Tell me your first memories of
hearing that Pete wanted to write a rock opera.
We'd
been influenced by our manager to make the three-minute pop song into something
more. We did the mini-opera ["A Quick One While He's Away"] on A
Quick One. Then we did another extended piece of music [on The Who Sell Out]
called "Rael." That song used loads of backing and vocals – a real
interesting piece.
When we
went back into the studio, we just had a mediocre success with "I Can See
For Miles." I thought that was a brilliant single, probably one of the
best we ever did. But with us being a singles band, it was wearing thin. Pete
was getting worn down, sort've frazzled. Having to come up with hit singles all
the time, that's the hard bit of the music industry. But coming up with music?
That was much easier. Well, I don't know about easier. . . It was more
artistically attractive to him.
So he
came up with this idea of what life would be like if you had lived through just
feeling vibrations. The idea was, "Imagine if you were deaf, dumb and
blind. What would it be like to experience certain episodes of your life?"
We had this one song called "Amazing Journey." That was the beginning
of it. My recollection is that we recorded that song about a deaf, dumb and
blind boy and the whole thing expanded from there. Basically, Pete went home
after we recorded that and came back with other songs that gradually went
together and loosely made the groundwork of what would become Tommy.
John
Entwistle was asked to write about the dark side of things. There were dark
characters like Uncle Ernie, which we did in fun at the time. I think everybody
in their life has someone who’s been kind've mischievous in that area. We
always poked fun at it. John wrote that song and "Cousin Kevin,"
which was the spiteful one. People talk about Pete Townshend's Tommy, but it
was really The Who's Tommy.
How did you grow and change as a
singer while making Tommy?
Well,
for the first time after "My Generation" – when I got thrown out of
the band – we'd done some very strange singles. "I'm A Boy" and
"Pictures of Lily" – those were interesting songs. I think that
"Pictures of Lily" is a great song, but they were very different in
the vocal area than I was ever used to singing and I found it difficult. I was
in a vocal no man's land. I started to improve with "I Can See For
Miles," but I wasn't quite there.
Once we
got into doing all the songs on Tommy, as a vocalist I realized they really
needed a stronger interpretation. It gave me a canvas that was big enough to
really, really take some chances. Once we got out on the road and sang it live,
it just took off on its own and my voice grew with it.
I hear a confidence in your voice
that wasn't quite there before on that tour.
I think
I had that confidence because it had a bigger meaning. It was touching people
at a different level, not in any of the kind've superfluous ways we had done
previously, in the way that "My Generation" had. Songs like
"Happy Jack" and "Pictures of Llly" were nice, but they
were. . .
Many fans see the Tommy tour as the
peak of the Who as a live band. Do you agree?
If I had
to choose between Quadrophenia, Who's Next or Tommy, I would always choose
Tommy. It's the most complete piece of work. That's not to say that musically
it's any better than the other three. I just think it's the most complete. It
is for me as a singer, anyway.
When you look at rock concerts
before that Tommy tour, most bands were doing forty minutes or less.
We used
to do forty minutes of other stuff before we even started Tommy! And at the end
of that, we used to get into a free-form jam session where we would do all
kinds of stuff, almost to the point where shows would extend to two and a half,
sometimes almost three hours. What was extraordinary was we'd play the first
bit and the audience would be a rock audience. But once we started playing
Tommy, the audience would sit down. And when that first happened, we thought,
"Oh shit!" It made you dig deeper as a performer, the fact they were
sitting down. You had to dig deeper to get them up again. The whole thing had a
very strange chemistry, but it just worked.
The story always goes that you
recorded a bunch of shows in late 1969, but Pete ordered all the tapes burned.
But there's an unheard show from October 1969 on this new set.
We've
got hundreds and hundreds of live shows. But sadly, they're only recorded on
two tracks, straight off the deck. There's not really much you can do with them
in the mixing area. But it's a good record of the work we were doing.
Did you ever worry that Tommy was
becoming so huge it was starting to overshadow everything else the group made?
I was
worried about it when we made the film [in 1975]. I didn't ever realize the
difference between being what you would call a film star and a rock star. It
was enormously different. It was very hard to deal with for a year or two after
that. But ultimately, I was always determined to hang on to The Who through
that whole roller coaster of a period. It was just crazy. People just treat you
so differently and you go, "I don't want to be treated differently. I want
to be in a rock band." It was hard. Just very, very difficult.
I guess the public just saw you as
Tommy.
They
would call me Tommy, and it would really get on my tits.
Film is a powerful medium.
I always
saw Tommy as a thing where everybody was Tommy. To me, the journey was inward.
It wasn't in this world or of this world. It was what our potential is
interiorly – spiritually. And that's what I liked about it. I liked that about
the film in a way, too, even though it was kind've loosely based in this world.
It was completely mad, and it grew on its own canvas.
Did The Who feel competitive when
they started Tommy because of Sgt. Pepper and what The Kinks were doing?
No,
because Sgt. Pepper gave us confidence that the public would be willing to
accept new ideas. There's no doubt about that. George Martin's work with the
Beatles and the songs they were writing really gave us confidence that the
public would accept anything if it was good.
I've been listening to Pete's demos
on the new box set. It's remarkable to hear the songs in their raw form, and
then hear what happened when the band got ahold of them.
For
quite a long time, people failed to recognize what The Who were adding to
Pete's music.
Those songs would have been
radically different were it not for your voice, Keith's drums and John's bass.
The
whole formula. And it was quite apparent from day one when Keith Moon joined
the band. Every piece of music we played up until then was different
immediately after Keith joined. The chemistry changed and it was quite clear
from day one.
It's a pretty amazing thing that the
four of you came together. You're all so different.
The
mathematics of our brains just work together. I mean, music is basically
mathematics in a funny way. In that sense, we were just a perfect jigsaw
puzzle.
I saw the Quadrophenia tour about a
year or so ago. It seemed like you were doing better vocally than the tours
before that. Is that how you felt?
Yeah.
I've been having a lot of problems with my throat for years. I've got a
condition that I've got to keep my eye on. But once I knew that I had a
condition and I had to keep my eye on it, God, it was a relief. And it was
wonderful just to sing again.
You've
got to remember that from the early days of The Who all through the 1970s, I
was having to scream just to hear myself. It was very, very difficult. I did my
voice a lot of damage, but I toughened it up, too. We had to find a new way of
working, because the volume was bringing Pete to his knees. His hearing was
going, as indeed mine is now.
I went
out with my own band and initially I did it the same way that The Who always
did it, with monitors and doctors and all that stuff. Then I suddenly thought,
"This is madness. I can't go on. This is a dead end. We can't go any
further with this."
Fortunately,
we found a way to deal with it. I started to wear the in-ear monitors, which
cuts the stage volume way down. Everybody can work their own sounds perfect for
them, instead of it being a war between the guitarist being too loud or the
bassist being too loud. Drummers are always too loud. You could suddenly create
your own world where you were always comfortable and you could always hear your
own work as you were doing it. That made a huge difference to me as a singer.
And it saved The Who. Well, it kept Pete and I together for the Quadrophenia
tour. He could never have done it otherwise. None of us could.
I'd like to move onto the Teenage
Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. Tell me your goals with that over the
next few years.
Teen
Cancer America has spring from my support from Teen Cancer Trust, which is what
we've had in Britain for about twenty-four years. The idea is that the ages of
thirteen to twenty-three is a completely different period of your life from
being a child or an adult in medical care. It has nothing to do with medicine,
but the fact that people want to be with other people of their same age.
The
system you had over here – at least before Teen Cancer America came on the
scene – was grouping people together from thirteen to thirty-nine. I don't know
what a thirteen year-old has in common with a thirty-nine year old apart from
the fact they both breathe. It's a totally different period of your life. It's
a shame that the medical profession doesn't realize that being comfortable
psychologically by being with your own age group has an enormous effect on how
people survive treatment.
I know you've opened Teenage Cancer
wings in America. What's the next step?
I hope
to push it across America. At the moment, we've got two units at UCLA. We've
got an impatient and an outpatient being built at Yale. We're in talks with
twenty-five other hospitals, but we need to make money. We've got one in a
cancer hospital in Cleveland. So, considering that we've only been going two
years, we're doing incredibly well.
Your voice is obviously key here.
This isn't an issue I knew much about before you made it your cause.
One of
the strange things about our society is that it's easy to raise money for
children because of the Bambi effect. When you talk about teenagers it's, whoa,
trouble. But they suffer terribly. The isolation that a teenager can suffer –
when they're just coming into a period in their life when they're finally going
to do all the things they've been dreaming about, and getting wacked with
cancer – can be terribly isolating. So the best therapist for a teenager with
cancer is another teenager with cancer.
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