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Entwistle and his wife Alison have been married for twelve years, have one son, Christopher Alexander John, and spend most of their time in a house on the edge of London. They also own an establishment in Gloucestershire consisting of eight houses spread over 52 acres. Entwistle's songs, which are like nightshade valentines, show up on Who albums often as a kind of bleakly bemused counterpoint to Townshend's. He is also a skilled caricaturist and is now drawing A Cartoon History of The Who. In this work, Entwistle made up imaginary ancestors for each of the band members based on some of their salient characteristics. There is, for example, a certain Wild Bill Daltrey, a tightwad gunslinger who drills his victims with platinum bullets, then digs them out of the victim for reuse. Townshend's forebear is a Norman soldier who landed at Hastings in 1066, fell out of the boat onto his shield and invented surfing, acquiring in the process a hugely swollen nose. Entwistle's own predecessor is a soused sea dog named Ahab, who goes about in a state of perpetual inebriation, spotting pink whales to port.
Kenny Jones has been christened "The Hairdresser" by the rest of the group for his high standard of grooming. Indeed in this mob he looks like a hopeful young actor fallen among thieves. Jones has a house on the outskirts of London, which he shares with his wife Janet and their two sons Dylan and Jesse. Jones enjoys the pleasures of a squire, himself, including riding to hounds, which he persists in calling "riding to dogs."
Life on the road tends to be livelier than home on the range. "I'm never fully alive unless I'm on the road," Entwistle says. "Groupies are part of that. They build up my ego, make me feel that I'm a star." Alison Entwistle has a different attitude: "I hate being at home when he is on the road. I know groupies are part of it, and I hate them all." Heather Daltrey says she doesn't bother about such things.
But Townshend, who wrote an ironic song about tour life called Romance on the Road, not yet released, is in typical fashion drawn in both directions about it. He can see through the romance like a pool, even as he dives into it. "He's perfectly capable of getting off the plane in New York and staying drunk for the entire tour," says one of his friends. A talk with Townshend at the best of times is a hopscotch game in a minefield. This is part of what he means when he says, with some melodrama and a strong measure of truth, "Rock is going to kill me somehow. Mentally or physically or something, it's going to get me in the end. It gets everybody in the end."
Any rock fan can recite the litany of tragic burnouts; whether Pete succumbs remains a matter of strength and a certain kind of sure footed brinkmanship that until now has kept Townshend writing and The Who performing true lifeline rock 'n' roll. The members of The Who know what this music means, know its power and its necessary mutability. They also know what it means to the kids, not just a quick charge and an antic rush in a minute of concert footage but a change as potentially profound as any art can work, and even more immediate. All of this is in the four lines of Music Must Change that Townshend sings quietly, almost to himself: