Pete Townshend Quotes

Rock 'n' Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them

Life's a bitch and so am I.

If you don't want anyone to know anything about you, don't write anything.

I couldn’t strut around like Mick Jagger, or smash my instrument up like Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend: bitter subsequent experience has taught me that if you get carried away and try and smash up a piano by pushing it offstage, you end up looking less like a lawless rock god and more like a furniture removal man having a bad day.

Announcer - "And where are you from Pete?" Pete Townshend - "London, I'm from London." Announcer - "London where, exactly?" Pete - "London, England

Keith Moon, God rest his soul, once drove his car through the glass doors of a hotel, driving all the way up to the reception desk, got out and asked for the key to his room.

People listen to music for different reasons. Some people, -its background music— but other people need it to survive. Other people need music to get things out and maybe that’s just where I’m coming from, you know, when things weren’t easy for me, growing up. You know, music, I felt, saved my life. Pete Townshend, wherever you are, Pete, you saved my life. You know, whether he knows it or not. I wouldn’t be here. And I had absolutely nothing else besides music. And so that’s still, you know, that’s in me, and so if we’re gonna play, if we’re gonna get up and play, or write a song, you know, write about something that means something. You know, why write about, you know, 'Oh, pretty day', or, 'Pretty girl' or 'Pretty people', there’s nothing… people have different reasons for listening and playing. I need to —for me-, it’s much more.. religious!

Enjoy life. And be careful what you pray for - remember, you will get it all.

Don't cry Don't raise your eye Its only teenage wasteland.

Do you realize why is it I'm so driven to operate within the Establishment? It's vengeance. 'Hope I die before I get old' is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.

Can't pretend that growin' older never hurts.

Like so many addicts, I'd thought that if I could only sort out my life, I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around

The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.

The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.

Stars are attributed w/ intelligence they don't have, beauty they haven't worked for, loyaly & love they are incapable of reciprocating, and strength they do not possess. They are treated like a beautiful vase of cut flowers. When wilted, simply replaced w/ new blooms.

Barriers were being torn down. Where Freddie Mercury was trying to keep his homosexuality from the front pages, Boy George was openly & outrageously gay.

All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed meeting fans face to face. They're less scary when they aren't going nuts at a Who show. But then, so am I.

Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.

Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

I am growing old of course, but I am still in the early stages of disintegration, and regarded as just about cool enough by some fashionable young ppl to be permitted to think aloud.

I wrote to my son. ‘Be a pessimist,’ I advised Joseph on his first birthday on 21 November. ‘It is the safest, most pragmatic way to be. Being an optimist may enrich the lives of others (with good cheer and smiling), but it leads you unaware to danger.

There's no easy way to be free.

Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.

His broken heart was unfeeling, like shattered glass in an acid bath.

In Tacoma, Washington, I speared myself on my guitar’s whammy bar – it went right through my hand. I went into shock,

People say, "You've gotta go on, man, otherwise all those kids, they'll be finished, they'll have nothing to live for." That's rock and roll!

When you're part of a gang, you soon find the parts of you that don't fit. These apparent defects can become assets; they're the things about you that make you interesting & useful.

I heard in my own voice the tulmult of a young man playig a role, uneasily, repackaging black R&B music from America, relying on gimmicky outfits, and pretending to be wild & free when in reality he needed to be looked after by his mother.

For the first time, a whole generation had the economic & educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatized by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity.

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties.

The word is dissociate. There is no 'a' before the 'ss'. People invariably say dis-a-ssociate, which, if you're suffering Disso-ciative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder, can be irritating. People then want to know how many personalities I have and the answer is: I don't know. The first book about Multiple Personality Disorder to make an impact was Flora Rheta Schreiber's Sybil, published in 1973, which carries the subtitle: The True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities. Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley published the controversial The Three Faces of Eve much earlier in 1957, and Pete Townshend from The Who wrote the song 'Four Faces'. People seem to feel safe with numbers. The truth is more complicated. The kids emerged over time. Billy, the boisterous five-year-old, was at first the most dominant. But he slowly stood aside for JJ, the self-confident ten-year-old who appears when Alice is under stress and handles complicated situations like travelling on the Underground and meeting new people. The first entity to visit was the external voice of the Professor. But he had a choir of accomplices without names. So, how many actual alter personalities are there? I would say more than fifteen and less than thirty, a combination of protectors, persecutors and friends - my own family tree.

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I'd first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract.

Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood.

I heard that Harry Nilsson had died. The secret to being a successful hellraiser, it seemed, was to stop raising hell before hell razed you.

I also had the ability to create alpha-state music in my head, go into a creative trance, have musical visions, and

So remember when you're looking for trouble That trouble is already busy with weaker men

The people on the hill, they say I'm lazy, but when they sleep, I sing and dance.

I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.

In 1945 music had a serious purpose; to defy post war depression & revitalize the romantic & hopeful aspirations of an exhausted ppl.

Wiggy & I were drug buddies. There is no tighter compact for friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.

Judging by the faces of those around me, just the fact of Roger speaking to me meant that my life could very well change.

Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss.

I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch my father's clarinets or saxophones, just my harmonica.

It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves -- I'm thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.

Some kid writes in to me and says, 'I've got all your records and I listen to your music all day long and I look at your pictures all the time and I write to you and all I get is a bleedin' autographed picture. You don't know how much time I spend thinkin' about you lot.' I write him back and say, 'You don't know how much time I spend looking at and thinking about teenagers.

Then there were more and more shouts and cries until the auditorium was filled with a roar louder than anything it had seen since Pete Townshend’s guitar riff and Roger Daltrey’s scream during “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” or the shriek of Hunter Biden at the climax of his epic spoken-word piece, “No More Showers with Ashley, Daddy.

Pete Townshend asked me to dinner with his wife at his house in Twickenham, on the Thames.

Elvis had been a truck driver, but John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ray Davies, and Keith Richards were all art college students who tended to think of themselves as artists.

Basically, Sam Phillips recorded Bill Haley, Johnny Cash, and all those other Memphis guys; Chuck Berry played the top two strings; Elvis appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show above the waist; the Beatles made all the girls squirm by singing about wanting to hold their “hands”; Ray Davies got lost in a sunset; Pete Townshend smashed his guitar; Brian Wilson heard magic in his head and made it come out of a studio; the Rolling Stones urinated on a garage door; and then (skipping a bit) you’ve got Joey Levine and Chapman-Chinn and Mott the Hoople and Iggy and the Runaways and KISS and the Pink Fairies and Rick Nielsen and Jonathan Richman and Johnny Ramone and Lemmy and the Young brothers and Cook and Jones and Pete Shelley and Feargal Sharkey and Rob Halford … and Foghat. You get what I’m saying. It didn’t happen in a vacuum, but it did happen, and now here we are in the aftermath.

I consoled myself by wiring up the keyboard studio in my house, the therapy I enjoyed most.

It’s good to know that not every old relationship or friendship needs to be subject to either ‘closure’ or forensic analysis.

thought The Clash were spectacular. They were charming to me when we met, and Joe Strummer clearly had a heart of gold. His work for political causes, especially anti-racist ones, was inspiring.

if you don’t like my trumpet go try blowing one of your own.

The Artist’s Way

PETE TOWNSHEND WROTE a lengthy essay, “A Discourse on Mick Jagger’s Fortieth Birthday,” and sent us a picture of himself holding a lit candle with “Happy Birthday Mick” written across his chest.

No one should ever underestimate the influence that Pete Townshend has had on popular music. There is no question in my mind that both he and The Who were every bit as influential as The Beatles and the Stones as the UK invasion took America and the rest of the world by storm. He was equally as innovative as a musician and lyricist, finding a way to state the feelings of the mod generation he and the band represented. The combination of these four unlikely cohorts interpreting Pete’s writing was something to behold, each of them contributing in his own original way. The seemingly uncontrolled explosion of energy they produced, glued together by exceptional musicianship.