PETE TOWNSHEND: FAN INTERVIEW (PART 1 OF 2)
26th September, 2011
PETE TOWNSHEND: FAN INTERVIEW (PART 1 OF 2)
Oldawg: Nearly 30 years after its release I find It’s Hard to be very representative (unfortunately) of what is happening in the world today. In particular John’s Dangerous, Eminence Front and Cooks County. How do you feel about It’s Hard today?
P.T.: It’s Hard is the only record the Who made where the individual members of the band agreed on a brief beforehand. I was having trouble working out what kind of songs to write for The Who, and asked everyone to give me some guidance. The response was clear – everyone in the band wanted to write about the fact that the post war dream, one that rock had partly helped to promise, hadn’t been delivered. I’m really not sure what I think now about It’s Hard. When I started work on it in early 1982 I had only just landed on my feet after a month long Ativan detox programme, and when I got home the band were already in the studio without me with Andy Fairweather Low standing in on guitar. I felt forced to get to work immediately, and I felt very rushed especially as I had to finish off my solo album Chinese Eyes at the same time. Both albums seem different from my perspective. To me, they belong together in a sense. They were never perceived this way by critics, fans or even the other members of The Who.
World’s Biggest Jukebox
Check this out if ya haven’t already, the Library of Congress is making thousands and thousands of public domain recordings available for free over the intetrnets.
Actually, this reminds me a lot of how people post old singles on YouTube, but whatever.
Point here is to pause for a moment and understand the MOUNTAINS of music that have been released in the scant 120 years of recording.
My faves: http://media.loc.gov/player/flowplayer.commercial.swf?0.5493758961092681
http://media.loc.gov/player/flowplayer.commercial.swf?0.5493758961092681
http://media.loc.gov/player/flowplayer.commercial.swf?0.5493758961092681
Seriously Vintage Musical Instrument
Amazing. Archaeologists have found a flute believed to be over 30,000 years old. Carved from a vulture bone, this instrument appears to demonstrate that homo sapiens had the gift of music at a very early stage of development. this may be one of the reasons they were able to leap past the Neanderthals. The ancient flutes are evidence for an early musical tradition that likely helped modern humans communicate and form tighter social bonds…. Music may therefore have been important to maintaining and strengthening Stone Age social networks among modern humans, allowing for greater societal organization and strategizing [National Geographic News].
What makes a music scene?
I recently had the privilige of interviewing Jacob McMurray Senior Curator of the Experience Music Project for a feature piece on music museums. Within the contect of describing his upcoming exhibition Nirvana in the Northwest Underground, 1982-1992 Jacob articulated a really interesting understanding about the development of music scenes:
“Nobody had looked, commercially, at the Northwest for a long time. What were the pieces of infrastructure in the creative underground that needed to be in place for their to be a scene in the first place? That’s one of the things that I’m really interested in exploring. In order to have a scene you have to have a sort of renewable source of music like a college. Olympia is a great example of this, Evergreen College there. You have to have a source of communication for your underground message. Like fanzines and radio, like the college radio, KAOS radio, or Op magazine. In Seattle the Rocket would serve that. You had to have venues. You had to have record stores to reinforce this underground message. And so trying to build step-by-step what it takes to develop the scene in the Northwest.”
