The 1980s were a brutal decade artistically for the guiding lights of the 1960s. In the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination, Paul McCartney floundered increasingly as the decade wore on. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell alienated both fans and their respective record labels. The classic lineup of Pink Floyd released one last gloomy album before raining lawsuits down on each other for most of the decade. The Rolling Stones hit their career nadir with Dirty Work in the middle of the decade. And Bob Dylan, perhaps the greatest songwriter of the 20th century, turned in albums and concerts that can largely be seen as uneven, at best.
No longer pop stars, or cultural touchstones, and not yet the “classic rock” legacy artists who’d find new creative footing as elder statesmen and women who would go on to dominate the live concert landscape in the early 21st century, the artists who’d soundtracked the Golden Age of rock and roll floundered as technology, MTV and pop culture in general conspired to leave them all largely frustrated, both creatively and commercially.
That is, except for Pete Townshend.
With the death of his bandmate, drummer Keith Moon, in 1978, and his band The Who’s career on arena hopping auto-pilot, Townshend threw himself in earnest into a solo career. The results, 1980s surprise smash success Empty Glass, which spawned the hit single “Let My Love Open the Door” and the rock radio and MTV staple “Rough Boys,” put Townshend on the map as a solo artist.
And after two more Who albums and the band’s (first) farewell tour, he released the still astonishing All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes and MTV-conquering White City: A Novel, both of which were also made into long-form video albums (nearly 30 years before artists like Beyoncé adopted the idea). In the process, he became a staple of FM radio in his own right, as well as an MTV heavy-rotation regular.
“I’d diversified, hugely, my solo life, or career,” Townshend, who will turn 80 next year, tells the Daily Beast. “I was running a series of recording studios. I was running an equipment hire company. I was running The Who group business with a couple of people. I created a bookshop, my own publishing company, and I became an editor at Faber & Faber.”
“The head of my label said, ‘What the f---? You’re a rock star. We don’t know what to do with you,’” he continues. “So, possibly if I had toured, it would have consolidated things, which would have helped me create a solo career, but that’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to be in the studio. That’s what I love to do. It’s where I’m happiest.”
Obviously, being a solo artist was an uneasy fit. Regardless, with his contemporaries struggling with their seemingly impending irrelevance, Townshend was becoming the star he’d never wanted to be.
“There was a German guy looking after me from Polydor at the time,” Townshend recalls of the moment in 1985 after one of his rare gigs with his Deep End band when he realized being a solo artist wasn’t for him. “After the show, he asked, ‘When are you planning to go on tour?’ I said, ‘I’m not planning to go on tour.’ And he went back to the head of Polydor, and said, ‘Pete Townshend is a lazy f---er!’ And they dropped me!”
While Townshend’s songwriting catalog is one of the most formidable of the classic rock era, his solo shows—often for charitable causes like Amnesty International, The Prince’s Trust and Townshend’s own Double O charity, which helps victims of domestic abuse and those suffering from addiction—have always been made up of setlists of songs culled from his own output, as well as Who songs that run the gambit from classic to all but forgotten, and covers by artists who influenced Townshend over the years.
All of this is present on a new 14–CD box set, Live In Concert 1985-2001, out now, which chronicles Townshend’s remarkable, yet exceedingly quirky, not to mention irregular live solo career. Townshend spoke to the Daily Beast about the past, present and future of The Who, his creative process, and why he never fully embraced his role as solo artist.
The box set covers so many different aspects of your solo career. It’s interesting to me that this comes on the heels of the vinyl reissues of your solo catalog. Let’s start there. Around the time of Chinese Eyes, and then particularly White City, you did a lot of videos and embraced MTV and the video market in a big way. It did seem like you were on the solo career track. But from your point of view, you never really were.
Only with respect to the fact that I didn’t want to tour. You know, I was doing shows that were two and a half hours long, singing and dancing and playing guitar as well. I was trying to save my hearing, and so I wasn’t playing very much electric guitar. I found it f---ing hard. I loved it, you can see that I loved it. I just found it too hard.
Well, being up front is a completely different animal, isn’t it?
It doesn’t feel that much different to being on stage with Roger [Daltrey]. Roger has a connection with the audience—and needs to connect with the audience—which I don’t have. Roger’s a front man who very much works to maintain a constant contact with the audience. This is art for me. And it’s important, and I want it to be right, but I’m not in it to have f---ing fun. And I think generally, for me, the thing was, although I was having fun in my solo shows, it was really hard work.
I don’t think, in the late ’80s, or early ’90s, anyone could have predicted that the trajectory of The Who would have been what it has been. What I love about the box set is that it reminded me that there’s an alternate universe Pete Townshend career. Can you imagine that? Can you put yourself back in ’93, ’96, 2000—if The Who hadn’t been the going concern that it became again in ’96 with the Quadrophenia tour— do you see avenues you would have gone down as a solo artist? Would that have been more experimental, perhaps?
I don’t know. Funny enough, I feel in a similar position now. I don’t know what’s gonna happen with The Who. I’m hoping Roger and I can find some common ground and find some way to work again, possibly without an orchestra, because I think we’ve done that. But also, there’s this sense that we’re in the last tour period of our career. Are we just hoping to do what Bob Dylan does and just keep going? I’m encouraged by seeing what Roger’s doing in his solo tour. It seems to me that if we put a small band together and just decided to throw s--t at the wall, it might be great. But Roger and I don’t converse. We don’t talk. So, it might be difficult to land on something that we both share an interest in. But it’s there for the taking, I think.
I think, really, for me, the question is that I think I made a mistake in 1982 blaming the rock industry for my difficulties. Having lost Keith Moon, and quite a few other friends, like Brian Jones and others, I thought, “This business kills people, and I’m not going to be one of their number.” So, I left The Who. In a sense, I was overlooking the fact that I had my own problems. I went into therapy for three years, but all that did was remind me that I had the problems. I’m very good at creating stuff and I’m a polymath and I was very successful as a book publisher, I was very successful as a recording studio owner. I was successful at everything I touched. But The Who was the one thing that should not have been let go because it was still alive and functioning. We’d just made an album that wasn’t that good, that’s all. We’d made a few other albums that weren’t that good. And there was another album in the air that could’ve been great. I think writing songs for The Who, it’s not difficult. Not if you just want to do what we’ve done before. Dare I say, any c--t could do it. And many c--ts do do it.
Pete Townshend — Live: In Concert 1985-2001 [14 CD Boxset]
Universal Music EnterprisesBut that wasn't where you were at. I mean, it’s easy to say that now, 40 years later. At the moment of All the Best Cowboys and It’s Hard, it seemed as though you were struggling not just in your own life, but creatively, trying to decide which direction you wanted to go. Talk a little bit about that moment in the ’80s, where you said there was another album after It’s Hard, but you were not interested.
What I was saying was that there could have easily been a last album. I think part of the problem was, we had a deal, and we had a deadline for a set of albums, which we were trying to meet. We’d taken the money upfront for the deal and spent it. We had to make the album. So, I think there would have been another album, and I think we learned a lot in making It’s Hard. What I learned was, you don’t go to the band and say, “What do you want me to write songs about?” You just write songs, and that’s what I should’ve done.
But you say that you could easily write Who songs like The Who songs that have come previously, but that wasn’t where you were at that point. You weren’t going to write cookie cutter Who songs for another Who album. I just can’t imagine you would have done that. At any point, quite frankly.
Well, when you say “cookie cutter,” you know, AC/DC did it forever. I think Bruce Springsteen has done it forever. There’s no diversification in process or intent. For me, there’s always been this sense that I needed experimentation, and in order to experiment and be creative, I need to be able to fail. One of the problems with being a successful artist is that you fail in public. I don’t want to become an Instagram guru here, but there’s a lot of people there saying, you have to be prepared to fail. And also, you’ve got to throw s--t at the wall. In the early days of The Who, the number of demos that I used to have to produce was tremendous. I remember, for The Who By Numbers, I produced 40 demos. And out of those 40 demos, Roger selected 12, and we only used eight. So, there was a lot of time spent on preparing the material, while the other members of the band were getting frustrated that we weren’t touring. So, if we had been the kind of band that worked together in the studio, writing together in the studio, it would have felt very, very different. But it didn’t feel like that.
And to be honest, I’m very pleased with my solo career, but I don’t think I should have done it. I was sort of bullied into it, by people who felt that my personal breakdown, which was to do with the breakdown of my marriage, overwork, and drinking too much, was to do with some sort of creative void. But in actual fact, it wasn’t that. I didn’t need to make a solo album. Empty Glass was an album that I made on the hoof. It turned out really, really well. But by the time that was finished, and The Who story, in a sense, was obviously coming to an end for me, Chinese Eyes was an album where I tried to write truly and honestly, from the hip, from the soul, from the heart. That’s the kind of work that I do. And I don’t think that kind of work is necessarily as valuable as music like Empty Glass, which is invigorating, uplifting, exciting, challenging, and moving.
So, if Roger comes off the road reinvigorated, would you try to corral him into the studio with a small group, and try to do one more record, and then get out on the road and promote it like the old days?
I’m not gonna try to bully Roger to do anything. I don’t want to have the job that I used to have around the time of Quadrophenia, which is bullying everybody in The Who to do exactly what I want to do.
And yet, it worked.
It worked, yeah. But it was no fun. And at the end of that, Roger knocked me out. I asked for it, but he knocked me out. Anyway, I’m hopeful. I’m certainly not saying that we won’t do anything, but Roger and I do have a bit of a river to cross. And once we cross that river, we’ll see what happens.
