Pete Townshend: Dr. Who
In June, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey gathered with their road crew and backing band at the cavernous Bray Film Studios an hour west of London to rehearse for the Who‘s sixth tour since their “farewell” outing in 1982 – and their first since bassist John Entwistle died of drug-related heart failure in Las Vegas on the eve of the group’s 2002 road trip. There was less than a week to go before the first dates in Europe. Daltrey was struggling to memorize the lyrics to songs from Endless Wire, the first new Who album in twenty-four years, and his frustration was evident. But Townshend’s spirits were high as he teased fifty-eight-year-old keyboardist John “Rabbit” Bundrick for being so quick to take his shirt off in rehearsals. Townshend was looking forward to taking the band to America, although Daltrey had yet to agree.
Outside, Townshend’s girlfriend, singer-songwriter Rachel Fuller, showed off her new Airstream trailer – a silver TV studio on wheels that would be used to film her In the Attic Web series from the road as she followed the Who from one European festival gig to the next. Townshend is a technology geek – at sixty-one, he’s obsessed with the Internet, and the original plan was to broadcast part of every Who show on the tour via In the Attic, with revenues donated to charity. (Financing fell through, scrapping the project.) But Townshend’s Internet jones will not be denied: The Web figures on Endless Wire, which comes out October 31st, in the form of the Grid, a variation on Townshend’s Lifehouse concept, which dates way back to 1971’s Who’s Next, and which can best be described as using the Net as a giant tuning fork that harmonizes all of humanity.
Endless Wire features time travel, meditation and murder as well, laid out in songs that sound like they could have been written during the same era that yielded Seventies Who classics such as Quadrophenia. “This album is a real mixture,” says Townshend. “There are some songs that fit the Who’s Next pattern: sonic experiments with complex and careful techniques behind them. But there are also very bask analog eight-track home-studio recordings – even a few tracks that are just acoustic guitar and vocals. I think the album that this one most closely echoes is one I made with Ronnie Lane in 1976 called Rough Mix – but sonically it stands as a Who record somewhere between Who By Numbers and Who Are You.” The collection includes a ten-song “mini-opera” about a guy Townshend’s age watching three kids from his neighborhood grow up and form a band. “They’re a precocious group of guys from different religions, and they make a commitment to each other,” the guitarist told me during the first in a series of interviews that began at rehearsals and concluded in New York in September, early in the Who’s American tour. The different religions – Christian, Muslim and Jewish – are Townshend’s reflection on a post-September 11th world. (He was initially in favor of the war in Iraq, by the way, but has since changed his position.) But it’s also a story about a band trying to get along, a subject he knows all too well. “They accept one another’s extraordinary eccentricities,” he says. “That idea reflects very much the commitment I made when I was about eleven or twelve with John Entwistle, who thought I was very, very strange. A band is a very extreme form of co-dependency, to use the recovery term. It’s like a marriage, without the sex, without the ceremony, without the love, without the children, without the golf, without the Sunday lunches, without the in-laws. When you put a band together, you tend to accept that this guy or girl in your band can do the job, but, God, they’re so weird. And if you get a hit, you’re stuck with this weird person for the rest of your life.”
There’s been talk of a new Who album for six years. Why such a long delay?
We did a press conference in 2000 where Roger and John both announced they’d written songs for a new Who album. I was shocked. I went to Roger and said, “So you’ve written some songs, have you? Would it be possible for me to hear them?” Of course he hadn’t written any songs. He still hasn’t. And I went to John and said, “Have you written any songs?” He said, “Yeah, I’ve got ‘undreds. But I’m not playing them to him.” I said, “Who’s him?” And he said, “Roger. I’m not having my songs sniffed out by him.” And that was that.
I had to try to rescue them because Roger had committed publicly to the idea that we were going to make a record, and he felt he’d look like a complete idiot if we didn’t make any new music. So we did “Real Good Looking Boy” and “Old Red Wine” for [the greatest-hits collection] Then and Now. But I couldn’t be driven by Roger’s needs. He’d never been a part of the Who’s creative engine. He longed to be a part of it, he longed to be able to wish it into existence, but it required me to come up with a piece of work I felt convinced I could carry for the rest of my life.
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