Pete Townshend has enormous respect for Angus Young. He also believes the AC/DC guitarist is living proof of what can happen when a musician spends too much time on the road.
Speaking to Guitar Player in 2000, the Who guitarist argued that many rock musicians stop evolving because they’re constantly touring instead of developing new ideas in the studio.
“I think a lot of great musicians become frozen in time because of their obsession with the road,” Townshend said. “I mean, look at AC/DC. They’ve never stopped touring and Angus is still wearing those stupid shorts. He still plays brilliantly—and he’s one of my favorite guitar players—but the band is definitely stuck in a rut.”
It was a surprising jab at one of rock’s most enduring guitar heroes — and, in fact, AC/DC are currently out on their massive Power Up tour, which returns to the U.S. on July 11.
But for Townshend it illustrated a larger point. Long before home studios became commonplace, he’d built one of his own and made it the center of his creative life.
The only people I know who had home studios before I did were Les Paul, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Barry Gray, who did music for English cartoons.”
— Pete Townshend
“I was the first person,” Townshend told Guitar Player. “The only people I know who had home studios before I did — apart from electronic music composers — were Les Paul, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Barry Gray, who did music for English cartoons.”
Having his own studio gave Townshend a place to experiment with sounds and develop songs long before he brought them to the Who. Working alone, he built remarkably complete demos that served as blueprints for ambitious projects including Tommy, the abandoned Lifehouse project and Quadrophenia, allowing the band to hear exactly what he envisioned before they entered the studio.
Many of those recordings were eventually released on the Scoop albums, Lifehouse Chronicles and expanded editions of classic Who releases, including Who’s Next/Lifehouse and My Generation.
Despite his reputation as one of Britain’s most influential guitarists, Townshend said recording — not playing guitar — had always been his true passion. In addition to his fluency on electric and acoustic guitar, he’s also a capable drummer, bass guitarist and keyboardist when it comes to turning his ideas into fully formed demos.
“Recording has always been a passion of mine, and it still is,” he said. “I find it hard to talk about guitars and amplifiers because playing guitar is just something that I do—it’s not a passion. The guitar just happened to be what I fell into, and the guitar has become an icon that has grown out of all perspective. The way that I used the guitar in the early days was incredibly irreverent. To some extent, I continue to be irreverent about it.
I’m a great believer in the concept that the creative process is often about where the music comes from.”
— Pete Townshend
“My passion and enthusiasm has often been contained in my home studio — partly because it’s private, and it’s where I’ve found a way of expressing my complete musicianship. For me, the creative idea is about a neighborhood. The creative spirit needs roots — you have to be fairly well grounded before you can set it free. My studio provides me with a place to create and to be creative.”
Townshend believed the place where music is made becomes part of the music itself, pointing to early rock pioneers like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, who rehearsed and recorded in garages.
“I’m a great believer in the concept that the creative process is often about where the music comes from,” he said. “People like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly rehearsed their routines and made recordings in their garages — Cochran used to engineer his own records!
“So you can’t remove the garage from the sound of their early work. You’d never find a painter, for example, who would say they didn’t need a place to work, but a lot of musicians undervalue the importance of the studio space. They’ll say, ‘Here’s my guitar and my bottle of water, so now I can go anywhere.’ Crap! You can’t really do that.”
Townshend’s own fascination with home recording began in the early 1960s after meeting Barry Gray, whose electronic soundtracks for British television introduced him to the creative possibilities of recording outside a commercial studio.
“He was doing those cartoon soundtracks electronically with simple organs,” Townshend recalled. “Pete Wilson, the guitar player in my very first band, had his father arrange for us to record our first demo in Gray’s studio. We recorded one of my first songs, ‘It Was You,’ which was also the first song I ever published. This was around 1963 or ’64.”
Townshend soon began experimenting with a pair of film-location tape recorders, bouncing tracks between the two machines to create sound-on-sound recordings before upgrading to a Revox recorder with Dolby noise reduction and, later, a 3M eight-track machine.
By 2000, Townshend had embraced Pro Tools, but his old analog studio remained his creative refuge. It was the kind of space he believed every musician needed—a place to experiment, evolve and avoid becoming, in his words, “frozen in time.”
“If I want to make a great-sounding demo,” he said, “I’ll go back to my classic analog equipment.”
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