Letter to America Diary

[L. Bird]

http://www.petetownshend.co.uk/diary/display.cfm?id=380&zone=diary

3 September 2006
A Letter To America


This is the last day I spend with my son, my family, our five dogs, in my 
garden, enjoying the end of the English summer, the blue dragon-flies over 
the mill-pond, the sound of the coots: Tomorrow I begin my journey to come 
and play to you. The European tour ended just before August began, and I’d 
hoped to spend the entire month relaxing, preparing for the two American 
legs of our tour this autumn. That was not to be. I have been finishing off 
the mixing of the Who album, liaising on the art work, doing some early 
interviews about it, and finally working to complete full-length versions of 
two songs from Wire & Glass (the Mini-Opera included on the album). If you 
have listened to the condensed version we put out in July, or watched any of 
our early live webcasts that featured the Mini-Opera, you will know the two 
tracks: Endless Wire and We Got A Hit.

I’ve been busy and so has my partner Rachel. We’ve recorded a few great new 
tracks of hers at home together, and she’s been working out how best to 
arrange her time on tour to promote her EP Shine and keep up her work on In 
The Attic. We try hard both to get in each other’s way as much as possible, 
and give each other career-space.

This weekend though has been deliberately slow. Two days running my son has 
had to do some inductions at his school, and show new kids around now he is 
a sixth-former. One of my two daughters is coming this evening to have a 
meal, and to catch up, and say goodbye. I walked the dogs this morning in a 
light rain on a deserted heath, passing only three people in ninety minutes, 
and stopped and chatted to a charming man who I didn’t recognise who said he 
had been the music director on the English theatre version of Tommy.

This entry is a kind of goodbye – for now – to this pleasant English life I 
lead when I am not being a rock musician. It is hello to hotels, media 
inquisitions, being shouted at in the street, and the security and safety of 
being sequestered at Who shows, ready to play, ready to fly, ready to try to 
forget who I was, who I am, and who I might one day soon become, and occupy 
the ‘zone’ for a few moments – and perhaps play as well as I did in Madrid.

I’m not going to pretend I’m looking forward to being away from home, but 
neither am I going to pretend I’m not looking forward to the tour. These are 
the last few hours I have to enjoy the almost absolute silence of the 
countryside, and the ability to instantly meditate as one can when sitting 
on a bench in a wood, or a field, or on a hill, with no body and no building 
in sight.

I heard some tracks from Bob Dylan’s new CD on BBC radio last night. They 
are great. Mature just as Bruce Springsteen’s last album was. The critics 
were favourable about the way Bob Dylan is facing his ageing process and is 
remaining connected with his ageing audience. It made me think; I believe I 
have done something like this on some of the songs on the Who album. But on 
some of them I have borrowed the voices of an imaginary young band of 
musicians, and allowed them to speak when very young, when young and 
middle-aged, and then when they are even older than I am today. I wonder why 
we, the song-writers of today, feel the need to even think about this? Did 
Cole Porter worry about the creatures of his craft growing old gracefully, 
bitterly or resolutely? Did Frank and Ella concern themselves about how 
strange it might be to sing songs about young love, when both of them were 
in old age?

Rock ‘n’roll – and Bob Dylan exploded from the slowly evolving folk 
traditions of Dave Van Ronk and Ritchie Havens and embraced the rock form by 
sheer force of will – is getting old. If it embraces the issues of ageing, 
it will age. Or would you say it is becoming universal now, free of 
limitation and constraint? Against all the odds I put up in my own jaundiced 
middle-age, rock is not dead. Neither is it right. Or wrong. Or a new 
religion. Or an answer. Or even a question. It’s a process. An island. Walk 
on, walk off. The kids in my imaginary band The Glass Household in Wire & 
Glass describe the process as breathing, exploding, imploding, climbing a 
stairway to a door made from a mirror, and walking through, expecting 
oblivion in a Black Hole, instead finding a slow after-show party.

I feel as though I’m walking out of the sleepy party, back through the door, 
down the stairway, to the stage. There’s some cleaning up to do down there 
before I can go back up and chit-chat about past lives.