PETE SAYS MORE ABOUT...THE LIFEHOUSE PROJECT

TOTAL GUITAR: You never got to make the movie...

TOWNSHEND: "My idea was always that somebody else would write the film
script of the drama. The Who's role, my role, in the film itself would
simply be that we would be the real rock 'n' roll band in the middle of it
all. Today, the fact is that I'm in a better position to make that film
myself than ever before. I could easily make such a film. So even that part
of it is something that has come closer to my reach. But the experiment, of
course, is still alive."

"What would be interesting is a real Lifehouse concert - a gathering of
people hearing music that belonged to them and was about them. In company,
for the first time, hearing their music as it was heard by others. That
experiment is one that I hope to carry out sometime in the coming year. The
main thing would be to avoid getting people involved and then letting them
down in some way. I love the idea of sitting in front of a computer and
entering in personal data and then getting gobbledy gook out the other side.
But I don't know that everybody would feel that way."

"There's a lot of very interesting software out there now which has been
developed over the last 10 to 15 years which just wasn't available in 1971.
The ideas were available but the machinery wasn't. I had a sponsor in place
for this - to do a year's work on producing music for up to 2,000 people.
But the sponsor has fallen through. I've been a bit slow in finalizing the
deal. So I'm now looking at some way to pay for it myself. And I call that
The Lifehouse Method."

PETE SAYS MORE ABOUT... THE WHO IN '82 TOTAL GUITAR: So it became inevitable
for you to pull the plug on The Who in '82?

TOWNSHEND: 'When I left The Who in 82, there were certain things going on.
One was that I wanted to preserve my hearing - what was left of it. I
decided I should stop touring and recording. But in actual fact, where my
hearing was suffering most was in the recording studio. And where my vanity
was suffering most was in the recording studio because I couldn't come up
with the kind of songs that The Who needed."

"So I ended the band, when all I really needed to do was say to the record
company, 'Listen, we're not going to make records for a while'. I could have
continued to perform live with the Who, or solo, or whatever. But what I
did, was I walked away from the whole caboodle and went to be an editor at
Faber and Faber. And that, in retrospect, was a big mistake."

"I now realize I can, whenever I like, go out with The Who or whenever I
like, I can go out on my own and play Who songs and I don't have to
apologize to anybody. What I do have to apologize to myself and to anybody
who's stuck with me creatively, is for the fact that I still find it very
very hard to write the kind of songs I wrote when I was a kid. But if you're
valued because you wrote great songs when you were a kid, then that's an
inevitability."

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