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jlowe

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gotdablouse
A long article in RS : [www.rollingstone.com]

Did realize Rog and Pete were at odds on just about everything...they did find a way to make an album though, using a rather "original" method, maybe Mick and Keith should try that to manage to overcome "the wall" !

Pete and Roger seem to have the same sort of relationship as Muck and Keith.


Good article, by the way.

Muck and Keith.......sounds like a comedy team.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-11-26 23:13 by Hairball.

Posted on Facebook by Pete:

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Pete Townshend
My interview with Rolling Stone. Headline: 'Pete Townshend says “thanks God” Moon, John Entwistle are dead; they were @#$%& difficult to play with”’.

This was said as part of an interview in response to a series of questions about Who history, the early days and how it is today.

PETE! FOR @#$%&’S SAKE PUT A LID ON IT!

No one can ever know how much I miss Keith and John, as people, as friends and as musicians. The alchemy we used to share in the studio is missing from the new album, and it always feels wrong to try to summon it up without them, but I suppose we will always be tempted to try. To this day I am angry at Keith and John for dying. Sometimes it shows. It’s selfish, but it’s how I feel.

But I am sincerely grateful to have had these second and third incarnations as a member of what we still dare to call The Who – once after Keith passed, then again after John passed. I do thank God for this, but I was being ironic in my own English way by suggesting it is something I am glad about. I can be grateful to be free as a player and writer, but sad about losing old friends. It does feel ironic, and it also makes me angry. Towards the end of my mother Betty’s life she drove me barmy, and there was a huge sense of relief when she finally passed, but I miss her very much. Love has so many facets.

I understand that a lot of long-time Who fans will be hurt by the way it comes across as a headline. I only hope that they know me well enough that I tell the truth as much as I can, but I also tell both sides and the upside is missing in the headlines.

Writing for Roger, and performing with him, is easier than the early days with the old four-piece band. Many of you will have heard me say that working with Roger these days can be tricky, and challenging, but that ultimately I find it “easy”. John and Keith were so eccentric and individual as musicians. They literally did take up so much musical and sonic space. As a guitar player I never learned to shred because there was never any space for it. On Live At Leeds and bootlegs from that time you can often hear me stop the music to noodle around, partly so I could think!

The upside with Keith and John was that on tour and in the studio we had so much fun. Playing with them was hard, but both Roger and I spent a lot of time doubled up in joy and laughter even though we could have benefitted from a quieter life sometimes. It was a riot.

To those family members of Keith and John, especially Chris Entwistle and Mandy Moon, I apologise for the headlines – and for carelessly providing the words that were used – but in the past three months I have done so many interviews I am losing focus and patience. I forgive myself. I hope they can forgive me too. I loved their dads and still do.

Roger lost his rag at a press conference at Wembley about Brexit. I found it worrying, but I understood. We may be rock stars but we are also human. Roger and I have not changed very much over the years, but we do love and like each other these days. It’s really poignantly painful to imagine how things would have turned out had John and Keith had also been allowed to become older, kinder and wiser. The Who might have grown musically, or possibly just gone around in circles, but I assure you we would have deepened our love for each other as human beings and colleagues.

As musicians? Who knows?

Link to Pete Townshend's Facebook post (and replies) - [www.facebook.com]

Rumor of The Who playing in Prague next year.....Just sent out by a promotion company called Fource.cz....10:00am CET TIME Friday...Via FB....Would be there first time here...Will see Friday Morning...Keep ya posted

There's a special 45 in the latest German edition of Rolling Stone. It's My Generation with Ball And Chain on white vinyl. Enjoy!

pete in the headlines!!....cant be because he has a new book to promote and a little thing called a NEW WHO ALBUM....pr will never change

long live rock!

Another great review for the album, this time from The Guardian

The first words you hear on the Who’s 12th studio album are Roger Daltrey, telling the band’s audience to get stuffed. “I don’t care,” the band’s 75-year-old frontman sings, “I know you’re going to hate this song.” There follows four and half minutes of agonising over whether there’s any point in making a new Who album at all – “this sound that we share has already been played” – before songwriter Townshend signs off on All This Music Must Fade with a muttered “who gives a @#$%&?”

The Who: Who album art work
The Who: Who album art work
This is obviously not the way heritage rock artists essaying their first album in 13 years are meant to carry on. Then again, it feels, well, very Who. No member of the rock aristocracy has ever seemed as troubled by the very notion of being a rock star as Pete Townshend. The Who weren’t even supposed to be a band, he said in 2006. As far as Townshend was concerned, they were a kind of art school project, complete with a thesis he’d written under the influence of Gustav Metzger’s concept of auto-destructive art, announcing that, as soon as they got famous, they were going to split up. Or worse: at one point, he suggested the band douse themselves in petrol and set fire to themselves on stage.

In truth, Townshend ruined his own plan by being such an innovative songwriter and performer that giving up no longer seemed like an option. Instead, he settled for metaphorically thrashing about, seemingly in the throes of a perpetual existential crisis, writing songs that were, as writer Jon Savage put it, “at war”: with the older generation, with the class system, with accepted notions of gender, with the commodification of pop and, frequently, with the Who and their audience. Townshend was big on sending out peevish signals that music was not what it could be. Amid the innovations of 1966, he protested that pop’s innocence had been tragically lost. In 1972, he worked on an unreleased projected called Rock Is Dead. By the time punk arrived, he was declaring himself old and irrelevant: “Am I doing it all again? … We’re chewing a bone.” He was 32.

Forty years on, with half of the Who deceased and the relationship of its two surviving members in a precarious state – Who was recorded without Townshend or Daltrey actually meeting – Townshend seems more troubled than ever. Who certainly does some of the things that artists of their vintage are supposed to do, including make knowing references to their most beloved work. The fantastic Detour has a definite air of Magic Bus, as well as a titular nod to the name that the nascent Who plied their trade under in the early 60s. A Baba O’Riley-ish synth flutters around Street Song; an echo of Substitute’s intro haunts the acoustic guitar of I Don’t Wanna Get Wise.

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The Who: I Don’t Wanna Get Wise – video
But the most Who-esque thing about it might be the way its songs repeatedly pick at questions of the Who’s own relevance. I Don’t Wanna Get Wise views a rock career as one of inevitable decline – from “snotty young kids” to “over-full, always sated, puffed-up and elated” – while Hero Ground Zero and Rockin’ in Rage both pitch fears of superannuation against the continued desire to create: “I’m too old to fight … I don’t have a right to join the parade,” suggests the latter, before adding: “you know you must write, you know you must rage.”

If not everything here works – there’s nothing wrong with the political sentiment of Ball and Chain, it just feels a little lumbering and clumsy – there’s something exciting about hearing Townshend vacillating between declaring himself spent and readying himself for another charge. Inspired by the Grenfell disaster, Street Song carries a distinct hint of Won’t Get Fooled Again’s furious snarl; Beads on One String rather sweetly sticks fast to a hippy-ish notion of universal brotherhood and the potential for world peace. Moreover, the changing mood fits Daltrey’s vocals perfectly: gruffer and more weathered than it once was, his voice imbues the lyrics with a sense of hard-won experience, alternately weary and fraught.


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Nor is Who afraid of assaulting its audience’s preconceptions. You get the feeling Townshend knows precisely who’s going to buy a new Who album in 2019, largely because he frequently seems to be having a high old time doing precisely the opposite of what they might expect. There are bursts of Auto-Tuned vocals. The sonic nods to “classic” Who sit alongside tracks that do things the “classic” Who would never have countenanced. I’ll Be Back is a lovely, Townshend-sung, harmonica-decorated bit of acoustic MOR that ruminates on dignity and reincarnation, while the folky stomp of Break the News, written by Townshend’s brother Simon, hymns the pleasures of old age, among them “watching movies in our dressing gowns”, which frankly seems like straight-up trolling of the kind of person who feels obliged to bring up My Generation’s thoughts about the relative merits of dying and ageing, whenever the Who’s name is mentioned.

Of course, half of the Who did get old, which means there’s a strong chance this might be their last album. If it is, then they’re going out the way they came in: as cussed and awkward and troubled as ever.

Just heard it on the radio while taking the kids to school: had to turn the volume at the MAX!

Just great!

C

No Who in Prague some crap DJ thing from London....

Pete Townshend interview: 'We felt complicit in Keith Moon's death'


The Who's Pete Townshend in London in July Credit: Matt Crossick

By Neil McCormick
29 November 2019

I’ve never really liked The Who,” announces Pete Townshend. “I’m serious. I think that they undermined the craft, they undermined the ideas, they turned into a heavy, stupid band that could get a bigger reaction smashing a guitar than playing a beautiful solo. I never liked it, I still don’t like it.”

The 74-year-old guitarist and songwriter may sound emphatic in his condemnation of the band he has led since 1964, but it is more complicated than it seems. This week on Facebook he apologised for comments in a Rolling Stone interview suggesting he was happy his old bandmates, drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, were dead. “Thank God they’re gone. Because they were f*cking difficult to play with.” Moon died of a drug overdose in 1978, aged just 32. Entwistle died of a cocaine-induced heart attack aged 57 in 2002, one night before the start of a US tour.

Townshend claimed sensationalist headlines missed the irony in his remarks, noting: “To this day I am angry at Keith and John for dying. Sometimes it shows.”

As anyone who has interviewed him might attest, part of the problem is his conversational style. Townshend is a brilliant, highly articulate individual who zigzags from proposition to contradiction, vigorously interrogating different viewpoints with passion and humour, like someone arguing with themselves in search of some core truth or revelation.

There is no doubt that his feelings about The Who are conflicted. “We’ve seen Elton John and Queen biopics, so what about a Who biopic? Film opens, Keith Moon is throwing a television through a hotel window. The end. That would be good enough for me. Every artist is reduced to a meme. That’s ours.” But he will also say: “We lost so much magic when Keith and John died. The chemistry when they played, that was The Who to me. We’ve had to become something else.”

Townshend and Daltrey continued with a brilliant touring band, and yet some part of the guitarist’s ambivalence about The Who still relates to his absent colleagues. “As funny as it was that Keith used to do crazy things that would make us laugh, there was always this sense that he was gonna die young. So we weren’t surprised, but we felt that we’d been complicit. And then John, taking incredibly powerful heart medication and doing lines of coke, you know. The Who has been a nightmare. There were fun bits, I suppose. But I was drunk most of the time.”

Nevertheless, this leads Townshend into an affectionate digression about Seventies recording sessions. “We used to keep a bar in a flight case. Where you’d expect to find equipment, you’d open it up and we had draft beer and bottles of brandy. John would be there with his big globe of Remy Martin, Keith would arrive in a pink Rolls-Royce dressed as the Pope, the storytelling was glorious and we’d be laughing for days.

"And then we’d start to play, slightly hung-over, and bam! Magic would happen. I might play a phrase and before I’d even finish, John is playing it, he’s almost ahead of me. Those years were wearing and terrifying, they really were, but they were also full of great moments where you just go into the zone and your fingers start to play themselves. And that was magical. When they were gone, I lost that. I really miss it.”

Next week, The Who will release their 12th album, simply titled WHO. It is fantastic, packed full of big, questioning, philosophical rock songs, sung with power and feeling by frontman Roger Daltrey, and driven by Townshend’s complex melodic progressions and dramatic power chords. A copy sits on the table between us in a bar in Chelsea, south-west London, with a snappy cover by the great pop artist Peter Blake.

Despite his comments, Townshend is clearly delighted with it. “I really needed to reconnect with what matters to me, which is creativity, songwriting, the dignity of being a composer.” So he set himself the task of writing new songs for Daltrey to sing. “Our relationship has never been better, never been healthier or more direct. But we are very polarised. He exhorts the whole notion of performing and I hate it. So when I was trying to work out what we had in common, I didn’t run out of fingers on one hand. We’re old. So I wrote songs about that.”

There are a clutch of rip-roaring political anthems alongside offbeat songs addressing spiritual and carnal love. But four belting rockers at the album’s heart grapple with the challenges of being an old musical warrior in a changing world: All This Music Must Fade, I Don’t Want to Get Wise, Hero Ground Zero and Rockin’ in Rage. “When I joined The Who, Roger Daltrey was a bully, an A**hole and a street fighter, and from that moment I felt safe under his protection. And I love to think about Roger as somebody who can reconnect with his rage and strength and power and defiance as a young man. At our age, we can honour the Dylan Thomas idea to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. Think of this as a long, drawn- out deathbed scene.”

Surprisingly, The Who almost broke up before making the album. At a meeting in December last year, Daltrey was reluctant to commit. “So I got up and walked out. And that was the end of The Who.” He started to make plans for a solo show before Daltrey capitulated, going on to proclaim this the best Who album since Quadrophenia. Townshend feels validated, yet the question remains why he has persisted with a band he is so conflicted about.

“I ask myself the same question. If I don’t like this, why would I do it?” he says. Townshend talks about his role as a family man, breadwinner, friend to band and crew and benefactor to charities. “People say you don’t need the money, but it doesn’t hurt to have an incentive.” He tells a story about helping a relative pay hospital bills. “When I write that cheque, my heart flies because I feel like I’ve been graced. So I’m not saying I pay a high price. I find it easy to do what I do, and it seems to have a high function and reason for being.”

This leads to a wide-ranging discussion encompassing his journey from art college to becoming one of the godfathers of art rock, and the role The Who played articulating a generational divide. “I think society was in terrible trouble, and we had to draw a line.”

Townshend spins bewildering theories about the mass psychological childhood brutalisation of his post-war generation, and how that lies at the root of the world’s current political and social problems. “The millennials say it’s your fault, you boomers! They’re f*cking right. But we had to find some way to cope and that was by living in denial.” He connects his own memories of childhood sexual abuse (which he wrote about in 2012 autobiography Who I Am) to his being cautioned by the police in 2003 after admiting he used his credit card to access a child pornography website.

Townshend claimed to have been trying to demonstrate banks were complicit in internet paedophilia, and feels exonerated by the police admission that no pornography was found on his computers. “It was a f*cking f*ck up. I mishandled it. It’s so strange to have this in your psyche. I know I will go to my deathbed and as I fade away, I will have to wake up that four-year-old boy inside and say ‘Sorry, son. I could not fix what happened to you. I can’t explain it. But thank you for staying with me.’ ”

The hour scheduled for our interview stretches closer to three. Townshend has been getting very busy of late. This month, Coronet published his debut novel, The Age of Anxiety, which he plans to turn it into “an opera and an art installation, f*uck the pretension!” He might even write more songs for The Who. “As much as I dismiss it as a brand name, The Who is a pillar around which so much revolves. I’ve had a few cracks at making art that contributes to society, that can make you look at yourself, not as a reflection but a challenge. Maybe there’s time for one more.”?

We are still talking as we walk out. “Next year, I’ll be 75,” he says. “This is a time of life when the clock speeds up so fast, one year blurs into another. But as long as I’m fit and I can keep my brain alert, I’m hoping that I can use these last few years to accomplish something. The big question is why keep doing this? And the answer is really simple: because I have to.”

The Who: Who will be released by Polydor on Dec 6

[www.telegraph.co.uk]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-11-30 23:22 by bye bye johnny.

Sounds like the typical haunted artist to me. A genuine article. Thanks to Pete!

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Hairball

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jlowe
Pete and Roger seem to have the same sort of relationship as Muck and Keith.

Muck and Keith.......sounds like a comedy team.

Ain't they? Like, their favourite routine being the slowburn - waiting for the punchline 13 years and counting ...

The more I read about it, the more the new Who album gets me interested.

the who are on british tv sat 7th dec - ITV jonathan ross show!! 10.25PM

why the stones did not do this for b&l i do not know, well aprt from Sir Mick wanting to be trending pop star not a front man for a cool blues band

suspect they hop across the pond and do sat night live

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mikey C
Rumor of The Who playing in Prague next year.....Just sent out by a promotion company called Fource.cz....10:00am CET TIME Friday...Via FB....Would be there first time here...Will see Friday Morning...Keep ya posted

I'd go to that one.

Rumor of The Who playing in Prague next year.....Just sent out by a promotion company called Fource.cz....10:00am CET TIME Friday...Via FB....Would be there first time here...Will see Friday Morning...Keep ya posted

WOW! Sounds GReat!!!!!

Scroll up lads not going to happen......Sad to say

All this garbage Pete is spewing...is it just to get The Who in the headlines and help promote the album? Maybe. Is it just Pete being Pete? Likely. But one thing's for sure, Who tickets were being sold for $5 ****ing dollars at Alpine Valley. FIVE. A beer costs more. I would think it bother's Pete on some level that The Who (the "Two") aren't doing better...and so some of this Pete nonsense in the press is perhaps akin to a lion roaring in dissatisfaction at the state of his kingdom.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2019-12-02 23:56 by floodonthepage.

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Hairball
New documentary about the 1979 concert tragedy in Cincinnati, including interviews with Pete and Roger:

The Who: The Night That Changed Rock

"This 60-minute documentary will air Dec. 3, the 40th anniversary of the tragedy, at 8 p.m. Eastern on WCPO-TV and stream live on wcpo.com.
The documentary and expanded interviews will also be available wherever you stream WCPO. A companion podcast will be available Dec. 4".

wcpo.com

The Who - The Night That Changed Rock



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-12-04 05:35 by Cristiano Radtke.

Well done documentary, thank you for sharing. I will be looking forward to seeing the Who in Cincinnati (Northern Kentucky actually) in April 2020!

Poignant and uplifting at the same time.

As for playing Cincinnati again, they could make it a benefit/pay per view with proceeds going towards the scholarships, etc.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

"Moving On!" 2020 U.S. tour dates:

April 21 - Hard Rock Live - Hollywood, FL
April 23 - BB&T Arena Northern Kentucky University - Highland Heights, KY
April 27 - American Airlines Center - Dallas, TX (Rescheduled)
April 30 - Toyota Center - Houston, TX (Rescheduled)
May 02 - Pepsi Center - Denver, CO (Rescheduled)
May 05 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 07 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 09 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 12 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 14 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 16 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV

seems thay have not made the Jonathan ross show this week 7th dec, maybe its posponed rather than cancelled...xmas show anyone

Got an email yesterday saying the new CD has shipped!

Every Ticketmaster purchase of tickets to this tour receives 1 copy.

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ukcal
the who are on british tv sat 7th dec - ITV jonathan ross show!! 10.25PM

why the stones did not do this for b&l i do not know, well aprt from Sir Mick wanting to be trending pop star not a front man for a cool blues band

suspect they hop across the pond and do sat night live

Yes, strange that both Mick and Keith (separately of course) seem happy to promote their latest product on US Chat shows but not the prime time ones in the UK.
It was Bill who more often than not would do the deed...and he was fine of course. Easy to interview. Now he is straight, I imagine Ronnie could do the media stuff, just he never seems sincere in the way Bill most obviously was.

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keefriff99
"Moving On!" 2020 U.S. tour dates:

April 21 - Hard Rock Live - Hollywood, FL
April 23 - BB&T Arena Northern Kentucky University - Highland Heights, KY
April 27 - American Airlines Center - Dallas, TX (Rescheduled)
April 30 - Toyota Center - Houston, TX (Rescheduled)
May 02 - Pepsi Center - Denver, CO (Rescheduled)
May 05 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 07 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 09 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 12 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 14 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV
May 16 - The Colosseum at Caesars Palace - Las Vegas, NV

Vegas: tempting!

Public Onsale : Fri, 6 Dec 2019 at 10:00 AM

Legendary rock band The Who have announced they’ll be moving on in 2020 with more tour dates, not quite ready to close the books on their acclaimed MOVING ON! TOUR, which paired Singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend with local symphony orchestras across North America and was hailed by critics as a once-in-a-lifetime rock experience. Along with a series of rescheduled shows announced earlier in the month the band has expanded their 2020 itinerary to include a show April 23 in the greater Cincinnati, OH area (BB&T Arena at Northern Kentucky University). Tickets will be available at Ticketmaster.com and the BB&T Arena Box Office.

The Who’s April 23rd show in Cincinnati will have added historical significance as it will be the first time the band will be performing in the city since eleven lives were tragically lost as the concert crowd waited to get into The Who’s concert on December 3, 1979. The historic show was announced December 3 by local Cincinnati TV station WCPO after airing a documentary special commemorating the 40th anniversary of the tragedy – The Who: The Night That Changed Rock. Pete and Roger were both interviewed for the special program along with long-time manager Bill Curbishley. The Who will make a donation from the concert to the P.E.M. Memorial, the organization that was founded to honor friends and classmates that lost their lives at the December 3rd, 1979 concert, providing college scholarships for students at Finneytown High School.

[www.facebook.com]

[www.thewho.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-12-04 22:04 by bye bye johnny.

"The Who will make a donation from the concert to the P.E.M. Memorial, the organization that was founded to honor friends and classmates
that lost their lives at the December 3rd, 1979 concert, providing college scholarships for students at Finneytown High School".



Just received email confirmation that my first of several free cd's (w/ticket purchased) has been shipped.
Vegas 2020 very tempting.....

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Quote
Hairball
"The Who will make a donation from the concert to the P.E.M. Memorial, the organization that was founded to honor friends and classmates
that lost their lives at the December 3rd, 1979 concert, providing college scholarships for students at Finneytown High School".



Just received email confirmation that my first of several free cd's (w/ticket purchased) has been shipped.
Vegas 2020 very tempting.....

Just got the same email...

the shoot 'em dead, brainbell jangler!

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kovach
Got an email yesterday saying the new CD has shipped!

Every Ticketmaster purchase of tickets to this tour receives 1 copy.

Every Ticketmaster purchase of two tickets receives one copy. Driving alone three hours to Nashville and back for me to see them for the first time does not entitle me to a copy.

I thought I read they were going to be at Jazzfest