It's Harder: Twelve Questions With Pete Townshend
New dates were just added to The Who's North American tour, which begins February 23 in Reno, Nevada. Get the full itinerary here.
Endless Wire, the Who's first album since 1982's It's Hard, was a stinker, one of the great disappointments of 2006. The mini-opera "Wire and Glass," recycled from guitarist Pete Townshend's dusty notebooks, sounded like a collections of demos. Yet anyone who's seen the group in its more recent incarnations – minus drummer Keith Moon, and then bassist John Entwistle – has to appreciate the undiminished muscle, style, and intelligence Townshend still brings to a stage. Moreover, as this recent Jambase Q&A suggests, he'll likely always be one of rock's top-10 interviewees, even via email:
"We all adored show business for its own sake, too. We liked stunts, tricks, gimmicks, ideas and special effects. But, deep down I think a lot of our power may have come from frustrated anger – a sense of impotence. Other artists didn't seem to share this in quite the way we did. Our music was quite vengeful in a way. The uplifting subtext came from a mixture of humour and a genuine belief that music could set us all free. It seems trite - and I think we knew that if music could do anything at all it would do it only for a short period - but that is what we believed."