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" I'm only interested in rites of passage stories. "
Pete Townshend
Only
Stories
Passage
Related Quotes:
" I want to age with some dignity. "
Pete Townshend
Some
Age
Dignity
" Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre. "
Pete Townshend
Angry
Men
Political
" I felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience. "
Pete Townshend
Touch
Shepherd
Lost
" What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh. "
Pete Townshend
Music
People
Father
" Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America. "
Pete Townshend
You
America
Early
" I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed, and that's why I think it's so unique. "
Pete Townshend
Style
Art
Guitar
" What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive. "
Pete Townshend
Trying
Theatre
Music
" As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic. "
Pete Townshend
Job
Body
Man
" It's sad when people break up. "
Pete Townshend
Break Up
People
Sad
" In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief. "
Pete Townshend
Follow
Religion
Organized
" My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good. "
Pete Townshend
Father
Dance
Wonder
" I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious. "
Pete Townshend
Believe
Try
People
" It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance. "
Pete Townshend
Rock
Performance
Lights
" Most of my songs are about Jesus. Most of my songs are about the idea that there is salvation, and that there is a Savior. But I won't mention his name in a song just to get a cheap play. "
Pete Townshend
Cheap
Name
Just
" I saw the Internet as being something which would allow power mongers to control us, and that we would willingly go to that if it promised us salvation - if it promised to show us who we were and let us find ourselves as we had, uniquely in our generation, through rock music. "
Pete Townshend
Rock
Music
Control
" I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.' "
Pete Townshend
Elegance
Society
Mirror
" If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high you'd laugh and say nothing that simple, but you've been told many times before messiah's point you to the door though no one's got the guts to leave the temple. "
Pete Townshend
Simple
Door
Laugh
" Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes. "
Pete Townshend
Long
Think
First
" A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes. "
Pete Townshend
Song
Home
Writing
" Although I dig my guitar playing, I think it's kind of an obvious situation; I play what I want to play within my own restrictions. "
Pete Townshend
Play
Guitar
Think
" Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color. "
Pete Townshend
World
Music
Color
" I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator. "
Pete Townshend
People
Know
Money
" What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story. "
Pete Townshend
Theatre
Story
Sometimes
" But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol's work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup can. "
Pete Townshend
People
Think
Work
" A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending. "
Pete Townshend
Audience
Pretending
Want
" Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true. "
Pete Townshend
Hypocrisy
Live
People
" Keith Moon is not interested in jazz and won't ever be a jazz drummer because he's more interested in looking good and being screamed at. "
Pete Townshend
Looking
Good
Drummer
" I bought a Dutch barge and turned it into a recording studio. My plan was to go to Paris and record rolling down the Seine. "
Pete Townshend
Paris
Plan
Recording Studio
" I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours. "
Pete Townshend
Early
Think
Work
" I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. "
Pete Townshend
I Was Born
Plastic
Spoon