THE PUNK AND THE GODFATHER

If I sounded a lit­tle dis­tracted dur­ing my inter­view on Tuesday’s edi­tion of “The World,” the BBC/​Public Radio International show, there was a rea­son: shock. Because while I was mum­bling about the Pentagon’s so-​​called bud­get cuts in the BBC’s cramped stu­dios on Broadway, a hero of mine was sit­ting in the next booth over.
He’d seen bet­ter days bet­ter decades clearly. His eyes were puffed and heavy; bags dropped most of the way down his cheeks. His skin was saggy and full of lumps. A cou­ple days’ worth of gray gris­tle didn’t make him look any more lively. Still, it took me only about a nanosec­ond to rec­og­nize him: Pete Townsend, gui­tar and song­writ­ing god of The Who.
Now, when I was about thir­teen or so, I didn’t just like The Who. I came pretty close to wor­ship­ping them. Before my record col­lec­tion had thirty LPs, Townsend’s two records from the mid-80’s were piled near Who’s Next and Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. “My Generation” was the first bad-​​ass song I learned to play on bass. I even went to a Roger Daltrey solo show at Madison Square Garden; Big Country opened the bill.
In the BBC stu­dio, I smiled a teenaged grin as I saw Townsend. And it took just about every­thing in my power not to go up to the booth’s glass and start doing Townsend’s sig­na­ture wind­mill strum. But I man­aged to resist. And as I tested my mic lev­els, the engi­neer kindly pumped in Townsend’s inter­view into my head­phones; he was dis­cussing a pink Stratocaster gui­tar.
My inter­view quickly got under­way. As I answered a ques­tion about the Raptor stealth fighter, Townsend backed away from his micro­phone, put on his coat, stood up, and walked out the door.
I sang “Behind Blue Eyes” the whole way home.

January 19th, 2005 | Blog Bidness | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.