I had a big, big problem because I had been the big rock idealist and now it was all letting me down. The industry hadn’t fulfilled its promise. Rock ‘n’ roll had changed the length of men’s hair and very little else. I felt like a fool because I’d waved the banner so aggressively. And what was really worse, I felt that I was being used by journalists.
I hated the feeling that I was in a band on the downward slide that was killing people in Cincinnati, killing off its own members, killing its manager. We were into making big money and anybody who got in the way or had a problem, we dropped. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to think this was a particularly bad thing, or we pretended it wasn’t, anyway. I felt it start to kill me. Something was getting its teeth into me. I should have stopped doing what I really didn’t want to go on doing. I should have stopped working with the band. I should have stopped and had another look at rock ‘n’ roll, the thing that I loved and cared about so much, which I held above all other things.
Pete Townsend, from the book:
The Courage to Change: Personal Conversations about Alcoholism
Dennis Wholey
Note – the book is from 1984.