the Grande, drugs, the audience and the Blues

the Grande, drugs, the audience and the Blues

the Grande, drugs, the audience and the Blues creativity. But I’ve been getting very simple buzzes out of other things.

Creem — Do you think your creativity while you were taking drugs was inhanced?

Townsend — Not by it immediately. Some people can work when they’re really stoned, but I never could, but I think that it did spark trains of thought and things. I can’t deny it, I wouldn’t attempt to. Yet at the same time I think I would have been a fairly creative person even if I never smoked. The piLls were totally destructive to me, and I think with Keith came very close to the judgement day. I think today’s speed is even more vicious. It’s very sad.

Creem The impression I’ve gotten the times I go to the Grande is that the people are there for an experience, that the music is a part that can be done without sometimes, the music is there only as a part of the experience, and not the most important part of it.

Townsend — No, I think it’s balanced, but unbalanced in front of the stage. I felt there were a .lot of people who came to bang their heads on the front of the stage, and I didn’t feel like giving them the opportunity because when people do that I feel like kicking out at them.

Creem — Do you think they’re trying to encroach on your performance?

Townsend - No, they just want to groove. I think that the problem is really that once you’ve got to that level where you’re just smashing out very, loud sounds and they’re banging their heads on the stage, where can you go from there? It’s very difficult as a performer. If you took at the Stones performance case history, that was very peculiar. It was like wherever they went there’d be alot of screaming kids and so eventually you got Mick Jagger never bothering to use a P.A. system. To me Jagger’s voice is one of the finest things to happen in this century. I understand from Mick Jagger that they’re going to be working again (in public) soon. 1 think it’s going to be ; such a blow to people to be able to experience them ' in a live show, to be able to listen to their voices. They’re going to sound very much like their recordings.

Creem — Do you feel that you sound differently than your recordings?

Townsend — Yes, I think our sound is far less controlled on stage, we make it far more flexible. I think in recording we try to record like a Memphis group, because recording is such that it needs control and restraint in order to get that limitation across and so become free, as it were. If you wind up in a studio and rip out when you get it on a record-player it just doesn’t have that sort of freedom, so you have to do it by sort of settling yourself a sound limitation and then breaking free from it, which is the whole nature of record production. They’s why record production is necessary as a thought process, and why groups like Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly, who sound very exciting to me live don’t have that sort of excitement on record.

Creem Do you prefer playing for an English audience?

Townsend I think its almost universal now with groups with any sort of meaning that they prefer playing in the States. But 1 think that it’s changing in England, England is going through a parallel scene to what’s happening here but on a different level. Remember we don’t have FM radio, we don’t have AM radio and we don’t have any radio. This makes things very difficult. I mean, it’s amazing to switch on a radio and have someone playing your music when you’re at a certain age. In this country there are enough people to create a sponsorship, whereas in England there wouldn’t be.. I think that this is one of the things which is causing live shows in England to become more important, and the college kids are becoming very good audiences. College dances in England start at 10 o’clock at night and go through to about 3 and we’d go on around 2 at night. By the time we got there they’d all be drunk, and some of them would go to sleep and wake up when we went on and they’d be sort of baggy eyed and looking at us.

Creem — In Germany I was suprised at the difference between the description of your performances and the audience response in Germany. Do you still do European tours?

Townsend §r I hate European tours.

Creem How do you like German kids?

Townsend — I would use the same expression and I think it would be unfair. I think that they’re just like kids everywhere except that their environment is different obviously. I think that one of the problems with the German kids is that when you get on stage with a Union Jack jacket on and start smashing guitars and hitting policemen over the head and start throwing smoke bombs at them, they start to cheer you for what you represent, rather than what you . are, what you represent to them in terms of personal liberty and terms of personal history and it’s a bit of a hang-up in German kids because you’ve got a load on you. You know, most families are split because of the East-West thing and most families have lived with

one or the other army. You know the American army is still there. This has always been sort of an insult to them because they had nothing to do with it, and because they had nothing to do with it they feel kind of up-tight about it. This makes them sort of overly excited.

Creem Do you think they’re experiencing a reaction?

Townsend — Sure. Once we played a gig at Dusseldorf where we went on and we’d done a three week tour there, which is, believe me, an arduous thing to do because they always seem to work you out, because,of the Autobahns which are very fast roads and there’s no speed limits of any kind they sort of regard a job 1,000 miles away from the one the night before as a short trip. So you get in the back of a Mercedes 600 and they ride you down the Autobahn at 130 miles an hour all the way and of course you arrive at the other end worn out, not because of any effort, but because it’s Very wearing to travel at that speed. We did three weeks of that. At the last day we played at Dusseldorf and we got paid and we all put our separate money in our separate pockets and went and did a T.V. show, and went and did a line-up, and all the money had been stolen. We went on at Dusseldorf feeling really down, and we played sort of ‘oh shit, I’ll be glad to get back to England.’ The kids sat there sort of bemused for awhile and then they sort of insisted that we snap out of it. They really skillfully brought us out somehow. They put over incredibly good vibes, they didn’t mind that we were down and they cheered us up. It was so cleverly done and such an act of generousity from them to us that we really sort of snapped out of it and did a very good show. It did prove to me that, despite all the other things I said, that they are a sensitive audience, they’d make a good audience, but the other qualities and emotions that are involved Creem — Do you prefer doing a concert gig-to a ballroom?

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tend to over-shadow.

Townsend — No. I do dig people to sit down. I think that’s nice. I think if they stand up it interferes slightly with the show; it feels sort of like finale time. I feel better about doing a long solo if I know I’m not wearing out people’s legs, even if I’m wearing out their heads. I think that’s the only stipulation I could make.. Organized concerts, in stadiums where everyone sits in numbered chairs can be very, very draggy. They can also be very good depending how people feel about being disciplined, but most kids today don’t like to be disciplined, not in their leisure time.

Creem — Has any of the content of your music been politically inspired or motivated?

Townsend — No, probably only the normal political frustrations. Feelings of youth frustrations have affected the music more.

Creem — Do you think that “The Who Sell Out” was a reflection of this?

Townsend — The album was, this statement might offend alot of people, like Sergeant Pepper, was a salvage job of alot of tracks which although having a certain nature of their own required something else. They needed an application and so I dreamed up “The Who Sell Out” packaging thing. This has always been a pet idea of mine, to go on stage and play commercials, really serious commercials and actually getting paid for it. And I always thought, ‘why should radio stations get such a bomb in sponsorship when we do commercials on the record?’

Creem — Have you ever cut any tapes just fooling around with ideas like that?

Townsend — There was a couple of tapes, one for Jaguar cars and one for the American Cancer Society, which they never used because it was too long. It was a three minute thing. That was very much like normal home material, like Odorono. I’d like to see that out, that’s a funny song.

Creem — Have you ever done a commercial on stage?

Townsend — Not like that, not to brainwash people. Every time we’ve played at the Grande we’ve played ‘Little Billy’ which is the American Cancer Society song — Discouraging young Americans from smoking tobacco; there’s a huge cheer.

Creem — I noticed you had some blues work in your performance.

Townsend — I find it difficult to pinpoint our influences by the blues. I cain more easily pinpoint being influenced by the Stones of anybody you can name, but the blues influences are much more difficult to pinpoint because our roots are in blues, we started out as a blues group, really.

Creem — ‘It’s a Legal Matter, Baby’?

Townsend — Oh, long before that, it was like two years before that. Tom Wright, thp guy who manages the Grande now, was a very good friend of mine in England, and he had a very comprehensive collection of all the blues records that were available in the States at the time and he brought the whole collection to England and sort of set up there. This was really where we got our catalogue. We liked most Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker, and those were the people that we used to play. And then the Beatles came along and kind of showed us there was no need to play that stuff because you could far more easily incorporate into your own thing and do your own thing rather than do someone else’s thing .

Creem — That’s been called the English Blues Process.

Townsend — Yah, probably. Anyway this is like what they showed us. They showed alot of other people, too, obviously. But the Stones thing has been much more slower. They started out doing what we started out doing and they seemed to hang on to it longer. That was something which probably comes through today. Now that we’re more musically free and more musically established, we don’t really have to be as careful about making musical statements obviously Who.

Creem — Have you ever read anything by Marshal' McLuhan?

Townsend — Yah, naturally. I read everything by Marshall McLuhan. The whole McLuhan thing appealed to me very much because it brought together alot of my loose ends. See, I was in a rock group, I’d been on T.V., I’ve written songs to people, I’d feeen a Mod, a Rocker, smoked pot with art sUsdents, popped pills, fought on the beaches, and all this sort of stuff and I really didn’t know how to string all this together, really didn’t know how it all fitted in. Then I read McLuhan and had really deep religious things going on all this time (or at least aspirations), and McLuhan helped me tie all these things together. I did have alot of difficulty in understanding alot of the McLuhan stuff, just because 1 thought it was very, very bad English, sort of like New York. It reminded me of maybe it had even been translated from Argentinian ^or something. Have you ever read any George Luis Borges, that’s another thing. If only I could read Argentinian, I’d really like to read his stuff, because I always feel like you’re only half-way there.

Creem — Do you get the feeling that you touch people through your music?

Townsend — I’d prefer to think I was doing it through records rather than live performances. Well, not so far, I feel really what we’ve been doing on records so far is like waving your arms at people. In our earlier records we were bragging or complaining. On our latest album we feel that we want to touch people. Not a direct communication from us to them, but rather just like a universal touch.

Creem — McLuhan remarked about the generation of children who were growing up in television, and that T.V. is primarily audio, as much as anything, it’s a cool medium, and he said that we all wear music. Can you sometimes get the feeling that an audience will wear you, or that you can wear an audience?

Townsend — Live performances are obviously a hot medium. You get the coarseness of an emotional, anything two-way becomes like that. Like a sexual relationship can be very, very coarse, or very, very smooth, or lumpy or bumpy or whatever. In a musical performance you get the same sort of thing. 1 know alot of people have connotated long term sexual relationships with group audience things, but in rock, and in recent rock, like post-drug rock, you get the feeling that it’s even more so because both sides are making far more cohortive. 1 feel that that kind of puts the fuse to the current time. The fuse is very low and the fuse blows very often. Its just the kind of thing we get in our performances and when I’ve been a member of the audience for people like Jimi Hendrix or the Cream. You get this feeling six times a night that the fuse has blown, like when Jimi tunes his guitar and makes jokes about only cowboys can play in tune, then you feel like there’s a huge repair job coming on and everybody has to turn off and sit back and switch back on again. It’s like coitus interupus because the stream of conscious is flowing both ways and you’re really at the mercy of a very accident-prone communicative process. Whereas T.V. is far more organized. Well, in this country it’s terrible, the way you string it all out, you often get 10 or 15 or even 20 seconds of blank screen and then a kind of flash and then a commercial and then

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