Okay, so money may have been a factor in The Who’s 25th anniversary reunion tour, which stops tonight and tomorrow at CNE Stadium.

Guitarist Pete Townshend is playing for history this time, looking to close out his band’s career with a flourish rather than the hollow half-measure that was the group’s 1982 Farewell Tour.

“I thought the whole last tour was extremely weird,” Townshend remarked recently during an interview in New York City.

Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens had been the scene of the very last show, televised for posterity and performed under the watchful eye of an international media come to pay their last respects.

“One of many, many girls I knew in Toronto, who was training for the pentathlon in the upcoming Olympics, she came up to me after that show and said: ‘You know, I’ve never, ever, seen anybody look as healthy as you do.’

“And I said: ‘Yeah, the interesting thing about being this healthy is that spiritually and emotionally you feel nothing.’ And that’s how I felt. Everything was so easy for me then.”

Townshend’s emotional emptiness, he feels, had a direct effect on the substance and texture of those 1982 shows. Though typically riotous and bold, they somehow lacked a core, a dynamic centre.

“It was the fact that the tour, in a sense, was a tour without passion. And that was what I walked away from as soon as I got home after that concert …

“What we’re looking at now is really something completely different. It really is new. The relationships are new, the way that we’re looking at the old music is new. The way that we’re talking about stuff that was at the heart of that classic period is new, too. The way that we’re talking about ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, ‘Baba O’Reilly’… all those kind of FM standards.

“We’re objective enough and far enough away from them to look at them again. We’ve never really been in this shape.

“The interesting thing about touring again is that in rehearsal, the other people in the band have been rehearsing before us (the three principals, including singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle).

“They’ve been learning Tommy.

THE WHO: Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle (from left), talkin’ ‘bout their degeneration.

and what’s been really interesting is that a couple of people in the band who sing jazz and play jazz and a couple of classically trained guys and Rabbit Bundrick who’s worked with the Who for 15 years – various people who thought they knew what Tommy was about – and they’ve been coming up to me and saying: ‘Y’know, it’s a bloody masterpiece! It’s a great piece of work.’

And I say, ‘Thank you, but it’s not me you should tell.’ It’s all those people like (Rolling Stone publisher) Jan Wenner, people that hailed it as a masterpiece in 1969 …”

Townshend, now 44, is the first to admit that he hasn’t always struggled to keep the band’s famous rock opera alive in the hearts and minds of a new generation.

Posterity didn’t much concern him when he was younger — now it does.

“As an enduring piece (Tommy) it has to be kept alive,” he insists. “I think The Who let it go. We shouldn’t have let it go, but we did.

“So that’s been great, to go back and look at that again and say: ‘Hey, here’s an opportunity to bring something to life again.”

With the arrival of punk in the late ’70s, The Who’s operatic period was scorned by younger musicians bent on reinventing the three-chord power anthem.

“Up to Tommy, everything was okay,” Townshend relates with a wan smile. “Tommy, and everything after, was the ‘selling out’, the point where we ‘sold our souls to the devil.’

“It wasn’t just the punk rockers, also people like Tom Dolby and Howard Jones, who actually just responded to one aspect of what The Who did. Interestingly enough though, what Tommy contained was that ironic sense of humor from the early albums.

“Even to the extent that ‘My Generation’ and ‘Can’t Explain’ are quite funny, actually. They’re serious, but even at the time they were written, they were quite funny.”

Nearing deafness now due to the double abuses of hard-drinking and ridiculously loud concert volumes, Townshend won’t be the windmill terror he once was in concert.

In the tour’s opening concert Wednesday night in Glens Falls, N.Y., Associated Press reported that Townshend “grimaced as he tried to hit a high note in ‘1921’, one of Tommy’s opening songs.

English guitarist Steve Bolton will handle many of the parts of the tour; Townshend has promised to stick to subtler antics on acoustic guitar.

“I remember coming off the stage (in the old days) and blood would be dripping from my finger nails from the centrifugal force of the windmill.

“I don’t care for that to happen any more. But I won’t be a lump out there, either.”