Pete Townshend: Who's Bored?

Losing His Hearing and Keith Moon: A 1979 Feature.

THE WHO may have won and maintained its devoted and massive following thanks to the flamboyant intensity of its peerless live performances and the surging power of its records. But, beneath the maddening volume and surface ferocity of the shows, there is that sensibility of acute intelligence which has given rock and roll much of its artistic and intellectual credibility.

That essential core of sanity in the Who's music is reflected in the work and words of its guitar playing songwriter, Pete Townshend. Townshend would be deserving of lasting honor in the rock world if he had done nothing more than compose 'My Generation', the 1965 anthem of adolescent assertiveness that defined the raucous lifestyle of England's cool, fashionable mods.

But Townshend's vision continued to expand. In the 1967 album The Who Sell Out, he and the Who created the first serious rock concept album, complete with Radio London time signatures and radio commercials intertwined with the songs. With Tommy, often hailed as the first and most vital rock opera, Townshend showed that a rock album could be the frame for complex and imaginative characterization. On Who's Next and songs such as 'Baba O'Riley' and 'Won't Get Fooled Again', Townshend advanced the state of the art of the synthesizer in rock while continuing to create pop anthems for the more mature generation of skeptical survivors of the sixties.

Townshend's work may have become increasingly more sophisticated in both instrumental structure and lyric content over the last 14 years, but at 34 he still seems to be in touch with the youthful intensity that made him one of rock's most influential and celebrated artists.

After a few years of relative inactivity, the Who are back in gear. The band's first movie, the documentary The Kids Are Alright, has just been released and the Who is preparing an autumn tour that should coincide with the release of a second movie, Quadrophenia. (It is based on the 1973 album of the same name, a less elaborate, harder rocking concept than Tommy). There is a new drummer, Kenny Jones, formerly of the Small Faces, to replace Keith Moon, the Who's original drummer, who died last year from what was apparently an accidental overdose.

Townshend believes the death of his dear friend Moon may have been a blessing in disguise. "I've lost Keith, but there are positive things," Townshend said, bleary eyed but chipper in his Manhattan hotel suite last Monday morning. "I've described Kenny Jones' addition as a blood transfusion. He's so different from Keith. He doesn't come across like a powerful character, but he's strong, and he's fit. He works hard not just at the musical side, but on relationships." Townshend said that if Moon had lived, it was possible that the Who, whose members (the others are singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle) had been putting their energy into individual projects, may never have played together again.

It had been suggested that one thing that kept Townshend from doing concert performances was an increasingly severe hearing loss, probably due to years of creating rock and roll that, for all its finesse, had the audio presence of a sonic boom.

Townshend is still concerned about the problem, but he has come to terms with certain priorities in his life. "I worry about it slightly," he said. "I can't afford to worry too much, because I couldn't keep playing."

Townshend said he first became aware of the hearing ailment in the reasonably bucolic area of London he lives in. "I used to wake up and say 'Don't the birds sound wonderful.' Once, I woke up and heard the chirping, and I realized it was the middle of the night. I stuck my fingers in my ears, and there was still that sound. The twittering drove me crazy."

A visit to a hearing specialist revealed substantial damage that couldn't be treated. "He said I'd go deaf very early in life," Townshend said. "By 38, I would probably begin having difficulty understanding what people were saying to me, and I would go deaf between 40 and 50."

Townshend paid another visit to the doctor accompanied by Bill Curbishley, the band's streetwise manager, who wanted to know if the doctor was insinuating that Townshend would have to give up his career. Townshend quoted the doctor: "Obviously, I can't pin it down to a precise thing," the doctor said. "But I would advise you, Mr. Townshend, to learn how to lip read."

The shock of that assessment made Townshend think about the impact of his music on those who attend concerts by the Who and other rock groups. "It's a bit of a status symbol to leave a concert and say, 'my ears are ringing,'" Townshend said. "When that happens, that means you have sustained damage! If you keep it up, you won't be able to hear your grandchildren, you won't be able to hear music. This great rock and roll nation is going to create thousands of people like that."

Townshend has rationalized his own decision to keep going anyway. "We've reduced the onstage level a little bit — there's a lot of unnecessary volume that we've gotten rid of. There's loudness that hurts, and loudness that's clean. But things have gotten out of hand. It's tied into the growth of the audio and PA (public address systems) business." More than a little bit of cynicism emerged when Townshend added, "That's what this world's about: growth, expansion." And he noted that he owns two companies that manufacture PA equipment: "I make a lot of money out of making people deaf."

Another reason for the Who's semi-retirement a few years ago was that the band had gotten bored. Or at least it sounded bored to many of the English music journalists who had championed punk rock. Though the Who is now rightfully regarded as the forerunner of the punk movement, the creator of the mold, you wondered if Townshend wasn't insulted by being considered obsolete.

"No. I felt very much the same way," Townshend said. He felt that a lot of young writers in Britain resented his agreeing with their insights. "Approval wasn't what was wanted. New Wave came at a time when I was unhappy about the state our band was in. I welcomed it. It made us think, and think, and think again. It caused a new influx of blood in the industry, and I do mean industry."

Townshend was speaking of the "Blockbuster" mentality that had dominated the record business in the mid-'70s, when tremendous promotional effort was put behind a few established artists who could be counted on to sell millions of copies of an album. New artists were largely ignored.

The outline Townshend drew of the business was bleak. "With heavy FM radio formatting and tight, unbreakable playlists, dare I say it, payola is one good way to get an act on the radio. If you can't buy them on the air, then no one's going to hear them. It took a lot of courageous people [in New Wave bands], a lot of energy, to make that full frontal attack. Everyone has a different attitude now toward new acts. I think it can only be healthy because I'm about to drop dead."

As an aging eminence of British rock, Townshend is concerned about his youthful audience. On one level, he's disappointed that his song 'Sister Disco' from the album Who Are You was seen as a rallying point for the rock fans who are vociferously anti-disco.

"I didn't use it to indict disco music," Townshend said of the song title. "It's about saying goodbye to something in The Who's career. It's about finding music that fits the band's development, rather than playing the same old stuff. I'm unhappy a lot of hard rock fans took it more literally. The hatred for disco could be a racist thing, and nothing could be worse. I used to listen to Tamla/Motown, rhythm and blues when I was young. To me, good music was black music. Disco is not made to analyze; it's made to be light and trivial. I don't like the idea of Studio 54, but I like dancing, and I like discos."

As the years have passed, Townshend has watched the audiences' drug preferences change from pot to booze or a combination of alcohol and marijuana. "Both are problems," Townshend said. "If you're fragile, which all youth are, even if they are robust and tough, too much booze is bad. I see a lot of violence at shows, and it comes simply down to booze. It's a far cry from 1960s shows where people tried to keep everything cool. There's a love of rowdiness now.

"I stopped smoking dope in 1967," Townshend said. "I realized I'd credited too much to it. I had assumed that the reason I'd written a good song, or a sunset looked beautiful was because I was stoned. I credited it with so much of my talent. I got really bitter about it. I still feel people who smoke too much dope are wasting themselves."

Despite the fact that the Who initially inspired a much earlier generation of rock fans, the band's position among the young of today seems assured. "The reason why rock will always appeal, if it's good, to adolescents, is that it's the time in your life when you're most pent-up, when you feel things most deeply," Townshend said. "There's frustration at school, frustration with work, frustration with relationships. Rock is a very physical thing. Rock both faces up to the problems in life, but also establishes a way of dancing all over the problems. It gives you the machinery to overcome them.

"A lot of writers are obsessed with the time of adolescence," Townshend said. "Quadraphenia for example, is the story of an adolescent who starts to grow up. Why these kids like bands like the Who and the Stones, when we're old enough, in some cases, to be their dads, escapes me completely." One explanation might be that while good bands may come and go, great rock and roll is forever.

This article originally appeared in Newsday June 24, 1979. Thanks to Rock’s Back Pages of London for digitizing my own odds & sods and maintaining a superb music journalism reference library.