PETE TOWNSHEND STOPS HURTING PEOPLE

"Personally I like the idea of embodying evil in the devil—it doesn't really matter whether you externalize the evil or recognize it as within. With regards to that, I found that experience I had in California at the beginning of this year very interesting."

It was on the last day of his month-long stay at the drug rehabilitation clinic outside Los Angeles that Pete Townshend took a walk along the nearby beach. Down by the edge of the Pacific, his attention for some reason or other focused on a large bottle that obviously had been washed up from the sea. Even as he walked towards it Townshend intuitively knew what was in it. He picked it up, unscrewed the stopper, and with a forefinger put to the end of his tongue some of the powder it contained. His hunch had been correct: it was cocaine. Much to the chagrin of his walking partner, the Who guitarist tossed the bottle back into the sea, watching it smash on some half-submerged rocks.

"I discovered there was a simple enough, rational explanation of why it was there. The nearby port is one of the biggest smuggling bases for stuff going into Los Angeles. Obviously whoever was taking it in lost their nerve and chucked it into the sea.

"But I do find it very interesting as an example of my feelings about the way in which the devil operates."

However you view evil it seems that Townshend was confronted by a curiously sinister temptation: for this was the final 24 hours of a two-year downward plummet in which the Who guitarist and songwriter split from his wife, succumbed utterly to the clutches of the alcoholism that had caused the marital breakdown, replaced the booze dependency with addiction to heroin and other drugs, and came close to both financial and spiritual bankruptcy.

At his Boathouse studio in Twickenham in a spacious, first-floor room overlooking the leisurely flow of the Thames, Pete Townshend sits in one corner of a four-seater sofa and calmly contemplates his two-year spell of total dissolution.

There is no trace of strain in his eyes, but the bags that linger under them appear to rise up from somewhere down by his jawbone: coupled with his famous anteater nose—a teenage complex about his hooter was a major factor behind Townshend's desire to prove himself through rock 'n' roll—they give him the lugubrious look when he is not smiling—which he often is these days—of a turkey contemplating Christmas Day. In time to the almost rhythmical ebb and flow of the passion in his speech in some four hours of conversation, he lights and re-lights the thin, irregularly burning Indian cigarettes he smokes. Their sweet scent fills the air—like incense, aptly enough, for the room serves as a semi-shrine to Meher Baba,,to whose teachings with little fanfare Townshend first devoted himself in 1967: we are surrounded by memorabilia and portraits of the Indian mystic whose everpresesnt smile was like an affirmation of his faith. Townshend gives over the upstairs floor of the large, modern looking building to the Meher Baba Society. Baba's presence in the room is a constant reminder of Townshend's battle to win back his soul, and he speaks with the clear strength of someone who has recently emerged victorious from such a struggle.

"After what's been going on in my life for the last couple of years I've ended roughly back in the same place," he admits, with a sense of relief. "During that time, however,

I was living against a lot of the principles of Meher Baba that I initially found enriching. Meher Baba came down heavily against drugs, for example. So for a while I pushed him out of my life, because I couldn't live within those principles. But in a way I did it almost deliberately, and now I've come back in a full circle."

Today is a particularly special day for Pete Townshend: it is his 37th birthday, an anniversary that a year ago he never expected to reach: "Not because I was really self-destructive, but because I had an intuition that I was going to burn out—I had a couple of very close shaves through getting very drunk and irresponsible, and taking things people vyere giving me when I didn't know what they were.

"I really miss booze a lot, but I've started to call myself an alcoholic—in other words, I don't intend to drink again. Like every arsehole writer, I felt that it was helping me to work, or at least helping me with some of the pressure I was going through. Quite how things will proceed from now, I don't know: the alcoholic's mentality is just to deal with the present day."

Townshend's two-year nonstop party suggested that the man who when he was 19 wrote the line "Hope I die before I get old" as part of the albatross-like anthem that "My Generation" was to become for the Who, had felt it necessary to prove how sincere he had been at the time of writing that song. In fact, this near-suicidal excess was motivated largely by his uncertainty over his relationship with the Who: "It really came down to an absolutely archetypal problem, which was that I was starting to feel very uncomfortable in this business, doing what I was doing. I was drinking myself into oblivion in order not to face up to the fact that there were certain things I couldn't do and certain things I just didn't want to do. I had to wake up and face up to the real reasons: was I still working with the Who just for money, or was I working with them just for friendship? I wasn't running away from life, but from . particular issues. Those are the things that at the moment I'm having to deal with head-on. I'm finding them much more invigorating than 11 ever imagined. I'm enjoying a sense of balance that I lost."

What I feel now is that not only am I willing to fight again within the structure of the Who but willing to fight again within the structure of society.

The willful hedonism in which Pete Townshend indulged would be unremarkable in many other rock 'n' roll figures. Yet, deliberately or otherwise, Townshend carries the burdensome responsibility of being regarded as the conscience of British rock 'n' roll, supposedly in direct communication with its unsullied source. Though a blameless life might be an excessive and contradictory demand, considering the form's rebellious framework, Townshend is at least expected not to make a prat of himself. Particularly considering that he had close acquaintance with one of rock 'n' roll's archetypal loonies in Keith Moon, the Who's drummer who finally imploded in 1979—one might suspect that at least a small cause of Townshend starting to hit the bottle with greater and greater frequency was a some form of reaction to Moon's death. In fact, the damage Townshend wreaked upon himself with such ostenbible delight after moving from his family home by Eel Pie Island to a flat above Kickers shoe shop on the Kings Road suggested he was in some way attempting to emulate Moon's mad feats: "Except I didn't have the constitution of Keith Moon, or the will to live of Keith Moon.. .Although before he died Moon had been playing a game with everybody, because he'd made everyone believe he'd cooled out and was going to get married. Yet behind the scenes, he was knocking back anything he could get hold of—not just drink."

Townshend found his subconscious delivering two warnings to him that he should quit drinking. The first was during the last series of British live dates the Who played, in the spring of last year. When the group played the Rainbow, an already drunk Townshend proceeded to consume four bottles of brandy onstage during the course of the set: "Basically I'd decided to go out and not play. I was just going to talk until somebody stopped me from talking by knocking me out. I went out and started to talk and the band began to play without me. Then I started to talk again and they continued to play without me. I don't really remember a thing about it, except that I'm surprised I didn't kill myself.

"I nearly poisoned myself on another occasion when I woke up in hospital after going down Club For Heroes. I went blue.

I think my heart stopped. That was the point when I decided I was going to have to do something about my drinking.

"Last November I went to my doctor and asked if he'd put me in touch with someone who specialized in alcoholism. I was put in a clinic where a doctor talked to me for three days, gave me books to read about it, and taught me the Twenty Tenets Of Alcoholism. I thought ' lAng on a minute: it's 'appened—Jimmy Greaves!'

"I feel a lot better for not drinking. I don't really feel I want to do it anymore. In the past when I've stopped—I stopped for two years in 1976 and '77—I was always looking forward to the day when I could get back to drinking again. But now I have to face up to the fact that I can't ever do it again."

But worse was to come during this time in Townshend's life that he now views as "a period of complete desperation." He had given up drugs in 1967, aware that their supposed benefits are illusory. But in what he describes as a conscious attempt to provide himself with a replacement crutch for drink, he rapidly became addicted to not only a number of prescribed tranquilizers, but also to heroin: "I just took anything I could lay my hands on— as a way of passing the time really, because I hated the sensation of not being drunk."

Townshend says he did not realize at all what he was getting into when he found himself moving in affluent rag trade circles where it was common to free-base cocaine, which now and then would have a little heroin sprinkled in with it—just for flavoring, as it were. This is the only time in our talk that Townshend—quite reasonably, in this case—displays any of the zeal of the reformed convert: "Someone would be free-basing, and you'd see them puff in a bit of burning junk through a straw. And that's it! A lot of people don't realize you are going to get addicted to heroin instantly by smoking it. If you snort it you don't get addicted instantly, but if you smoke it you do. It's not as dramatic as sitting at a party and drawing out a hypodermic and banging it in your arm, but it's the same thing.

"What was incredible to me was to watch the pushers sweetly come in and say, 'I've got some nice stuff here, but it's not good enough for snorting, it's really for smoking.' And that was it. At least 50 people I know got addicted in the space of six months last year."

And Townshend himself was one such casualty, which is how he ended up in a California drug rehabilitation clinic at the beginning of this year.

Like many people's, Pete Townshend's life is formed from a complex set of paradoxes, some self-created and some imposed by external forces, that can often seem hypocritical. But again like many people, Townshend lives on several levels at the same time, and is at least aware of his contradictions.

For example, at the same time as he reacquaints himself with the philosophies of Meher Baba, he claims—from personal experience, it,would seem—to detect a dishonesty when people "turn to the East." "You're not actually looking inward at all, you're not dealing with God. You're just looking to the East, and hoping for a new set of answers. It does give temporary peace.

"But the good news or the bad news is that eventually you do what I did, which is to keep coming back and looking at the world and saying, 'I still think it's a shit-heap, and I still can't bear to live here without doing something about it.' "

There are more basic contradictions: the Who sell out every concert seat whenever they tour Britain, yet their U.K. record sales are low, America being their main market. And then there are the higher truths Townshend finds in the ostensibly simplistic form of rock 'n' roll: "I feel the real potential for rock on a spiritual level is that it's a drug all on its own. I don't mean a drug you can get addicted to, but an effective uplifter. Music has always done this: it has a very unique quality—it both takes you out of and into yourself. When the modern musician uses it to lyrically say something either about himself or about the way society is wrongly set up, and that is combined with music, two amazing forces are brought together—the power of poetry and the most powerful, abstract art form. So when it does work, it works on double, and apparently contradictory levels: it's capable of both uplifting you, and rubbing your nose in the shit.

The new Who songs are the most violently aggressive stuff we9ve ever come up with...totally preoccupied with the danger of living In the '80s.

"In the past I've said that rock allows you to face up to your problems and then to dance all over them. That to me is what effective rock is about, and it's something which the Clash," he mentions a group to whom he turn returns again and again as a yardstick, "are a prime example. When you listen to the Clash you're facing up to life, and at the same time being given strength to deal with it—which is what rock 'n' roll is about to me."

Where Pete Townshend differs from almost all of the other rock superstars of the 1960s—and why of all those figures he alone was spared from verbal execution by 1977's punk reappraisal—is that he has not forgotten what initially motivated him to pick up a guitar, he still burns with a true fan's passion. He carries within him a broad-based chronicle of contemporary culture, often gleaned from personal experience, which he has from time to tme felt inclined to interpret in print, as in the case of the Time Out cover story he wrote on the Jam early in the spring. "I'm really very weak when it comes to trends," he reflects amusedly on his flirtation last year with New Romantic nightlife. "I adore them, and always get very drawn into them. I see myself wandering around looking for the latest thing like some George Melly or Larry Adler figure."

He recalls far more ruefully his own springtime of the '60s, a supposedly vibrant, liberated time whose human and spiritual wreckage is visible with greater and greater frequency as an indication of much of the cause of the current sickness and confusion: "Was it not similar to a load of ostriches going around with their heads in the sand? Or a load of people doing what I did last year, walking around drunk, having a lot of fun, supposedly enjoying life when really everything was terrible behind the scenes, or at least on the route to going wrong."

The absolute nadir of '60s youth culture was represented for Pete Townshend by the Woodstock festival, at which the Who played. "All those hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day. As a cynical English arsehole I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, and shaking them and trying to make them realize that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change. Not only that, what they thought was an alternative society was basically a field full of six foot deep mud and laced with LSD. If that was the world they wanted to live in, then fuck the lot of them. That self-deprecation lasted a long time."

During the course of the Who's Woodstock set, Townshend used his guitar to club Abbie Hoffman off-stage, when the American radical attempted to seize the stage to use it as a platform for his views: "I won't get involved with platforms in the way Vanessa Redgrave does—I prefer the role I've played recently: doing gigs for Rock For Jobs and things like that. I wrote 'Won't Get Fooled Again' as a reaction to all that—'Leave me out of it: I don't think you tot would be any better than the other lot!'

"Having two daughters really points this out," Townshend prefaces his contentious point, "but the strangest thing I've learned over the last five or six years is that the one set of people who as a group have suffered the most and are about to suffer and will suffer for a long time are young women. Because behind all the superficial freedoms from restraint is still the same old male lust and the same kind of confused reaction to an intelligent, well-put-together woman who knows her position and fucks when she wants to. There's still the same old attitude where if she fucks she's a slag, but halfway-alright-for-the-night, and if she doesn't she's a pain-in-the-arse.

Behind that there's the confusion that a lot of girls do see the family as a remnant of the old order of restraints, which is going to tie them down—live life while you're young... It seems to throw women into a sense of futility because so much more now depends on their youth and vitality and their strength and their courage. As soon as they run out of any of those qualities, they're given no respite—they're discarded.

"It really annoys me that in the generation in which feminism was born, men still don't know how to treat women. Mind you," he chuckles ironically, "they don't know how to treat themselves either."

One's intuition hints that Townshend's unconscious may well have prodded him in the direction of his wild hedonism in a pursuit of fresh subject matter—a former art student, Townshend spends most of his existence in the gap between life and art, but at least has sufficient sensitivity and humility to perceive the play-acting necessary for the maintenance of his role. As a consequence of this perception he is inclined to tumble temporarily into bottomless pits of black angst over his doubts about the probity of his position. But at least he can profit from this pain by using it as subject matter for new songs.

His new solo album, All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, contains a number of harrowing instances of this. The opening song, "Stop Hurting People," is, he says, a prayer for him to be reunited with his wife. "I wrote it last summer," he remembers. "I suddenly broke down and scribbled it out on a piece of paper, and didn't realize until later quite to what an extent it was a prayer."

"The kind of violence we need is the most difficult to produce: it is to stand, if you have the opportunity, six inches from Margaret Thatcher's face and scream until the blood pours from your eyes, but not to lay a finger on her in case you catch her fucking rotten germs: we've got to be absolutely clear about how incensed we've got to appear to be."

This talk of the one female who, by her evil actions, has come so close to putting the women's cause back by a few hundred years that her very existence might well be construed as an establishment conspiracy, leads Townshend to consider the currently jumbled feminism issue.

Townshend has gone on record as an advocate of the power of praying: "Sometimes you can pray quite eloquently, but other times you just beg, 'God help me!' It's incredible what a last resort it is to a lot of people, and how often it also helps in that last resort. Yet equally incredible is once that situation is departed from, how quickly you forget the value of it.

"I don't know who it is that you actually pray to: whether you are doing it for yourself or to something inside yourself or to an externalized image of God or what. But there's something about that actual act of sublimation in which you put yourself aside for a second and try to see yourself clearly for once.

"For centuries and centuries this concept of the power of prayer has lasted and survived, and yet now in this incredibly complex and busy world, it's got lost."

Like a number of rock 'n' roll musicians who are similarly untrammelled by academic snobbishness, Pete Townshend draws no distinction between writers of musical lyrics and writers of literature. Amongst his favorite wordsmiths he lumps together Dylans Bob and Thomas ("So perfect in the use of words: he can make a normal sentence so rhythmical and musical —I think he was a musician without realizing it.";), Bukowski, Joe Strummer, Echo and the Bunnymen, and T.S. Eliot. His belief in the hand-in-hand relationship of rock 'n' roll and prose writing enjoys its physical manifestation in Eel Pie Publishing, the book publishers Townshend founded in the 70's, which specializes in rock books as well as having a healthy catalogue of children's books.

Eel Pie Publishing—his Eel Pie recording studio is located in the basement of its Soho premises—developed from Townshend's Richmond bookshop, Magic Bus, frequently the best-stocked and most atmospheric bookshop in London: "The original idea behind Magic Bus was that I hoped it would teach me a lot about publishing, and in fact it taught me one thing: that most bookshops could learn a lot from operating the way we did—in other words, by putting people that are alive and well on the desk."

However, Magic Bus never made large profits—it would break even, at best. And last spring, Townshend was obliged to sell the shop to Penguin, as though to remind him of the fact that when things are bad, the one thing of which you can be certain is that they are likely to get even worse, his already miasmic existence was thrown into even greater turmoil by seemingly disa• strous financial problems; through a combination of unbusiness-like benevolence and inept advice from quarters other than the Who's management, he found himself personally in debt to the tune of around half a million pounds. Eel Pie Publishing came close to collapse and Townshend began to sell off his possessions. Magic Bus had to go: "That hurt my pride—I don't like failing. But in the context of the fact that I almost failed at the most important thing of all, which is staying alive, I don't mind losing things like that."

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31

By the end of last year he was close to bankruptcy: "I was caught in an incredible cleft stick: I'd not wanted to blow the money I had on mansions or Rolls-Royces or homes in L.A., because I thought it was much better to create jobs or put the money into something which helps other people create, and to accept that this was part of my responsibility. But then I was unable to properly follow it through, either because I was so fucked up or distracted or simply not here because I was on the road with the Who. Also, the people I'd appointed to do the work thought there was an endless supply of money. I suddenly realized that after all the sneering I'd done about Apple, the same thing was happening to me—people were spending my money faster than I could earn it."

Townshend also had to come to the sad realization that his friendly National Westminster Bank was "just a fucking bank...I still had an account at the same bank inEaling Common that I'd opened with my first art school grant check when I was 16.1 had the same bank manager as well, but he was about to retire and was getting very worried about all the money I had oustanding—I think he was worried they were going to take it off his pension.

"He asked me if I'd come over and talk the the area manager. So I went and suddenly realized that behind this nice man is the National Westminster bank who are rats, and they want my bollocks: despite the fact that I'd put every personal penny I had into the company to keep it afloat, they wantecf more. They wanted my house, they wanted my recording contract —they wanted me to sign with them, anf they would sign to my record label.

"Furthermore, the bank never understood, and still doesn't, how I earn money. They don't see how I can go in one day without a penny to me name, and then the next morning a royalty check can come through the post and I can be rich. So they thought I knew more than I was letting on."

"In the end, I was quite seriously considering the joys of bankruptcy— 'Great: fuck the lot of you—I'm going to go bankrupt and live in Paris and have a peaceful life.' But in the end I though, 'No, I'll beat the bastards at their own game. I'll come back from the dead and make some money."

Although Townshend knows this to be by no means the ideal situation, the delivery to his record label of the master tapes of All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, has pulled him a large way out of his state of relative penury, and restored some semblance of solvency. However, he realizes this is not the best way to run a business—from now on the publishing company must be self-sufficient. "In the past," he admits, "my answer to financial problems always has been to go out on the road with the Who or to sign a music publishing deal, or to get another record advance. Which basically accounts for the problem I've had for a long time with overwork and overcommitment. It's not altruism. It's basically fuckin' stupidity."

But Townshend's 1980 deal with Atco was motivated more from a lack of confidence in the future of the group with whom he had played since 1963.

"For a time I believed the band wasn't going to go ahead," he confesses. "I also believed there were a lot of things the band was incapable of doing that I could do on my own. But I've since learned that it was a question of me not fighting hard enough within the structure of the band to get my own feelings across—I'd become tired of having to fight within the band.

"What I feel now is that not only am I willing to fight again within the structure of the Who, but willing to fight again within the structure of society. I think that's the only thing that can keep the Who alive, and the only thing that can keep me alive. I don't think that sitting in isolation making solo albums provides me with enough fulfillment.

I've had to face up to the fact that the Who still have fantastic potential, which the band has rejected or neglected or turned away from."

Recently the Who were in the studio, recording their newest album with friend and producer Glyn Johns.

"Recording has rejuventated us," Townshend enthuses. "Not so much in musical terms, but in the sense of standing together and saying that we're prepared to actually change the way that we live, and the way that we operate, if it will make a difference. The new Who songs are violently aggressive, the most aggressive stuff we've ever come up with. The songs that I've written are totally preoccupied with the danger and tension of living in the 80's. And that is the common attitude and stance that the band has."

"I must say that at the moment I don't know whether to just shut up and enjoy what is one of the happiest and most fulfilling periods of my life, or to go rub my face in the shit. Really, I'm trying to do both. Though I am delighted in a sense how things have develop ed—delighted is the wrong word, because I occasionally feel quite euphoric at the way thirigs have turned out. But that kind of euphoria can lead to the state of mind where you think, 'Oh, everything is OK,' and, of course, it isn't OK at all. I think that juggling act is the most difficult balance of all to achieve.

"Our generation has had its fun, we've had our peace, we've had a relatively quiet time, and some really great moments, a great period of life.

"But what -kind of world are bur kids going to be going out into? Because in a way we've neglected all our responsibilities. We've done nothing.

"And that's got to alter."