Pete Townshend shared his thoughts about quitting the Who from the start.
From his recent comments about his bandmates, Keith Moon and John Entwistle were no longer with the band, he was glad about it and fans were shocked. The guitarist also admits he enjoyed certain moments with the two.
When asked by Rolling Stone about leaving the band Townshend replied,
“Pretty much day one. I always wanted it to be as brief as possible, and it hasn’t been. … This is not a judgment on them. It’s a judgment on me. … Immediately I started to realize it wasn’t a job that I like. I didn’t like the the traveling. I didn’t like being onstage. I didn’t like the fact that it all seemed like all the other guys in the band just wanted to get girls. It didn’t seem like art to me, and I’d been to art school.”
He also said that he came to believe that the Who were past their great years, “when the punk movement came along.”
“I loved the punk movement because that’s what I wanted the Who to be,” he explained. “I remember after seeing Generation X and Siouxsie and the Banshees, just thinking, ‘Wow, this is what we used to do. They aren’t doing it quite as well as we did, but they’re doing it really, really well.’”
Townshend recalled as well that he had enjoyed his moments with the group when they began performing in the U.S.
“That was probably quite a way down the road,” he said. “It may have been around the time we first started to work in the United States playing places like the Fillmore and the Electric Factory and the Boston Tea Party, where we were allowed to stretch out and explore.”