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" 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
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" I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man. "
Pete Townshend
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" 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
" 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 used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally. "
Pete Townshend
Going
More
Try
" I don't really know any other musicians like me. I grew up backstage with my dad who played in a post-war dance band, so I always feel at home at a venue. "
Pete Townshend
Home
Feel
Dance
" The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage. "
Pete Townshend
Music
Rock And Roll
Today
" It's an ordinary day for Brian. Like, he died every day, you know. "
Pete Townshend
Like
Brian
Day
" English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records. "
Pete Townshend
Kind
You
Playing
" 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
" I felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience. "
Pete Townshend
Touch
Shepherd
Lost
" When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment. "
Pete Townshend
Up
Color
Interesting
" 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
" Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything. "
Pete Townshend
Child
Everything
Me
" 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
" 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
" It's like the mod thing is happening again. "
Pete Townshend
Like
Happening
Thing
" 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 needed to give back, give back, give back. I felt guilty about my success. I felt uncomfortable about how easily I had been delivered this extraordinary life that I had. "
Pete Townshend
Back
Uncomfortable
Success
" 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 was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. "
Pete Townshend
I Was Born
Plastic
Spoon
" He is the king. If it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble', I would have never picked up a guitar. "
Pete Townshend
King
Never
Up
" I have to say that anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that blunts and blurs my sense of proportion. "
Pete Townshend
Anger
Say
Sense
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Backstage, I get sleepy, and want to curl up and snooze. I never get nervous, whatever the event. I feel quite detached until I walk on stage, and then some gear inside me clicks and off I go like a wind up doll. "
Pete Townshend
Nervous
Walk
Want
" 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
" When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar. "
Pete Townshend
Hear
Guitar
Blues