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One of rock’s most influential figures. “I’m thinking, What should I be doing now?” And I haven’t got an answer yet.”

While he ponders the next big thing, Townshend has embarked on a 20-date reunion tour with the other two surviving members of The Who, singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle. The band is backed by drummer Zak Starkey — son of Ringo Starr — and The Who’s longtime guest keyboardist John (Rabbit) Bundrick. The group performs Saturday night at the Gorge Amphitheatre.

Early reviews of the tour describe a Townshend who still has fire in his loins and hurricane-force gusts in his windmill guitar moves. But in a wide-ranging interview before the tour began, Townshend sounds surprisingly nonchalant about reuniting the band that formed the original triumvirate of British rock along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He describes the tour not as a landmark event but as a lark among old friends.

“It’s the kind of thing that people do when they’re retired, isn’t it — they go on a cruise with their golf clubs or something,” Townshend says, a wry tone creeping into the cockney accent he retains from his youth in a working-class London neighborhood. “We’re not quite retired yet, and I know Roger’s got a lot of passion about this stuff. But for me, one of the things that’s nice is that I can do it without getting heated about it, without panicking about whether or not I’m going to find it inspiring.”

It’s hard to imagine Townshend not getting heated about a performance. Before his solo acoustic endeavors of recent years, he was known for smashing his guitars on stage as he railed against the establishment and delved into the bittersweet angst of adolescence. But Townshend, who in his white pullover shirt, close-cropped hair and loose gray slacks looks no more like a rocker than he sounds, insists he considers the tour significant.

The tour is heavy on old hits, including “Magic Bus,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Pinball Wizard” (from “Tommy,” Townshend’s masterpiece musical that created the rock opera genre) and “Baba O’Riley” (the songwriter’s paean to Avatar Meher Baba). But Townshend says The Who also may compose and perform some new material on the road, and if the songs gel, they may end up on a studio album.

In the last few years, Townshend’s songwriting has been so private that although he’s composed and recorded about 850 new pieces of music (his London home, he says, is so wired that “I can send and receive e-mail or record on a multitrack in my bathtub”), he hasn’t developed any of them into songs for mass consumption.

“I don’t know what it is, I don’t have that need to wrap it all up so that you can have it,” he said during a Manhattan news conference a couple of months ago. “I don’t know, maybe I’m not so interested in you.”

But nearly four decades into his career, Townshend appears conflicted, and at times mournful, about what rock has done to his own life.

“I thought that rock ’n’ roll was a different form of show business. I thought it unlocked something different about the human spirit and about the artistic process,” he says. “And, of course, it didn’t; it does it exactly the same as many other art forms of entertainment.”