Pete Townshend

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. The list of iconic rock guitarists who were also top tier songwriters is pretty short, and at the top of that list is none other than The Who's Pete Townsend. He's been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, received Kennedy Center Honors, Lifetime Achievement awards from both the brit Awards and the Grammys, and all for good reason. Pete's iconic power chord guitar style and early use of synthesizers established him as a musical innovator in the sixties and seventies. His on stage antics, smashing his guitars and leaping halfway across the stage mid song, cemented his reputation as a consummate rock and roll showman. It's not for nothing that The Who were once known as the world's loudest band. In the early sixties, The Who scored a string of chart topping singles, but Pete Townsend wanted the band to try for more than just pop hit, so he set out to work writing the first ever rock opera, a project that became the double album Tommy. Tommy's widely considered The Who's breakout album and is considered a masterpiece by critics. Following its release, Pete started writing songs in a script for another ambitious project, a sci fi epic called Life House. After that project was scrapped, which he details in today's episode, the songs he'd written for wound up on different releases from the band over the next decade, including their nineteen seventy one classic album Who's Next. Last month, The Who released an epic box set called Who's Next Lifehouse that contains one hundred and fifty five tracks, eighty nine of which have never been released. The set also includes a graphic novel based on Pete's original script on her demos, complete live concerts, posters, collectible pins. It's an incredible set to pour over. On today's episode, I talked to Pete Townsend about how some of the ill fated effects of technology that he predicted in Lifehouse have actually come to pass. He also explains why he decided to target a specifically male audience when writing for The Who, and gives an unexpected take on the grateful dead in San Francisco's music scene of the sixties. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's my interview with Pete Townsend. I was really excited to do this interview last week, but then we kind of had a posit so I could get this box set. That's, dear god, what a beautiful I mean, I have some box sets that I really like, but this is this is something else. It's just incredible to read through as I'm as I'm listening the memorabilia book with the pins, the buttons, the posters, the graphic, not the detail on the graphic novel. It's a good, good, good attempt. It's unbelievable good. So this is a project I've long been interested in as a WHO fan. It seems like a project that you've long been interested at least returned to you many times. When did you decide that you were going to do this treatment for this project? When did this come about? You know, I didn't decide to do it. I think the last big thing that I did around life House was I did I think called Lifehouse Method, And prior to that, I'd done a thing called Lifehouse Chronicles, which was a gig at Sadler's Well's Theater in London, and I tried on that occasion. That was in two thousand tried to gather together everything that I thought my fans and the Who fans had imagined had been a part of Life House, because in fact, the songs that are attributed to Life House, particularly in this package, were sort of scattershot things that I was working on while I was waiting to finish the project with the Who's manager, Kit Lambert. When when I wrote Tommy, for example, it was pretty basic, and Kit Lambert, who was always somebody that had helped me with my songwriting and been my mentor I was the Who's producer, came in and helped me shape it up and make it sharper and make it more cohesive. It was still regarded as a bit weak by some people plot wise, but with Lifehouse, I wrote the script and submitted it to our managers in two parts. One was this fiction, which was basic science fiction, and the other was a handbook for a electronic music workshop, and I called it Barrel one for the fiction, barrel two for the workshop, and the graphic novel worked very very close to the film script, which I felt at the time was very naive. You know, I wasn't a film script writer, but it was a story, and that's a kind of a joy for me because I was young and I was full of ideas, and it was a wacky idea. But what they've done in the Graphic novel is they've allowed some some lightheartedness and some humor and some mischievousness to get into the story. There were two scripts. There was one written in nineteen seventy one and another in nineteen seventy five, I think and on those two scripts were loosely gathered together by James Harvey, who was the guy who did the story for the Graphic novel. And it feels cohesive, it feels fun, and I think it will help people understand what I was shooting for. But hey, you know, when I was writing the songs, I had no idea a whether the movie would ever get made. It was for a movie I was interested in, but a movie that was that featured live music, a movie that featured the who live at their best working with an audience, so very much an experiment that when we made the first steps and we went into the Young Vic Theater in London and started to work with audiences, that was when I realized that it just wasn't going to work. We had a lot of technology, we had synthesizers, we had backing tapes, We had some great ideas, but the audience were unwilling really to indulge in an experiment in which they might be revealed to be in some way I don't know. And in any case, it wasn't advertised. The actual series of workshops in London weren't advertised. We were afraid we would get overrun. You know, we were a big band, we were playing too big, so we were afraid that if we advertised it we would get besieged and people would just want to hear the hits. So nobody really came. And at the time, when you say the hits, just mean that would have been this material from Tommy would have been really what audiences at that time were wanting to hear, would you imagine or would it have been the earliest thing. Yeah, yeah, it would have been Tommy. It would have been the singles as well. The singles as well, you know, and our act at that time, even after Tommy, was very much rooted in the early singles and some R and B stuff. You know. One of our big songs was Summertime Blues. We'd had a hit album with Live at Leeds which was a live album and that featured summertime blues. So yeah, we were playing. We were playing a rock gigs, you know, but in the center of our shows was Tommy, and in fact Lifehouse we hoped would provide us with a new centerpiece for our live show. We tended always to work with what you would, you know, in an artistic sense, called a Tripard type show. Three parts, you know, some very old hits to start the show, then Tommy take the level down, and then kind of real whack out lunelessly at the end, with long, long, long version of my generation with lots of stretched out jamming and stuff and guitar smashing. I mean, the guitarist machine had been a part of the repertoire for a bit, but the long, stretched out version of my generation was at a bit because you guys were tired of the song and wanted to just do something different with it. We were tired of everything. I think around that time we were tired of Tommy in particular. And you know, we had a lot of songs. We had plenty of songs. You know, we had kids, all right. We had a song called Tattoo. We had a whole load of songs. We had plenty of songs to do in those days. The sets were very sure. Yeah. You know, the only people that were doing three hour shows were the Dead, right. Did you see them much in those days? Yeah, yeah, a little bit. Yeah. We did a gig with them called Tea in the Park in San Francisco, and that's when I met them all, and particularly Matt Jerry Garcia, who I just loved, was such a great guy, really great guy. Yeah. Did you connect to the music or to the idea of I connected to the idea of the dead, the idea of you know. I remember Bob Dylan once said to me. You know, I said to him, why are you doing so many shows? You know, why why you're constantly on the road. You know, don't you have a fucking life, you know, just just on the fucking road all the time. And he said, Pete, I'm a folks singer. And I said yeah. And he said, well, what is a folks singer? And I said tell me and he said, it's a guy with a good memory and the music for songs. So true, and he said, you know, and he said, I've got six hundred and fifty songs and I have to keep playing them, otherwise I forget them. And it was a bit like that with a Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead were a band that could play fucking anything that you came up with. So somebody in the crowd would sort of saying, play Bay Fifth Symphony and they would have a go. You know, yeah, it's pretty wild. But also the commitment of their fans was something that was interesting. The big thing about the Dead I remember was that they gave their road crew the same share that they got themselves. Did you know that. I did not know that. Yeah, it was a true cooperative. So nobody got rich. Nobody they made a living, but they didn't get rich. It stands the reason in a way, because I imagine just setting up that wall of sound that they were assembling must have been just as much work as in a way is that you know, the three hour jams that they were doing. You know, they're taking the audience requests. But they were definitely they were real contemporaries of the band, and they were a challenge in a sense because because they had a connection with their audience that I was envious of. My belief. The thing about Lifehouse was is that there was a whole tract of thinking, which was about the function of rock music. What was it for, what was it best at, what could it do that it hadn't done before? And that was an underlying theme. It was a conversation, it was a discussion. It was or it invited those things. It invited conversation, it invited discussion. It challenged the whole concept of people coming to see a band, whoever that band was, and sitting down, you know, smoking a bit of a joint and having you know, an experience of some sort. The idea was that for me, was that the who had somehow stumbled on through the mod movement, through the post war syndrome that young men had about you know, being worthless, being disenfranchised. It was a tremendous contrast to what was going on in the seventies in America, which was an anti war movement, you know, against Vietnam, and quite rightly of course, But for us, as young men, we had been country that was actually at the front line of war. So we believed in victory, We believed in fighting for a cause. We felt that America had come and taken part in the whole thing and saved us because towards the end we were very close to being beaten. So it was a new learning process in a sense to come to the States and feel that there was this pacifistic, hard driven pacifistic activist so passive aggressive pacifism. And for me, the main thing was this idea that music had a spiritual function rather than a political function. Rather than a function to change society, it was to change and communicate and uplift and provide solace and spiritual connection to people in the audience. And so that was part of the underlying idea about Lifehouse was what would be a really good that is, the equivalent of a rock band like The Who or led Zeppelin, or an artist like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or whomever going in front of an audience, or Sliming the Family Stone or Stevie Wonder or Prince or whomever going in front of an audience and playing music, and the audience going home and saying to each other, what the fuck happened there? Because I'm different, I'm actually different. You wanted to change people, You wanted the audience to similar to the way that the audience was as much a part of the Dead Show or the way that they created an engagement between themselves and the fans. You wanted to create a symbiosis in a way between the well. Funny enough, I think, looking back, I'm interpolating some stuff which wasn't actually exactly true. At the time, I didn't really understand what the dead we were doing. I didn't understand the San Francisco scene at all. I spent a lot of time there, but I was a follower of a teacher called Maha Barber, and he there were a lot of Maya Barber people in San Francisco. There were a lot of people who followed lots of other spiritual masters as well. But I spent a lot of time there, and I never really quite got the San Francisco music scene. It seemed scruffy, it seemed disorganized, and it seemed to need focus. It seemed to lack focus. And I suppose what had actually happened with the Who as opposed to the Stones, as opposed to Led Zeppelin, as opposed to the Beatles, as opposed to the maybe less so the Kinks. The Kinks were more like Who in that there was one writer and that was me, and that I was not just a songwriter. I was also an ex art schoolboy whose brain had been fried by a bunch of young, radical, forward thinking artists who wanted to return to the Bowhouse method of thinking about art, which was not like Andy Warhol, was not like William Burrows was. You know. It was orderly and structured and scientific and the idea that art itself had a function. So I was always looking for that function. And I had control of the Who because I was the only songwriter. John it Was all wrote really good songs the bass player, but they weren't really written for the Who. They were just written for him, and he never took on the Who as a cause celeb Anyway, that's another story. He Doctor Doctor, by the way, is one of my favorite end whistles Dunes, But well, the Pink Floyd's song Doctor Doctor is also great. Do you remember that? Yeah, Doctor it was. He wrote some really good songs, he did, but they were all very eccentric. When it came to Tommy and I had to face up the fact that I'd had some really terrible neglect and abuse as a young kid at four and a half years old, which had really kind of fucked me up for a while, and Luckily my parents got back together and everything sorted itself out in time. I couldn't write the two songs that I needed, one about sexual abuse and the other about bullying. And I said to John, could you write a song, you know, for Uncle Ernie? And could you write a song for cousin Kevin? And he just kind of rubbed his nose and said yep. And he came up with these two fucking brilliant songs. I mean, cousin Kevin is is like an Eric Sarti fuke. It's quite extraordinary. When we got to the movie with Ken Russell in the seventy four, I had to orchestrate it, and as I started to analyze it, I started to realize what it is a proper fugue. But anyway, yeah, he was great, but I had control of the band. I did all the interviews. John very very rarely spoke, you know. Roger when he was asked to speak, usually spent a lot of time talking about how what a pain in the ass I was. Keith Moon just made jokes, you know. So I would do, you know, a six hour fucking interview with young Wenner for Rolling Stone, and he would publish every word you know, so I was in this place where I could talk the who trip as well as do it. I could talk it, I could Did you want to die or did you just feel the response? Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah I did. I did because I got feedback. And you know, a lot of the feedback I got positive feedback was from journalists. So I'd do an interview and then the next time I would sit with the journalists, they would say, do you mind if we sit and just hang out for a while and talk. So I would learn a huge amount from the journalists at the time as well, you know, Dave marsh and Grew Marcus and a lot of the big famous journalists of that era, and the photographers too. You know, they they all had a passion for what it was that that was hidden in the music industry at the time, and in the band industry at the time. The Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, that who you know, Crosby, Steels, Nash, the f Jefferson Airplane, the leading figures of that period, that there was something that could be done that wasn't being done and won't get fooled again. I suppose was an expression against that. You know, we are not here to provide leadership, because leaders tend to be fly by night yeah, and dictators. Anyway, the thing about what I was saying about Life House was I wanted a model that seemed to me to emulate what was happening with the music business in the West, rock music in particular. And I thought, well, really, in a sense, what we're doing is we're removing, We're not confronting, We're not dealing with the conclusive of societal decisions that one would normally make when you were exposed to art. And this was true even of artists like Bob Dylan, whose work was evidently political. It wasn't happening with artists who were in the first wave of racial change, like the Temptations. They were still seen to be just a band. The conversations may have been happening with people at home, but I never got any real sense of it. So, in a way, I imagine that there would be a place, a world where music was just removed completely and what would be left. What would be left could still be dialogue, it could still be experienced, it could be exchanges, but basically it would be a world which was very, very easy to manipulate. So in other words, you're sort of saying you did not feel that music was being taken seriously as and art form at the societal level. It wasn't. We weren't asking the questions that needed to be asked. No, I think every now and again, for example, when the kids got shot in Ohio, Crosby Steelson n Ash did that amazing song called for Dead in Ohio, which was an expression, but that's rebellion, that's you know, that's albut Camu and you know, create dangerously and rebellion. He died in nineteen sixty, so most people don't know anything about him now. But you know, we still we still live in that place where we have to accept that. You know. The synthesizer was invented by Russians in nineteen twenty six. Thirty five of them were invited to meet Stalin, Joseph Stalin. He gave them dinner, and then he lined them up outside and he shot them all. So, in a sense, the emulation the idea that musicians were dangerous, that music was dangerous. He tried to destroy Schoenberg, he tried to destroy Stravinsky. They both managed to get away. Schumburg actually stayed but he managed to say, if we managed to get away with this life. But you know, of course Stalin was killing everybody. But basically that idea that music was was was if it's dangerous, why is it dangerous? It's because it's capable of stirring up. What we see now in the fiftieth Anniversary of Hip Hop is Chuck d talking about the fact that he's been part of a miracle of societal change and racial change. And it all started with, you know, a bunch of boys playing one of Roger Lynn's wonderful, funny machines. And so in a sense, I wanted something as big and as powerful a model as that, just as I had with Tommy. I'd made Tommy deaf, dumb and blind. I wanted all of the participants in my story to be effectively deaf, dumb, and blind to music to change, and that they were happy, they were comfortable, they were safe, but they were never going to be released. And in a way, one of the most important things about Lifehouse that echoes today is the danger of a bipartisan but also highly polarized political system. And it's not just America, it's the UK too, It's all over the world apart from dictatorships in democracy, creating a place in which people are separated from each other, that the conversation tends to be people shouting at each other rather than speaking to each other sensibly, and that music therefore has become incredibly shallow. It's fucking brilliant, a lot of it, without question, really brilliant stuff, but it's like the froth on the top of the coffee, and it comes and goes very quickly. The pop industry has always done that. It's always have to be careful not to get canceled here, but it always has been most effective for young girls who get a record, listen to it together, learn dances, learn all the songs, and then when they go to a concert they sing. You know that. It's something that's always been really important about pop. Sadly, it was never a part of the whose career, not because we were ugly fuckers. It was because I decided I didn't want girl fans. I felt that they weren't they weren't loyal enough, So that was kind of real calculation at some point. Oh yeah, yeah. When I was a kid, my dad was in a dance band and there was this guy who was a big heart, throb Jewish guy, handsome Jewish guy called Frankie Vaughan. He was pre Engelbert Humperdink and Tom Jones. He was from that era. He was like a kind of a Sinatra type figure. But he had this one song where he did this erotic thing. It was like, give me the music, give me the girl and leave the rest to me. And when he sang that, he kicked a very high kick and the girls used to scream. Anyway, one day I was at the Norwich City Playhouse with my dad. I was ten years old, and he came on and he did that and the girls went mad. And I was in the audience between two teenage girls and one of them took off her nickers next to me. God knows what was happening with pheromones, but I was only ten and threw them up on the stage. Anyway, I went back to London and I said to my best friend Graham, and we were just getting interested in skiffle. Around that time. Rather than Bill Haley and Elvis, there was a kind of a folk music thing again. Yeah, yeah, so trad jazz really, but with a guitar. Anyway, so I said, you've got to come and see this guy, you know, and we'll sit in the audience and maybe these girls will take their knickers off again. Anyway, so we go and he does thing, and all the girls in the audience folded their arms and I went backstage. He was a friend of my dad, So I said, you know, mister Vaughan, I was you know, I told my friend that the you know, the girls would all throw the neckus. What's happened? And he said, he said, it's over for me? And I said why. He said, did you see that boy in the first act? I said, no, who was? He said he was a singer called Craig Douglas. He was a teenage heart throb. They switched sides in the concert, and so when the band started, and it was quite clear that the other three members of the band were mainly interested in trying to be like the Beatles and the Stones and have screaming fans that they could presumably shag if they were lucky. Not that we weren't short of pretty girlfriends. We all had lovely, pretty girlfriends, but it was just that model. Yeah. I just remember saying to them, no, no, no, let's play to the male audience. I'll write songs that are about boys. I'll write songs that are about you know, boys, sexuality, about boys, frustrations with life, you know about boys, boys, boys boys, because you know, when a boy signs up to a soccer company, a soccer team, that's it for life. He supports them for the rest of his fucking life. You know. It's like it's like sport in the US. And it worked for us. I mean, we drifted into a slightly more normal audience. I suppose around the time Tom the Tommy Movie was on, when Roger became a much more glamorous figure. Then we started to get girls coming in, but never the kind of female, crazy female audience that are banned like the Stones hat or I mean, what's interesting about somebody like Tom Jones and then Gulbert Humperdinku a sort of British products. Was that when we were still doing shows and coming home with maybe one hundred dollars each, he was playing one show in Vegas and going home with a million dollars. This is in the seventies, was making huge money. Zepplin seemed to somehow find some sort of balance between really appealing to a male audience but then also leveraging I guess the Robert plant ness of whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, Robert, and Robert based himself very much on Roger's performance in the Woodstock movie. You know that that was the point at which Roger transformed from being short haired, you know, not really having a job in the band at all, but just singing the songs, to having a really important central function. His wife ordered him this beautiful shammy leather jacket with fringes, encouraged him to stop bleaching his hair, to let it grow out and it went into ringlets, and to display his body because he was always very well built up top. And of course the Woodstock film was huge, and in it he was beautifully beautifully photographed, and suddenly we had a rock god. Yeah. But at the same time, so did Zeppelin. Did that framing of Roger change any dynamics within the group? Yes, yeah, it gave Roger much more of a sense of being a part of a band that valued him and knew what he was good at. Prior to that, he it had been troublesome. He didn't drink very much, he didn't take drugs. He was never part of the party. He used to say that he couldn't because of his voice, but I don't think it was the kind of thing that he really liked anyway. But suddenly he was an important member of the band on a functional level. And you know, from that moment on we did have a much bigger I think when the Who did their big deal with Warner Brothers, which would have been nineteen seventy eight seventy nine, I had already made one solo album, Empty Glass, and Warner Brothers did a sweep and discovered that the Whose audience was about seventy percent male and thirty percent female, and my audience was fifty to fifty and I remember being very surprised by that. But you were the one. You were the one that was let's right for the boys, and then yeah, you know, and then you wow. I think maybe I don't know quite why, but the full force of the Who in those early days, particularly live, was very, very aggressive, whereas Led Zeppelin were not aggressive. They played loud, and they played and they played, you know, the same kind of music we did, but they were there was no sense of machisma. There was a sexuality, for sure, but there was no none. The thing that Whose shows was something that I suppose I felt that with Life House we might come to change and rise above. It was almost as though when we played tom Me on the stage, we had to put that particular who band on a nail, hang it on a nail, because the the band that had to play Tommy had to play what was basically an opera, It was a story. It had to be presented in a way that made sense. And therefore we just became performing musicians rather than an idea, rather than a pack, rather than a you know, there to challenge and to change and to steer. And I suppose when you say, as a young man, I'm only going to pitch my music to young men, the question that one should be asked is why, And I would say, because I think young men in my day, when I was young, were really fucking lost. They needed they yeah. Yeah. And what's interesting is when we got to America, I couldn't work out why young American boys identified so much with some of the thesis, some of the ideas, and some of the methods that I was presenting. And although they'd never been exposed to the bombing and the post war apocalyptic nature of the bombing that we experienced and also they had experienced being told that they were worthless because they weren't called up to fight. There was no national service. There were plenty of people in the military they didn't need anymore. And at the same time, of course, there was marijuana. There was a degree of political change, of artistic change or going on in the We didn't get to America until sixty seven, and already some of the changes in the way that young men were valued were deep seated. We have to take a quick break and then we'll come back with more of my interview with Pete Townshend. We're back with more from Pete Townsend. As I'm thinking about one of the things that really has always attracted me to The Lifehouse as a project, hearing the demos, like when the Lifehouse Chronicles came out. I think I came to that around two thousand and eight finally, and hearing the demos. The demos are as good as the finished songs. And that's not to say that I prefer one over the other, because I think they're both great, but it's like there's a sensitivity to your performance of songs that are on For instance, Who's Next that when it comes to the band and it gets the treatment from John and from Keith, and from from Roger and but also from me as a member of that band. Yeah, and the way you're playing is it's like a cover version of the song I don't know how to explain. I mean, maybe that's not that's relationship with the music, but that that's my I think. I think when I when I was working, whenever I worked in the studio, I worked partly for fun. You know. I knew that we would take the songs in and the band would do their band thing on it. But I was writing for the band. Of course, I wasn't writing for myself. But when I came to do my own albums, the difference between my demos and the finish thing was much less. So. Yeah, the band was definitely an aggressive, powerhouse machine. Yeah, and you know, in a s set year, we replaced musicianship with machismo and with athleticism. In my case, you know, I spent more time up in the air than I did play in the guitar. Yeah, you had you had real HAPs Some of those photos are incredible, in the in the in the sparks at your view and there. One of the other things I've wondered, is to me, it felt like there was a shift in the songwriting between Tommy and in what the stuff they came out of Lifehouse project, Like some of the stuff, the stuff Tommy and before felt like it had a specifically British lilt, and Who's Next had this sort of like American ness to it, this boldness like this. Well, I think my I abandoned my old approach of writing, and I decided what actually happened was that when I was demoing before, I used to go from machine to machine, stereo machine to stereo machine, got very good at it and made very fine sounding demos. But when I started work on Lifehouse, I'd got a studio tape machine, an eight track machine, was one of the first people to use Doldby, so I could do lots of bounce downs and you know, end up with equivalent of sixteen to twenty performances with backing vocals and stuff. But the band that I modeled my demo sound on was The Band, And it was because the album The Band, by the band who had spent a lot of time then supporting Dylan, was recorded by them in a barn, and their previous album Big Pink was done in a house called Big and was again recorded so not in a conventional studio. So I felt it was possible for me if I had the right equipment, to make a demos where I played the drums, the bass, the guitar, did the backing vocals, played the you know, the Lowry organ. At the time, Hammond organ was on everything, and Hammond organs have this wonderful sound, but they all sound the same. Whereas Garth Hudson was a magician, you know, he used to take this organ, is old Lowry organ and make it sound like all kinds of things. And so I had a Lowry organ, and which is how I stumbled on the sound for Barbara Riley. It was built into the organ. I just modified it a bit with synthesizers. So that was my reference track, was that album. That was what I was listening to. And when we got in with Glynn John's eventually after the failure of the recording in New York, where we did some good recordings, but we never got very far because Lambert was not really with us anymore. Glynn took those tracks and I think actually he sort of anglicized them again a little bit. He gave them a bit of the kind of you know, the Olympic Studios reverb based airiness that he was so famous for. My demos are certainly funky. Your demos they're amazing. They're really beautiful. They're really beautiful, and it's a testament to your songwriting that it can work as well as they did with you know, in the way that you recorded them, and that they worked as well as they did with the group, and then that even hearing being all the finally hear these record plant sessions from New York, that the work as well as they did with Leslie West playing over them really bringing like I mean, it's just like incredible, Like the versatility of the songs is wow. Yeah, that was fun working with Leslie. Leslie was always a huge fan of the Who, but particularly of me. He used to compare me to every other lead guitarist and I because I used to wrong myself down a little bit and say I can't play like Eric Clapton and I can't play like Jimmy Page, but I'm the best rhythm player in the world. And he used to say, yeah, you can play. They're all playing fucking cliches. And he was a good buddy, and so he happened to be there working with Felix Papilladi on a Mountain recorded by their band Mountain, and I invited them to break in the studio for us. Kit was away. He arrived the second day we were there, so that first day we played that track with them. And by the time you got back to London and recorded at the Olympic, and I think you did at least one track in the Rolling Stones mobile mobile bus, it just didn't feel rate to bring someone else in again. No, we brought we brought in a violinist for the end of Barbara Riley, but that was all right. Yeah. No, we were not a band that collaborated with other musicians. You know, John Elwisill when he started solo touring. John did the Ringo all Star band tours. I think he did it four or five times when the Who were inactive for whatever reason, probably because I was writing and he loved performing. John he loved playing. He loved playing, and I was never crazy about it. I was never crazy about touring. I was never that crazy about performing. I knew I was good at it, but you know, I didn't know why I was good at it. And I still don't. I still don't know why I'm so good at performing. I suppose I have to put a lot of it down to the history my childhood, because growing up with my dad's band. You know, I feel very comfortable on stage, and I feel very comfortable backstage, But I don't get that excited. It feels like a job to me. It feels like a job that I do well, that I don't have any arguments with. But it doesn't set me on fire. You know. When I see some artists about to go on stage at Clusterbury or someone like that, they're so excited and so thrilled that they almost like, you know, they could go up in the air like a balloon. I don't get that. Is there anything that does set you on fire in that way? Well, I really like being at a recording studio. Yeah, to some extent, Yeah, yeah, of course there are things. But I think I think musically speaking, I feel like the whole picture, the whole you. I mean, when we opened up this conversation, you you talked about, you know, in a sense, the idea of me as a as a renaissance man, being able to do various things, and so there are moments in everything that I do where I get a kick. It's just that thing that some performers get that they just love it. You know who I talked to a lot about this was Tina, you know, yeah, And I said, what fucking happens to you on the stage? And she just looked at me and she said, Pete, what fucking happens to you? Same thing. She didn't know who that person was. She was quiet, shy, sad, would walk onto the stage and bang, you know, and I look at myself on the stage, and I don't know who that person is. Do you remember the first time that person appeared on stage? Yeah? I think I do. I think it was we were doing a little We was just a school band and we were doing some show and it was we did the gig and then I got off stage and went into the crowd and we'd been playing. The new dance of the era was the Twist Chubby Checker's song The Twist, which is really significant because it was when men started to dance on their own right, super super important because there was this whole group of people in the in the male brigade, who would pretend I don't dance. I could but I don't. I just wait till the end and then I go and pull a bird and take her home and I'll marry her. Maybe you know that kind of stuff. But then there were the boys like John Emwistle was a great driver, was really good at it. And anyway, I started to dance, and I remember being surrounded by this group of boys and girls who were clapping because I was dancing. I was thinking, Wow, I should do that on the stage. It was a bit like a scene from you know, a corny movie. Yeah, exactly, like then the Footloots or something. Yeah. Your dad was Cliff Townsend, who was quite an accomplished musician over in the UK and had a solo career. Briefly. Norri Paramore, who had discovered the artist Cliff Richard, signed my dad to a series of solo recordings playing it was Cliff Townsend and he's singing saxophone. Wow. Yeah. And he did a recording of Unchained Melody that nearly got in the charts, but it had been recorded by about four other artists. Wow. Your relationship with him musically, would you say there was a strong bond between you guys musically speaking? No, it was terrible He really didn't think that I would ever be a musician. He encouraged me to look at journalism because I'm a good writer, and art because I could draw, and he steered me away from music. When he realized that I could play the guitar, well, he did start to encourage me. He tried to get me to join a small band that he ran and do a summer season with him. But by that time I was at Art College and I was already in the WHO band that was starting to develop, so it was sort of sort of too late. Whereas my mother was really supportive, you know. She got the school band that I was in, the detours with Roger and John. She got us auditions, she got some really great shows. She knew she'd been an agent for while, a music agent. She was started. She met my dad and she was a singer in a beautiful voice, and my dad had a lovely voice too. I'm very proud of the fact that all me and all my three brothers have got something of their vocal nature. That's something about the voice, which is nice and it's nice to have. But no, he wasn't useful, but he was a huge influence because of his discipline. You know, he used to drink a lot. He was pretty wild, really good looking guy, but he was a bit of a waste trel. You know. He used to bet on the greyhound dog racing a lot. He fritted away a lot of money. You know. I bought him his first car, I bought him his first house. You know. Yeah, he was you know, it was always broke. Wow. Yeah. But he would get up in the morning and practice the clarenet for two hours. And I remember teasing him saying, you know, you're playing all this fucking per coffee off and god knows what, and then you're going to a dance hall and going And I always used to do this to my dad, used to go and here Dad comes the really exciting bit that you have to spend two hours a day playing dirt dirt. You know. Everything that they played was really basic and simple. Did he take that in a good natured way? He used to laugh, but you know he had a couple of phone calls. I remember when I was still living at home, I would have been about fifteen, because I left home when I was sixteen, maybe sixteen and a half. I came back home for a while as well. In my middle years, mid middle teens, but he was. One day got a phone call from a guy who said, have you got a bass clarinet? And he's just say, yes, I do have a bass clarent. He said, could you play the pro coffee off bass clarinet concerto? And he said is it written? He said yeah, he said, I can play anything you put in front of me. Went to Wigmore Hall and did this BBC broadcast of a pro coffee off bass clarinet cantata or something. I can't know what it was, but it was a procoffee of thing that's beautiful. So he was a brilliant reader and interpreter. But he was in a swing band, you know, and the swing band world was like punk because you know, Glenn Miller in America and the Squadronaires my dad's band. Then they were there to raise spirits, you know, of people that would probably be dead in two weeks. You know. They weren't forces sweethearts, but they were providing and they were considered, you know, because in those days military music was brass bands. So the people that put together the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the Squadronaires in the UK were air Force. The Air Force. People were not serious military. They were like, you know, the Navy was the Navy, the Army was the army, but the Air Force were these stupid fuckers that went up and flew planes about and crashed them, and they cost millions of dollars. I remember I did a thing in Chicago recently when Tommy was on there, and I told this story, and somebody in the audience told me the name of the guy who allowed what he called pop music. They called it some thing that music to be part of the military exercise. I grew up with that. I grew up with the fact that my dad was yeah, big band, Yeah, super cool, super cool, sort of smoochy music and really beautifully written. And then of course as I got older, I realized that bands like the Baisy Band and Duke Ellington and Woody Harman and all these people were people that had influenced my dad's playing in his music, but were also people that I really got into and loved, and particularly Arlington, who was kind of crazy genius composer. So I grew up with that and it was just the most wonderful place to be the main thing being able to go and be a little kid and go and you know, be part of the dance hall world. And I remember once a story I often tell. It's a great story. As I was my dad was doing a summer season in a holiday venue up in the north of England and there was this beautiful, big ballroom and I was eleven, I think so I was eleven. I may have been just starting to think about girls seriously. And I got myself a milkshake and I sat up in the balcony, which was a big square balcony, not like a theater balcony, and these two girls came and sat outside me. They were about eighteen, and in those days would have been fifty eight fifty nine something like that. Girls used to wear these big flowing frocks and decolotage, you know, bosoms hanging out, beautiful hair, lots of makeup. And he went, what are you doing here, little boy? You know? And I said, oh, I'm here because my dad's in the band. And they went, oh, your dad's in the band, and said I said, which one is he? And I said that one there and she went she said to her friend across me. They sat either side of me, said across me, oh damn, it, he's married, he's got a son, damn it. He was the one I liked. And then they're thinking, Wow, I get this, I really fucking get this. And then the other one said I want the drama. This is a guy called don Ken or something. He was a Scottish boy. He was really handsome, and I realized that he was handsome, and that my dad was handsome, and that these two girls wanted to have sex with these two boys. And there I am with my milkshake. I also I also saw some dark things. I was telling somebody today about being at this particular ballroom and a whole bunch of teddy boys coming in and suddenly starting to beat up certain boys. And two police officers came in, and these teddy boys pulled out iron bars and they practically beat these two policemen to death and ran away, and there was blood on the pavement, and these guys were helped out, and I remember being there watching it and thinking, what the fuck? You know. So there were ups and downs, but most of it was glorious, you know, And it made me confident that this business, this show business, this music business that I'm still a part of, is a wondrous place to be. You know, it's not about being rich and famous. It's a place where you're dealing with the mystery of music and the wonderment the magic of music, and also the way that music. In those days, the function was to bring people together to dance, to make love, to kiss in a back alley, maybe for the girl to get pregnant, to have children, to start a new life after the misery of two world wars. And the music was designed for that, the atmosphere was designed for that. And then suddenly there I am, you know, in this place where I'm looking at Why don't I have a value? Why don't I have a meaning like my father? Why you know I wasn't asked to fight. I've not been asked to join the army. I'm grateful to be free. But then, you know, I knew that the war had ended with the nuclear bomb. With the atom bomb, the glorious Oppenheim is now making loads of money. And I suppose jacked into rock music after me being a big jazz fan, jacked into rock music is the way to express that disenfranchisement. It's big words about silly stuff, really, but the path is quickly for a break and then we'll come back with more from my chat with Pete Townsend. We're back with the rest of my conversation with Pete Townsend. The use of Organs synthesizers that you started to do. I find it fascinating that at a similar time that you're starting to ease these things. Malcolm Cecil is the great producer. He was a friend of my dad's right and he worked with Stevie Wonder on his class of records. He did a lecture. He did a lecturer eating art school when I was sixteen, and he was playing his bass. He said, you know, you can do anything with a musical instrument, and he got his bow and he started to bang the bass with the bow. And my friend Dick Seaman went up to him and said, you can do anything, can you? And he said, yeah, anything, anything at all you want to do with a bass, you can do it. And he put it on its side and he sat on it and he turned it back to front and banged the back of it. He said, this is a machine. You know, you can do anything with it. So Dick Seeman went and got a saw, a wood saw, and Malcolm Cecil soared through his strings and as the saw went through the top, It hit the belly and made a notch in the belly of his bass, which I used to see. I used to go and see him at Ronnie Scott's and he had his bass with a saw notch in the He was fucking radical. He was radical, So me smashing guitars was partly inspired by him, as well as Gustav Metzka, who was a considered you know, auto destructive artist who wanted us all to save the planet by stopping flying and stopping being so bourgeoires to need big cars and television sets and all of that stuff. Anyway, he wrote to me about a year before he died. He wrote me a letter. Wow, is it just a couple of years ago? Then? Yeah, yeah, because it's only recent, isn't it. He was He was with Robert Margolev, wasn't he worked with and they built that big synthesizer that were you aware of what he was doing with that stuff at that time? You know? It was after me, It was after me. He was still in a jazz band. He was in a band called the Johnny Something Quintet. The floortist in that band was going out with a girl in my class eeling that I fell in love with and kind of crazy. Anyway, The interesting thing about the synthesizers was that the Beatles had already got hold of a Mogue synthesizer. It was being operated for them by a guy called Chris Thomas, who was working for George Martin. Chris Thomas became my record producer. I had produced Chris Thomas's first record in a band called The Cat, so I knew Chris, so I heard stories about this amazing thing that they were working with. And then the Beatles came out with Maxwell's silver hammer, Bang bang, then with a bit of some weird synthesizer noises, and so I knew about synths. But in the UK, a guy called Petersenoviev, who was an electronic music musician, decided to make his own synthesizer, and he made one called the EMS Electronic Music Studios Putney because they were based in Putney, a small box. So I bought one, and it made me realize that there was a language there that was that I could tack on too, in a sense, tack on to rock and roll. And then I heard that he had a music computer. It was a punch paper computer. I met him a few years before he died, and he told me that he never got it to work. But anyway, I then started to meet other people like Roger Powell, who was working went on to work with Todd Rungren who was working for ARP. A guy called David Friend was a marketer for the ARP. Alan Perlman made a mood like synthesizer and I bought one. So I was a great believer in the fact that synthesis would not just be about music, would not just be about making funny noise for electronic music mort Subotnek or you know whomever, but would be able to jack into a computerized system to produce very very tailor made musical harmonies and stuff according to data that could be produced by analyzing people's minds, bodies, temperaments and stuff, which is at the heart at the heart of the experimental side of the Lifehouse project. Yeah, it was in two phases. I mean so much of that sort of that concept to me seems to obviously resonate today with making music with AI. Right, AI applications potentially for making music, I guess is what's sort of starting to occur now what you had envisioned in some way. No, I don't know, I think. I mean, what's really interesting is I was one of my counselors, one of my supporters when I was working on Lifehouse was a guy called Tim Seuster. He was a friend of Carnheinz Stockhaus, and I met Stockhouse when I was working on Lifehouse, and I met the people in the BBC Radiophonics workshop as well. But Tim Suster said to me one day, Pee, I'll have a tab behind my ear. You'll have a tab behind your ear. I'll be able to send you the melody and you'll be able to send me the counterpoint. And I said what through the air And he said, yeah, through the air. So but in my story it was all tubes and wires running through the streets. And I didn't get the Wi Fi bit that I didn't see that happening there. And no, I didn't see that coming. So the thing about the the AI issue of today is that we're in a very very strange place at the moment and it's not like the Internet at all. It won't have the same I don't think. I can only say what I think. A lot of it is based on search engines very much like exotic Google and bing and God knows what gathering data and gathering images, you know. But if you go to you know, Adobe Max and you say, I want a picture of a dragon, you know, holding a nude girl in its mouth, you know, set in an ice field with snowmen and pixels, it knows what to do, it knows where to gather those images. But that has got to be junk. However beautiful it is, however extraordinary it is has come. On the other hand, what's so extraordinary is that when we challenge ourselves as artists, we'll often use that kind of shorthand. We'll often say, I want to write a rock song. I want it to be sexy. I want it to be something you can dance to. Want it to have a bit of an edge, have a groove like this song, yeah, groove like this yeah. So in a sense, AI at the moment is only looking backwards. It's when AI starts to look forwards. For example, supposing AI which will be wonderful for international translation. It could save the planet. You know, while the dictator in China is talking to the dictator in America, whoever happens to be in power at the time about what's going to happen with Taiwan. You and I could be having street level conversations with Cantonese kids. We could use our jargon, they could use their jargon. We'll be sitting at our computers zooming battles and forwards, and we hearing each other heart to heart at a level which is so familiar. You know. We could actually say, you know, what flavor of ice cream do you like? And they're going to say, well, I'm not keen on vanilla. You know that kind of stuff, low level, high level, whatever it happens to be. It will completely disable the manipulating dictators who say Americans are your enemy, you know, or in our case, the Chinese are our potential enemy. You know. You meet them, you talk to them, and you think, well, hey, they're just like us, they just have a different language. So I think in a sense, ai can conquer that. But it's when you say, for example, you know, chat GTP, I write me a CV, I want to be a guitar player, I want to be in a band, I want to play R and B music. I want to blah blah blah blah blah. I've done you know I've got a music course. I did a course at a university, but it was literature and services and so, and I want you to write my CV for me, and Jack Tip actually says to you, Pete, you're making a big mistake here. If that ever happens, if it just does what I fucking asked it to do, then I'm very happy to have AI. I used it for the first time last night. It's been built into to an organizer that I use called Clickup, which is a task manager which I use because I've got so many projects i'm juggling with. It's not the most popular, but I really like it. And they've just introduced AI and one of the pages is a long, long, long essay about my project, The Age of Anxiety, which is a young musician who hears the anxiety of people in his audience, gets distressed, quits, meets an old rock star who has gone through a similar experience of disenchantment with rock music and become an actor and then that hasn't worked out either, and just says to him, listen, if you're feeling crazy, embrace it. The reason why I just did that chat was because yesterday I gave this six page description of my thesis for my play and said summarize it. And that's what it said, and it's a really good summary. Wow. I don't know you personally, but having followed your career, knowing a bit about from Afar, you're far from a technophobe, seem to have embraced technology wholeheartedly throughout your career. You do see some practical useful application of AI. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, I do. I do. I think it will help in all kinds of ways that will surprise us when they happen, just like the Internet has. And of course the Internet has its dark side, very very dark side, but then so does social media, you know, and social media could actually be described as having a dark side in the music industry, you know, because in a sense what's actually been happening is that very very few artists has started to monopolize the majority of streaming to the extent with the long tale which was predicted when the Internet started, there will be a long tale which will be the interesting part will be all the people that are doing all the interesting personal stuff is become so clogged up. You know. You go on, you go on to Spotify and go into some of the Apple is the same title as the same You go into an area which nobody else is listening to, and you hear the most extraordinary stuff. You hear it on you know, SoundCloud, you hear it on band camp. You'd make discoveries and you think, who the fuck is this? They're brilliant, they're a genius. But they've got twelve followers. You know, it's sort of tragic what's actually happened, because not that all of those people could ever have been famous. You know, we're used to the Star System being a place which they you know, which that guy, I can't remember his name, but he called it black Swan's you know where a black Swan is somebody that's just extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time. So no, but with respect to AI, I'm hopeful, but I'm not going to say it's inevitably going to be a good thing, because I think it's when it becomes what drives a machine that we have to be careful. I think I have to give personally, I have to give the credit for my ability to bounce off new ideas is because of my training at Art College. You know, the team of people that were running the course when I was sixteen. Were radical thinkers, you know, and they were predicting the eminence of personal computers, which took thirty or forty years to arrive. You know, they were their students. You know, don't learn to draw because you don't need to that kind of thing. You know, what you actually need to do is you need to learn how to start a conversation, to create communication, but most of all, to understand that the most important thing about art in the modern world is creating a channel for feedback. Feedback from your client, feedback from your audience, feedback from other artists, conversation with other artists, so that art becomes bigger than society and bigger than small chunks of society. And what's interesting now right now, you know, I've got the Chuck d book. He's a great drawer mind signed, which is very cool. Yeah. I was working on some theater piece and the kid that lived opposite my studio, his bedroom was right opposite my window, so when I was sitting at my keyboard, I could see him, young kid, he was about fifteen. The wall was plastered with public enemy posters. So one day I thought, I've got to check these guys that they were really hard to find. They weren't easy to find, but I found them and it felt like this, this this is some black guy who's very, very angry with me, and he's shouting at me a lot, and he's making stuff up on the spur of the moment, and a lot of it sounds pretty threatening. But now, of course I kind of look back at it and I think, you know, the whole journey of it has been through wholes you know, from Jay Dilla, questlove and all of that stuff. It's turned it into a high level art form but also also a political success story. Like so you you follow hip hop? You you are interested in the production of of hip hop? Yeah, yeah, I read that. I read the Diller book, which is cool, so you get his life story. My friend Dan Charnis wrote that incredible. Tell him I love it. I love it. I love it. It's because he was such an interesting young man and I wish he'd been around. And of course the Who's bass Player for a while, Yeah yeah, and he Kipino played based on the Miseducation of Lauren Hill. Shit, man, do you have to be not much anymore? Of these days? Like I had this thing recently where I met a young guy on Instagram who'd done a beat every day for a year, because I'd tried to do that a few times, try to write a little song every or even a verse of a song every day for a year, and I would get to sort of fifth of January and give up. And he did a whole year. And I just wrote to him, sent him a DM and just said it was fantastic, and got to know him, helped him with a few things, and brought him to my studio and he wanted to look at a while. It's a piano that was his thing. I want to see all. I've got one to come and see it. He lived fairly nearby, so he came, very shy young man, and he started to tell me about you know, I said, where did you learn about this slack beat thing that you do? Because it's really fucking slack. Sometimes it's so slack that you can't work out where the rhythm is. And he said, I'm a fan of Questlove, So I said, sort of rings a bell, and I got my computer out and I did it Jay Diller on Questlove. I saw Pino's name, so I got Pino on a zoom, and Pino was so thrilled to meet this young guy who was such a big fan of Jay Diller and Questlove. And this guy Brynn Morgan, who's a Welsh boy. Pino's Welsh is now sending beats to to Pino whether anything will happen who. So it was a really nice coincidence. That's amazing. I like People's last record at all. Yeah, it was so fucking cool, so interesting was yeah, yeah that I'm so glad you heard it. It was good, really cool stuff. And I think they're going to make another one. And he's such a charming guys. He got into the Who by you know, we we were about to do a big tour. John Atmusall decided to kick the tour off that was starting in Las Vegas with a with a cocaine binge in a hotel in Las Vegas. He was he got into bed with a prostitute who professed to have said I'm taking your friend into bed and I'm going to fuck him to death, and she did. She fucked him to death. And we had this big tour set up happening the next day, and I said, I wonder if I can find Pino so I got Pino on the phone and he was just getting on a plane from Florida. He'd just been working on the Lauren Hill album, and I said, will you come over? And he just came over and we did three days in a rehearsal studio. We canceled Las Vegas in three days in a rehearsal studio. He was with the band for a quite a long time. I think he got fed up with her, but he was good while it lasted. I got to see him with you guys a couple of times. That was a great show. Yeah, I mean your example of you bringing the the guy doing a beat to day to your studio, I mean, just just cool, because you know, I'm sure you guys didn't get that. No, I'm sure there was enough of a disconnect between what you guys in the mid sixties were doing, you know, when you're eighteen. There were exceptions, you know, when we did Tommy at the film or Leonard Bernstein came and got hold of me afterwards, he brought his daughter to see the show and got hold of me and shook me and said, Pete, you've got to do more of this. You've got to do more of this. It's such great work. You know, the storytelling, you know, the vivacity of the music, the lyrical sensibilities of it. It's just wonderful. You must do more, and you must bring it to Tanglewood. And we took it to Tanglewood. He was the director there. Wow. Yeah, wow. So there have been exceptions, and I think even as a young man too. In the fact, I've recently written a song about it about Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttleton, who were two jazz players, so crossover from what we call traditional jazz, which would have been Louis Armstrong basically inspired jazz and bebop, and they were just in between those two stools. They invited artists like The Who and many other acts in London at the time, and the Stones, who were playing R and B onto their stages, which were jazz stages. They invited us in and they gave us airtime and they were encouraging. And Chris Barber, who was a jazz musician, his wife, Otterley Patterson, was a really great jazz singer. They were married and they were twosome and they were national treasures as it were. You know, they ran the Marquee Club and they invited us in and he used to sometimes get on stage with his trumpet and join into you know, R and B songs that we were playing I'm a Man and Smokestack, Lightning and stuff like that. And Humphrey Lyttleton, who was who knew my dad, was another trumpeter who was who did lots of stints at Ronnie Scott's Club in London, and Ronnie Scott. We premiered Tommy to the press at Ronnie Scott's Club and we were very loud for the club. But he was a sax player like my dad, a tenor player. And he came afterwards and he said, Pete, that was fucking great. You know, you must do more. And at that time, you know, I was dabbling with the idea of doing more concept work, but I was so encouraged by lots of well not lots of people, but certain key people. There were people that were did the validation meant to mean something new from those from the oh yeah yeah, yeah, particularly for me because they were they were from my dad's world, you know, and my dad had been unable to give me that validation. That makes sense. I don't know that he even came to see us when we were a school band. Did he see you once you became the who ever? Now? And again he wasn't keen. Yeah, he used to say as a joke, he used to say, you know, you guys have put us out of work. You know, we we we need fourteen musicians on stage minimum, you know, to raise seventy five decimals. You know, you guys come in with your big amplifiers and there's only four of you making a noise. You know, Come on, Dad, put you in a car, but you a home. Well, the car was the best thing, the first car I bought him. He'd had an old banger, you know, but I bought him a brand new Series one Range Rover for very first one, which was like a big high car and it only did nine miles to the gallon. So I used to have to send him money for petrol as well. But then I bought the house that they rented that they lived in, and my two brothers now live in that house, so two flats of each other, so it's still a family home. But yeah, he was lovely. My dad and we went boating together. We bought a boat together, and we used to go out on the River Thames and we both drank a lot, so we would drink buddies and that's fun. Yeah, man, Pete Townsend, thank you so much. Well, I mean for all your deep writing over the years, songwriting, all the music, sticking together all these years putting out incredible music. And thank you so much for this beautiful package. It's lovely to talk to you. Thanks again, thanks to the legendary Pete Townsend for sharing so many incredible stories from his career. The Who's new box set Whose Next Lifehouse is out now. You can hear a collection of all of our favorite Who songs and other songs mentioned in this episode on a playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Lea Rose and Eric Sandler. Our show is engineered by Echo mat. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four to ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Are theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.