Indeed, He Can Explain

The Who on the road in America again, 18 years after their “farewell” tour? “It’s a long story and not a particularly nice one,” says Pete Townshend. That’s because it concerns the financial embarrassment of rock immortals.

Last year, singer Roger Daltrey told Townshend that, candidly, he and bassist John Entwistle could both do with the kind of cash infusion that only a new Who enterprise would generate for them.

“I wasn’t particularly sympathetic,” Townshend admits, adding harrumphy observations about his colleagues’ living in “mansions about 40 times the size of my house.” (More respectfully, he also refers to Entwistle’s costly determination to stay on the road with his own hobby group, giving “magnificent bass player performances” on the American club circuit.)

Even so, Townshend studied the angles of mutual benefit. He was already committed to play two benefits for an orphanage in Chicago last November. If the Who took the concerts on instead, he would consider where else the reunion might take them. Daltrey and Entwistle agreed, and, as Townshend puts it, the gods smiled.

Set to raise $2 million in Chicago, and more by playing the annual Bridge School benefit in the Bay Area, they got an offer of $2 million on their own account to add a live online concert in Las Vegas. What’s more, they played impressively and reveled in one another’s company like the best of old times.

“I enjoyed the shows,” says Townshend. “I enjoyed the fact that Roger and I have a more honest relationship now, although there’s always been a lot of love between us and he’s a great ally.

“But it’s been very--the psychological word is ‘codependent,’ I suppose. I’ve needed to have him at arm’s length in order to feel that I’ve had any control over my life, and he’s needed to feel frustrated that I won’t do what he wants me to do. Another thing is the Who are so loud I worry about going deaf--John uses hearing aids in both ears now. But I’m really looking forward to being with my muckers again this summer.”

(Neither Daltrey nor Entwistle responded to requests for comment on Townshend’s account.)

He thinks the tour could even lead to that album of new Who songs they have been pussyfooting around since they officially, though not quite finally, broke up in 1982.

“Roger sat in a press conference recently and said, ‘I’ve written a couple of songs and I’m going to throw them in the pot,’ ” says Townshend with practiced abrasiveness. “But I immediately found myself going into deep cynicism thinking, ‘Couple of songs, yeah. I used to submit 30 for an album and he’d reject [expletive] half of them.’ ”

The 20 U.S. dates, a teaming with the Jimmy Page-Black Crowes alliance, include a show at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine on Aug. 16. Meanwhile, the Who are doing an Internet-only release of a live album from last fall’s gigs, “The Blues to the Bush,” available from Musicmaker.com as a download or customized CD.

Townshend says he still likes to be “cutting-edge.” Which is fair enough, because the other project he will synergetically publicize on the tour is sometimes portrayed as having envisioned the Internet a quarter-century before it became reality.

At a discreet hotel near his home in the London suburb of Richmond, Townshend settles into an armchair. He looks trim as ever in T-shirt and slacks. When it comes to “Lifehouse,” the album project he has just completed after 29 years in the making, he is ready to talk an Olympic marathon.

It began in 1971 with the Who in its pomp: legends of Woodstock, peerless creators of the first credible “rock opera,” members of big-time stadium rock’s first generation.

But that’s exactly what was eating at the purist in Townshend. “ ‘Lifehouse’ started with my feeling that stadium rock was going to kill us all. Because I knew as an artist that I was completely powerless. I couldn’t stop the Who performing in football stadiums, and I absolutely hated it.”

He imagined the Lifehouse--a kind of super-venue cunningly adapted to warp minds--as a metaphor for corporate government attempting to control every aspect of people’s lives by feeding them food, information and soothing sounds through the “experience suits” they had to wear. But, ever the idealist, he proposed rock ‘n’ roll as the answer, suggesting that music that was “good and true and ambitious and risky” could free souls to overthrow the oppressive regime.

Looking back, he gives a sly smile of self-deprecation: “ ‘Pretentious’ is just not a big enough word.”

*

With his screenplay optioned by Universal in 1971 for $2 million, all seemed well at first. But he hit a wall. He couldn’t seem to make anything actually happen, especially after an attempt to develop the project the same year through two weeks of daily live performances at the prestigious Young Vic Theatre fell apart when the theater board took against them and chucked them out.

What Townshend didn’t know was that the Who’s co-manager Kit Lambert, based in New York, was telling interested parties that “Lifehouse” was a nonstarter and the next serious Who project would be a “Tommy” movie. But, trusting and relying on Lambert, Townshend flew to New York in 1971 to seek his help.

Townshend recalls the scene as vividly as if it were yesterday: “I thought, ‘Kit’s going to save me, now it’s going to happen.’ Then, as I walked up to his office door, I heard him say to Angie Butler, his secretary, ‘If Townshend thinks he’s going to walk all over my “Tommy” project. . . .’ I was so naive, but it was hearing him call me ‘Townshend’ that did it. I got a panic attack. I sat in there thinking, ‘He’s calling me Townshend. There’s nobody calling me Pete anymore. I’m Townshend. I can’t live like this.’

“I looked ‘round, and Kit and the other people in the room became frogs. I stood up and walked towards an open window until Angie grabbed me. She said it was obvious I was going to jump out of the window.”

Triggered by Townshend’s experience of powerlessness to combat commercial demands, “Lifehouse” was scuppered by the band’s own business arm. QED, perhaps.

Mercifully, the Who’s collective momentum soon dragged Townshend back from his breakdown. Later that year, the band recorded its most enduring and successful studio album, “Who’s Next,” featuring the great “Lifehouse” songs “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Let’s See Action” and “Behind Blue Eyes.”

But Townshend never gave up on the project. The key “Lifehouse” track “Pure and Easy” appeared on “Who Came First” in 1972. A couple of years later, he took another abortive shot at the movie with director Nicolas Roeg and science-fiction novelist Ray Bradbury, and “Who Are You,” from “Lifehouse,” was the title song of their 1978 album. (The “Tommy” movie Lambert had talked up, meantime, came out in 1975.)

“Lifehouse” lay dormant, though, for many years after the Who broke up, while Townshend busied himself with solo albums, book publishing activities with top British poetry house Faber & Faber, and the Who “comebacks”--for its 25th anniversary (in 1989) and the first-ever live performances of “Quadrophenia” (1996).

Reflecting on the latter comeback, Townshend recalls with some amusement that the premiere was scheduled for a major outdoor event in London’s Hyde Park with Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan also on the bill: “And I’d decided to do it solo; me, an acoustic guitar and a movie screen. Then the promoter, Harvey Goldsmith, told me half a million people were coming and I said, ‘I’m scared, I don’t think I can do it.’ ”

Hence, another Who reunion. Meanwhile, “Lifehouse” was never far from his thoughts. Significantly, his 1993 solo album, “PsychoDerelict,” was about an old star revisiting a failed project from his youth.

What’s more, he was resolving most of the problems that had perhaps hamstrung his attempts to complete his most difficult project. Like many a middle-aged man of the therapy generation, he worked on sorting out confusion about his relationship with his late father, Cliff, a big-band sax player often absent during his childhood.

“I think the creative process requires that you should be, not bad in a rock ‘n’ roll cliche way, but disturbed in a way and doing something out there to find out who you are,” he says.

“What’s happened to me recently is not that I’ve had any revelations or discovered who I am, I’ve just had a long period of acceptance, which is partly to do with giving up booze and finally realizing that I used to drink because it fixed something that was wrong with me--which was a feeling of being unable to fit in, unable to value myself.

“So now, instead of avoiding specifics--you know, let’s keep it [expletive] abstract!--I tend to be writing songs about whether I love life, or whether I love God, or whether I love my girlfriend, or whether I love me, or whether I love anybody at all.”

However it may fit his self-analysis, this new state of mind enabled him, at last, to return to “Lifehouse.”

“It inspired me and continues to inspire me,” is his simple explanation, confirmed this year by the appearance of the six-CD “Lifehouse Chronicles” (1971 demos, new recordings, orchestral versions, a BBC radio play). While the magnum opus can be ordered only via the Web, a single-CD edition, “Lifehouse Elements,” was released in U.S. record stores last week by Redline Entertainment--just four days after his 55th birthday.

So at last he has translated his one great failure into achievement. He can afford to bask a little, sit back and reflect on the constant, paradoxical gift he has exercised on behalf of the Who’s and his own audience. As he writes in the booklet accompanying “Lifehouse Chronicles”: “What I was best at putting into words for them was the frustration that they could not put anything into words.”