The Kids Are Alright Page #2

Which reflect in a certain sense

the phenomenon of youth subculture.

There is narcissism.

There is a kind of new sensibility

as a strong tendency

for playing up things

and no more putting it into

aggressive forms of counter-action.

- It's. ..

- Yeah.

Thank you

Good.

Thank you.

Because that was the end of the '60s.

That seemed to sum up

an awful lot about rock.

It was the time when you were

a great star of Woodstock.

Woodstock itself was one of the

biggest pop events in world terms

because of the film that masses

and millions of people have seen.

And it was a marvelous thing

in its way.

But just as a matter of interest,

what do you think it changed?

What was different after it?

What did that generation,

all those people,

given the same high by the same thing,

yourself in turn...

what did it change?

I'm just interested to know.

Well, it changed me. I hated it.

Ladies and gentlemen...

The Who.

You have to resign yourself to the fact

that a large part of the audience

ls sort of thick, you know,

and don't appreciate quality,

however much

you try and put it over.

The fact is that our group isn't...

hasn't got any quality.

It's just musical sensationalism.

You do something big on the stage,

and a thousand geezers

sort of go "Ahh."

It's just basic Shepherd's Bush

enjoyment.

Our sound appeals to mods

in the case for aggression.

For example, for a brief period,

I stopped smashing guitars.

Kids started shouting out

"Smash your guitar, Pete.

Smash your guitar"

and getting quite annoyed

that I wasn't

because to a large percentage

of geezers that come to see the group,

they paid their money to see me

re-amplify with the guitar

or see a guitar break, you know?

A lot of girls come to see the group

because of various things

which people in the group wear

such as John's jacket of medals

and my jacket made out of flags

and Keith who wears sort of fab gear,

pop art T-shirts

made out of targets and hearts

and things like this

Because the group is a fairly

simple form of pop art,

we get a lot of audience this way.

Off stage, the group get on

terribly badly.

There's a lot of just spite

and things which flash around.

The singer is

a Shepherd's Bush geezer

who wants everything

to be a big laugh,

and when it isn't,

he thinks something is going wrong,

Terribly wrong

The drummer is a sort of

completely different person

to anyone else other than me.

The bass player

just doesn't seem to be

interested in anything, you know,

which makes it all very difficult.

You've been together 10 years.

You must have been subject

to a great deal of strain

and inner tension.

I now cannot ask that...

- Actually...

- We do try to ignore each other.

We've always been very close,

you and I.

No.

Most of the thing

is that I loathe Pete Townshend.

- Keith and I...

- The group has had no history,

and I've hated him

ever since we began.

Since I've been doing the bulk of the..

The thing is that he does no writing.

I do most of it.

I end up doing most of the lyric work.

He keeps taking the tapes.

He thinks he does the lyrics.

What about musical quality, though?

You said that you don't think

your group have got any.

Why don't you try and give it some?

If you don't...

If you steer clear of quality,

you're all right, you know.

No, really.

This is the truth, you know.

But wouldn't you say

The Beatles and people like that

have a certain musical quality?

You know, that's a tough question.

I... actually this afternoon,

we, John and I were listening

to a stereo of The Beatles

in which the voices

come out of one side

And the backing track

comes out of the other.

And when you actually hear

the backing track to The Beatles

without their voices,

They're flipping nails.

The first major American tour

was by bus.

We traveled from coast to coast,

and from Miami we'd go up to Canada.

It was pretty awful.

We used New York as a springboard.

We used to play for Murray the K.

We used to do five shows a day there,

and we had three minutes

to do our show.

First you'd have one and a half minutes

of kind of explaining

and one and a half minutes

Of "My Generation,"

smash your guitar, and run off,

you know.

Five times a day, seven days a week.

In those days,

your performances used to end up

with you smashing all your equipment.

There were stories about you

smashing hotel rooms on every tour.

All lies. Not a word of truth.

Well, according to people at the time,

it certainly was true.

Why was there all that violence

surrounding you?

Well, this was only last week, wasn't it?

What made us first want to go

to America and conquer it

was being English.

Not because we cared monkeys

about the American Dream

or about the American drug situation

or about the dollars or anything.

It's because we were

English kids, right?

And we wanted to go to America

and beat it.

Pop music is crucial to today's art,

and it's crucial that it should remain art,

And it is crucial

that is should progress as art.

I saw you.

Girls came to see you mainly

to look at the clothes you wear.

Don't you think that most of them

come for a certain sexual thrill

they get out of your performance?

Our group is probably one of the most

unglamorous on the stage today.

I mean...

No, really, I mean, this is one of our

big problems, you know,

and probably still is, you know,

is that the group

didn't have enough glamour.

It was all these clothes

and smashing things up

it was all mechanical things.

It was bricks and stones and things

and not enough of, sort of,

normal group things, you know.

We made our second album,

which he produced,

and it was during that album,

which, as I said, Kit Lampert produced,

that we really realized

what making albums was all about.

You know, we had great fun,

and it was very creative.

And Kit was learning

about record production

and doing crazy things

like recording the group

from a microphone down the corridor

and all these things which are

very commonplace nowadays.

Using incredible amounts

of compression

and squeezing the sound up,

squeezing cymbal sounds up

to make them sound

like steam engines

and various, sort of,

twiddling knobs

as the recording was going.

The engineers

throwing their hands in the air.

"It... coated knobs, mate.

You can't do that."

And all this was going on

in the studio,

but unfortunately we had

ten minutes on the album to fill

when we'd finished,

and so Kit turned around to me

and said "I think you should

write something linear,

something with continuity,

perhaps a ten-minute song."

So I said, "You can't

write a ten minute song."

I mean, rock songs

are two minutes 50, by tradition.

It's one of the traditions, you know.

They only allowed you one modulation.

Four chords or five, you know.

Five chords, you might be

up before the committee.

Ten minutes is ridiculous.

So he said "Well, listen, if you can't

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