Pete Townshend took part in a performance from The Who's Tommy Tuesday night on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, leading the Broadway cast through three songs featured in the musical.
The latest revival of the musical opens Thursday at the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway. To celebrate, Townshend led the cast through his classic songs "Pinball Wizard," "See Me, Feel Me" and "Listening to You."
Townshend, sporting a red knit cap and sunglasses, also joined Fallon for a discussion about how they first met at a 9/11 tribute, Tommy and the origins of The Who with singer Roger Daltrey.
"He was a short kid and he claimed that he'd been bullied a lot at school," Townshend recalled. "His system of dealing with bullying was to become a fighter and he was a really good fighter in the playground...and I was pretty scared of him." Townshend went on to explain that Daltrey recruited him for his group. "Since then, I feel like I've had the necessary protection," echoing a line from Tommy.
Fallon also asked Townshend about his tendency to smash his guitars on stage. "I would fix them," Townshend revealed. "I used to glue guitars together." Townshend recalled an early visit to New York with The Who when they performed four times a day on a Murray the K package show. "I only had the one guitar, so I had to break it and fix it four times a day. In the end it was probably more glue and string than guitar."
Townshend revealed that his first guitar was a present from his grandmother who "bought it from the Greek restaurant in Ealing, where we lived, off the wall." For that reason, Townshend said he's not one who holds the instruments in high regard. "Nobody's going to tell me that a hunk of wood with some string stretched across it is sacred," he said. "Not to me."
During the interview, Townshend revealed that Tommy developed out of his desire to expand The Who's repertoire and reach. "We were doing really well with rock songs, so I thought we needed to do something really drastic. And that's when I came up with the idea of rock opera. And that's when I wrote Tommy. I felt that I needed to write something that was bigger than just a single."
Tommy, the Townshend-penned rock opera, is returning to Broadway after three decades. The original production won five Tony Awards in 1993, including Best Original Score, Best Direction and Best Choreography. It was also honored with a Grammy Award for Best Original Broadway Cast Recording.
