POP MUSIC

Townshend

Continued from Page 6

At a discreet hotel near his home in the London suburb of Richmond, Townshend settles into an armchair. He looks trim as ever in T-shirt and slacks. When it comes to "Lifehouse," the album project he has just completed after 29 years in the making, he is ready to talk an Olympic marathon.

It began in 1971 with the Who in its pomp: legends of Woodstock, peerless creators of the first credible "rock opera," members of big-time stadium rock's first generation.

But that's exactly what was eating at the purist in Townshend.

"'Lifehouse' started with my feeling that stadium rock was going to kill us all. Because I knew as an artist that I was completely powerless. I couldn't stop the Who performing in football stadiums, and I absolutely hated it."

He imagined the Lifehouse—a kind of super-venue cunningly adapted to warp minds—as a metaphor for corporate government attempting to control every aspect of people's lives by feeding them food, information and soothing sounds through the "experience suits" they had to wear. But, ever the idealist, he proposed rock 'n' roll as the answer, suggesting that music that was "good and true and ambitious and risky" could free souls to overthrow the oppressive regime.

Looking back, he gives a sly smile of self-deprecation: "'Pretentious' is just not a big enough word."

With his screenplay optioned by Universal in 1971 for $2 million, all seemed well at first. But he hit a wall. He couldn't seem to make anything actually happen, especially after an attempt to develop the project the same year through two weeks of daily live performances at the prestigious Young Vic Theatre fell apart when the theater board took against them and chucked them out.

What Townshend didn't know was that the Who's co-manager Kit Lambert, based in New York, was telling interested parties that "Lifehouse" was a nonstarter and the next serious Who project would be a "Tommy" movie. But, trusting and relying on Lambert, Townshend flew to New York in 1971 to seek his help.

Townshend recalls the scene as vividly as if it were yesterday: "I thought, 'Kit's going to save me, now it's going to happen.' Then, as I walked up to his office door, I heard him say to Angie Butler, his secretary, 'If Townshend thinks he's going to walk all over my "Tommy" project. . . .' I was so naive, but it was hearing him call me 'Townshend' that did it. I got a panic attack. I sat in there thinking, 'He's calling me Townshend. There's nobody calling me Pete anymore. I'm Townshend. I can't live like this.'

"I looked 'round, and Kit and the other people in the room became frogs. I stood up and walked towards an open window until Angie grabbed me. She said it was obvious I was going to jump out of the window."

Triggered by Townshend's experience of powerlessness to combat commercial demands, "Lifehouse" was scuppered by the band's own business arm. QED, perhaps.

Mercifully, the Who's collective momentum soon dragged Townshend back from his breakdown. Later that year, the band recorded its most enduring and successful studio album, "Who's Next," featuring the great "Lifehouse" songs "Won't Get Fooled Again," "Let's See Action" and "Behind Blue Eyes."

But Townshend never gave up on the project. The key "Lifehouse" track "Pure and Easy" appeared on "Who Came First" in 1972. A couple of years later, he took another abortive shot at the movie with director Nicolas Roeg and science-fiction novelist Ray Bradbury, and "Who Are You," from "Lifehouse," was the title song of their 1978 album. (The "Tommy" movie Lambert had talked up, meantime, came out in 1975.)

"Lifehouse" lay dormant, though, for many years after the Who broke up, while Townshend busied himself with solo albums, book publishing activities with top British poetry house Faber & Faber, and the Who "comebacks"—for its 25th anniversary (in 1989) and the first-ever live performances of "Quadrophenia" (1996).

Reflecting on the latter comeback, Townshend recalls with some amusement that the premiere was scheduled for a major outdoor event in London's Hyde Park with Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan also on the bill: "And I'd decided to do it solo; me; an acoustic