Speaker 1: Pushkin. The list of iconic rock guitarists who were also
Speaker 1: top tier songwriters is pretty short, and at the top
Speaker 1: of that list is none other than The Who's Pete Townsend.
Speaker 1: He's been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
Speaker 1: received Kennedy Center Honors, Lifetime Achievement awards from both the
Speaker 1: brit Awards and the Grammys, and all for good reason.
Speaker 1: Pete's iconic power chord guitar style and early use of
Speaker 1: synthesizers established him as a musical innovator in the sixties
Speaker 1: and seventies. His on stage antics, smashing his guitars and
Speaker 1: leaping halfway across the stage mid song, cemented his reputation
Speaker 1: as a consummate rock and roll showman. It's not for
Speaker 1: nothing that The Who were once known as the world's
Speaker 1: loudest band. In the early sixties, The Who scored a
Speaker 1: string of chart topping singles, but Pete Townsend wanted the
Speaker 1: band to try for more than just pop hit, so
Speaker 1: he set out to work writing the first ever rock opera,
Speaker 1: a project that became the double album Tommy. Tommy's widely
Speaker 1: considered The Who's breakout album and is considered a masterpiece
Speaker 1: by critics. Following its release, Pete started writing songs in
Speaker 1: a script for another ambitious project, a sci fi epic
Speaker 1: called Life House. After that project was scrapped, which he
Speaker 1: details in today's episode, the songs he'd written for wound
Speaker 1: up on different releases from the band over the next decade,
Speaker 1: including their nineteen seventy one classic album Who's Next. Last month,
Speaker 1: The Who released an epic box set called Who's Next
Speaker 1: Lifehouse that contains one hundred and fifty five tracks, eighty
Speaker 1: nine of which have never been released. The set also
Speaker 1: includes a graphic novel based on Pete's original script on
Speaker 1: her demos, complete live concerts, posters, collectible pins. It's an
Speaker 1: incredible set to pour over. On today's episode, I talked
Speaker 1: to Pete Townsend about how some of the ill fated
Speaker 1: effects of technology that he predicted in Lifehouse have actually
Speaker 1: come to pass. He also explains why he decided to
Speaker 1: target a specifically male audience when writing for The Who,
Speaker 1: and gives an unexpected take on the grateful dead in
Speaker 1: San Francisco's music scene of the sixties. This is broken
Speaker 1: record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchman.
Speaker 1: Here's my interview with Pete Townsend. I was really excited
Speaker 1: to do this interview last week, but then we kind
Speaker 1: of had a posit so I could get this box set. That's,
Speaker 1: dear god, what a beautiful I mean, I have some
Speaker 1: box sets that I really like, but this is this
Speaker 1: is something else. It's just incredible to read through as
Speaker 1: I'm as I'm listening the memorabilia book with the pins,
Speaker 1: the buttons, the posters, the graphic, not the detail on
Speaker 1: the graphic novel.
Speaker 2: It's a good, good, good attempt. It's unbelievable good.
Speaker 1: So this is a project I've long been interested in
Speaker 1: as a WHO fan. It seems like a project that
Speaker 1: you've long been interested at least returned to you many times.
Speaker 1: When did you decide that you were going to do
Speaker 1: this treatment for this project? When did this come about?
Speaker 2: You know, I didn't decide to do it. I think
Speaker 2: the last big thing that I did around life House
Speaker 2: was I did I think called Lifehouse Method, And prior
Speaker 2: to that, I'd done a thing called Lifehouse Chronicles, which
Speaker 2: was a gig at Sadler's Well's Theater in London, and
Speaker 2: I tried on that occasion. That was in two thousand
Speaker 2: tried to gather together everything that I thought my fans
Speaker 2: and the Who fans had imagined had been a part
Speaker 2: of Life House, because in fact, the songs that are
Speaker 2: attributed to Life House, particularly in this package, were sort
Speaker 2: of scattershot things that I was working on while I
Speaker 2: was waiting to finish the project with the Who's manager,
Speaker 2: Kit Lambert. When when I wrote Tommy, for example, it
Speaker 2: was pretty basic, and Kit Lambert, who was always somebody
Speaker 2: that had helped me with my songwriting and been my
Speaker 2: mentor I was the Who's producer, came in and helped
Speaker 2: me shape it up and make it sharper and make
Speaker 2: it more cohesive. It was still regarded as a bit
Speaker 2: weak by some people plot wise, but with Lifehouse, I
Speaker 2: wrote the script and submitted it to our managers in
Speaker 2: two parts. One was this fiction, which was basic science fiction,
Speaker 2: and the other was a handbook for a electronic music workshop,
Speaker 2: and I called it Barrel one for the fiction, barrel
Speaker 2: two for the workshop, and the graphic novel worked very
Speaker 2: very close to the film script, which I felt at
Speaker 2: the time was very naive. You know, I wasn't a
Speaker 2: film script writer, but it was a story, and that's
Speaker 2: a kind of a joy for me because I was
Speaker 2: young and I was full of ideas, and it was
Speaker 2: a wacky idea. But what they've done in the Graphic
Speaker 2: novel is they've allowed some some lightheartedness and some humor
Speaker 2: and some mischievousness to get into the story. There were
Speaker 2: two scripts. There was one written in nineteen seventy one
Speaker 2: and another in nineteen seventy five, I think and on
Speaker 2: those two scripts were loosely gathered together by James Harvey,
Speaker 2: who was the guy who did the story for the
Speaker 2: Graphic novel. And it feels cohesive, it feels fun, and
Speaker 2: I think it will help people understand what I was
Speaker 2: shooting for. But hey, you know, when I was writing
Speaker 2: the songs, I had no idea a whether the movie
Speaker 2: would ever get made. It was for a movie I
Speaker 2: was interested in, but a movie that was that featured
Speaker 2: live music, a movie that featured the who live at
Speaker 2: their best working with an audience, so very much an
Speaker 2: experiment that when we made the first steps and we
Speaker 2: went into the Young Vic Theater in London and started
Speaker 2: to work with audiences, that was when I realized that
Speaker 2: it just wasn't going to work. We had a lot
Speaker 2: of technology, we had synthesizers, we had backing tapes, We
Speaker 2: had some great ideas, but the audience were unwilling really
Speaker 2: to indulge in an experiment in which they might be
Speaker 2: revealed to be in some way I don't know. And
Speaker 2: in any case, it wasn't advertised. The actual series of
Speaker 2: workshops in London weren't advertised. We were afraid we would
Speaker 2: get overrun. You know, we were a big band, we
Speaker 2: were playing too big, so we were afraid that if
Speaker 2: we advertised it we would get besieged and people would
Speaker 2: just want to hear the hits. So nobody really came.
Speaker 1: And at the time, when you say the hits, just
Speaker 1: mean that would have been this material from Tommy would
Speaker 1: have been really what audiences at that time were wanting
Speaker 1: to hear, would you imagine or would it have been
Speaker 1: the earliest thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it would have been Tommy. It would have
Speaker 2: been the singles as well. The singles as well, you know,
Speaker 2: and our act at that time, even after Tommy, was
Speaker 2: very much rooted in the early singles and some R
Speaker 2: and B stuff. You know. One of our big songs
Speaker 2: was Summertime Blues. We'd had a hit album with Live
Speaker 2: at Leeds which was a live album and that featured
Speaker 2: summertime blues. So yeah, we were playing. We were playing
Speaker 2: a rock gigs, you know, but in the center of
Speaker 2: our shows was Tommy, and in fact Lifehouse we hoped
Speaker 2: would provide us with a new centerpiece for our live show.
Speaker 2: We tended always to work with what you would, you know,
Speaker 2: in an artistic sense, called a Tripard type show. Three parts,
Speaker 2: you know, some very old hits to start the show,
Speaker 2: then Tommy take the level down, and then kind of
Speaker 2: real whack out lunelessly at the end, with long, long,
Speaker 2: long version of my generation with lots of stretched out
Speaker 2: jamming and stuff and guitar smashing.
Speaker 1: I mean, the guitarist machine had been a part of
Speaker 1: the repertoire for a bit, but the long, stretched out
Speaker 1: version of my generation was at a bit because you
Speaker 1: guys were tired of the song and wanted to just
Speaker 1: do something different with it.
Speaker 2: We were tired of everything. I think around that time
Speaker 2: we were tired of Tommy in particular. And you know,
Speaker 2: we had a lot of songs. We had plenty of songs.
Speaker 2: You know, we had kids, all right. We had a
Speaker 2: song called Tattoo. We had a whole load of songs.
Speaker 2: We had plenty of songs to do in those days.
Speaker 2: The sets were very sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, the only people that were doing three hour
Speaker 2: shows were the Dead, right.
Speaker 1: Did you see them much in those days?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: We did a gig with them called Tea in the
Speaker 2: Park in San Francisco, and that's when I met them all,
Speaker 2: and particularly Matt Jerry Garcia, who I just loved, was
Speaker 2: such a great guy, really great guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Did you connect to the music or to the
Speaker 1: idea of.
Speaker 2: I connected to the idea of the dead, the idea
Speaker 2: of you know. I remember Bob Dylan once said to me.
Speaker 2: You know, I said to him, why are you doing
Speaker 2: so many shows? You know, why why you're constantly on
Speaker 2: the road. You know, don't you have a fucking life,
Speaker 2: you know, just just on the fucking road all the time.
Speaker 2: And he said, Pete, I'm a folks singer. And I
Speaker 2: said yeah. And he said, well, what is a folks singer?
Speaker 2: And I said tell me and he said, it's a
Speaker 2: guy with a good memory and the music for songs.
Speaker 2: So true, and he said, you know, and he said,
Speaker 2: I've got six hundred and fifty songs and I have
Speaker 2: to keep playing them, otherwise I forget them. And it
Speaker 2: was a bit like that with a Grateful Dead. The
Speaker 2: Grateful Dead were a band that could play fucking anything
Speaker 2: that you came up with. So somebody in the crowd
Speaker 2: would sort of saying, play Bay Fifth Symphony and they
Speaker 2: would have a go.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, it's pretty wild.
Speaker 2: But also the commitment of their fans was something that
Speaker 2: was interesting. The big thing about the Dead I remember
Speaker 2: was that they gave their road crew the same share
Speaker 2: that they got themselves.
Speaker 1: Did you know that. I did not know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a true cooperative. So nobody got rich.
Speaker 2: Nobody they made a living, but they didn't get rich.
Speaker 1: It stands the reason in a way, because I imagine
Speaker 1: just setting up that wall of sound that they were
Speaker 1: assembling must have been just as much work as in
Speaker 1: a way is that you know, the three hour jams
Speaker 1: that they were doing. You know, they're taking the audience requests.
Speaker 2: But they were definitely they were real contemporaries of the band,
Speaker 2: and they were a challenge in a sense because because
Speaker 2: they had a connection with their audience that I was
Speaker 2: envious of. My belief. The thing about Lifehouse was is
Speaker 2: that there was a whole tract of thinking, which was
Speaker 2: about the function of rock music. What was it for,
Speaker 2: what was it best at, what could it do that
Speaker 2: it hadn't done before? And that was an underlying theme.
Speaker 2: It was a conversation, it was a discussion. It was
Speaker 2: or it invited those things. It invited conversation, it invited discussion.
Speaker 2: It challenged the whole concept of people coming to see
Speaker 2: a band, whoever that band was, and sitting down, you know,
Speaker 2: smoking a bit of a joint and having you know,
Speaker 2: an experience of some sort. The idea was that for me,
Speaker 2: was that the who had somehow stumbled on through the
Speaker 2: mod movement, through the post war syndrome that young men
Speaker 2: had about you know, being worthless, being disenfranchised. It was
Speaker 2: a tremendous contrast to what was going on in the
Speaker 2: seventies in America, which was an anti war movement, you know,
Speaker 2: against Vietnam, and quite rightly of course, But for us,
Speaker 2: as young men, we had been country that was actually
Speaker 2: at the front line of war. So we believed in victory,
Speaker 2: We believed in fighting for a cause. We felt that
Speaker 2: America had come and taken part in the whole thing
Speaker 2: and saved us because towards the end we were very
Speaker 2: close to being beaten. So it was a new learning
Speaker 2: process in a sense to come to the States and
Speaker 2: feel that there was this pacifistic, hard driven pacifistic activist
Speaker 2: so passive aggressive pacifism. And for me, the main thing
Speaker 2: was this idea that music had a spiritual function rather
Speaker 2: than a political function. Rather than a function to change society,
Speaker 2: it was to change and communicate and uplift and provide
Speaker 2: solace and spiritual connection to people in the audience. And
Speaker 2: so that was part of the underlying idea about Lifehouse
Speaker 2: was what would be a really good that is, the
Speaker 2: equivalent of a rock band like The Who or led Zeppelin,
Speaker 2: or an artist like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or
Speaker 2: whomever going in front of an audience, or Sliming the
Speaker 2: Family Stone or Stevie Wonder or Prince or whomever going
Speaker 2: in front of an audience and playing music, and the
Speaker 2: audience going home and saying to each other, what the
Speaker 2: fuck happened there? Because I'm different, I'm actually different.
Speaker 1: You wanted to change people, You wanted the audience to
Speaker 1: similar to the way that the audience was as much
Speaker 1: a part of the Dead Show or the way that
Speaker 1: they created an engagement between themselves and the fans. You
Speaker 1: wanted to create a symbiosis in a way between the well.
Speaker 2: Funny enough, I think, looking back, I'm interpolating some stuff
Speaker 2: which wasn't actually exactly true. At the time, I didn't
Speaker 2: really understand what the dead we were doing. I didn't
Speaker 2: understand the San Francisco scene at all. I spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time there, but I was a follower of
Speaker 2: a teacher called Maha Barber, and he there were a
Speaker 2: lot of Maya Barber people in San Francisco. There were
Speaker 2: a lot of people who followed lots of other spiritual
Speaker 2: masters as well. But I spent a lot of time there,
Speaker 2: and I never really quite got the San Francisco music scene.
Speaker 2: It seemed scruffy, it seemed disorganized, and it seemed to
Speaker 2: need focus. It seemed to lack focus. And I suppose
Speaker 2: what had actually happened with the Who as opposed to
Speaker 2: the Stones, as opposed to Led Zeppelin, as opposed to
Speaker 2: the Beatles, as opposed to the maybe less so the Kinks.
Speaker 2: The Kinks were more like Who in that there was
Speaker 2: one writer and that was me, and that I was
Speaker 2: not just a songwriter. I was also an ex art
Speaker 2: schoolboy whose brain had been fried by a bunch of young, radical,
Speaker 2: forward thinking artists who wanted to return to the Bowhouse
Speaker 2: method of thinking about art, which was not like Andy Warhol,
Speaker 2: was not like William Burrows was. You know. It was
Speaker 2: orderly and structured and scientific and the idea that art
Speaker 2: itself had a function. So I was always looking for
Speaker 2: that function. And I had control of the Who because
Speaker 2: I was the only songwriter. John it Was all wrote
Speaker 2: really good songs the bass player, but they weren't really
Speaker 2: written for the Who. They were just written for him,
Speaker 2: and he never took on the Who as a cause
Speaker 2: celeb Anyway, that's another story.
Speaker 1: He Doctor Doctor, by the way, is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite end whistles Dunes, But well, the Pink Floyd's song
Speaker 1: Doctor Doctor is also great.
Speaker 2: Do you remember that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Doctor it was.
Speaker 2: He wrote some really good songs, he did, but they
Speaker 2: were all very eccentric. When it came to Tommy and
Speaker 2: I had to face up the fact that I'd had
Speaker 2: some really terrible neglect and abuse as a young kid
Speaker 2: at four and a half years old, which had really
Speaker 2: kind of fucked me up for a while, and Luckily
Speaker 2: my parents got back together and everything sorted itself out
Speaker 2: in time. I couldn't write the two songs that I needed,
Speaker 2: one about sexual abuse and the other about bullying. And
Speaker 2: I said to John, could you write a song, you know,
Speaker 2: for Uncle Ernie? And could you write a song for
Speaker 2: cousin Kevin? And he just kind of rubbed his nose
Speaker 2: and said yep. And he came up with these two
Speaker 2: fucking brilliant songs. I mean, cousin Kevin is is like
Speaker 2: an Eric Sarti fuke. It's quite extraordinary. When we got
Speaker 2: to the movie with Ken Russell in the seventy four,
Speaker 2: I had to orchestrate it, and as I started to
Speaker 2: analyze it, I started to realize what it is a
Speaker 2: proper fugue. But anyway, yeah, he was great, but I
Speaker 2: had control of the band. I did all the interviews.
Speaker 2: John very very rarely spoke, you know. Roger when he
Speaker 2: was asked to speak, usually spent a lot of time
Speaker 2: talking about how what a pain in the ass I was.
Speaker 2: Keith Moon just made jokes, you know. So I would do,
Speaker 2: you know, a six hour fucking interview with young Wenner
Speaker 2: for Rolling Stone, and he would publish every word you know,
Speaker 2: so I was in this place where I could talk
Speaker 2: the who trip as well as do it. I could
Speaker 2: talk it, I could Did you want to die or
Speaker 2: did you just feel the response? Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah
Speaker 2: I did. I did because I got feedback. And you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of the feedback I got positive feedback was
Speaker 2: from journalists. So I'd do an interview and then the
Speaker 2: next time I would sit with the journalists, they would say,
Speaker 2: do you mind if we sit and just hang out
Speaker 2: for a while and talk. So I would learn a
Speaker 2: huge amount from the journalists at the time as well,
Speaker 2: you know, Dave marsh and Grew Marcus and a lot
Speaker 2: of the big famous journalists of that era, and the
Speaker 2: photographers too. You know, they they all had a passion
Speaker 2: for what it was that that was hidden in the
Speaker 2: music industry at the time, and in the band industry
Speaker 2: at the time. The Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Stones,
Speaker 2: the Kinks, that who you know, Crosby, Steels, Nash, the
Speaker 2: f Jefferson Airplane, the leading figures of that period, that
Speaker 2: there was something that could be done that wasn't being
Speaker 2: done and won't get fooled again. I suppose was an
Speaker 2: expression against that. You know, we are not here to
Speaker 2: provide leadership, because leaders tend to be fly by night yeah,
Speaker 2: and dictators. Anyway, the thing about what I was saying
Speaker 2: about Life House was I wanted a model that seemed
Speaker 2: to me to emulate what was happening with the music
Speaker 2: business in the West, rock music in particular. And I thought, well, really,
Speaker 2: in a sense, what we're doing is we're removing, We're
Speaker 2: not confronting, We're not dealing with the conclusive of societal
Speaker 2: decisions that one would normally make when you were exposed
Speaker 2: to art. And this was true even of artists like
Speaker 2: Bob Dylan, whose work was evidently political. It wasn't happening
Speaker 2: with artists who were in the first wave of racial change,
Speaker 2: like the Temptations. They were still seen to be just
Speaker 2: a band. The conversations may have been happening with people
Speaker 2: at home, but I never got any real sense of it. So,
Speaker 2: in a way, I imagine that there would be a place,
Speaker 2: a world where music was just removed completely and what
Speaker 2: would be left. What would be left could still be dialogue,
Speaker 2: it could still be experienced, it could be exchanges, but
Speaker 2: basically it would be a world which was very, very
Speaker 2: easy to manipulate.
Speaker 1: So in other words, you're sort of saying you did
Speaker 1: not feel that music was being taken seriously as and
Speaker 1: art form at the societal level. It wasn't. We weren't
Speaker 1: asking the questions that needed to be asked.
Speaker 2: No, I think every now and again, for example, when
Speaker 2: the kids got shot in Ohio, Crosby Steelson n Ash
Speaker 2: did that amazing song called for Dead in Ohio, which
Speaker 2: was an expression, but that's rebellion, that's you know, that's
Speaker 2: albut Camu and you know, create dangerously and rebellion. He
Speaker 2: died in nineteen sixty, so most people don't know anything
Speaker 2: about him now. But you know, we still we still
Speaker 2: live in that place where we have to accept that.
Speaker 2: You know. The synthesizer was invented by Russians in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty six. Thirty five of them were invited to meet Stalin,
Speaker 2: Joseph Stalin. He gave them dinner, and then he lined
Speaker 2: them up outside and he shot them all. So, in
Speaker 2: a sense, the emulation the idea that musicians were dangerous,
Speaker 2: that music was dangerous. He tried to destroy Schoenberg, he
Speaker 2: tried to destroy Stravinsky. They both managed to get away.
Speaker 2: Schumburg actually stayed but he managed to say, if we
Speaker 2: managed to get away with this life. But you know,
Speaker 2: of course Stalin was killing everybody. But basically that idea
Speaker 2: that music was was was if it's dangerous, why is
Speaker 2: it dangerous? It's because it's capable of stirring up. What
Speaker 2: we see now in the fiftieth Anniversary of Hip Hop
Speaker 2: is Chuck d talking about the fact that he's been
Speaker 2: part of a miracle of societal change and racial change.
Speaker 2: And it all started with, you know, a bunch of
Speaker 2: boys playing one of Roger Lynn's wonderful, funny machines. And
Speaker 2: so in a sense, I wanted something as big and
Speaker 2: as powerful a model as that, just as I had
Speaker 2: with Tommy. I'd made Tommy deaf, dumb and blind. I
Speaker 2: wanted all of the participants in my story to be
Speaker 2: effectively deaf, dumb, and blind to music to change, and
Speaker 2: that they were happy, they were comfortable, they were safe,
Speaker 2: but they were never going to be released. And in
Speaker 2: a way, one of the most important things about Lifehouse
Speaker 2: that echoes today is the danger of a bipartisan but
Speaker 2: also highly polarized political system. And it's not just America,
Speaker 2: it's the UK too, It's all over the world apart
Speaker 2: from dictatorships in democracy, creating a place in which people
Speaker 2: are separated from each other, that the conversation tends to
Speaker 2: be people shouting at each other rather than speaking to
Speaker 2: each other sensibly, and that music therefore has become incredibly shallow.
Speaker 2: It's fucking brilliant, a lot of it, without question, really
Speaker 2: brilliant stuff, but it's like the froth on the top
Speaker 2: of the coffee, and it comes and goes very quickly.
Speaker 2: The pop industry has always done that. It's always have
Speaker 2: to be careful not to get canceled here, but it
Speaker 2: always has been most effective for young girls who get
Speaker 2: a record, listen to it together, learn dances, learn all
Speaker 2: the songs, and then when they go to a concert
Speaker 2: they sing. You know that. It's something that's always been
Speaker 2: really important about pop. Sadly, it was never a part
Speaker 2: of the whose career, not because we were ugly fuckers.
Speaker 2: It was because I decided I didn't want girl fans.
Speaker 2: I felt that they weren't they weren't loyal enough, So.
Speaker 1: That was kind of real calculation at some point.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah. When I was a kid, my dad
Speaker 2: was in a dance band and there was this guy
Speaker 2: who was a big heart, throb Jewish guy, handsome Jewish
Speaker 2: guy called Frankie Vaughan. He was pre Engelbert Humperdink and
Speaker 2: Tom Jones. He was from that era. He was like
Speaker 2: a kind of a Sinatra type figure. But he had
Speaker 2: this one song where he did this erotic thing. It
Speaker 2: was like, give me the music, give me the girl
Speaker 2: and leave the rest.
Speaker 1: To me.
Speaker 2: And when he sang that, he kicked a very high
Speaker 2: kick and the girls used to scream. Anyway, one day
Speaker 2: I was at the Norwich City Playhouse with my dad.
Speaker 2: I was ten years old, and he came on and
Speaker 2: he did that and the girls went mad. And I
Speaker 2: was in the audience between two teenage girls and one
Speaker 2: of them took off her nickers next to me. God
Speaker 2: knows what was happening with pheromones, but I was only
Speaker 2: ten and threw them up on the stage. Anyway, I
Speaker 2: went back to London and I said to my best
Speaker 2: friend Graham, and we were just getting interested in skiffle.
Speaker 2: Around that time. Rather than Bill Haley and Elvis, there
Speaker 2: was a kind of a folk music thing again. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: so trad jazz really, but with a guitar. Anyway, so
Speaker 2: I said, you've got to come and see this guy,
Speaker 2: you know, and we'll sit in the audience and maybe
Speaker 2: these girls will take their knickers off again. Anyway, so
Speaker 2: we go and he does thing, and all the girls
Speaker 2: in the audience folded their arms and I went backstage.
Speaker 2: He was a friend of my dad, So I said,
Speaker 2: you know, mister Vaughan, I was you know, I told
Speaker 2: my friend that the you know, the girls would all
Speaker 2: throw the neckus. What's happened? And he said, he said,
Speaker 2: it's over for me? And I said why. He said,
Speaker 2: did you see that boy in the first act? I said, no,
Speaker 2: who was? He said he was a singer called Craig Douglas.
Speaker 2: He was a teenage heart throb. They switched sides in
Speaker 2: the concert, and so when the band started, and it
Speaker 2: was quite clear that the other three members of the
Speaker 2: band were mainly interested in trying to be like the
Speaker 2: Beatles and the Stones and have screaming fans that they
Speaker 2: could presumably shag if they were lucky. Not that we
Speaker 2: weren't short of pretty girlfriends. We all had lovely, pretty girlfriends,
Speaker 2: but it was just that model. Yeah. I just remember
Speaker 2: saying to them, no, no, no, let's play to the
Speaker 2: male audience. I'll write songs that are about boys. I'll
Speaker 2: write songs that are about you know, boys, sexuality, about boys,
Speaker 2: frustrations with life, you know about boys, boys, boys boys,
Speaker 2: because you know, when a boy signs up to a
Speaker 2: soccer company, a soccer team, that's it for life. He
Speaker 2: supports them for the rest of his fucking life.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like it's like sport in the US. And it
Speaker 2: worked for us. I mean, we drifted into a slightly
Speaker 2: more normal audience. I suppose around the time Tom the
Speaker 2: Tommy Movie was on, when Roger became a much more
Speaker 2: glamorous figure. Then we started to get girls coming in,
Speaker 2: but never the kind of female, crazy female audience that
Speaker 2: are banned like the Stones hat or I mean, what's
Speaker 2: interesting about somebody like Tom Jones and then Gulbert Humperdinku
Speaker 2: a sort of British products. Was that when we were
Speaker 2: still doing shows and coming home with maybe one hundred
Speaker 2: dollars each, he was playing one show in Vegas and
Speaker 2: going home with a million dollars. This is in the seventies,
Speaker 2: was making huge money.
Speaker 1: Zepplin seemed to somehow find some sort of balance between
Speaker 1: really appealing to a male audience but then also leveraging
Speaker 1: I guess the Robert plant ness of whatever it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Robert, and Robert based himself very much on
Speaker 2: Roger's performance in the Woodstock movie. You know that that
Speaker 2: was the point at which Roger transformed from being short haired,
Speaker 2: you know, not really having a job in the band
Speaker 2: at all, but just singing the songs, to having a
Speaker 2: really important central function. His wife ordered him this beautiful
Speaker 2: shammy leather jacket with fringes, encouraged him to stop bleaching
Speaker 2: his hair, to let it grow out and it went
Speaker 2: into ringlets, and to display his body because he was
Speaker 2: always very well built up top. And of course the
Speaker 2: Woodstock film was huge, and in it he was beautifully
Speaker 2: beautifully photographed, and suddenly we had a rock god.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, so did Zeppelin.
Speaker 1: Did that framing of Roger change any dynamics within the group?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, it gave Roger much more of a sense
Speaker 2: of being a part of a band that valued him
Speaker 2: and knew what he was good at. Prior to that,
Speaker 2: he it had been troublesome. He didn't drink very much,
Speaker 2: he didn't take drugs. He was never part of the party.
Speaker 2: He used to say that he couldn't because of his voice,
Speaker 2: but I don't think it was the kind of thing
Speaker 2: that he really liked anyway. But suddenly he was an
Speaker 2: important member of the band on a functional level. And
Speaker 2: you know, from that moment on we did have a
Speaker 2: much bigger I think when the Who did their big
Speaker 2: deal with Warner Brothers, which would have been nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: eight seventy nine, I had already made one solo album,
Speaker 2: Empty Glass, and Warner Brothers did a sweep and discovered
Speaker 2: that the Whose audience was about seventy percent male and
Speaker 2: thirty percent female, and my audience was fifty to fifty
Speaker 2: and I remember being very surprised by that.
Speaker 1: But you were the one. You were the one that
Speaker 1: was let's right for the boys, and then yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and then you wow.
Speaker 2: I think maybe I don't know quite why, but the
Speaker 2: full force of the Who in those early days, particularly live,
Speaker 2: was very, very aggressive, whereas Led Zeppelin were not aggressive.
Speaker 2: They played loud, and they played and they played, you know,
Speaker 2: the same kind of music we did, but they were
Speaker 2: there was no sense of machisma. There was a sexuality,
Speaker 2: for sure, but there was no none. The thing that
Speaker 2: Whose shows was something that I suppose I felt that
Speaker 2: with Life House we might come to change and rise above.
Speaker 2: It was almost as though when we played tom Me
Speaker 2: on the stage, we had to put that particular who
Speaker 2: band on a nail, hang it on a nail, because
Speaker 2: the the band that had to play Tommy had to
Speaker 2: play what was basically an opera, It was a story.
Speaker 2: It had to be presented in a way that made sense.
Speaker 2: And therefore we just became performing musicians rather than an idea,
Speaker 2: rather than a pack, rather than a you know, there
Speaker 2: to challenge and to change and to steer. And I
Speaker 2: suppose when you say, as a young man, I'm only
Speaker 2: going to pitch my music to young men, the question
Speaker 2: that one should be asked is why, And I would say,
Speaker 2: because I think young men in my day, when I
Speaker 2: was young, were really fucking lost.
Speaker 1: They needed they yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And what's interesting is when we got to America,
Speaker 2: I couldn't work out why young American boys identified so
Speaker 2: much with some of the thesis, some of the ideas,
Speaker 2: and some of the methods that I was presenting. And
Speaker 2: although they'd never been exposed to the bombing and the
Speaker 2: post war apocalyptic nature of the bombing that we experienced
Speaker 2: and also they had experienced being told that they were
Speaker 2: worthless because they weren't called up to fight. There was
Speaker 2: no national service. There were plenty of people in the
Speaker 2: military they didn't need anymore. And at the same time,
Speaker 2: of course, there was marijuana. There was a degree of
Speaker 2: political change, of artistic change or going on in the
Speaker 2: We didn't get to America until sixty seven, and already
Speaker 2: some of the changes in the way that young men
Speaker 2: were valued were deep seated.
Speaker 1: We have to take a quick break and then we'll
Speaker 1: come back with more of my interview with Pete Townshend.
Speaker 1: We're back with more from Pete Townsend. As I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about one of the things that really has always attracted
Speaker 1: me to The Lifehouse as a project, hearing the demos,
Speaker 1: like when the Lifehouse Chronicles came out. I think I
Speaker 1: came to that around two thousand and eight finally, and
Speaker 1: hearing the demos. The demos are as good as the
Speaker 1: finished songs. And that's not to say that I prefer
Speaker 1: one over the other, because I think they're both great,
Speaker 1: but it's like there's a sensitivity to your performance of
Speaker 1: songs that are on For instance, Who's Next that when
Speaker 1: it comes to the band and it gets the treatment
Speaker 1: from John and from Keith, and from from Roger and.
Speaker 2: But also from me as a member of that band.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the way you're playing is it's like a
Speaker 1: cover version of the song I don't know how to explain.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe that's not that's relationship with the music,
Speaker 1: but that that's my I think.
Speaker 2: I think when I when I was working, whenever I
Speaker 2: worked in the studio, I worked partly for fun. You know.
Speaker 2: I knew that we would take the songs in and
Speaker 2: the band would do their band thing on it. But
Speaker 2: I was writing for the band. Of course, I wasn't
Speaker 2: writing for myself. But when I came to do my
Speaker 2: own albums, the difference between my demos and the finish
Speaker 2: thing was much less. So. Yeah, the band was definitely
Speaker 2: an aggressive, powerhouse machine. Yeah, and you know, in a
Speaker 2: s set year, we replaced musicianship with machismo and with athleticism.
Speaker 2: In my case, you know, I spent more time up
Speaker 2: in the air than I did play in the guitar.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you had you had real HAPs Some of those
Speaker 1: photos are incredible, in the in the in the sparks
Speaker 1: at your view and there. One of the other things
Speaker 1: I've wondered, is to me, it felt like there was
Speaker 1: a shift in the songwriting between Tommy and in what
Speaker 1: the stuff they came out of Lifehouse project, Like some
Speaker 1: of the stuff, the stuff Tommy and before felt like
Speaker 1: it had a specifically British lilt, and Who's Next had
Speaker 1: this sort of like American ness to it, this boldness
Speaker 1: like this.
Speaker 2: Well, I think my I abandoned my old approach of writing,
Speaker 2: and I decided what actually happened was that when I
Speaker 2: was demoing before, I used to go from machine to machine,
Speaker 2: stereo machine to stereo machine, got very good at it
Speaker 2: and made very fine sounding demos. But when I started
Speaker 2: work on Lifehouse, I'd got a studio tape machine, an
Speaker 2: eight track machine, was one of the first people to
Speaker 2: use Doldby, so I could do lots of bounce downs
Speaker 2: and you know, end up with equivalent of sixteen to
Speaker 2: twenty performances with backing vocals and stuff. But the band
Speaker 2: that I modeled my demo sound on was The Band,
Speaker 2: And it was because the album The Band, by the
Speaker 2: band who had spent a lot of time then supporting Dylan,
Speaker 2: was recorded by them in a barn, and their previous
Speaker 2: album Big Pink was done in a house called Big
Speaker 2: and was again recorded so not in a conventional studio.
Speaker 2: So I felt it was possible for me if I
Speaker 2: had the right equipment, to make a demos where I
Speaker 2: played the drums, the bass, the guitar, did the backing vocals,
Speaker 2: played the you know, the Lowry organ. At the time,
Speaker 2: Hammond organ was on everything, and Hammond organs have this
Speaker 2: wonderful sound, but they all sound the same. Whereas Garth
Speaker 2: Hudson was a magician, you know, he used to take
Speaker 2: this organ, is old Lowry organ and make it sound
Speaker 2: like all kinds of things. And so I had a
Speaker 2: Lowry organ, and which is how I stumbled on the
Speaker 2: sound for Barbara Riley. It was built into the organ.
Speaker 2: I just modified it a bit with synthesizers. So that
Speaker 2: was my reference track, was that album. That was what
Speaker 2: I was listening to. And when we got in with
Speaker 2: Glynn John's eventually after the failure of the recording in
Speaker 2: New York, where we did some good recordings, but we
Speaker 2: never got very far because Lambert was not really with
Speaker 2: us anymore. Glynn took those tracks and I think actually
Speaker 2: he sort of anglicized them again a little bit. He
Speaker 2: gave them a bit of the kind of you know,
Speaker 2: the Olympic Studios reverb based airiness that he was so
Speaker 2: famous for. My demos are certainly funky.
Speaker 1: Your demos they're amazing. They're really beautiful. They're really beautiful,
Speaker 1: and it's a testament to your songwriting that it can
Speaker 1: work as well as they did with you know, in
Speaker 1: the way that you recorded them, and that they worked
Speaker 1: as well as they did with the group, and then
Speaker 1: that even hearing being all the finally hear these record
Speaker 1: plant sessions from New York, that the work as well
Speaker 1: as they did with Leslie West playing over them really
Speaker 1: bringing like I mean, it's just like incredible, Like the
Speaker 1: versatility of the songs is wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was fun working with Leslie. Leslie was always
Speaker 2: a huge fan of the Who, but particularly of me.
Speaker 2: He used to compare me to every other lead guitarist
Speaker 2: and I because I used to wrong myself down a
Speaker 2: little bit and say I can't play like Eric Clapton
Speaker 2: and I can't play like Jimmy Page, but I'm the
Speaker 2: best rhythm player in the world. And he used to say, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can play. They're all playing fucking cliches. And he
Speaker 2: was a good buddy, and so he happened to be
Speaker 2: there working with Felix Papilladi on a Mountain recorded by
Speaker 2: their band Mountain, and I invited them to break in
Speaker 2: the studio for us. Kit was away. He arrived the
Speaker 2: second day we were there, so that first day we
Speaker 2: played that track with them.
Speaker 1: And by the time you got back to London and
Speaker 1: recorded at the Olympic, and I think you did at
Speaker 1: least one track in the Rolling Stones mobile mobile bus,
Speaker 1: it just didn't feel rate to bring someone else in again.
Speaker 2: No, we brought we brought in a violinist for the
Speaker 2: end of Barbara Riley, but that was all right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, we were not a band that collaborated with other musicians.
Speaker 2: You know, John Elwisill when he started solo touring. John
Speaker 2: did the Ringo all Star band tours. I think he
Speaker 2: did it four or five times when the Who were
Speaker 2: inactive for whatever reason, probably because I was writing and
Speaker 2: he loved performing. John he loved playing. He loved playing,
Speaker 2: and I was never crazy about it. I was never
Speaker 2: crazy about touring. I was never that crazy about performing.
Speaker 2: I knew I was good at it, but you know,
Speaker 2: I didn't know why I was good at it. And
Speaker 2: I still don't. I still don't know why I'm so
Speaker 2: good at performing. I suppose I have to put a
Speaker 2: lot of it down to the history my childhood, because
Speaker 2: growing up with my dad's band. You know, I feel
Speaker 2: very comfortable on stage, and I feel very comfortable backstage,
Speaker 2: But I don't get that excited. It feels like a
Speaker 2: job to me. It feels like a job that I
Speaker 2: do well, that I don't have any arguments with. But
Speaker 2: it doesn't set me on fire. You know. When I
Speaker 2: see some artists about to go on stage at Clusterbury
Speaker 2: or someone like that, they're so excited and so thrilled
Speaker 2: that they almost like, you know, they could go up
Speaker 2: in the air like a balloon. I don't get that.
Speaker 1: Is there anything that does set you on fire in
Speaker 1: that way?
Speaker 2: Well, I really like being at a recording studio. Yeah,
Speaker 2: to some extent, Yeah, yeah, of course there are things.
Speaker 2: But I think I think musically speaking, I feel like
Speaker 2: the whole picture, the whole you. I mean, when we
Speaker 2: opened up this conversation, you you talked about, you know,
Speaker 2: in a sense, the idea of me as a as
Speaker 2: a renaissance man, being able to do various things, and
Speaker 2: so there are moments in everything that I do where
Speaker 2: I get a kick. It's just that thing that some
Speaker 2: performers get that they just love it. You know who
Speaker 2: I talked to a lot about this was Tina, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: And I said, what fucking happens to you on the stage?
Speaker 2: And she just looked at me and she said, Pete,
Speaker 2: what fucking happens to you? Same thing. She didn't know
Speaker 2: who that person was. She was quiet, shy, sad, would
Speaker 2: walk onto the stage and bang, you know, and I
Speaker 2: look at myself on the stage, and I don't know
Speaker 2: who that person is.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the first time that person appeared on stage? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think I do. I think it was we were
Speaker 2: doing a little We was just a school band and
Speaker 2: we were doing some show and it was we did
Speaker 2: the gig and then I got off stage and went
Speaker 2: into the crowd and we'd been playing. The new dance
Speaker 2: of the era was the Twist Chubby Checker's song The Twist,
Speaker 2: which is really significant because it was when men started
Speaker 2: to dance on their own right, super super important because
Speaker 2: there was this whole group of people in the in
Speaker 2: the male brigade, who would pretend I don't dance. I
Speaker 2: could but I don't. I just wait till the end
Speaker 2: and then I go and pull a bird and take
Speaker 2: her home and I'll marry her. Maybe you know that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff. But then there were the boys like
Speaker 2: John Emwistle was a great driver, was really good at it.
Speaker 2: And anyway, I started to dance, and I remember being
Speaker 2: surrounded by this group of boys and girls who were
Speaker 2: clapping because I was dancing. I was thinking, Wow, I
Speaker 2: should do that on the stage. It was a bit
Speaker 2: like a scene from you know, a corny movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like then the Footloots or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Your dad was Cliff Townsend, who was quite an accomplished
Speaker 1: musician over in the UK.
Speaker 2: And had a solo career. Briefly. Norri Paramore, who had
Speaker 2: discovered the artist Cliff Richard, signed my dad to a
Speaker 2: series of solo recordings playing it was Cliff Townsend and
Speaker 2: he's singing saxophone.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And he did a recording of Unchained Melody that
Speaker 2: nearly got in the charts, but it had been recorded
Speaker 2: by about four other artists.
Speaker 1: Wow. Your relationship with him musically, would you say there
Speaker 1: was a strong bond between you guys musically speaking?
Speaker 2: No, it was terrible He really didn't think that I
Speaker 2: would ever be a musician. He encouraged me to look
Speaker 2: at journalism because I'm a good writer, and art because
Speaker 2: I could draw, and he steered me away from music.
Speaker 2: When he realized that I could play the guitar, well,
Speaker 2: he did start to encourage me. He tried to get
Speaker 2: me to join a small band that he ran and
Speaker 2: do a summer season with him. But by that time
Speaker 2: I was at Art College and I was already in
Speaker 2: the WHO band that was starting to develop, so it
Speaker 2: was sort of sort of too late. Whereas my mother
Speaker 2: was really supportive, you know. She got the school band
Speaker 2: that I was in, the detours with Roger and John.
Speaker 2: She got us auditions, she got some really great shows.
Speaker 2: She knew she'd been an agent for while, a music agent.
Speaker 2: She was started. She met my dad and she was
Speaker 2: a singer in a beautiful voice, and my dad had
Speaker 2: a lovely voice too. I'm very proud of the fact
Speaker 2: that all me and all my three brothers have got
Speaker 2: something of their vocal nature. That's something about the voice,
Speaker 2: which is nice and it's nice to have. But no,
Speaker 2: he wasn't useful, but he was a huge influence because
Speaker 2: of his discipline. You know, he used to drink a lot.
Speaker 2: He was pretty wild, really good looking guy, but he
Speaker 2: was a bit of a waste trel. You know. He
Speaker 2: used to bet on the greyhound dog racing a lot.
Speaker 2: He fritted away a lot of money. You know. I
Speaker 2: bought him his first car, I bought him his first house.
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, he was you know, it was always broke. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But he would get up in the morning and practice
Speaker 2: the clarenet for two hours. And I remember teasing him saying,
Speaker 2: you know, you're playing all this fucking per coffee off
Speaker 2: and god knows what, and then you're going to a
Speaker 2: dance hall and going And I always used to do
Speaker 2: this to my dad, used to go and here Dad
Speaker 2: comes the really exciting bit that you have to spend
Speaker 2: two hours a day playing dirt dirt.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Everything that they played was really basic and simple.
Speaker 1: Did he take that in a good natured way?
Speaker 2: He used to laugh, but you know he had a
Speaker 2: couple of phone calls. I remember when I was still
Speaker 2: living at home, I would have been about fifteen, because
Speaker 2: I left home when I was sixteen, maybe sixteen and
Speaker 2: a half. I came back home for a while as well.
Speaker 2: In my middle years, mid middle teens.
Speaker 1: But he was.
Speaker 2: One day got a phone call from a guy who said,
Speaker 2: have you got a bass clarinet? And he's just say, yes,
Speaker 2: I do have a bass clarent. He said, could you
Speaker 2: play the pro coffee off bass clarinet concerto? And he
Speaker 2: said is it written? He said yeah, he said, I
Speaker 2: can play anything you put in front of me. Went
Speaker 2: to Wigmore Hall and did this BBC broadcast of a
Speaker 2: pro coffee off bass clarinet cantata or something. I can't
Speaker 2: know what it was, but it was a procoffee of
Speaker 2: thing that's beautiful. So he was a brilliant reader and interpreter.
Speaker 2: But he was in a swing band, you know, and
Speaker 2: the swing band world was like punk because you know,
Speaker 2: Glenn Miller in America and the Squadronaires my dad's band.
Speaker 2: Then they were there to raise spirits, you know, of
Speaker 2: people that would probably be dead in two weeks. You know.
Speaker 2: They weren't forces sweethearts, but they were providing and they
Speaker 2: were considered, you know, because in those days military music
Speaker 2: was brass bands. So the people that put together the
Speaker 2: Glenn Miller Orchestra and the Squadronaires in the UK were
Speaker 2: air Force. The Air Force. People were not serious military.
Speaker 2: They were like, you know, the Navy was the Navy,
Speaker 2: the Army was the army, but the Air Force were
Speaker 2: these stupid fuckers that went up and flew planes about
Speaker 2: and crashed them, and they cost millions of dollars. I
Speaker 2: remember I did a thing in Chicago recently when Tommy
Speaker 2: was on there, and I told this story, and somebody
Speaker 2: in the audience told me the name of the guy
Speaker 2: who allowed what he called pop music. They called it
Speaker 2: some thing that music to be part of the military exercise.
Speaker 2: I grew up with that. I grew up with the
Speaker 2: fact that my dad was yeah, big band, Yeah, super cool,
Speaker 2: super cool, sort of smoochy music and really beautifully written.
Speaker 2: And then of course as I got older, I realized
Speaker 2: that bands like the Baisy Band and Duke Ellington and
Speaker 2: Woody Harman and all these people were people that had
Speaker 2: influenced my dad's playing in his music, but were also
Speaker 2: people that I really got into and loved, and particularly Arlington,
Speaker 2: who was kind of crazy genius composer. So I grew
Speaker 2: up with that and it was just the most wonderful
Speaker 2: place to be the main thing being able to go
Speaker 2: and be a little kid and go and you know,
Speaker 2: be part of the dance hall world. And I remember
Speaker 2: once a story I often tell. It's a great story.
Speaker 2: As I was my dad was doing a summer season
Speaker 2: in a holiday venue up in the north of England
Speaker 2: and there was this beautiful, big ballroom and I was eleven,
Speaker 2: I think so I was eleven. I may have been
Speaker 2: just starting to think about girls seriously. And I got
Speaker 2: myself a milkshake and I sat up in the balcony,
Speaker 2: which was a big square balcony, not like a theater balcony,
Speaker 2: and these two girls came and sat outside me. They
Speaker 2: were about eighteen, and in those days would have been
Speaker 2: fifty eight fifty nine something like that. Girls used to
Speaker 2: wear these big flowing frocks and decolotage, you know, bosoms
Speaker 2: hanging out, beautiful hair, lots of makeup. And he went,
Speaker 2: what are you doing here, little boy? You know? And
Speaker 2: I said, oh, I'm here because my dad's in the band.
Speaker 2: And they went, oh, your dad's in the band, and
Speaker 2: said I said, which one is he? And I said
Speaker 2: that one there and she went she said to her
Speaker 2: friend across me. They sat either side of me, said
Speaker 2: across me, oh damn, it, he's married, he's got a son,
Speaker 2: damn it. He was the one I liked. And then
Speaker 2: they're thinking, Wow, I get this, I really fucking get this.
Speaker 2: And then the other one said I want the drama.
Speaker 2: This is a guy called don Ken or something. He
Speaker 2: was a Scottish boy. He was really handsome, and I
Speaker 2: realized that he was handsome, and that my dad was handsome,
Speaker 2: and that these two girls wanted to have sex with
Speaker 2: these two boys. And there I am with my milkshake.
Speaker 2: I also I also saw some dark things. I was
Speaker 2: telling somebody today about being at this particular ballroom and
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of teddy boys coming in and suddenly
Speaker 2: starting to beat up certain boys. And two police officers
Speaker 2: came in, and these teddy boys pulled out iron bars
Speaker 2: and they practically beat these two policemen to death and
Speaker 2: ran away, and there was blood on the pavement, and
Speaker 2: these guys were helped out, and I remember being there
Speaker 2: watching it and thinking, what the fuck?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: So there were ups and downs, but most of it
Speaker 2: was glorious, you know, And it made me confident that
Speaker 2: this business, this show business, this music business that I'm
Speaker 2: still a part of, is a wondrous place to be.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not about being rich and famous. It's
Speaker 2: a place where you're dealing with the mystery of music
Speaker 2: and the wonderment the magic of music, and also the
Speaker 2: way that music. In those days, the function was to
Speaker 2: bring people together to dance, to make love, to kiss
Speaker 2: in a back alley, maybe for the girl to get pregnant,
Speaker 2: to have children, to start a new life after the
Speaker 2: misery of two world wars. And the music was designed
Speaker 2: for that, the atmosphere was designed for that. And then
Speaker 2: suddenly there I am, you know, in this place where
Speaker 2: I'm looking at Why don't I have a value? Why
Speaker 2: don't I have a meaning like my father? Why you
Speaker 2: know I wasn't asked to fight. I've not been asked
Speaker 2: to join the army. I'm grateful to be free. But then,
Speaker 2: you know, I knew that the war had ended with
Speaker 2: the nuclear bomb. With the atom bomb, the glorious Oppenheim
Speaker 2: is now making loads of money. And I suppose jacked
Speaker 2: into rock music after me being a big jazz fan,
Speaker 2: jacked into rock music is the way to express that disenfranchisement.
Speaker 2: It's big words about silly stuff, really, but.
Speaker 1: The path is quickly for a break and then we'll
Speaker 1: come back with more from my chat with Pete Townsend.
Speaker 1: We're back with the rest of my conversation with Pete Townsend.
Speaker 1: The use of Organs synthesizers that you started to do.
Speaker 1: I find it fascinating that at a similar time that
Speaker 1: you're starting to ease these things. Malcolm Cecil is the
Speaker 1: great producer. He was a friend of my dad's right
Speaker 1: and he worked with Stevie Wonder on his class of records.
Speaker 2: He did a lecture. He did a lecturer eating art
Speaker 2: school when I was sixteen, and he was playing his bass.
Speaker 2: He said, you know, you can do anything with a
Speaker 2: musical instrument, and he got his bow and he started
Speaker 2: to bang the bass with the bow. And my friend
Speaker 2: Dick Seaman went up to him and said, you can
Speaker 2: do anything, can you? And he said, yeah, anything, anything
Speaker 2: at all you want to do with a bass, you
Speaker 2: can do it. And he put it on its side
Speaker 2: and he sat on it and he turned it back
Speaker 2: to front and banged the back of it. He said,
Speaker 2: this is a machine. You know, you can do anything
Speaker 2: with it. So Dick Seeman went and got a saw,
Speaker 2: a wood saw, and Malcolm Cecil soared through his strings
Speaker 2: and as the saw went through the top, It hit
Speaker 2: the belly and made a notch in the belly of
Speaker 2: his bass, which I used to see. I used to
Speaker 2: go and see him at Ronnie Scott's and he had
Speaker 2: his bass with a saw notch in the He was
Speaker 2: fucking radical. He was radical, So me smashing guitars was
Speaker 2: partly inspired by him, as well as Gustav Metzka, who
Speaker 2: was a considered you know, auto destructive artist who wanted
Speaker 2: us all to save the planet by stopping flying and
Speaker 2: stopping being so bourgeoires to need big cars and television
Speaker 2: sets and all of that stuff. Anyway, he wrote to
Speaker 2: me about a year before he died. He wrote me
Speaker 2: a letter.
Speaker 1: Wow, is it just a couple of years ago? Then?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because it's only recent, isn't it. He was
Speaker 2: He was with Robert Margolev, wasn't he worked with and.
Speaker 1: They built that big synthesizer that were you aware of
Speaker 1: what he was doing with that stuff at that time?
Speaker 2: You know? It was after me, It was after me.
Speaker 2: He was still in a jazz band. He was in
Speaker 2: a band called the Johnny Something Quintet. The floortist in
Speaker 2: that band was going out with a girl in my
Speaker 2: class eeling that I fell in love with and kind
Speaker 2: of crazy. Anyway, The interesting thing about the synthesizers was
Speaker 2: that the Beatles had already got hold of a Mogue synthesizer.
Speaker 2: It was being operated for them by a guy called
Speaker 2: Chris Thomas, who was working for George Martin. Chris Thomas
Speaker 2: became my record producer. I had produced Chris Thomas's first
Speaker 2: record in a band called The Cat, so I knew Chris,
Speaker 2: so I heard stories about this amazing thing that they
Speaker 2: were working with. And then the Beatles came out with
Speaker 2: Maxwell's silver hammer, Bang bang, then with a bit of
Speaker 2: some weird synthesizer noises, and so I knew about synths.
Speaker 2: But in the UK, a guy called Petersenoviev, who was
Speaker 2: an electronic music musician, decided to make his own synthesizer,
Speaker 2: and he made one called the EMS Electronic Music Studios
Speaker 2: Putney because they were based in Putney, a small box.
Speaker 2: So I bought one, and it made me realize that
Speaker 2: there was a language there that was that I could
Speaker 2: tack on too, in a sense, tack on to rock
Speaker 2: and roll. And then I heard that he had a
Speaker 2: music computer. It was a punch paper computer. I met
Speaker 2: him a few years before he died, and he told
Speaker 2: me that he never got it to work. But anyway,
Speaker 2: I then started to meet other people like Roger Powell,
Speaker 2: who was working went on to work with Todd Rungren
Speaker 2: who was working for ARP. A guy called David Friend
Speaker 2: was a marketer for the ARP. Alan Perlman made a
Speaker 2: mood like synthesizer and I bought one. So I was
Speaker 2: a great believer in the fact that synthesis would not
Speaker 2: just be about music, would not just be about making
Speaker 2: funny noise for electronic music mort Subotnek or you know whomever,
Speaker 2: but would be able to jack into a computerized system
Speaker 2: to produce very very tailor made musical harmonies and stuff
Speaker 2: according to data that could be produced by analyzing people's minds, bodies,
Speaker 2: temperaments and stuff, which is at the heart at the
Speaker 2: heart of the experimental side of the Lifehouse project. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was in two phases.
Speaker 1: I mean so much of that sort of that concept
Speaker 1: to me seems to obviously resonate today with making music
Speaker 1: with AI. Right, AI applications potentially for making music, I
Speaker 1: guess is what's sort of starting to occur now what
Speaker 1: you had envisioned in some way.
Speaker 2: No, I don't know, I think. I mean, what's really
Speaker 2: interesting is I was one of my counselors, one of
Speaker 2: my supporters when I was working on Lifehouse was a
Speaker 2: guy called Tim Seuster. He was a friend of Carnheinz Stockhaus,
Speaker 2: and I met Stockhouse when I was working on Lifehouse,
Speaker 2: and I met the people in the BBC Radiophonics workshop
Speaker 2: as well. But Tim Suster said to me one day, Pee,
Speaker 2: I'll have a tab behind my ear. You'll have a
Speaker 2: tab behind your ear. I'll be able to send you
Speaker 2: the melody and you'll be able to send me the counterpoint.
Speaker 2: And I said what through the air And he said, yeah,
Speaker 2: through the air. So but in my story it was
Speaker 2: all tubes and wires running through the streets. And I
Speaker 2: didn't get the Wi Fi bit that I didn't see
Speaker 2: that happening there. And no, I didn't see that coming.
Speaker 2: So the thing about the the AI issue of today
Speaker 2: is that we're in a very very strange place at
Speaker 2: the moment and it's not like the Internet at all.
Speaker 2: It won't have the same I don't think. I can
Speaker 2: only say what I think. A lot of it is
Speaker 2: based on search engines very much like exotic Google and
Speaker 2: bing and God knows what gathering data and gathering images,
Speaker 2: you know. But if you go to you know, Adobe
Speaker 2: Max and you say, I want a picture of a dragon,
Speaker 2: you know, holding a nude girl in its mouth, you know,
Speaker 2: set in an ice field with snowmen and pixels, it
Speaker 2: knows what to do, it knows where to gather those images.
Speaker 2: But that has got to be junk. However beautiful it is,
Speaker 2: however extraordinary it is has come. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: what's so extraordinary is that when we challenge ourselves as artists,
Speaker 2: we'll often use that kind of shorthand. We'll often say,
Speaker 2: I want to write a rock song. I want it
Speaker 2: to be sexy. I want it to be something you
Speaker 2: can dance to. Want it to have a bit of.
Speaker 1: An edge, have a groove like this song, yeah, groove.
Speaker 2: Like this yeah. So in a sense, AI at the
Speaker 2: moment is only looking backwards. It's when AI starts to
Speaker 2: look forwards. For example, supposing AI which will be wonderful
Speaker 2: for international translation. It could save the planet. You know,
Speaker 2: while the dictator in China is talking to the dictator
Speaker 2: in America, whoever happens to be in power at the
Speaker 2: time about what's going to happen with Taiwan. You and
Speaker 2: I could be having street level conversations with Cantonese kids.
Speaker 2: We could use our jargon, they could use their jargon.
Speaker 2: We'll be sitting at our computers zooming battles and forwards,
Speaker 2: and we hearing each other heart to heart at a
Speaker 2: level which is so familiar. You know. We could actually say,
Speaker 2: you know, what flavor of ice cream do you like?
Speaker 2: And they're going to say, well, I'm not keen on vanilla.
Speaker 2: You know that kind of stuff, low level, high level,
Speaker 2: whatever it happens to be. It will completely disable the
Speaker 2: manipulating dictators who say Americans are your enemy, you know,
Speaker 2: or in our case, the Chinese are our potential enemy.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: You meet them, you talk to them, and you think, well, hey,
Speaker 2: they're just like us, they just have a different language.
Speaker 2: So I think in a sense, ai can conquer that.
Speaker 2: But it's when you say, for example, you know, chat GTP,
Speaker 2: I write me a CV, I want to be a
Speaker 2: guitar player, I want to be in a band, I
Speaker 2: want to play R and B music. I want to
Speaker 2: blah blah blah blah blah. I've done you know I've
Speaker 2: got a music course. I did a course at a university,
Speaker 2: but it was literature and services and so, and I
Speaker 2: want you to write my CV for me, and Jack
Speaker 2: Tip actually says to you, Pete, you're making a big
Speaker 2: mistake here. If that ever happens, if it just does
Speaker 2: what I fucking asked it to do, then I'm very
Speaker 2: happy to have AI. I used it for the first
Speaker 2: time last night. It's been built into to an organizer
Speaker 2: that I use called Clickup, which is a task manager
Speaker 2: which I use because I've got so many projects i'm
Speaker 2: juggling with. It's not the most popular, but I really
Speaker 2: like it. And they've just introduced AI and one of
Speaker 2: the pages is a long, long, long essay about my project,
Speaker 2: The Age of Anxiety, which is a young musician who
Speaker 2: hears the anxiety of people in his audience, gets distressed, quits,
Speaker 2: meets an old rock star who has gone through a
Speaker 2: similar experience of disenchantment with rock music and become an
Speaker 2: actor and then that hasn't worked out either, and just
Speaker 2: says to him, listen, if you're feeling crazy, embrace it.
Speaker 2: The reason why I just did that chat was because
Speaker 2: yesterday I gave this six page description of my thesis
Speaker 2: for my play and said summarize it. And that's what
Speaker 2: it said, and it's a really good summary.
Speaker 1: Wow. I don't know you personally, but having followed your career,
Speaker 1: knowing a bit about from Afar, you're far from a technophobe,
Speaker 1: seem to have embraced technology wholeheartedly throughout your career. You
Speaker 1: do see some practical useful application of AI.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, I do. I do. I think
Speaker 2: it will help in all kinds of ways that will
Speaker 2: surprise us when they happen, just like the Internet has.
Speaker 2: And of course the Internet has its dark side, very
Speaker 2: very dark side, but then so does social media, you know,
Speaker 2: and social media could actually be described as having a
Speaker 2: dark side in the music industry, you know, because in
Speaker 2: a sense what's actually been happening is that very very
Speaker 2: few artists has started to monopolize the majority of streaming
Speaker 2: to the extent with the long tale which was predicted
Speaker 2: when the Internet started, there will be a long tale
Speaker 2: which will be the interesting part will be all the
Speaker 2: people that are doing all the interesting personal stuff is
Speaker 2: become so clogged up.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: You go on, you go on to Spotify and go
Speaker 2: into some of the Apple is the same title as
Speaker 2: the same You go into an area which nobody else
Speaker 2: is listening to, and you hear the most extraordinary stuff.
Speaker 2: You hear it on you know, SoundCloud, you hear it
Speaker 2: on band camp. You'd make discoveries and you think, who
Speaker 2: the fuck is this? They're brilliant, they're a genius. But
Speaker 2: they've got twelve followers. You know, it's sort of tragic
Speaker 2: what's actually happened, because not that all of those people
Speaker 2: could ever have been famous. You know, we're used to
Speaker 2: the Star System being a place which they you know,
Speaker 2: which that guy, I can't remember his name, but he
Speaker 2: called it black Swan's you know where a black Swan
Speaker 2: is somebody that's just extremely lucky to be in the
Speaker 2: right place at the right time. So no, but with
Speaker 2: respect to AI, I'm hopeful, but I'm not going to
Speaker 2: say it's inevitably going to be a good thing, because
Speaker 2: I think it's when it becomes what drives a machine
Speaker 2: that we have to be careful. I think I have
Speaker 2: to give personally, I have to give the credit for
Speaker 2: my ability to bounce off new ideas is because of
Speaker 2: my training at Art College. You know, the team of
Speaker 2: people that were running the course when I was sixteen.
Speaker 2: Were radical thinkers, you know, and they were predicting the
Speaker 2: eminence of personal computers, which took thirty or forty years
Speaker 2: to arrive. You know, they were their students. You know,
Speaker 2: don't learn to draw because you don't need to that
Speaker 2: kind of thing. You know, what you actually need to
Speaker 2: do is you need to learn how to start a conversation,
Speaker 2: to create communication, but most of all, to understand that
Speaker 2: the most important thing about art in the modern world
Speaker 2: is creating a channel for feedback. Feedback from your client,
Speaker 2: feedback from your audience, feedback from other artists, conversation with
Speaker 2: other artists, so that art becomes bigger than society and
Speaker 2: bigger than small chunks of society. And what's interesting now
Speaker 2: right now, you know, I've got the Chuck d book.
Speaker 2: He's a great drawer mind signed, which is very cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was working on some theater piece and the kid
Speaker 2: that lived opposite my studio, his bedroom was right opposite
Speaker 2: my window, so when I was sitting at my keyboard,
Speaker 2: I could see him, young kid, he was about fifteen.
Speaker 2: The wall was plastered with public enemy posters. So one
Speaker 2: day I thought, I've got to check these guys that
Speaker 2: they were really hard to find. They weren't easy to find,
Speaker 2: but I found them and it felt like this, this is
Speaker 2: some black guy who's very, very angry with me, and
Speaker 2: he's shouting at me a lot, and he's making stuff
Speaker 2: up on the spur of the moment, and a lot
Speaker 2: of it sounds pretty threatening. But now, of course I
Speaker 2: kind of look back at it and I think, you know,
Speaker 2: the whole journey of it has been through wholes you know,
Speaker 2: from Jay Dilla, questlove and all of that stuff. It's
Speaker 2: turned it into a high level art form but also
Speaker 2: also a political success story.
Speaker 1: Like so you you follow hip hop? You you are
Speaker 1: interested in the production of of hip hop?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I read that. I read the Diller book,
Speaker 2: which is cool, so you get his life story.
Speaker 1: My friend Dan Charnis wrote that incredible.
Speaker 2: Tell him I love it. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2: It's because he was such an interesting young man and
Speaker 2: I wish he'd been around. And of course the Who's
Speaker 2: bass Player for a while, Yeah yeah, and he Kipino
Speaker 2: played based on the Miseducation of Lauren Hill.
Speaker 1: Shit, man, do you have to be not much anymore?
Speaker 1: Of these days?
Speaker 2: Like I had this thing recently where I met a
Speaker 2: young guy on Instagram who'd done a beat every day
Speaker 2: for a year, because I'd tried to do that a
Speaker 2: few times, try to write a little song every or
Speaker 2: even a verse of a song every day for a year,
Speaker 2: and I would get to sort of fifth of January
Speaker 2: and give up. And he did a whole year. And
Speaker 2: I just wrote to him, sent him a DM and
Speaker 2: just said it was fantastic, and got to know him,
Speaker 2: helped him with a few things, and brought him to
Speaker 2: my studio and he wanted to look at a while.
Speaker 2: It's a piano that was his thing. I want to
Speaker 2: see all. I've got one to come and see it.
Speaker 2: He lived fairly nearby, so he came, very shy young man,
Speaker 2: and he started to tell me about you know, I said,
Speaker 2: where did you learn about this slack beat thing that
Speaker 2: you do? Because it's really fucking slack. Sometimes it's so
Speaker 2: slack that you can't work out where the rhythm is.
Speaker 2: And he said, I'm a fan of Questlove, So I said,
Speaker 2: sort of rings a bell, and I got my computer
Speaker 2: out and I did it Jay Diller on Questlove. I
Speaker 2: saw Pino's name, so I got Pino on a zoom,
Speaker 2: and Pino was so thrilled to meet this young guy
Speaker 2: who was such a big fan of Jay Diller and Questlove.
Speaker 2: And this guy Brynn Morgan, who's a Welsh boy. Pino's
Speaker 2: Welsh is now sending beats to to Pino whether anything
Speaker 2: will happen who. So it was a really nice coincidence.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. I like People's last record at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was so fucking cool, so.
Speaker 2: Interesting was yeah, yeah that I'm so glad you heard it.
Speaker 1: It was good, really cool stuff.
Speaker 2: And I think they're going to make another one. And
Speaker 2: he's such a charming guys. He got into the Who
Speaker 2: by you know, we we were about to do a
Speaker 2: big tour. John Atmusall decided to kick the tour off
Speaker 2: that was starting in Las Vegas with a with a
Speaker 2: cocaine binge in a hotel in Las Vegas. He was
Speaker 2: he got into bed with a prostitute who professed to
Speaker 2: have said I'm taking your friend into bed and I'm
Speaker 2: going to fuck him to death, and she did. She
Speaker 2: fucked him to death. And we had this big tour
Speaker 2: set up happening the next day, and I said, I
Speaker 2: wonder if I can find Pino so I got Pino
Speaker 2: on the phone and he was just getting on a
Speaker 2: plane from Florida. He'd just been working on the Lauren
Speaker 2: Hill album, and I said, will you come over? And
Speaker 2: he just came over and we did three days in
Speaker 2: a rehearsal studio. We canceled Las Vegas in three days
Speaker 2: in a rehearsal studio. He was with the band for
Speaker 2: a quite a long time. I think he got fed
Speaker 2: up with her, but he was good while it lasted.
Speaker 1: I got to see him with you guys a couple
Speaker 1: of times. That was a great show. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: your example of you bringing the the guy doing a
Speaker 1: beat to day to your studio, I mean, just just cool,
Speaker 1: because you know, I'm sure you guys didn't get that. No,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there was enough of a disconnect between what
Speaker 1: you guys in the mid sixties were doing, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're eighteen.
Speaker 2: There were exceptions, you know, when we did Tommy at
Speaker 2: the film or Leonard Bernstein came and got hold of
Speaker 2: me afterwards, he brought his daughter to see the show
Speaker 2: and got hold of me and shook me and said, Pete,
Speaker 2: you've got to do more of this. You've got to
Speaker 2: do more of this. It's such great work. You know,
Speaker 2: the storytelling, you know, the vivacity of the music, the
Speaker 2: lyrical sensibilities of it. It's just wonderful. You must do more,
Speaker 2: and you must bring it to Tanglewood. And we took
Speaker 2: it to Tanglewood. He was the director there.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, wow.
Speaker 2: So there have been exceptions, and I think even as
Speaker 2: a young man too. In the fact, I've recently written
Speaker 2: a song about it about Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttleton,
Speaker 2: who were two jazz players, so crossover from what we
Speaker 2: call traditional jazz, which would have been Louis Armstrong basically
Speaker 2: inspired jazz and bebop, and they were just in between
Speaker 2: those two stools. They invited artists like The Who and
Speaker 2: many other acts in London at the time, and the Stones,
Speaker 2: who were playing R and B onto their stages, which
Speaker 2: were jazz stages. They invited us in and they gave
Speaker 2: us airtime and they were encouraging. And Chris Barber, who
Speaker 2: was a jazz musician, his wife, Otterley Patterson, was a
Speaker 2: really great jazz singer. They were married and they were
Speaker 2: twosome and they were national treasures as it were. You know,
Speaker 2: they ran the Marquee Club and they invited us in
Speaker 2: and he used to sometimes get on stage with his
Speaker 2: trumpet and join into you know, R and B songs
Speaker 2: that we were playing I'm a Man and Smokestack, Lightning
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. And Humphrey Lyttleton, who was who
Speaker 2: knew my dad, was another trumpeter who was who did
Speaker 2: lots of stints at Ronnie Scott's Club in London, and
Speaker 2: Ronnie Scott. We premiered Tommy to the press at Ronnie
Speaker 2: Scott's Club and we were very loud for the club.
Speaker 2: But he was a sax player like my dad, a
Speaker 2: tenor player. And he came afterwards and he said, Pete,
Speaker 2: that was fucking great. You know, you must do more.
Speaker 2: And at that time, you know, I was dabbling with
Speaker 2: the idea of doing more concept work, but I was
Speaker 2: so encouraged by lots of well not lots of people,
Speaker 2: but certain key people. There were people that were.
Speaker 1: Did the validation meant to mean something new from those
Speaker 1: from the.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah yeah, yeah, particularly for me because they were
Speaker 2: they were from my dad's world, you know, and my
Speaker 2: dad had been unable to give me that validation.
Speaker 1: That makes sense.
Speaker 2: I don't know that he even came to see us
Speaker 2: when we were a school band.
Speaker 1: Did he see you once you became the who ever?
Speaker 2: Now? And again he wasn't keen. Yeah, he used to
Speaker 2: say as a joke, he used to say, you know,
Speaker 2: you guys have put us out of work. You know,
Speaker 2: we we we need fourteen musicians on stage minimum, you know,
Speaker 2: to raise seventy five decimals. You know, you guys come
Speaker 2: in with your big amplifiers and there's only four of
Speaker 2: you making a noise.
Speaker 1: You know, Come on, Dad, put you in a car,
Speaker 1: but you a home.
Speaker 2: Well, the car was the best thing, the first car
Speaker 2: I bought him. He'd had an old banger, you know,
Speaker 2: but I bought him a brand new Series one Range
Speaker 2: Rover for very first one, which was like a big
Speaker 2: high car and it only did nine miles to the gallon.
Speaker 2: So I used to have to send him money for
Speaker 2: petrol as well. But then I bought the house that
Speaker 2: they rented that they lived in, and my two brothers
Speaker 2: now live in that house, so two flats of each other,
Speaker 2: so it's still a family home. But yeah, he was lovely.
Speaker 2: My dad and we went boating together. We bought a
Speaker 2: boat together, and we used to go out on the
Speaker 2: River Thames and we both drank a lot, so we
Speaker 2: would drink buddies and that's fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, Pete Townsend, thank you so much. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean for all your deep writing over the years, songwriting,
Speaker 1: all the music, sticking together all these years putting out
Speaker 1: incredible music. And thank you so much for this beautiful package.
Speaker 2: It's lovely to talk to you.
Speaker 1: Thanks again, thanks to the legendary Pete Townsend for sharing
Speaker 1: so many incredible stories from his career. The Who's new
Speaker 1: box set Whose Next Lifehouse is out now. You can
Speaker 1: hear a collection of all of our favorite Who songs
Speaker 1: and other songs mentioned in this episode on a playlist
Speaker 1: at broken Record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube
Speaker 1: channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where
Speaker 1: you can find all of our new episodes. You can
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is
Speaker 1: produced with help from Lea Rose and Eric Sandler. Our
Speaker 1: show is engineered by Echo mat. Broken Record is a
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Speaker 1: us on your podcast app. Are theme musics by Kenny Beats.
Speaker 1: I'm justin Richmond.