While there are some musicians who insist in interviews that they prefer first takes, I’m pretty sure those folks are liars, or else they just have attention deficit disorder. 50+ videos Play all Mix - PETE TOWNSHEND ON TRADEMARK WINDMILL YouTube Pete Townshend and Steve Luongo chat about John Entwistle & The Who - … As the years pass, the moments that surprise you come less and less often, but if the crowd’s clapping as loudly as ever it can start to feel like you’re a priest for some cargo cult: your followers love the bamboo air towers and wooden headphones so much that they’ve forgotten what those things are supposed to call down from the sky. Because it’s your job to please the crowd, you try it again the next night, only this time you’re practiced, so the crowd responds not just to the moment you summon, but also to your obvious command of that moment. When the show was over, they’d collect what pieces they could, then try to put them back together so they could stay in tune for at least the length of one more song. No matter what Daffy does, Bugs always one ups him, until finally Daffy drinks some gasoline, then swallows a match and explodes. It’s about nothing more than a moment of glorious noise, and surrendering completely to its power.Calling up those moments is tremendously difficult, and making them last for any serious length of time nearly impossible. It’s all the same this year as it was last year. It’s not like being possessed, it’s just I do my job, and I know that I have to get into a certain state of mind to do itOK, now it’s time to watch what Pete means, as he and the band tear through “Young Man Blues” at the Isle of Wight in 1970:When Pete says, “I do my job,” he’s not being ironic in the slightest.
And when the music can’t pull that off on its own, talented performers can force it to do so. The exact same way he lost it: he remembers who and where he is! The crowd goes wild and Bugs urges Daffy to take an encore. The windmill is now such an iconic rock gesture that not only does it have a name, but the very footage we just watched is featured in a montage sequence in School of Rock, when Jack Black’s teaching his students how to look and move onstage. So when you want to summon one, you do what superstitious humans have always done: namely, whatever the hell you were doing the first time it happened.This goes on all the time when you’re a touring rock band: you do something accidentally one night — some new banter, or a way you haven’t strummed on that song before, or someone else in the band jumping through the air at the same time you fall to your knees, so he just misses your head — and both you and the crowd are surprised and excited. We want to hear from you! The Who's lead guitarist and main songwriter Pete Townshend commonly plays his guitar with a fast windmill motion, inspired by watching Keith Richards' warm-up exercise. I’m not this rational person that can sit here now and talk to you…I’m just not there, really. If you’re like me, though, you noticed two different kinds of Pete Townshend windmills. Back! It’s like that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he and Daffy Duck keep trying to outdo each other onstage. We weren’t laughing at the music – we were laughing at the chasm between what the music wanted to mean and what it was doomed to mean to anyone who’d heard it too many times before.But as I hope you saw when Pete started windmilling so fast that he seemed seconds away from taking off like a helicopterthe music can always surprise you, and the times that it does are actually sweeter if you’ve already convinced yourself it’s all bullshit. PETE TOWNSHEND ON TRADEMARK WINDMILL - Duration: 1:11. Back! But that’s the point I want to be sure I’ve made before I shut up: the more music you play, the more music you hear, the harder it becomes for the music to affect you, and the better it feels whenever it does anyway. More importantly, though, as a guy who spent a good ten years on the road in a band that very much wanted to be the Who (actually, the Clash, but it’s really the same thing), I know just how easy those moments are to fake, and how that can make chasing after genuine onstage epiphanies not just a point of honor, but a physical craving that gets harder and harder to satisfy the more often you do it.That’s the nifty thing about this bit of film: you don’t just get to see the band reaching for an elusive moment and capturing it. Required fields are marked He takes his work very seriously, and on stage his job is to lose control. But how’s he get it back? 16:47. But, as his ghost ascends to heaven, Daffy sighs and says, “That’s the problem with that bit: I can only do it once.”Townshend’s windmill must have happened for the first time once, presumably because he couldn’t control himself. And when he finally succeeds, the whole thing rockets to another level, and you get to witness both the man and the song disappear entirely for a few priceless moments.Before the song, though, Pete’s got something apropos to say about his job.When I’m on the stage, let me try and explain: when I’m on the stage, I’m not in control of myself at all.