Pete Townshend of The Who was a guest on CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, November 12. The 80-year-old rock legend visited the chat show to promote the new ballet based on The Who’s classic 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia, which will get its U.S. premiere with a limited November 14-16 engagement at New York City Center in Manhattan.
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In an extended edition of Townshend’s Late Show appearance, posted exclusively on the program’s YouTube channel, host Stephen Colbert asked the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer to please name his “top five Pete Townsend songs.”
[RELATED: The Who’s Pete Townshend Bringing Quadrophenia Ballet to New York City in the Fall]
Most of Townshend’s choices were some of The Who’s most popular and enduring songs. He said his top pick was the dramatic ballad “Love Reign O’er Me,” from Quadrophenia. His next choice was another Who power ballad, “Behind Blue Eyes,” from the 1971 album Who’s Next.
Pete’s third top tune was the only non-Who song on his list, and his biggest solo hit in the U.S., “Let My Love Open the Door.” The tune peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1980.
Number four was the classic anthem “Baba O’Riley,” another song from Who’s Next. Townshend proudly mentioned about “Baba O’Riley,” “I think that’s now got 1.5 billion streams on Spotify.” Pete was a bit off, as a check of Spotify showed that the song actually had amassed a bit over 700 million streams as of November 13.
Townshend’s fifth and final choice of his list of the top-five songs he’s written was another epic anthem from Who’s Next, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
Townshend Talked About What Inspired “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
In choosing “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Pete noted that it was the song with a theme “that is most applicable to the modern world, which is that our leaders are never any good.
He continued, “[W]hen people try to tell us who to vote for, we always don’t feel quite right about that. So, I wrote this song called ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ And [the message] was, you know, as Bob Dylan said [in his song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,] ‘Don’t follow leaders … [watch the] parking meters.’ It’s a kind of a comment on the fact that the people that we put in power always seem to end up breaking their promises.”
Townshend further explained, “[T]hat’s not directed at anybody now, today, but just everybody that there’s ever been. Politicians promise stuff that they sort of know they have their fingers crossed behind them. They know that they can’t deliver some of the stuff that they promise.”
Pete pointed out that in the early 1970s, “I was being bullied … by a bunch of hippies who said, you know, ‘Pete, the revolution is coming, and you’ve got to get behind it.’ So I wrote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ for a project called Lifehouse.”
He added that what he was trying to say was, “‘No, I won’t … be part of your revolution.’ I think the revolution, if it comes, won’t need me to write for it.”
Townshend Also Sat In with The Late Show’s House Band
Prior to his interview with Colbert, Townshend sat in with The Late Show’s house band, Stay Human. During commercial breaks, Pete jammed with the group on snippets of a number of songs.
Among them were the Quadrophenia tunes “Drowned” and “5:15,” as well as on “Let My Love Open the Door.”
Other Topics Townshend Discussed with Colbert
You can watch the full episode on CBS.com.
During Townshend’s chat with Colbert, he also talked about the Quadrophenia ballet, what inspired the 1969 Who rock opera Tommy, the band’s recent North American farewell tour leg, and the many unreleased song he’s amassed.
For more details about Quadropnia, A Rock Ballet, visit NYCityCenter.org.
(Photo by Scott Kowalchyk/Courtesy of CBS)
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