another article

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here is another article from today's sun-sentinel!!!!

Who’s this sad-eyed dreamer?

By Letta Tayler, New York Newsday Staff Writer

The demure man with the equine nose and silver stubble glances aimlessly around his 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 is backed by drummer Zak Starkey -- son of Ringo Starr -- and the Who’s longtime guest keyboardist, John (Rabbit) Bundrick. 

Early reviews of the tour, which kicked off 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 along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He describes the tour not as a landmark event but as a lark among old friends. The group is scheduled to perform Sunday at West Palm Beach’s Mars Music Amphitheatre. 

"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 onstage 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, 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 onstage 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.) 

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. "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. 

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 ’n’ 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."