Find out 'Who's Next'

By Bruce Fessier - The Desert Sun - Palm Springs,CA,USA

Saturday, November 11, 2006

The Who didn't invent the concept album - Frank Sinatra and Gordon Jenkins were making those in the '40s and '50s.

But Pete Townshend took the concept album advanced by The Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club" and turned it into something that could be adapted to Broadway, film, even the Metropolitan Opera.

Townshend called it "Tommy." Critics called it rock opera.

Now, 24 years after his last album of new material for The Who, Townshend has reunited with singer Roger Daltrey to create a new concept CD with its own "mini-opera." The album is "Endless Wire." The mini-opera is "Wire & Glass," and it's based on a novella Townshend wrote titled, "The Boy Who Heard Music."

The Who will play segments (or fragments, as Townshend calls them on the album) with classic Who staples Saturday at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

The concept of "Wire & Glass" is simple, as Townshend explained in an exclusive interview with The Desert Sun:
"A retired rock star meditates. From the heights of his stratospheric point of view he sees three children from his old neighborhood exalt and revive his early, flawed but most ambitious work. He watches them rise. He joins them in their attempt to realize the most important part of his vision: The unification of a global audience, in a single moment. He then watches them fall."

Like his previous classic concept projects, "Tommy," "Quadrophenia," "The Who Sells Out," and the multi-media film "Lifehouse," which was eventually whittled down to "Who's Next," the theme is music as an instrument of spiritual transformation.

Townshend told The Desert Sun how this theme came to permeate his work, and how his appreciation of Sinatra impacted his music.

Can you trace your fascination with that theme to an autobiographical experience?There was for me as a boy a series of revelations - this happened in two instances that I use in "The Boy Who Heard Music." I dramatize them a little in the story. What happened was that I began to hear imagined music when playing my aunt's delightfully out-of-tune piano. I was about 8 years old.
Later, in an incident on the River Thames, at around 11 years old, I experienced a loss of consciousness when listening to the "music" created by the sound of an outboard motor. I also use this experience in "Quadrophenia."

Did growing up the son of a touring musician influence that? Was it something you learned from Meher Baba?Growing up around my father's band was wonderful. The only regret I have was that, when my father invited me to play guitar with him in his afternoon band on the Isle of Man when I was about 14 or 15, I didn't have the confidence to join him. If I had, I would have side-stepped rock 'n' roll and R&B and had a much quieter and no doubt more stable life.

Meher Baba's teachings are rather Sufic by nature. He stressed obedience over love, but was very liberal and easy with his outer circle of devotees, many of whom were from the West. In fact, he was profoundly loving I think. But those close to him had to be extremely devout in most cases, and very disciplined.

It was meeting those people - I've never come across any group of such high quality since - that convinced me I'd found a genuine spiritual master.

Your career has embraced the virtual history of pop music - having played in blues and trad jazz bands before The Who and having worked with Pete Kameron through the '70s after he had worked with (folk progenitors) the (Weavers and the Modern Jazz Quartet in the '40s and '50s. Is this something you're conscious of? If so, what does it mean to you?How extraordinary you should mention Pete Kameron. I have been thinking of him while here in L.A. wondering how he is. Pete was with me and our manager, Kit Lambert, when Universal Pictures gave the green light to my "Lifehouse" movie in 1972, an event that seems to have become entangled in myth.
My father and my father-in-law, the film composer Edwin Astley, had more to do with this broad immersion in all kinds of music, I think. Neither man would countenance any kind of musical snobbery, even though they both had very clear boundaries about the value of their own era, style and capabilities.

I grew up idolizing Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and, as an early teen moved to Connie Francis and Bobby Darin.
It's clear that as wonderful as the latter couple were, they were not Frank and Ella; the prognosis was grim. Bill Haley was the miracle I needed to make a break from the old order that I could see was declining. But I've never lost my love of a beautifully arranged orchestra, a detached interpretation of a smart Broadway song by a great singer.

Today after years of study, I can at least write music, and with the help of my partner Rachel Fuller - an organ scholar no less - I have the confidence to put the parts in front of great players.
How has the family you've been raising since your last album in 1982 affected your art today?

I took my son to check out my stored collection of vinyl recently. He is just 17. I told him to take what he wanted. Without much hesitation, and acting almost intuitively, he pulled out a most precious record: "Funky Blues" by Charlie Parker. Not his greatest work, but it's laid back and opens with a cool groove, and has a great sleeve.

My son's first love as a 5-year-old was John Coltrane's "Trane Ride." Now he leads me to new music.

I've been very lucky to be surrounded by professional music in my family all my life, in my wife Karen's family (we are long separated), and now in my relationship with Rachel.

Any thoughts on where music is going?At art school in 1961 my tutors correctly threatened that the coming age of computers would change the language of everyday life. What has remained aloof from most of the explosive change is music itself as a form of meditation.

For us in the West, music is our most effective pathway to something akin to Zen. And our form of spiritual connection allows us to dance if we wish while we attain the trance. We are like dancing Buddhists.

Maybe that's why I like the idea of Sufism, not all Sufis whirl of course, but those that do create an image that I think God - if he really does bother to observe us - must find very amusing.