Pete Townshend was
born May 19, 1945, ten days after the German surrender, into a middle class
British household. His parents were both musicians who met through their
work. His father, Cliff Townshend, was a saxophonist in a Royal Air Force
jazz band, and his mother Betty was a singer with the Squadronaires. Sometimes
the young Peter was taken along on dance band tours where he absorbed the
live swing and jazz sounds of forties popular music, and other times he
was left with his maternal grandmother, an experience which he maintained
led to many of his later insecurities. "She was completely nuts," he said.
Although Townshend's
early life was filled with his parents' music, he discovered a broader
musical horizon in 1956. His father took him to see a film which featured
Bill Haley and the Comets, and Rock Around the Clock exploded all
his preconceptions of what music should be. His grandmother bought
him a cheap guitar and Townshend began learning to play himself.
About that
time, Pete Townshend was attending Acton County Grammar School, where he
became friends with schoolmate John Entwistle. Entwistle (later a songwriter
and virtuoso musician himself) had formal musical training on both piano
and horn and was then playing with a Dixieland band. On his friend's recommendation,
Pete Townshend was also accepted into the band as a banjo player, but he
continued to practice guitar, and soon acquired an electric model with
amplifier, much to his grandmother's dismay.
Eventually
the two friends left the Dixieland band to play with another local band
called The Detours, which was actually making money--and thus was
highly attractive. This band was organized by Roger Daltrey, another schoolmate
from grammar school, and played a set list of rhythm and blues, country
and rock ‘n' roll songs at local clubs. The band evolved a distinctive
sound with Pete Townshend playing lead guitar, John Entwistle playing bass
and Roger Daltrey handling lead vocals. In 1964 the band found a new drummer
in the person of Keith Moon, the final member necessary to complete the
band which would become The Who.
Adopted as
the icon of the mod subculture, The Who quickly expanded beyond their roots.
Told at a recording studio that bands should write their own songs, Townshend
went home and began to write. In 1965, the first single released under
The Who's name, Townshend's "I Can't Explain," was the band's first hit.
"My Generation," written the same year, became the song which established
the band as the ideological voice of sixties youth. The Who
quickly developed a volatile image which became identified
with the "rock ‘n' roll" lifestyle, but even though the band laid down
many of the foundations for later hard rock, punk rock, heavy metal and
alternative rock music, they actually created music which was beyond classification.
Pete Townshend's
compositional abilities quickly outpaced the simple structures of early
rock ‘n' roll music, and he began to develop complex chord structures and
innovative styles and arrangements, producing edgy, socially conscious
works reminiscent of Aaron Copland and similar cross-genre composers.
When the band had too little material to fill a second album, Townshend
wrote the first mini-rock opera, a humorous set of songs tied together
by a story line, called A Quick One While He's Away. While The Who
made their first tour of America, he began at odd moments to scribble the
lyrics for an hour-long opus which caught the world's attention at the
Woodstock music festival in 1969. The rock opera Tommy established
a new musical genre which was quickly taken up by Broadway, and which established
a bridge between rock and classical music which is still developing today.
The outstanding
achievement of Tommy established Townshend for the first time on
both a strong financial and creative footing, but it also burdened him
with the necessity to follow up with another strong composition. He planned
a grand project to be called Lifehouse, but the stress and creative
demands led to the beginnings of a real dependency on drugs and alcohol.
His relationship with manager Kit Lambert became strained during work on
a movie version of Tommy, and as a result, Townshend lost the management
skill which had helped him to form his first full rock opera into a coherent
whole. Finally admitting that he was working with too broad a concept,
he assembled the songs into an album called Who's Next, generally
considered to be The Who's best album.
During the
following decade, Pete Townshend pioneered a number of techniques for composers,
including the use of demo tapes, whereby the composer plays an instrument,
overlays other instrumentation, and then transcribes music from the tapes,
a forerunner of today's computerized transcription. He also recorded
a number of solo efforts. Who Came First was issued in 1972,
a collection of miscellaneous work dedicated to his spiritual mentor, Meher
Baba, and Rough Mix in 1976, a collaboration with friend Ronnie
Lane. He began to establish a musical direction apart from The Who,
experimenting with a wider variety of sounds and styles, including the
big band jazz sounds of his parents' generation.
Townshend continued
to write for and perform with The Who, completing another major rock opera,
Quadrophenia, in 1973. Quadrophenia proved difficult both
to record and to perform, and Townshend's insistence on maintaining creative
control of the band led to conflicts which began to spill over into public
view. Later albums failed to attract the following earlier works did, and
Townshend came under increasing pressure. He began to suffer with tinnitus,
damage to his hearing from years of careless exposure to loud music. The
death of Who drummer Keith Moon in 1979 from a drug overdose worsened
Townshend's dependencies and led to binges on drugs and alcohol.
In spite of
these problems, Townshend continued working on a movie version of Quadrophenia
and a solo album called Empty Glass, released in 1980. Although
some reviewers labeled this album a "suicide note," creatively it was highly
successful, and it established the first real distance between Pete Townshend
and The Who. That same year, with Townshend struggling to find a new creative
direction for the band, eleven fans were killed at a Who concert in Cincinnati,
Ohio. Townshend was devastated, and his drug problems climaxed shortly
afterward with an overdose of heroin and alcohol. After barely
surviving the incident, he sought medical help and finally managed
to escape the dangers of failing health.
In 1982 Townshend
released another solo album, All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes,
which was again successful. Another album released by The Who was less
so, and further increased the distance between his solo career and his
work with the band. Townshend felt trapped by the band and planned to retire
from touring. He commented: "There are limitations in writing for the band
we call The Who, based on the preconceptions that we all share about what
the function of that band is. It should stick to what it has always done
because what it has always done has been so important...." After the farewell
tour, Townshend decided against even writing further material for the band,
defaulted on a recording contract, and closed that chapter of his life.
Townshend's
work at his own Eel Pie Press had caught the attention of London publishers,
and as a result, he surprised the world by taking an editorial position
at Faber & Faber publishing company. "The first thing I did to
try to give myself some roots in the publishing world was to write a book,"
he said. The book was published in 1985, a collection of short stories
called Horse's Neck.
While working as
an editor, Townshend released the albums Scoop in 1983 and
Another Scoop in 1987, including including accumulated tapes and
orchestral arrangements which he had never considered commercial enough
to release otherwise. "I think the Scoop series shows how much music
is woven in and out of my life," he said, "but, in a way, that some of
it is not all that important in that it doesn't always carry messages...
Everybody has music in their lives; it's there wherever you look."
White City
- A Novel, released in 1985, was Townshend's first major musical effort
following dissolution of The Who. This concept album was based on a Townshend
short story in which he presented a portrait of a working-class housing
project in London near where he grew up. White City was also
produced as a film directed by Richard Lowenstein, in which Townshend appeared
as Pete Fountain. In 1989 he released another concept album based
on poet Ted Hughes' children's story, Iron Man. Although neither
effort was commercially successful, Townshend felt that he had successfully
combined the two directions of his career--literary and musical--into workable
theatrical pieces. "I realized that I'm not just a songwriter," he said.
"I'm also a storyteller."
The release
of Iron Man was somewhat eclipsed by the 1989 twenty-fifth anniversary
tour by The Who and their induction into the Rock ‘N' Roll Hall of Fame.
Although the reunion tour was commercially successful, Townshend regretted
that it detracted from efforts he had made to move away from his career
with the band. However, the tour contributed to interest in a Broadway
staging of Tommy which won five Tony Awards in 1993. Iron Man
was also staged at London's Old Vic theater that year, and plans were begun
for movie production of the children's story, using Townshend's work as
the soundtrack.
Pete Townshend
continued his interest in theatrical music with the release of Psychoderelict
in 1992. Resembling a radio play, this album combined a narrative script
and musical elements including eleven songs. With an ensemble of actors
and musicians, Townshend set out on a solo tour of America during which
he presented this unconventional work on stage. Nineteen-ninety-three marked
the twentieth anniversary of the Quadrophenia, and renewed
interest spurred by a Roger Daltrey tour led to an offer of funding to
stage the rock opera. Recalling earlier difficulties with the piece, Townshend
at first doubted it could be done, but with advances in technology, a seventeen
piece band and considerable creative assistance from Roger Daltrey and
John Entwistle, he staged the opus and took it on an impressive tour in
1996 and 1997. Rumors began to circulate that it might also be staged for
Broadway.
Pete Townshend
continues to break down barriers, creating hybrid and unconventional literary
and musical works. He is currently writing an autobiography, plans
a musical adaptation of Arthur Miller's memoir, Timebends, and the
long-delayed completion of Lifehouse for the BBC's Millennium
Project. He also continues to make solo appearances, including
a brief tour in 1998. About the future, he says, "It's impossible
to predict what I will do. I've been wrong so many times and I don't want
to rule anything out. With regard to my own work, I've always refused to
set limits for myself and I've always taken the view that anything is possible...and
that belief remains as strong as ever." He looks back on the signature
line of "My Generation" from a productive middle age. "Perhaps if I had
died before I got old," he says, "I would have been forgotten." His fans
are glad that he didn't.