In the early days of the Who, Pete Townshend gave little thought to a solo career. Writing songs for the band, crafting albums, and touring behind them occupied nearly all of his time and mental energy.
In 1972, however, he was persuaded to shape Who Came First — a spiritual collection of oddities and demos meant only for the ears of friends and fellow followers of Meher Baba — into an official release once bootlegs flooded the market. And five years later, he teamed up with Faces bassist Ronnie Lane for the collaborative LP Rough Mix.
It wasn’t until 1980, two years after the death of the Who’s drummer Keith Moon, that he finally agreed to create a proper solo album, Empty Glass. “There was great pressure on me to release myself creatively from the constraints of only writing songs for the Who, a band that had become increasingly self-aggrandizing and pompous, anthem-like even, and allow myself the outlet of a solo album,” Townshend writes in liner notes for Studio Albums, a new 8-CD box set chronicling his entire recording career outside of the Who, which arrives this week. “Although here is a collection of solo songs, they could all have been Who songs in my opinion…Let’s not fall into the trap that I kept songs back from The Who. I never did that. I just wrote songs.”
A few days before he was due to meet up with Roger Daltrey and begin rehearsals for a pair of Who concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall to benefit the Teenage Cancer Trust, he jumped on Zoom with Rolling Stone to talk about his solo career. But as always happens, the conversation veered into all sorts of other realms.
John Entwistle made his first solo record in 1971. Roger Daltrey did his in 1973. Keith Moon followed in 1974. You didn’t do a proper one until 1980. Why were you the last?
Because I was writing the songs for the fuckin’ Who, that’s why!
That’s a pretty reasonable explanation. The songs you wrote for The Who by Numbers were so intimate and personal, though, unlike anything the band had done before. Did it ever cross your mind to put them on a solo record at the time?
No, I didn’t. That’s an interesting album because what actually happened with that is I’d submitted 35 songs as demos to Roger, and he was the one that pretty much selected the very handful that we actually recorded with [producer] Glyn [Johns]. And quite a few of them, including “Empty Glass” and a couple of others, ended up on the Empty Glass album because they were rejected from Who by Numbers, by Roger. I don’t suppose he’ll remember it quite that way, but that’s what happened.
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He didn’t balk at ones like “How Many Friends Do I Really Have,” where you’re just pouring your soul out?
No, I don’t think he did. I don’t know what he said about it in the past. I haven’t tracked it, but I think he seemed quite willing to dig into those things. Remember we also had a producer, Glyn Johns, who’s a pretty forceful character, so he guided us through what we were going to do.
Jumping to Rough Mix. I’ve read that Ronnie Lane wanted to write songs with you. Why weren’t you interested in trying that out?
We had already tried to write songs together, to be fair. We were close friends. He used to come to my studio and we did a few things together. I suppose I might be a bit precious about my studio time. I really love being in the studio and I like being able to experiment. I just don’t think I’m a very good collaborator. I’m not one of those musicians that likes to gaze into the eye of the other man and connect soul to soul.
I think my writing process has crept up on me since the beginning. I’m not 100 percent sure of what I’m doing when I set out to write a song. Sometimes it starts with a catchphrase, sometimes with a complete lyric or poem. Sometimes it might be an essay idea. Other times it might be some goofy sound that I produce on a synthesizer. So the collaboration aspect of music for me has been limited because the Who were not a collaborative band, except when they were onstage. In the studio, we were very much guided by Kit Lambert as our producer. And we didn’t jam, for example, in the studio, as we did on the stage. The only Who album that you’ve got where you can hear the band jamming is Live at Leeds.
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When you wrote the songs for Empty Glass, were you in the mindset of creating work for a solo album?
There may have been a couple that I wrote around the time of the album, but the backstory of this is that a lot of people close to the Who, and on the boundaries of the Who, were worried about my mental health. They blamed the lack of emotional, creative support I was getting from not just the members of the Who, but also from Kit Lambert, the manager of the Who, who had been a great ally of mine up until that time. And they figured that it was really important for me to express myself as a solo artist. I don’t know that they were right, to be honest.
I think the reverse happened. By setting me up with a record deal for a set of solo albums over a period of time, at the same time that the Who did a huge record deal, just added to my mental illness issues. It was just overwork, and too much pressure.
You made four albums in three years. That’s a lot on your shoulders.
It is when you consider that I was writing the songs, doing the demos, doing the PR around it all, and still continuing to do Who shows. I remember one of the guys at Warner Brothers who signed me called me lazy because I wouldn’t tour [my 1985 solo album] White City. I’ve never really liked touring very much, with or without the Who, so as a solo artist, I wasn’t exactly going to run towards touring.
The Empty Glass period was a really exciting period for me. I look back at it with great affection. I got a great offer from CBS, which I turned down. I went with Doug [Morris] at Atco. I was incredibly well-supported by them. I found a great producer in Chris Thomas.
I had a good time making the record, but I think what suffered was my family. It’s just one of those situations where as soon as I had time to breathe on my solo project, I was then having to fill in time with the Who. And that led to a decision, which I made in 1982 with the second solo album [All the Best Cowboys Have] Chinese Eyes, where I left the Who. In a sense I was blaming the Who, or blaming the general malaise of the rock industry, as it applied to me. That was a mistake. I should just have said, “Listen, I need more time. I need to take things more slowly.”
There was also this phenomena that all the other members of the band loved to tour, and I didn’t. So in a sense, there was this feeling, “Oh, Pete’s gone to his studio to write songs for the next album, and it’s going to take as long as it takes.” There was this sense that I was indulging myself. Whereas the way that I saw it, was that it was a place where I could be at home, do my job, and be close to my family. When I got home after tours with the Who, there would be emotional wreckage dumped at the front door. Touring with the Who was no fun. It wasn’t a joy. It wasn’t a rock & roll, Led Zeppelin, shagging virgins exercise.
When I hear the song “Empty Glass,” I can’t help but think I’m hearing from a pretty unhappy person dealing with some serious addiction issues. How much of that is me projecting from what I know about your life, or was it indeed a reflection of your pain at that time?
I don’t know that it was reflecting it, but it has to be a realization, doesn’t it? It came from the heart. But also, since 1966 or 1967, I was realizing that I was going to embark on what I describe as a spiritual journey. I knew that it would have its ups and downs. And this was not something to be undertaken lightly.
It’s not, “Oh, I’m going to become a hippie, and do meditation, and dig into mindfulness, and light incense.” I knew it was going to be tough because I wanted to do it properly. And it wasn’t a very good landscape in which to try to do such a thing. Instead of opening my hotel room door and inviting in a beautiful groupie, I was sending them away, and having them bang on the door until I let them in. And then sitting them down and saying, “Listen, I will talk to you, but I won’t fuck you.”
That was the weird anomaly lifestyle that I was living in. Eventually, that world of attempting to balance spiritual values in terms of moral behavior that I felt was appropriate to what I was doing as a spiritual person was weighing on me very heavily.
I think “Empty Glass,” though, is a fantastic song… The idea is that you set yourself challenges right at the moment that you need the most guidance. I got guidance when I was really young. I was 19 or 20 when I met Kit Lambert. He was exactly the right kind of guy to help me. He was gay. He didn’t treat me as a commodity. He appreciated my talent. He helped me as an editor, but he also helped me as an educator. He helped me learn about life and about society and the way that the industry works. He treated me with the most incredible respect. That wasn’t how the rock industry treated me.
The main thing was that I realized after a few tracks of Empty Glass came back off the speakers was that I was making a great record. And when you get that feeling, it’s a real buzz. Nothing can stop you then.
Did you see “Let My Love Open the Door” as a possible hit song that would connect to a mass audience or did that surprise you?
It surprised Atco, but it didn’t surprise me. I knew it was a hit song from the moment that I started it. It’s very lighthearted. It doesn’t have a lot going on for it, but I think that’s also why I knew it would be good. As I was performing it, I liked the way that it felt.
What was so funny when I played the Chinese Eyes tracks to Doug Morris, he said to me, “So where’s the ‘Let My Love Open the Door?’” And I said, “Doug, you tried to get me to take ‘Let My Love Open the Door’ off the Empty Glass album. You said that it wasn’t rock & roll enough.”
I think it was Noel Gallagher who said it so well recently. “The audience doesn’t know what it wants until it gets it.” They didn’t know that they wanted the Beatles, they didn’t know they wanted the Stones. They didn’t know that they wanted Bob Dylan. And in a sense, that’s what happens with music. You don’t know that you are going to love it until you get it.
The journeys that you take, the ways that you find the artists and the creators that you really love, it’s often a clumsy stumbling journey. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that creative artists, musicians in particular… Elton John is a pain in the ass on it, isn’t he? He’s such a musicologist fan. He just seems to love everything that there is out there. To the extent that his very existence is an embrace of what’s good about the music industry. We are all fans. We listen to music.
A lot of people heard “Rough Boys” and felt it was you basically coming out of the closet.
I think it was that, in a sense. I think what’s misconstrued is the fact that I was ever in the closet. I had had a few gay experiences and just decided really that it wasn’t for me. But there was certainly a period when I was a young man hanging out with Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert. I look back and I realized I really wanted to be gay, but for all the wrong reasons.
Not because of a love, a physical love for men, but because it was cool. Because it was illegal. Because it was dangerous. And for all those reasons. That song emerged as a cat call to the…it’s interesting now, of course that the Village People are saying that “Y.M.C.A.” is not about being gay. But “Rough Boys” is a piss-taker at “Y.M.C.A.” Basically, the idea that we dress in these uniforms of gayness and homosexuality, but in actual fact what we’re attached to is the dangerousness of it. The edge of it.
Why did you call the next album All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes?
I think it was just about the look. I had a photo in my mind of Clint Eastwood in a movie. And that’s it. Just about a look. Trying to describe a look in a poetic sense.
“Slit Skirts” is my favorite one from that record. It starts with “I was just thirty-four years old and I was still wandering in a haze.” Did you feel old at 34?
I did. I think everybody does. I think it’s one of those transition periods. You think 30 is going to be difficult, and I think it is. But I think that the years leading up to 30 are terrible for people. Because you expect a doorway to come down and it doesn’t. And what actually happens is that the readjustment is one of being on a track where the next significant birthday is going to be 40, which feels, in a sense, if you halve the actual average life, it’s less than 80. So you are on the way to being halfway through life.
The thing that I was going through at the time was punk. That must be clear to anybody looking at the way that I operated. I was pissed off about two things. One, that I was too old to be a part of it, but two, the fact that they stole my fuckin’ idea!
It’s true.
The Who was supposed to self-combust within six months. Instead of self-combusting decently and honorably and getting out of the fuckin’ way, we went on and on and on at tedium. Performing like fuckin’ monkeys, smashing guitars and swinging microphones and doing the Keith Moon routine. And what happened with punk was that they took my original manifesto and put it in practice.
But the other thing was it echoed with the New Romantics, where I felt just about young enough to be able to get away with backcombing my hair again like in the mod days. I’m a fashion victim. I grew up in a mod neighborhood and I had loads of friends. But when the Who were in their mod phase, in the High Numbers era and the very early phase, I loved being a mod and loved being a part of it. But it was so brief.
“Slit Skirts” is about the New Romantic era. It was about feeling like I could just about be a part of it, but literally was just a couple of years too old to get away with it. So that sense of being embarrassed about what it is that one wants.
Chinese Eyes was released just a few months before It’s Hard and the Who’s farewell tour. There weren’t many singles, even “Slit Skirts.” It kind of got buried. Do you think in hindsight it should have been shelved until 1983, when the Who were done touring?
I didn’t have those choices. I had contracts. A lot of people felt that what I’d needed after Keith Moon’s death was a solo album career. So I had a solo career, and it turned out to be not the fit. It wasn’t what I needed. I was quite content writing for the Who. What I needed was better time management. Not two record deals on top of each other.
When Chinese Eyes was done, I didn’t go into rehab. I wanted to stop drinking and using drugs, and I did. But I went into therapy for a few years. I decided that, and my therapist agreed, that the best thing for me was to take a rain check on the Who. And it was interpreted as me leaving the Who when we did the ’82 tour.
It wasn’t me that said, “This is the last tour.” It was the Who’s manager. And he did it because it was a “ka-ching” moment. We sold out an arena tour. It wasn’t a very smart thing to do. I should have really protested, but I didn’t. But I felt we could go, “I don’t care what the manager says, I don’t care what the record company or the promoter says. If we want to get back together on a tour again, we fuckin’ will.” It just took a long time.
And it took a long time because the alternative life for me, what I found, working as an editor at Faber and being able to rebuild my family life, was really great. I had a peaceful few years.
In the new liner notes to the box set you wrote, “I handed the stadium stage to Queen and U2, and of course to Bruce Springsteen. That wasn’t a bad thing. But we should have been a part of that Post-Punk legacy act resurgences that those acts enjoyed?” Can you elaborate on that?
The Who invented Stadium Rock. We gave it away. Our timing was terrible. When we did Live Aid, we could barely fuckin’ play. Queen were in the middle of a tour, walked out there, took the whole thing, and turned it into an advert for themselves.
I never really appreciated what Queen was about, to be honest. I liked ABBA, but I didn’t really connect it with the lighthearted pop diversity of Queen’s catalog. I’m a huge fan of Bruce, of course, and a big fan of U2, and very happy to see the way that they took the stadium mantle.
But with songs like “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Baba O’Riley,” I fuckin’ nailed it. There’s no question. And I gave that instrument away. But it would be wrong to say that I regret it, because I don’t. I have to look back and say, “Well, what is, is.” But where it really bit for us all was financially, because that moment was one where instead of playing places like the Fillmore and the occasional arena, the big acts were playing consistently huge venues.
Years after the Who broke up, John Entwistle said being in the Who was like having a winning lottery ticket, but being unable to cash it in.
I think that’s well put. We set it up, and then we walked away from it. And of course, it wasn’t just us. We were really, really lucky to have done that first big stadium gig we did in Anaheim in 1976. What the shock was is that nobody had ever thought about doing it with anybody. You could have done it with Grateful Dead, you could have done it with a whole load of other acts, but nobody thought of doing it. Nobody thought there was a band that could hold the attention of a football stadium or a soccer stadium or an ice hockey stadium.
And we were able to do it. But once it was proven, it then became a given, and then it was something that everybody could use. But yeah, we’d had a struggle making money. And we’d also been ripped off in a lot of ways, but that’s another story.
You poured a lot of energy into your 1993 solo album Psychoderelict. You even toured behind it. Why do you think it didn’t find a big audience?
Well, because it was really weird. I was working on the theater production of The Iron Man with Ted Hughes, and working with Des McAnuff on a new book for the Tommy show on Broadway. I wanted to have my own little, crazy theater show. At first it started as a radio play. I got into a bit of a muddle with it, and I was very active supporting the Tommy productions, because it wasn’t just a Broadway show, it was also a tour in various places.
My old high school friend Barney got involved, and helped me turn it into a comedy. As a comedy, it became deeply and almost like King Lear-type ironic. It worked on stage really well. But on the album, it just didn’t work. The fact that in the box set, you’ve got a version with music and with the play, and a version without, that’s insane. It was never ever meant to be a collection of songs. It was meant to be a play.
Why did you stop making solo albums after that?
I don’t know that I did stop. I continued to write music. Nobody came and offered me a deal.
When I was a teenager in the 1990s, I feel like the Who were often mentioned in the same breath as the Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin. I get the feeling that’s no longer the case, and young people aren’t as aware of your work as they used to be. Do you think that’s true? Do you care?
I think you’re right. I think they may not be, and no, I don’t really care that much. I think because we’re dealing in mythology now, which has actually been fed by social media and by streaming. It’s a vacuous world. The Stones don’t help themselves do they, really? I think they’ve made so many really interesting albums, which they’ve in a sense, disowned. I think the whole process of disowning albums when you’re a mythological band is not a good move.
My favorite Stones album is still Aftermath. Brian Jones was still alive and kicking and had ideas. It felt to me that they were in an incredibly interesting art school creative space. A bit hippy dumb, but it was interesting. The Beatles just didn’t last long enough. And the same thing happened with the Beach Boys. Once the Beach Boys had done Pet Sounds, you could have a conversation with Brian Wilson, “Come on, Brian. Why didn’t you make another Pet Sounds? What happened, man?” “What actually happened is I went fuckin’ insane is what happened!”
I wonder whether kids who think that Jimmy Page is the best guitar player in the world have heard Pet Sounds? Not that it’s got anything to do with guitar playing, but it’s where the myths begin and end.
The corporate entities behind the Beatles and Zeppelin and many of these other bands work very hard at keeping the brands alive with biopics, documentaries, museum exhibits… They are always working to keep the flame going. You seem less interested in that.
I wonder though whether it’s about exploiting the brands. You see this certainly with the ABBA avatar musical, whether there’s something more to wring out of it. And a couple of times recently I’ve been asked why that is. I spend so much time talking about and focusing on it, and trying to wring more out of stuff in my career that I feel has been neglected.
Because as one gets older, it’s harder to come up with new bright ideas. And so I think, well, I’ve already got some bright ideas that I came up with when I was 25 that have been neglected. And I think so much about the success of Quadrophenia, for example, is that it’s about an era that’s very, very interesting sociologically. Have you come across this new TV series called Adolescence?
I keep hearing about it, but I haven’t watched it yet.
My wife and I just watched it yesterday. It has been produced and directed in single-shot camera episodes, four episodes. It’s just about a young boy that gets into trouble. And the first incident at the police station, he’s asked to be strip searched in his father’s presence. And his father refuses it.
What’s interesting is this is a story about a young boy who gets into trouble in the social media age. And then you look at the pre-echoes of that going way, way back to Marlon Brando and James Dean and very, very early Elvis Presley. It’s images of the guy in the leather jacket, trying to look tough, but actually really looking wimpish in a sense, and behaving in a wimpish manner. That story hasn’t changed.
What’s changed is what we hang it on, where the conversation begins and ends. What happens now is that we draw lines. When I put this box set out…well, that’s a fuckin’ joke, because I didn’t put this set out. I didn’t even know it was coming out until about four weeks ago. I sold my solo deal material to Universal, and they’re just cashing in. They’re trying to recoup on their investment. I bought a boat, they’re buying a solo deal.
The Who are playing the Teenage Cancer Trust events at the Royal Albert Hall later this month. What will those shows be like? Who will be in the band?
It’s going to be a stripped down band. It’s going to be me, my brother, a keyboard player, a bass player, Zak [Starkey], Roger. That’s it. And we don’t really know what we’re doing. We’re starting the rehearsal on Saturday. I’m hoping to keep it simple. We shall see.
I’ve got no idea what it’s going to be like. I’m actually nervous. And I think Roger’s nervous as well. We’re both in our eighties, beyond our eighties, in Roger’s case. I’m 80 in May. And I’ve just had a knee transplant, which it was nothing to do with being young or virile. It was to do with having an accident years ago.
That kind of stuff gets harder as you get older. It gets harder to recover from surgery, to recover from taking loads of codeine and all of that stuff, the brain fog that’s involved in it. So we’ve got a list of songs. We’re looking at them, and I’m going, “Which are the easy ones?” But it’s sold out. I could go out and just play a fuckin’ kazoo. I’ve made the money for the charity.
I’ve never had the chance to see you play solo beyond a couple of quick shows at Joe’s Pub years ago. There are so many fans like me that have seen the Who a bunch of times, but have never seen you sing songs like “Slit Skirts” and “The Sea Refuses No River.” Do you think you’ll ever do a solo tour again and play them?
I’d love to sing them again, yeah. I do think about it sometimes. But I think if I was going to spend a lot of time with Simon Phillips, for example, I think he and I could make a great album together. I wouldn’t want to play old stuff. So I’d want to use the fact that there would be a dynamic energy between us that could probably crack open some new veins.
I think we’re at an interesting time. And I think for the Who, it’s probably not as interesting as it is for some other people. I think what we call the Who is just Roger and me. And we can exchange e-mails and we can sit and nag at each other about various political things on which we agree or disagree. But the fact is that we have this legacy, and it’s a Black Swan legacy, which is that we’ve been lucky.
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For you guys to still be doing this band in your 80s that you started in 1962 is pretty remarkable.
I’ve got maybe 10 years left as a creative. So I’m doing all kinds of interesting things, theatrical projects, art projects, book projects, working. I’ve done four record productions in the past couple of years. I’ve just done a thing with my friend, Reg Meuross, a song cycle about Woody Guthrie called Fire and Dust. I did an album with the Bookshop band. They write songs about books. I produced an album with a young indie band called the Wild Things.
I’m really active on music and doing stuff and trying to keep myself fueled up. I think if I was a journalist…I’m not suggesting I want the job because I hate deadlines…but if I was, fuck I wouldn’t know where to begin.
