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An older,wiser Townshend.......Part 1 of 3 Parts



This just in Kiddies on06/16/00 from Yahoo via a reporter from Detroit
named Gary Graff........

An older,wiser Townshend focuses on "unfinished business"



Pete Townshend says he has a "character quirk" that seems to guide his
creative endeavours these days.
"I don't like to leave things unfinished" says Townshend, 55, the
guitarist and chief songwriter for the Who, who kick off a North
American tour June 25th in Chicago. "I think somebody,when I was
young,told me that.....an artist is somebody who finishes things."
"So I always carried the idea tha I had to finish what I started, and if
i didn't finish what I started, nobody else would be able to. What would
be an embarrassment for me would be to feel that I talked about some of
my better ideas more than I've actually done them."
 Townshend is dealing with quite a bit of unfinished business at the
moment. He recently returned to "Lifehouse", a conceptual piece that was
supposed to have followed the Who's 1969 rock opera "Tommy" but which
the group lost enthusiasm for and abandoned, with the songs showing up
on other band peojects===most notably on 1971's celebrated "Who's Next"
album.
 During the past couple of years,Townshend has turned "Lifehouse" into a
pair of album releases---the six-disc "Lifehouse Chronicles" and the mre
truncated "Lifehouse Elements"-----a radio play and a concert
presentation, some of which was featured on his recent VH1
"Storytellers" episode. He hopes that at some point "Lifehouse" also
will become a film and some sort of "live event".
 Origionally conceived as a musical "happening" as well as an album, the
"Lifehouse" plot involved a futuristic, "1984" ish society in which an
electronics whiz named Bobby----a messianic figure not unlke
Tommy---leads a rebellion through music.
 Meanwhile,Townshend is back with the Who, a band he's frequently
declared he would never play with again but has returned to periodically
since 1982's "Farewell Tour". After a short run of dates last fall, the
Who will tour North America in two legs this summer---sharing a road
crew and staging with Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes-----and there's
also talk of a new studio album in the near future.
 "The unfinished business of the Who is the friendship," says Townshend,
who co-founded the band in 1964 in London with singer Roger
Daltrey,bassist John Entwistle and the late drummer Keith Moon. "I know
that sounds a bit cheesy,but it's true. We did alot of great work
together, and we should have enjoyed our friendship more. And we didn't.
And now we do"
 "And what may come out of that might be very profound."


(a finger rest for me!)