"Roger Daltrey speaks a lot about the magic that happens when the three of us get together to play," says Pete Townshend, who spent many years inscribing rock and roll history alongside the singer in the mighty Who. With a benevolent laugh, he demurs. "I have to say I've yet to experience that."

A complex and paradoxical artist whose restless self-awareness winds back on itself like a lost river, the guitarist-singer — who leads The Who to Nassau Coliseum Friday for a new production of "Quadrophenia" — has lately eased his lifelong discomfort at being a rock star by making the musical theater his metier. Turning "Tommy" into a hit on Broadway and elsewhere has allowed him to display his creative wares without having to endure the trauma of getting up night after night and, to borrow a lyric he once wrote, "pounding stages like a clown."

In doing so, Townshend — three decades after declaring the sovereignty of youth in "My Generation" — finally seems to have made an uneasy peace with adulthood.

Once a disconsolate rebel with a mean self-critical streak, the loquacious and thoughtful auteur is, at 51, a model of self-effacing conciliation, living proof that age's leading lesson is to show us how much we don't know.

Calling from London, Townshend mentions his new-found ability to accept contributions from artistic collaborators and his retreat from dictatorial control of creative associates. Even his infamous feuds with Daltrey have been set aside for the time being.

"When 'Tommy' hit Broadway in Ninety-three," he recalls, "people asked me what I was going to do next. There were a few projects floating around in my head. 'Quadrophenia' was one of them, but I never really thought about it seriously until about a year ago when our manager came to me with a proposal for a European tour of a rough treatment I'd done. It was very ambitious and very expensive, with two bands" — neither of which he intended to be in. So much for that idea.

Enter Des McAnuff, director of "Tommy: The Musical." "He came to see me early this year with a proposal to do a celebration for fifty years of the Vespa in Rome," recalls Townshend, referring to the mods' beloved motor scooter, which figured prominently in the "Quadrophenia" LP and film. As sugar-daddy dreams of the Piaggio motor company danced in his head, he began the process of taking the durable 1973 concept album, about a troubled '60s mod with four personalities, out for another spin. With a plan forming not around the planned August events in Italy but this past June's Prince's Trust concert in London, Townshend sought out the allies he needed to bring "Quadrophenia" back to life. "I had to have some kind of visible link to the movie," he says. "So the first person I asked was Phil Daniels," who starred in the 1979 movie. "When he agreed to narrate the show, I asked Roger if he would sing and help me stage the thing. No one could sing the stuff like he can."

It could not have been so easy an invitation to tender. The two men always enjoyed a volatile relationship in The Who, an endless head-butt of Townshend's self-conscious theorizing and Daltrey's burly emotionalism. This undertaking, Townshend says, allowed him to "contribute to John [Entwistle] and Roger's artistic needs by asking them to do me a favor. It always felt to me that the burden was the other way around. I realized that I'm the one with the problem, not them. What they have is a career which has just stopped. I have a series of continuing artistic and creative difficulties."

Daltrey's long-standing desire to see the band reunite has never been a secret; for all his success as an actor and a solo artist, he remains the singer of The Who. Though billed as a tribute to his colleague, the 1994 tour in