Posted on 09/12/2006 12:30:20 PM PDT by dirtboy
If Betty Townshend hadn't broken her hip, The Who would not have recorded Endless Wire, its first album of new material in 24 years.
And Betty's son, Pete, and his sole surviving original bandmate, Roger Daltrey, wouldn't be leading The Who - or "The Two," as fans have cheekily dubbed them - into the Wachovia Center tonight for the first date of their North American tour.
Of course, just by giving birth to the now 61-year-old Pete, Betty Townshend can be credited as the source of one of the most brilliant resumes in popular music. It embraces gems from "I Can't Explain" to Quadrophenia to "Hope I die before I get old" - the iconic lyric from a band that went on to hold seemingly endless reunions after claiming to call it quits in the early '80s.
In the case of Endless Wire (out Oct. 31) and the half-a-Who's 2006 return to the stage, Pete's mum had a direct causal relationship.
Let Pete explain.
"Around January of this year, my manager was pressing me for a decision as to whether The Who were going to tour in 2006," a talkative Townshend says by phone last week after a rehearsal in New York.
"I said I wasn't ready. I didn't want to tour unless I had new music. I couldn't really see the point of taking the old circus around the world," says the guitarist and charter member of the British rock aristocracy. "I just felt there was a kind of pointlessness to it."
Not that Townshend hadn't been busy. A self-described "Internet nut," he had just finished publishing a novella in blog form called The Boy Who Heard Music - it's at www.petetownshend.co.uk - that grew out of the aborted '70s project Lifehouse.
Then Betty Townshend broke her hip. "She's had an alcohol problem all her life, and she suddenly started to drink around Christmas time," Pete says. His mother is in her mid-80s, and lives on the street in west London's Acton section where Pete grew up.
"We all thought she would... wither away, and maybe go nuts and die. But she didn't. She rallied. She got herself together, healed up, and continued to cause lots of trouble."
And that was just the inspiration her son needed. "I kind of dusted myself down and thought: Well, if she can [obscenity] do it, I can do it."
So he "knocked out a bunch of songs" based on The Boy Who Heard Music, which concerns a fictional band a generation younger than The Who. Then he phoned his manager and told him it was a go for the tour (which reaches the Borgata in Atlantic City on Nov. 24 and the Wachovia Center on Nov. 25).
Now, he's back alongside Daltrey, who was a sheet-metal worker when he first joined together with Townshend, an art school student, to make music more than four decades ago.
Their tour comes four years after bassist John Entwistle followed drummer Keith Moon to an early grave. Their European shows in the summer drew raves, with a band that includes drummer Zak Starkey (son of Ringo Starr) and bassist Pino Palladino, plus longtime Who helpmates John "Rabbit" Bundrick on keyboards and Townshend's multi-instrumentalist brother, Simon.
It's remarkable that this year Townshend has a career at all. Three years ago, news that Scotland Yard was investigating him for purchasing child pornography on the Internet in 1999 was met with shock and revulsion. Townshend turned himself in, and said that the Web surfing was for research for A Different Bomb, a (still-unpublished) book based on an anti-child-pornography essay he had written.
Police found no incriminating evidence on any of his 14 computers, and Townshend, who lives in London (on the same street as Mick Jagger) with his 31-year-old singer-songwriter girlfriend, Rachel Fuller, was released. But he will remain on Britain's sex offender list until 2008. He has repeatedly asserted he is "not a pedophile," but refused to discuss the subject in this interview.
He's quite willing, though, to talk about his contentious relationship with Daltrey, who knocked Townshend cold with a right cross in 1973. On tour this summer, they had a spat when Daltrey forced Townshend to pull the plug on Webcasting shows.
"Roger is my partner in The Who," Townshend wrote on his Web site. "He is not my partner in anything else. We love each other, but we are not regular social buddies like Bono and Edge, we do not discuss or share ideas, and we have no unified or joint vision or strategy."
Daltrey, always game for regrouping The Who, sounded pumped up for the task in a press conference, saying, "Pete's music, for me, is still a driving force in my life." He said the Endless Wire songs have "the Townshend magic."
After Entwistle's death from a cocaine-induced heart attack in 2002, Townshend says, he and Daltrey realized "how much we care about each other, though we're not always in accord.
"I've always known that Roger is a fantastic interpreter of my work," he goes on. "He brings a rich theatrical passion to it, which I can't pull off, and also a very powerful masculinity which I don't have. But I have to say that I've always secretly felt that I do it better."
Now, though, he realizes that "together there's a mechanism that generates euphoric chemistry and... is really quite extraordinary."
This summer, National Review magazine called "Won't Get Fooled Again" the greatest conservative rock song of all time. Townshend says that's "on the money." The self-described "working musician" who sees his job as "helping the audience to forget themselves," says he never really bought into "all that hippie s- I so despise."
And, Townshend says, "when people say "Won't Get Fooled Again" is not about rebellion, it's the exact opposite of that, I say they're right."
That song, along with "Who Are You" and "Baba O'Riley," gained The Who ubiquitous exposure on CSI, the crime-investigation television shows. Considering that Townshend has been willing to sell the rights to seemingly every significant Who song - "Happy Jack" on Hummer ads, for instance - spinning The Who's greatest hits can seem like listening to one long TV commercial.
He's unapologetic.
"We have to do whatever we can to make sure that people do hear the music," he says. And he complains that "when our music was played on the radio, they did pay a few cents to play it, but quite often those cents did not find their way into my pocket." He figures it's a contradiction that it's OK for radio stations, magazines and newspapers to solicit advertising and "sell their souls to whoever comes along and pays," but not for rock stars. "There's a sense that it's all right for you guys," he says, "but it's not all right for us guys."
But if Townshend can be contentious and pragmatic one minute, the next he can sound an idealistic note about the communal power of music, reminding you that he's a product of the '60s.
"The thing that the last great war did was leave us not so much a bleakness of spirit as a vacancy," he says. "And we filled the vacancy. We filled it with a lot of tosh... but we also filled it with a lot of passion... .
"As a 61-year-old man, I can still write very powerfully about how I am one of those people who changed the way we use entertainment and art and music and movies - everything - to deal with what we need to express. What we feel is wrong, what we feel we can't explain, what we can't articulate. And how we can only share it sometimes by realizing that we're all listening to the same records."
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Abbie Hoffman found that out the hard way at Woodstock.
But that's just me.
But will Horton hear Eric the Half-a-Who?
The new songs might be interesting, given that they are tied to the Lifehouse concept, which is what led to the best songs on Who's Next.
When Pete was young, he was once described as a "nose on a stick". Guess that doesn't apply any longer.
He was cleared of that.
I admit I'm not a huge Who fan, but I think Zak is a great post-Moon drummer for them. He has his father's timing with Moon's energy. Just my two cents' worth...
I have to wonder what the interest would be with only two surviving members, especially after 24 years since their last studio album. After this much time, what is the difference between a Townsend solo album and a Who album (besides Roger Daltrey singing)?
Have their tours the last few years been sold out or are there plenty of tickets left over? Part of this is that Entwistle was too much a part of their sound. Another reason may be that the "Boomers" (at least a large segment) are no longer going to concerts. Lots of "Classic" rock acts can't get any air play on regular rardio - maybe on Satellite radio. Just look at Robert Plant's last studio album. I only heard it on XM radio - the Boneyard. He is now releasing a box set of all his solo albums this Fall, including his last two studio albums just to create a buzz.
Kind of sad......
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