Dr. Who

What at this point is the most fulfilling aspect of creating new material for the Who?
The attention it receives, and the powerful filtering and editorial process that is imposed when I work with Roger, my interpreter and partner. There is a sense that I am closing a circle here too -- I did feel that when I completed songs for the last Who studio album, in 1982, that I had completely lost my connection with our audience. Somehow, today's audience has granted me a second chance to reconnect as the Who's chief songwriter, and it really does seem as though almost everyone has thrown away the rule book. Some of our live shows have taken this function of mine to a place that it seems no mere CD could ever reach. At Madrid, for example, as I played my guitar toward the end of the show, I felt like a triumphant liberating giant come to release a million captive children. Could make me a little vain.

You've been very involved with the Internet, and originally you planned to sell live Webcasts of all the shows on this tour to raise money for charity.
It's unfortunate we couldn't do more of that, because the Web site and the Internet have given the Who the most extraordinary ten years. Whenever we wanted to go out, we've gone out and sold out our tours. Now if Roger truly believes it's because people want to look at his chest or truly believes it's because Pete Townshend is a magical genius and people want to hear this music one more time, he's wrong. I think it's because we have this incredible tied-in fan base. The Web sites I've been running are like fan clubs. And fan clubs back in the old days really were the way that artists made sure that they got hits. If you had 400,000 fans and they all went out and bought your album on the same day, you got a fucking Number One!

This fan thing is very powerful. I don't think that the big boomer bands are going to be able to do this much longer. I really don't. We're fucking lucky to be able to do it, but I don't think we'll be able to do it much longer. I don't want to go out and see Bob Dylan. I don't want to go out and see the Stones. I wouldn't pay money to go see the Who, not even with new songs. I wouldn't pay money to go see Crosby, Stills and Nash. They fucking make me sick. When I say that, what I mean is I'm ageist about it. I don't want to look at these old guys in their self-congratulatory mode. Somebody gave me tickets for Marlene Dietrich's last concert in London, and apparently she came out and she looked fantastic under the lights, but you know that she's an eighty-year-old woman held together by glue and string. Why would you want to do that? I'd prefer to come and see Elaine Stritch down in the bar here. My point is, I don't think it will go on much longer.

Our audience, our boomer audience, are sustaining it. It's not young kids. People say, "Oh, I went to a Rolling Stones concert and there were lots of young people there!" Once. They come once. I went to see Jimmy Reed once. I went to see John Lee Hooker once. I went to see Jimmy Smith once. I went to see Ray Charles once. I just wanted to be able to say I saw him. If Charlie Parker had been alive, I would have seen him once. I saw Roland Kirk once. I saw them all once. I wouldn't follow them around the fucking world. There's a lot of people that come and see bands like the Who once.

It works out fine, right? Because those same artists aren't going to be touring forever. It's not like fifteen years from now you're going to be like, "Oh, I guess nobody wants to come to our shows anymore."
No, my point is when you look at the commerce behind the music business, what's running the whole thing is live shows. The problem for the Who is because we can go out and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket grosses, we're a commodity and treated as such. It would be nice if it was the same with the record, but it won't be. Universal are probably stamping around today thinking, "Oh, my God, not another fucking Who record. Oh, my God, what do we do? Thank God for the Scissor Sisters!"