Pete interview in The Desert Sun

[Brian Cady]

http://tinyurl.com/ycp75u

Pete Townshend previews what's next after The Who tour
Bruce Fessier
Desert Post Weekly
November 9, 2006

The Who was always the thinking man's rock band - the '60s British Invasion group that best mixed testosterone with gingko bilova.

Pete Townshend was the mastermind who drove The Who with the physical energy of a young punk. He wound them up with his windmill guitar strokes and lit the explosion of Keith Moon's drums and Roger Daltrey's cathartic scream on Won't Get Fooled Again.

He's 62 years old now and will perform Saturday, Nov. 11, with Daltrey and four new members of The Who, including Ringo Starr's son, Zak Starkey, in Moon's old drum seat, at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

But this grandfather of punk disproves the punk axiom that you don't get wiser, you only get older.
After a career that has seen him grow from the jazz-loving son of musical parents in England to a conceptual songwriter whose works have succeeded on concert stages, Broadway, film and the Metropolitan Opera, Townshend has returned with his first new material for The Who in 24 years on the CD Endless Wire.

He's presenting bits and pieces of the album, including a mini-opera based on his novella, The Boy Who Heard Music, on this concert tour.

But with Townshend's history of introducing concept pieces such as Tommy, Quadrophenia and Lifehouse (which was edited into Who's Next) on record before advancing them through different media, we had to wonder if The Who's concert Saturday would be a retrospective of all the band has done or a preview of what is to come.

The concert tour has been a celebration of its past with a peak at the future, including pieces of the new mini-opera, "Wire & Glass."

But the lanky follower of the late Meher Baba said in a rare e-mail interview with Desert Post Weekly, the CD is a showcase of what could develop after the concert tour.

Weekly: "Endless Wire" offers so many levels of ideas. One criticism I've heard is "its parts don't quite fit together, and not all of the parts work on their own." But that seems to be another theme, especially opening with "Fragments" and reprising it in the mini-opera. Is there also a Marshall McLuhan "the media is the message" theme here - that the nature of the CD is itself fragmentary? Are you comfortable with your ability to express your ideas on a CD or are you using the CD as a showcase of ideas that could move on to another medium?

Pete Townshend: I feel as if I've been found out! Of course the "other" medium that began to interest me once I decided to tour was The Who stage, so uppermost on my mind when I gathered the lyrics together for the songs that became Wire & Glass was creating words and music that would work in the live rock arena. However, before I knew for certain that we would play any of the songs from Wire & Glass live, I had enjoyed visions of producing some grand evolution of it based on the story that lay behind it (The Boy Who Heard Music).

So there really is something of a chaotic lack of focus in Wire & Glass, but some of that was intentional. I see my work as a tightly drawn cycle from artist to audience, from commission to brief, from function to conclusion, from arrival to departure. I see music's principle function in the modern world as the mere division of time into manageable chunks.

But there is more. When one or more gather, there is congregation and suddenly a higher meaning and purpose, whether or not the audience sets out to find it. So in a very real sense the medium is the mechanism, or the medium is the method. The audience itself is - somehow - the message, and it carries that message to itself.

What have you learned from your earlier concept pieces?

Quadrophenia taught me that the narrative behind a good rock opera should be very simple indeed. That leaves space for the listener to interpolate their own experience, thus the music becomes their tailor-made backdrop to the issues of their moment rather than a panoply of tightly modeled ideas about another life, another world.

You have worked in so many media - the 45 rpm single, the concept album, the concert stage, Broadway, film, TV, full-length books, novellas, the Internet. Do you enjoy having so many options for realizing your ideas or are you always looking for that great project - your "Moby Dick" so to speak - and then applying your ideas to best media, like spinning "Who's Next" from the "Lifehouse" multi-media project?

Lifehouse and all its strands gather as the most simple idea I have. I find it hard to let go simply because it has become like a new language to me. It has become the way I see art.

Who do you write for? Yourself? Your band? Your audience?

I am always looking for a way to serve my audience. They are the ones who charged me to write for them when I was a 19-year-old "installation sculptor" fresh from art school looking for a patron. I never expected to find such a loyal and passionate advocacy in the legion of early fans of The Who, nor such support and commitment from my colleagues in the band. They became my installation, and I became their faithful servant - occasionally taking too much time off to pursue extra-mural projects.

Because a lot of my writing is rooted in a bigger picture, it is fairly easy to develop for other mediums, but any dramaturg must understand rock, and its system, before they start to wrought soap opera from rock opera.

 
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com



 
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