Pete Townsend Keynote Interview - photo by clint gilders - staff photographer |
Pete Townshend’s keynote address to the SXSW Music Festival is being held in the same room where I liveblogged Dan Rather’s keynote interview at the interactive part of this conference a couple of days ago – same stage set, and lots of the same people. Quite a few less laptops in evidence, though. And with less than 15 minutes to the start, plenty of empty seats, although people are streaming in – I think they may be making people without badges wait until the last minute to come in, not sure.
It’s now only 6 minutes until the address is supposed to begin – still more than half the seats are empty, and the number of rock ‘n’ roll as opposed to indy/geek types is growing. Probably not so much now with the Rather crowd. And a lot more camera equipment.
I shall now amuse myself counting Grateful Dead t-shirts.
Four minutes now…. I can’t help but think this is a disappointing turnout, although I don’t really know what they were expecting.
I also noticed when the music festival officially opened, there was suddenly a deluge of tan, white haired, industry types from LA with cell phones glued to their ears. It’s not that the tech crowd didn’t have cell phones glued to their ears. It’s not that
I didn’t. It’s just these guys do it in a certain self-important way quite different from how geeks do it.
It should be starting now, but people are still pouring in. There’s a girl who is probably young enough to be Pete Townshend’s granddaughter, wearing army fatigues and a Grateful Dead t-shirt.
Here we go. Welcome to SXSW XXI etc. Then more etc. “It is entirely reasonable for kids, and adults, to devote their passions and their lives to rock and roll.�
Standing ovation for Pete. Chants of “Pete, Pete, Pete.�
He looks good, very relaxed. Black pants and jacket, grey shirt over a white t-shirt.
Says he first realized he was in the Who when he was driving his mother’s yellow van, and suddenly heard “Can’t Explain� on the radio. He said, I’m no longer an artist, I’m something else. In a sense he’d been captivated by hearing something he’d written for and a bout the kids in his neighborhood on the radio – felt he’d been voted in and couldn’t get out. Since then, he never felt he wasn’t in the Who, but felt he had the right to say no. He got back with the Who to help John Entwhistle with his money problems, but it only helped briefly, he spent it all on cocaine.
Interviewer said that even since the death of Entwhistle, Townshend and Zack Starky seem to be able to take the band where it needs to go.
Pete says the band was always about chemistry. When Keith Moon died, Pete was over the moon with Kenny Jones, but the chemistry wasn’t there. Pete had the chemistry with Entwhistle, but when he passed away, the chemistry emerged with Zack.
Then he played some air guitar…. Said John’s death also changed Pete and Roger Daltry’s chemistry, different but just as good.
Interviewer described the new Who album as stripped down, intimate. Asked if there are lots of big Wagnerian songs Pete wrote but set aside. Pete says yes, but he might have been joking.
Says in Britain we had a view of world music that was unique --- Hank Williams and Leadbelly, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, great singers, great jazz… Louis Armstrong… then there was music from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, plus African music, Irish, folk, protest songs. All that unique view they had let the post-Beatles bands to see that the American musical tradition was almost a three legged chair of blues, country, and pop – which the Brits drew together and then Americans said, great idea, as if they thought of it.
Pete said the post-war condition in England was one of total denial, no one talked about it. Young people of his generation (born 1945) brought to the three legged chair of blues pop and country was not anger, though it looked like anger, but was frustration and a demand for answers, that to be honest to this very day they have never had. The function of the Who’s music was to demand something to fill the gap, to keep screaming for answers. How do we avoid the same mistakes if we don’t know how these mistakes came about?
I can read the history books and tell you what it was about…. I wake up today in 2007 and realize that this anger, this symbolic guitar splashing, these big violent noisy acts aren’t working anymore. If it’s going to be political, let’s make it fucking political.
Interviewer points out England was much more traumatized by the war, bombings, than the US was. That how we feel about 9/11 went on for months, years after the war in England.
Then asks about the change in record companies…. A big CEO told Pete, Rome is burning.
Visigoths, agreed the interviewer. The horse is going away and the automobile hasn’t arrived. All these means of distribution, but the boulder in the road is the conventional expectations of the record companies.
Pete says.. we’re a baby boom band, we’re happy because people bring their kids, and they get an extra ten percent… and then they deafen the kids.
The Internet is here, the web is here, the GRID that holds us together, is here. A SXSW on top of the Internet is a really different thing than just the fact that people in Austin like to drink beer and listen to bands. No disrespect.
The Who is an anomaly. If you’re a new band today, don’t fuck with it. Don’t even go with it.
Where are the stars? You have to wait for the stars and work and build, you don’t just wake up one morning and go BING I’m Christina Aguilera. That start system is one that people like me are very familiar with, I started playing in a band when I was 14 years old.
Back to interviewer: Different experience playing for the enormous audiences you play for – Monterey Pop, Live Aid, Isle of Wight, all the great iconic gatherings of the tribe, but also very intimate shows.
Interviewer said he saw Pete and Lou Reed do a Velvet Underground set in New York two weeks ago.
Pete said he has a foot in both worlds. Said Lou Reed is a couple of years older than him and had to sit down while they played. Laughter.
In that club at that moment what is music, what is zen, what is god, what is love, what is this but things that happen in the fucking moment. What is the internet? We delay them. Fuck it. I want it LIVE.
Applause.
If I can watch for fifty bocks, a boxing match on a cable show live from Vegas, why can’t I watch my buddy Mac around the corner’s band, I want to watch it when he’s there, share it when he shares it.
Why is it the industry that controls the web, the credit card companies, the phone lines… who said, we can’t have it live?
Interviewer suggests artists don’t want it live. Pete says you write and create in privacy, but then you perform it live.
Small events he does with his partner Rachel Poole taught him this. Suggests using the web to bring people together, all looking in at an event like this at the same time. Knowing who you are like and who you’re not like. At the hotel I’m staying at, on the iTunes network someone is sharing a playlist called Eat My Shit Bitch. Electro industrial with a couple of Cocteau Twins tracks.
You lose yourself when you listen to good music. It’s the zone. Where did that time go? It’s a timeless zone.
Interviewer brings up the idea of some kind of scientific/magical communication that would bring the world together that Pete envisioned long ago.
Pete came up with the Lifehouse (?) method that generates music from information you enter.
Tried it in 1971, no Internet, no computer that could do it. He had to wait 30 years for you guys to have computer powerful enough – April 25 they are launching it, now called the Method. The idea is we take all this music and play it at a big event, share our music in the flesh, see what it sounds like.
This is not music to order. It’s music ABOUT you. April 25 web launch www.petetownshend.com.
Lifehouse was the planned follow up to Tommy that he abandoned, but turned into Who’s Next. Interviewer asked if it’s true Pete doesn’t like Who’s Next as much as the rest of us do.
He said he likes Quadrophenia better, he had more control. Said maybe his control hurt the band, especially Roger who felt somewhat like an outsider. Rock must speak to those who listen to hit, not those who play it.
It’s what I listening feel that counts, not what he intended.
Quadrophenia was more self contained. If the failure of Lifehouse led to Quadrophenia, then I’m happy with it.
As musicians and composers we’re not really a mirror at all. I call it a mirror door. You look in the mirror and say that’s not me, and then go through to the other side. If a rock band is a mirror of its audience, then I think… Gene Simmons.
A lot of it’s about creating a phantom image, a comedic lighthearted image, an exaggerated image… like the Sex Pistols. They only had one fan, her name was Siouxsie. She’s my ideal, I dream about her often. There’s a picture of them playing with Siouxsie with no clothes on. We never had that! We had mod boys who took their shirts off, but we never had a Siouxsie.
Where I felt the mirror was constructed by the audience and not the artist was the 9/11 show. .The lights came up, it was firefighters, law enforcement, their families. They were crying. That’s to do with them, not with us.
As we say in recovery, those of us who bother to fucking recover… it’s their shit. The building came down on THEM. They were the people who’d been through the real stuff. We were proud to have these tools to give them to release this stuff. What we did was provide a vent. That’s what our brand of rock music was designed to do and still does, in certain circumstances. I’d like to think we’ll never need our music to do that ever again. Ever again.
The function of rock or pop, what does it need to do now. We have more information, strength, power than we ever had. Good deeds, good thoughts, good actions. How can you do the good actions without information. Our generation, we were driving blind.
Interviewer says you’ve always been so honest… have you ever regretted putting so much of yourself out there, wish you’d been more like Dylan or Jagger? Has this incredibly open relationship you had with your audience taken a toll?
He says no. Laughs. Says he saw journalists as his friends. Then he says no, I saw them as artists and creators and researchers, fellows on the creative pathway. Every writer is a Writer. I would sit with somebody like Jann Wenner and opened my heart. It felt safe to do so and it was safe to do so. I know what you’ve said that I said, but I know what you haven’t printed that I said. I admit sometimes I shove my foot up my ass.
Interviewer says we’re not set up for questions but will take two.
Audience member asked if there will be a theatrical version of Quadrophenia. Says yes, at Welsh College of Music and Drama.
Someone else asks about work with Down’s Syndrome and disabilities. He met a child with Down’s who grew up to be a dancer. Another who writes poetry. Rachel set the poetry to music. “Would Stevie Wonder be as great a musician if he could see?� He knows if the things that happened to him as a child, the disabilities that he carries today, are his power.
Standing ovation.