Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304160020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY CAMPBELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
MUSIC THEATER HELPS WHO GUITARIST SEE THE CRAFT THAT'S IN ROCK 'N' ROLL
Guitarist Pete Townshend says that working in music theater "has made me realize there is an equal, parallel craft in rock."The music theater he's working on is "Tommy," the rock opera he composed in 1969 for the English rock group the Who. It's now on Broadway, at the St. James Theater, with a cast of 28 and 14 musicians.
Townshend, 46, says, "What my generation of rock has suffered from is, we didn't develop a craft. We developed a lifestyle and an attitude. We felt it would be pretentious to try to develop a craft around something which was evolving unformed. We were convinced that it was destined to destroy itself. Nevertheless, there is a craft there.
"We rock artists who are aging, instead of becoming objects of ridicule, need to start to refine our craft rather than let it blunder on like a lumbering machine until it crumbles to dust."
Townshend had time recently to work on a theatrical production of "Tommy" because of a Friday the 13th bike accident in 1991. He, singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle did a Who 25th anniversary tour in 1989. Who drummer Keith Moon died in 1978.
After the tour, Townshend started making a solo album. It was due Sept. 30, 1991. Then he fell off a bicycle Sept. 13, 1991, and smashed his right arm. He says, "I was sailing. I stopped at the Scilly Isles and rented a bike. I hit a hole, went over the handlebars, landed on my right shoulder and the bike hit my hand. A helicopter took me to the mainland. Somebody else sailed my boat back. I was in and out of hospital six weeks, then had a long period of physiotherapy.
"There are metal plates in my arm. I can't flex my wrist or twist my arm at all. I can't do my Pete Townshend thing on the guitar. It sounds like somebody else.
"Virgin Records encouraged me to go on with the album. Some was recorded before the accident and some afterwards." Atlantic Records will release "Psychoderelict" on June 15 in America.
While he was recuperating, Pace Theatrical Group, which had been trying to get the rights to tour "Tommy," tried again.
Townshend says, "They put me together with Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, who directed `Big River' on Broadway. I liked him immediately. We had long brainstorming sessions. When I was happy with the material, they did a workshop production in La Jolla, last year."
When Townshend was composing "Tommy," which became the most famous of a new musical genre, rock opera, he was thinking about saving the Who.
"We were a singles band facing ignominy. We'd had a hit, `I Can See for Miles,' in America. It wasn't an international hit.
"I sat down to write to save not just the Who but the process that the Who had begun. Every band thought they had a cause. We believed rock 'n' roll was an ideology rather than a lifestyle."
The Who was saved. It recorded "Tommy" and toured performing it, sometimes in opera houses. The group got a further boost when Ken Russell made "Tommy" into a movie in 1975.
Townshend liked the film, which had Roger Daltrey as Tommy, Ann-Margret as his mother, Tina Turner as the "Acid Queen" gypsy and Jack Nicholson as the doctor. Townshend, who worked on the music, says, "The style turned each scene into kind of an MTV video, revolutionary at the time."
But he's even happier with the Broadway "Tommy."
"For me it really is such an exciting thing to happen," Townshend says, "partly because I'm so sure that `Tommy' is a good solid piece of work. The work we have done on it I think has revealed that there was a very solid heart to it in the first place. It wasn't just a bunch of hippies getting stoned and listening to a story that wasn't really there. It is a story."
But there's a new ending for the '90s.
Originally, Tommy goes into "traumatically induced isolation" after he sees his father, reported missing in a war, return and kill his mother's lover. (Because of protests from parents of autistic children, Tommy is no longer called autistic.) Tommy's Cousin Kevin bullies him; Uncle Ernie molests him; a gypsy gives him LSD. His silent plea is, "See me, feel me, touch me, heal me."
Tommy becomes a pinball wizard, develops a following. A doctor notices that he responds to his image in a mirror. His mother breaks his mirror. He suddenly can talk. He becomes a religious leader, again gets followers but they turn against him. The final song is Tommy's statement of wonderment.
Townshend says, "In the original story, Tommy was very much a rock-star figure. Pinball was a metaphor for rock 'n' roll and celebrity, decadence, power and the misuse of power.
"Emerging from silence, he rushed straight into some kind of spiritual emancipation, which solved all his childhood problems and left him facing only God. It was a nice airy-fairy ending for the '60s and '70s, not right for this day and age, I don't think.
"We've rewritten the second act. Now, as soon as Tommy emerges, he takes charge of his life.
"I think the great moment for me was discovering `Tommy' did have an ending. Instead of the abstract ending of him turning away from everything difficult in life and going up the mountain, he goes home. At the end, he is off to restart his life.
"In these dark days we have to be optimistic. We have to believe we can start again and make this life work." Townshend was the author in 1965 of the rock lyric line, "Hope I die before I get old." He no longer feels like that, either.