Are you planning to do anything for the thirtieth anniversary of the Who this year?
DALTREY: I refer all Who questions now to Pete.
[Continued . . .]
Oasis guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher sat in a hotel bar in Manhattan, wearing a loud paisley shirt and drinking a beer. From a side door, his manager appeared. “I just got off the phone from England,” he announced. “Your album’s sold more in one week than Blur’s did in a month.”
“Pigs!” Noel yelled triumphantly, pumping his fist into the air.
You guys are the top British band right now. If you were playing back in the sixties, do you think you could compete with the Beatles?
NOEL GALLAGHER: In the sixties? What year is it now, 1995? If it was 1965, and we’d just put out our second album, we’d be absolutely the pop kings of the world. It would’ve been the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Oasis, and then the Who. No one else. I firmly believe that. If we were out in 1975, it would have been the Sex Pistols and Oasis. And if it were 1985, it would have been the Smiths and Oasis. I feel we could chance it in any decade. I could say to any band member from any era, “Pick your best song. Give me the best song you think you’ve written, and I’ll pick mine.” And I think the best of ours would be above the best of theirs.
[Continued . . .]
In which Pete Townshend very thoughtfully undermines the fiftieth birthday celebration Roger Daltrey has been working so hard on . . .
What made you decide to take part in Roger Daltrey’s show, since you had the option of saying no?
PETE TOWNSHEND: Do you think so?
I would think so. Maybe I’m wrong.
TOWNSHEND: Maybe you’re wrong.
When I asked Roger about a Who reunion, he said, “Ask Pete.” So do you have the power to just snap your fingers and make that happen?
TOWNSHEND: I really don’t think that’s accurate. I think it’s not about when to perform, it’s about the need to perform. I don’t think people expose themselves to all the rigors of performing for fun. They do it because they really, really have a need to do that. And I just feel that if the Who thing needs to happen, it will happen. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
That’s probably the attitude that perplexes Roger.
TOWNSHEND: I think Roger likes to think this is all about my intransigence, but I don’t think that’s right. I just won’t initiate anything and I won’t say yes to anything without thinking about it very, very hard. I’ve always been very conservative in that respect.
That makes sense, but when everyone else wants to play and you don’t—
TOWNSHEND: I did for many, many years honor the Who democracy. We would sit around and vote before deciding to do something, and I went along with that. But in the end, I started to lobby the other members of the band to get the kind of results that I wanted. So I effectively took the Who off the road between ’75 and ’76 because I just felt that I had had enough and Moon seemed to have had enough, even though he didn’t know he’d had enough.30 And eventually when I left the group, one of the senses of relief I had was not so much that I didn’t have to work with the guys in the band again, but I didn’t have to lobby them all the time and fight the democratic functioning of a group.
But what’s the point of having a democracy if you can’t accept the majority decision?
TOWNSHEND: That’s one of the things that makes all groups time limited: Democracy itself requires a change of government every now and again. And what happens in groups is that you end up with many dictatorships, which are not very creative. And if not dictatorships, terrible collusive relationships in which everybody does what everybody else wants in order to get a quiet life. It just doesn’t work for the creative life at all, sadly. And it does mean that we’re all very nostalgic for those early days of relationships when it did seem to work.
I suppose it’s like a marriage where people grow apart.
TOWNSHEND: And we lament that. But it’s like saying, “What a pity George Burns and Gracie Allen had to die at different times. They should have just lived forever.” And I think that’s what I feel about the future of the Who: It is just an attendance to its history. That’s it. People talk about what we can do in the future, and all that we can do in the future is look back.
That’s a good answer.
TOWNSHEND: It’s not an answer Roger would accept because . . . I shouldn’t really speak for him, but I think that he has a dream or a vision that he could do it again. He could get me out of bed again. He thinks this is about me lying in bed (laughs). But, you know, I’m not lying in bed.
So he got you to do this birthday thing instead?
TOWNSHEND: Looking back at the Who’s career, as wonderful as I’m sure this concert is going to be, all it’s really gonna do is make us remember, those of us that were there, the better concerts that we did.
When was the last time you actually sang with an orchestra?
TOWNSHEND: In public, I don’t know. I think the last time I attempted to do it was an orchestral version of Tommy where I was the narrator. I hated it. Absolutely hated it. I got drunk, and about halfway through I stopped and walked off.
What made you hate it so much?
TOWNSHEND: It just seemed like I’d spent my whole life trying to evolve rock and roll—in a way, advance it within its own terms—and somehow it was being co-opted and swamped by a much greater tradition, which was the tradition of the orchestra, classical music, and traditional opera. We had our own version of pomp and circumstance, and that was smashing a few guitars.
How did the band react when you first decided to start writing songs instead of doing covers?
TOWNSHEND: Well it was actually a reaction of relief. We went to Fontana [Records] with a very, very good version of a Slim Harpo song called “Got Love if You Want It” and a really good Bo Diddley song called “Here ’Tis,” both of which I think would have been ballroom hits for the R&B crowd. And we were told that they wouldn’t do. We had to have original material. This was kind of the Beatles fad era when everybody was expected to write their own material.
I’d written a couple of fairly sophomoric songs for the band to play really just for fun, and everybody was very encouraging about that, Roger included. But by the time it was released a bit later, Roger really felt that his power base in the band was being threatened somewhat by me writing, so we co-wrote “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” together. And he remembers contributing quite a lot and I remember him contributing very little. But we did it together in a sense to find out whether we could co-write, and I actually felt that we couldn’t. So I just stuck to my guns and proceeded to be the writer and the power base did shift.
What are some