When Townshend looked back at the style-mad English mod movement of the early '60s in "Quadrophenia," he made sure the album's lyrics and artwork featured the teenage subculture's motor vehicle of choice: Along with the obligatory mohair suits, parkas, Tamla/Motown soul singles and John Anthony haircut, no proper mod was complete without his Vespa or Lambretta scooter.

For all their posturing and popularity in trendy London circles, members of the Who never were mods. Daltrey could pass, but Townshend didn't come from the working class, and his artistic ambitions were geared well beyond serving a local constituency obsessed with appearances. Still, the mods' beloved scooter — more precisely, its manufacturer — provided the kick start that finally got him to rally the troops and take "Quadrophenia" out for another spin.

"When Tommy hit Broadway in '93," Townshend 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. When Townshend announced he wouldn't appear in the production, there went the likelihood of adequate funding.

Enter Des McAnuff, director of "Tommy: the Musical." "He came to see me (early) this year with a proposal to do a celebration for 50 years of the Vespa in Rome," recalls Townshend, whose fortnight discussion of the role financing plays in plotting his creative path — no longer a simple matter of sweet-talking a record company or signing up a brewery as sponsor — makes him sound like rock's answer to Christo. As sugar-daddy dreams of the Piaggio motor company danced in his head, he began to think seriously about reviving "Quadrophenia."

The Vespa event was postponed, but Townshend soon began to focus his plans on the Prince's Trust gala concert in London in June, seeking 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. When he agreed to narrate the show in Hyde Park, I asked Roger if he would sing."

It could not have been an easy invitation to extend. The two men had a volatile and sometimes violent relationship in the Who. It was a clash of contrasting personalities — Townshend's self-conscious theorizing versus Daltrey's burly emotionalism — exacerbated by Townshend's creative control and the inevitable discomfort of having one serve as the mouthpiece for the other's deeply personal songs. When Townshend finally decided to retire the band (by his admission, two albums too late), his move cost Entwistle and Daltrey their jobs and froze the three in mutual resentments.

This latest undertaking, he says, allowed him to "contribute to John 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. In this case,

"I've started to look at the more

positive experiences I've had in my

life; I've spent most of my time

drawing on negative experiences."

PETE TOWNSHEND

I turned to the right people for help."

Daltrey has long pushed for the Who to reunite. His 1994 tour, in which he sang Townshend's songs, was billed as a Townshend tribute.

"Roger's tour was meant to honor the work, celebrate the work and use it in the absence of the Who," Townshend notes. "But I felt comfortable with it. Where I started to feel uncomfortable was when Roger's manager started to suggest that I might turn it into the new Who. That was a real problem for me, because I couldn't see us going into a studio and coming up with songs that were a credit to each of us as human beings."

Having already followed "Tommy" as a concept album, film and tour, will "Quadrophenia" also wind up as a musical?

"I'm already getting interest from theatrical producers in developing it as a simple theatrical production with a band onstage, like 'Rent.' It would be easy enough to do. What one can't ascertain at this time is whether it would be worth doing, because it might be that the audience is a narrow one."

Whether this project remains his priority or not, Townshend has seemingly reoriented his musical approach for good. "What I'm writing today is very different from anything I've ever written before," he says.

Prone to both epic bouts of self-doubt and maddening displays of solipsism throughout his career, Townshend has spent the years since the Who disbanded in 1982 simultaneously dismantling the platform on which his fame rests and carefully nurturing it. For a time, he kept a conspicuously low profile, working as a book editor at Faber & Faber, his hearing threatened by tinnitus that made his ears ring, and generally adopting the dignified stance of a wealthy middle-aged Englishman.

He produced a book of fiction ("Horse's Neck," 1985), released little new music and rarely performed. As the theater beckoned, Woodstock and classic rock albums like "Who's Next" and "The Who Sell Out" receded into memory faster than Townshend's hairline.

Still, he remained sympathetic to, and fluent in, the raucous vulgarity of mass youth culture, a social club that his stodgier peers in the aristocracy would sooner ban than join. And soon his past reasserted itself. Reclaiming a self he had unceremoniously attempted to shelve, he took the Who out on a reunion tour to perform parts of "Tommy" in 1989, released an ambitious solo album (1993's "PsychoDerelict") and followed that with a full-scale tour, all while working to bring his "deaf and dumb and blind boy" to Broadway.

Recently, Townshend has been active in refurbishing and augmenting the Who's catalog (including a four-disc boxed set). He put together his own greatest-hits album, did a few acoustic solo shows and is about to begin work on an autobiography, essentially the culmination of an ongoing monologue he's been conducting in the press all along. If this is Townshend's dotage, it rocks.

This past May, he played a pair of low-key solo shows at the Supper Club in New York, offering well-known songs like "Let My Love Open the Door" and "Rough Boys" while testing the tolerance of balding, beer-bellied fans with a catalog of his not-quite-rock obsessions, from arcane Meher Baba spirituals ("O Parvadigar") to an unfortunately jazzified piano rendition of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You."

"I would have been quite happy to sit and bang away at the piano all night, or play John Fahey ragtime," he says. "That's what I do. I also do a lot of extended compositions — I wouldn't call them jazz, but they're very modal, they're very simplistic — it's a style of composition I've been developing particularly to support dramatic language.

"I've been training myself for another life, to write for the stage. I've been learning to play the piano better, to score more elegantly, to deal with other players without being quite so dictatorial.

"I've started to look at the more positive experiences I've had in my life. I find it difficult, because I've spent most of my time drawing on negative experiences." That turnabout extends to his sense of stardom as well. "I'm accepting the fact that my fans, and the Who's fans, are people I depend on," he says. "I should accept that with some good grace and enjoy it." ■