NEW YORK — Pete Townshend was wearing a black suit and white shirt, buttoned to the collar, when he performed at the Beacon Theater on Monday night. He used a third of his three-hour show to perform his latest album-length musical theater work, Psychoderelict (Atlantic).

But with an electric guitar in hand, the 48-year-old songwriter was still a rocker, singing with fervor, duckwalking and jumping around and, at one point, accidentally careening into a speaker cabinet as he bounded across the stage. The first hard-rock pioneer to win a Tony award has not succumbed to middle-aged decorum.

The concert, part of Townshend’s first American tour leading a band that’s not the Who, balanced crowdpleasers and obscurities. He drew on his solo albums and on “Rough Mix,” a 1977 collaboration with Ronnie Lane.

But he didn’t hesitate to sing material he wrote that was originally belted by Roger Daltrey with the Who. Townshend even came up with a reasonable match for the drawn-out shout of “Yeahhhh!” in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Townshend reworked the Who’s songs, finding new inflections for the vocal lines and playing guitar leads steeped in Chicago blues. Because he was leading a seven-piece band, with two additional guitarists, the music didn’t em

File photo Pete Townshend’s latest album is ‘Psychoderelict.’

bums. With “Tommy” on Broadway and “Psychoderelict” just released, Townshend clearly has theatrical music on his mind.

“Psychoderelict,” like most concept albums, is on the nutty side. It has everything: a tortured artist, virtual reality, sadomasochism, media-bashing and 1960s utopian dreams. It’s the story of a has-been rock star, Ray High, whose manager connives with a wicked, whip-loving pop journalist to goad him out of a creative slump. Meanwhile, the star dreams of uniting the world through a virtual-reality network.

At the Beacon, “Psychoderelict” was presented with three actors and a large projection screen that was often filled with neo-psychedelic fractal patterns. It slumped during its dialogue (“You must serve the press as well as the audience,” the star advises a protege) and picked up during its songs, although a muddy sound mix swamped most of the new lyrics.

Townshend hasn’t changed style much since “Who’s Next” in 1971; in fact, some of the futuristic keyboard passages in “Psychoderelict” come from that album’s “Baba O’Riley.” Townshend still relies on basic chords and still likes straightforward, chugging rock rhythms.

Although the dialogue was intrusive onstage, as it is on the album, love songs like “Now and Then” and “I Am Afraid” could stand on their own.

Who’s next? Don’t ask

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When it comes to personal priorities right now, Pete Townshend says, Who is not on first.

Townshend rose to fame with The Who, one of the most charismatic of rock ’n’ roll bands, and three of the four original members — Townshend, lead singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle — remain active. They reunited in 1989 with a new drummer for an extremely lucrative 25th-anniversary tour, and with 1994 approaching, that means a 30th anniversary.

“The record company is planning to mark it with a box set — a collectors’ box with outtakes and that sort of thing,” says Townshend. “But I doubt we’ll be doing any live things to back it up.

“It’s not that I’d do it if I didn’t have anything better to do, either. I just don’t believe it’s the right thing for any of us to do. The Who, to me, is like a three-legged chair. If you leave it alone, it’s fine. If you sit in it, it falls down.”

Townshend acknowledges that Daltrey and Entwistle would like to play again, but he says there was some friction on the 1989 tour.

Furthermore, he says, the success of “Tommy” lessens the need for a Who tour: “It has made Roger and John financially secure, at least for as long as the show runs. In the past, that has been one of the concerns.”