In the excerpt, Townshend recalls writing the 1980 classic on the organ in his country house while entertaining guests. Realizing he had something special, the musician stayed up all night working on the song in his non-soundproofed studio — keeping his family and friends from catching a wink of sleep. (COS)
“I had this special studio which was supposed to be soundproofed, but the architect said, ‘I don’t do soundproofing. You can do that.'” Townshend recalled before adding that he never bothered with it. “I started to write this song and I thought, ‘Fuck, this is definitely a hit.’ So I kept going.”
“ When I looked at my watch, it was half past 4 and I managed to go to bed. I get up the next day at 2, and my guests and my wife and my kids are just black. And I say, ‘Yeah, but it’s a hit!’ Nobody had slept a wink.”
The Who performed the song for the first time since 1989 during their stripped-back acoustic concert at the Royal Albert Hall on March 25, 2022 in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust. "Well, this next song is definitely not a Who hit," Townshend told the crowd to introduce "Let My Love Open The Door." "It's a Pete hit."
In the previous episode Pete Townshend was planning to quit The Who before Keith Moon died The revelation comes in a Guitar World-exclusive excerpt from Townshend’s Audible Original, Somebody Saved Me, which arrived on May 6.
We’re just celebrated because we’ve managed to survive,” he says. (Rolling Stone)
Pete Townshend has announced his new Audible Original “Words + Music.” (Udiscovermusic)
(The link to hear the full two-hour Audible Original can be found here: audible.com/SomebodySavedMe.)
“I had decided to leave The Who,” the guitarist reflected. “I had decided when we did the Who Are You album. Keith played drums on a song called Music Must Change, and it was in 6/8 time. All he had to do was go, (sings simple melody), and he couldn’t do it.”
Speaking in Somebody Saved Me, Townshend recalled that his initial decision to leave the Who arose while the band were recording Who Are You in 1978, during which he began to question whether Moon – who was struggling with addiction issues at the time – was ever going to “cut it” again. (Guitarworld)
“I don’t know whether it was because it was so cheesy or jazzy – because Keith wasn’t very good at swing – but we sort of gave up,” he added. “We ended up using footsteps and tossing a coin on the ground, making a kind of soundscape out of it. That was the last track we finished on the album.”
“The album contained the track Who Are You, on which he played the most fantastic drums, which was only recorded about six months before. I went back and realized that Keith was just not going to cut it really, at all, ever again. We sort of lost him. I decided to quit.”
Townshend told Billboard that “the two-hour ‘Words + Music’ covers some material he’s discussed in the past, but that the opportunity to create a long-form podcast, in which he can weave his story in between poignant performances of some of his favorite solo songs, was what convinced him to participate.”
But in his new Audible Original “Words + Music,” Somebody Saved Me (out May 6), the guitarist once known for his windmilling, instrument-bashing style and youth-gone-wild rock operas turns down the volume to focus on a less-inspected period in his career when his commercial prospects were dimming and he struggled to keep the band afloat after the death of gonzo drummer Keith Moon in 1978.(Billboard)
And bearing in mind that I’m not particularly prolific, and I like to record demos of every song I present to myself or to my producer or to Roger Daltrey, this was an impossible mission.
And yet I signed both deals and proceeded ahead. And that was over ‘78, ‘79, ‘80 and ‘81. And at the end of ‘81, I was really in the depth of a massive personal crash. …
It seemed to me like it was something that I’d touched on in my autobiography, but not to the extent that I spoke about (it here)…
I thought it was a tricky period to talk about: the death of Keith Moon, the Cincinnati disaster (in which fans were killed trying to get into a Who concert in 1979), and the death of John Entwistle, because he went into decline, financially mainly, after that period."
He added, “I loved this format, because it enabled me to approach the songs and the music that I was writing in that five-year period [through] what was going on in the music.” He discussed a stretch from T1978-1982 that included the release of his solo albums Empty Glass
(1980) and All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (1982). One of the other perks for Townshend was working with revered music journalist and Somebody Saved Me co-producer Bill Flanagan, an old friend who also helped shepherd the VH1 Storytellers episode he recorded in 2000.
Townshend donated the proceeds to the Teen Cancer America charity. “I really, really enjoyed it and I felt safe with Bill and Audible talking about a kind of dangerous period for me — where I was very productive but not particularly successful, where everything I was doing was lucrative, but the pressures were fantastic.”
“I really, really enjoyed it and I felt safe with Bill and Audible talking about a kind of dangerous period for me — where I was very productive but not particularly successful, where everything I was doing was lucrative, but the pressures were fantastic.”
Credits: Main photo is a graphic mash up with detail of Robert Wilson's photo