The Who returning with first album in decades

updated 1:58 p.m. ET Oct. 31, 2006

NEW YORK - Most of the 24 years since the last time the Who released a new album passed with the group’s creative force, guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend, believing there would never be another one.

That doesn’t mean no one tried — with almost comically dysfunctional results.

Although the Who is down to only two original members in Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey, the first disc to carry the group’s name since 1982 is set for release at the end of October. “Endless Wire” is familiar in its crunchy rock ’n’ roll and literary aspirations; half is a rock opera based on a mini-novel Townshend wrote and distributed online.

From “My Generation,” to “Baba O’Riley” to “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Who Are You,” it’s a daunting legacy to live up to.

Townshend has always considered live performances as important a part of the Who’s legacy as recordings, and the band has sporadically performed both before and after bassist John Entwistle’s death in 2002. He said he never wanted to release an album that he wasn’t sure was good, and he couldn’t say that for the previous two, including 1982’s aptly titled “It’s Hard.”

“I’ve just been waiting,” he told The Associated Press, “waiting, I suppose, for science to take over and give me the right to have another baby as a 60-year-old woman and suddenly it’s arrived and there’s a baby and it feels good. It think it’s a good record. It feels like a record I may have made way back, back in 1968 or 1970.”

Squabbling over songs
The wait may have been longest for Daltrey, who’s always been impatient for new Townshend songs to sing.

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“Roger would say, ‘all we have to do is get in the studio and play and the music will happen’ and I’d have to say to him, ‘No, Roger, it won’t,” Townshend said. “So we would try it, the music wouldn’t come and he’d have another press conference where he’d claim to have written four songs and I said, ‘can I hear them?’

“He’d say, ‘it’s about this and that’ and I’d say, ‘No, Roger, I want to hear them.”’ Came the reply: “Well... they’re not quite finished.”

Entwistle would claim to have hundreds of songs written.

“I’d say, ‘great, maybe we can do the first Who album of songs by John Entwistle, can you play them for me?”’ Townshend recalled. “And he’d say, ‘I’m not playing them to Roger.’

“And I said, ‘we have a slight problem there. Why not?’ And he said, ‘because he’s always picking my songs apart and saying they’re not as good as yours.”

A number of factors came together to push Townshend toward finally making another Who record, including Entwistle’s death.

With the band on hold, Townshend had quite happily started another career as a book editor. But it didn’t pay the bills. He tried working in musical theater, but found he could only be successful with things that had already been successes before. It didn’t make sense to ignore a powerful band that he enjoyed and found easy to work with.

“I just thought, ‘why am I trying to reinvent the wheel here?” he said.

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