FORWARD INTO THE PAST

Here is a fact that seems almost impossible to believe: It has been over 20 years since Pete Townshend, angriest of the four angry young men in the Who, wrote, “Hope I die before I get old.” But it’s 1986, not 1965. Several generations of wild youth have mouthed and spat those fightin’ words, only to grow up, carry on at school, and then move: to responsible jobs and/or marriage. For God’s sake, Pete Townshend’s two daughters are verging perilously close to the age he was when he wrote “My Generation.”

So what’s a flinty, determined, unsparing rock ’n’ roller to do at 40, faced with the mocking call of his establishment busting years? He could, of course, have followed through on the implied death wish, but fortunately, having flirted with disaster as much as any superstar who lived to talk about it, Townshend opted for life along the relatively straight and narrow, enjoying the company of his wife, kids and friends. Equally, he could have pretended that the outside world didn’t exist, and wallowed away the second half of his years in isolated rock star splendor. However, far from that, Pete neglected neither his musical craft nor his awareness of reality, taking on additional pursuits as a respected book editor and an active participant in several charitable organizations.

What Pete Townshend ultimately decided to do was grow older (never old) creatively, adapting two connected postWho projects to three different media. First, he wrote a semi-autobiographical book of short fiction, Horse’s Neck, which won him the respect of literary critics. Then, he recorded an equally semi-autobiographical album, called White City, its name derived from a working class neighborhood in West London, close by Shepherd’s Bush, where the Who spent several of their formative years. To complement and enhance the LP, Townshend and director Richard Lowenstein created an hour-long videocassette of White City, which focuses on a love triangle of the past and its resolution in the present. It even comes complete with a wiser-andhappier-ending—unlikely with anything emanating from the Who legacy of musical destruction, but accurately reflecting Townshend’s enjoyment of his newfound maturity.

“Don’t make a big deal about rebellion. Rebellion is just a token. ”

In New York for exactly one week to promote his various projects, Townshend’s available time is measured out in frustrating droplets. Frustrating because the artist is one of those rare beings who thinks before he speaks, which means that in an allotted half-hour, you cover maybe five-and-a-half topics completely, only to think of at least two dozen more when the hotel room door has been firmly shut. However, after two decades of wanting to meet The Man, you figure that 30 minutes is at least half a blessing.

The years have been pretty good to Pete Townshend, who, in a short-sleeved white knit shirt, tailored slacks and slipon shoes, looks lean, yet muscular; good health and attention to staying fit, rather than a rock ’n’ roll anorexic pallor, are the appropriate buzzwords. Although he’s desperate for some breakfast, having waited 90 minutes for his room service order of tea and toast to be sent up, Townshend quickly prepares a cup of his brew and slathers some jam on the bread—then turns his full, clear-eyed attention to the task at hand.

“Everything that’s ever befallen you

Happened simply ’cause it crossed your mind You’re crashing by design.”

—Crashing By Design

Freed from the loving and horrible bonds of the Who once the band parted

in 1982 (the Live Aid reunion notwithstanding), Townshend admits to experiencing a new sense of freedom, which brought with it the ability to look profitably back on his life. During the past three years, music has provided just one-third of his fulfillment, with book editing (at the prestigious British house of Faber & Faber) and charity projects taking up the rest of the time. Such diversion gives Townshend a perspective shared by few of his fellow rock veterans.

He explains, “People say to me, ‘How do you spend your life?’ and I say, ‘Well, I spend a third of it doing charity stuff and a third I’m doing publishing and a third I work on music and video.’ And they say, ‘Well, surely the biggest audience is for music and video, it’s millions of people. So what’s the point? When you can make a million people happy with a record, what’s the point in going and working with three drug addicts?’

“The thing is that it’s very, very important for me to be doing that, because it makes me realize that I can actually, as a human being, do something. Even though it’s only a little, it’s important to me; it’s selfish. / get something from it. The hidden bonus has been the fact that I think it’s enriched my writing.

“It’s very easy to get isolated,” he says with great intensity. “Young bands’ first albums are obviously very, very rich, ‘cause they enter the music industry with a batch of songs and a batch of experiences which have been drawn throughout their whole childhood. All their Freudian hangups are caught up in there, their adolescent drives and confessions. Those first records are often, maybe not the most adult or intellectually balanced, but they contain all that wonderful stuff. You look at a band 15 or 20 years later, all these guys have seen is airports, hotels, and the wrong end of a straw. And when they sit down to write a song, they’ve got no experience to draw on. So what Was interesting for me in sitting down to write White City was the fact that I suddenly thought, you know, there’s all these people who reckon I’ve wasted twothirds of my time. What’s been fascinating is how rich the experience I’ve had in that last three years since I’ve stopped working with the Who has been, how valuable.”

Freed of the personal as well as creative constraints which being the focus of an impossibly public band had imposed, Townshend luxuriated in the months he spent wandering through the neighborhoods of his youth, doing inperson research for White City. Exploring the area—whose streets are named for all the colonies of the old British empire—Townshend was inspired to consider the area’s political dimension as well as its personal one. For a man who supports charities including Amnesty International and Rock Against Racism and was born just days before the end of World War II, traveling through White City prompted him to wonder just what true freedom meant, to him and to his society. And according to the artist, the most productive kind of liberation is contained in three words: control, resistance and action.

“In the very last story in Horse’s Neck, when I talk about leaving a garden and coming out on the beach, and riding this horse—that’s how I felt for awhile. It’s incredible, a sort of expansive freedom. But freedom is not important,” he emphasizes. “That’s the thing I’ve realized. What’s important is control, so that you decide what you do...

“I wanted to make a metaphor [out of White City] and I got a bit confused, to be honest, of what it was that I was trying to make a metaphor of. Whether I was making a metaphor of, say, South Africa and apartheid out of what was happening in the White City, or vice versa. In the end, I tried to create a kind of quantum symbol for the resistance. What’s happening in Britain at the moment, I think, is a kind of French idea. That you can face changes by resisting them. Not by not allowing them to happen, but refusing to let them affect your chosen way of life...

“What I would say to young people is, ‘Don’t make a big deal about rebellion.’ Because rebellion is just a token. It’s like being stubborn. There’s a bitterness to it. There are some great street expressions: ‘Go with the flow’ is one. ‘Different strokes for different folks.’ A lot of them emanate from the streets of America. Each one of them is a philosophy far more accurate and succinct than anything you’ll find in Kierkegaard. And I like the idea of, you look out a window and see a street that’s covered with litter and trash. You get up the next day and it’s still there. And you think, ‘I wish one day the city would come and clean it up.’ And another day you look out and it’s still there. And if you count the number of minutes that you look out the window worrying about the city coming to clean up the trash, and you join them together, you maybe have an hour or two of looking at garbage, in which time you could have gone out and cleaned it up! (laughs) And while you were cleaning up, you could have whistled a happy tune.”

Once Townshend stopped fretting about the garbage within his own life— in his case, abuse of drink and drugs— and instead took matters in hand to not let the transitions of existence screw him up anymore, he finally discovered the productivity which flowed from life without fear. And though he laughs while admitting that his own deep-seated desire for control “is the way megalomania lies,” his voice takes on a much more tender quality at the prospect of using that power to help other people.

And it’s not just in philanthropical activities that Pete Townshend is now able to help himself and others. Although he acknowledges a recent request by his old buddy/nemesis Roger Daltrey to put together a touring package featuring the two of them, apart and together, by saying, “It doesn’t appeal to me at all,” he is finding new pleasure in a different kind of work with the Who’s former vocalist. Townshend wrote the poignant title song for Daltrey’s latest solo album, After The Fire, and is quite enthused at the prospect of writing a musical for the singer/actor. “There’s all kinds of things we can do together,” he explains. “I want to do new things. I don’t want to do those things we’ve been doing all our lives.” So, even though he enjoyed a set of concerts performed in the poor area of Brixton with the musicians from White City, Pete Townshend does not even want to consider going out on tour, for the foreseeable future.

“We must race the race

So we can face the face.”

—Face The Face

Along with accepting the physical state of turning 40, Pete Townshend has discovered time—lived in the here and now—as the only value that has substantial, permanent meaning. He talks of obstacles, and you see so many concrete blocks filled with easy flatteries and halftruths. With understanding, born of experience, the obstacles slowly erode, trailing insight in their wake. “Obstacles work in tvkr directions,” he says. “The obstacles that you see in front of you when you’re young, which prevent you from seeing very far into the future, also seem to remaihlfyou grow through them and out the other side, and they seem to be there when you look back.

“And the obstacle for me, I think, was that formative period when I was young. When I actually became so consumed with the idea of value—a person’s value being weighed up in terms of their physical qualities, in terms of their beauty, their potential for success, their ability to compete, their ability to crack the right kind of jokes or whatever. The problem is, it’s a misconceived idea, isn’t it? But what it does, it’s not the way that people judge you that’s important, but the fact that because people judge, or you think that people judge you in a particular way, you end up using the same terms to judge them. Maybe I’m generalizing too much, but this is how I was.

“And when I look back now, I find it very difficult to get past that same obstacle, because I started to be even further confused about what wasn’t of value. The confusion of being a celebrity and being given accolades for a show that you only thought was halfway OK, or being followed around by a pretty girl when you’ve jUst been sick over here. Or being loved by people who were close to you','whether family or friends, despite the fact that you’re a complete schmuck. This only further confuses the whole thing. In the end, all that points to the fact that this idea of even putting a value on a human being to start with is absurd. It’s like, you look at a garden full of flowers and you may like one variety and I might like another, these are kind of artificial value judgments. And they’ve got absolutely nothing to do with the existence and the reality and most of all, the short life of whatever it is we’re talking about.

“It’s like somebody said to me the other day, ‘What kind of sex do you prefer?’ I don’t mind any of it, really, I suddenly think I’m fed up with sex. They said, ‘Well, when you were really into sex, what kind of sex did you like?’ Well, I think, I’ve tried it all, and one thing I could say is the only sex I don’t like is short sex! Anyway, this is the thing that you get when you’re on your deathbed and you suddenly look back and you think, ‘Hold on a minute. Now I realize what my value is. My value is that it’s all very, very, very brief.’”

“Freedom is not important. ”