It was about 1967 that I started to think deeply about rock music and The Who's particular role in it. I began to believe strongly that we were being tied down too much to single records, to the 45s that had to be three minutes long, were released, got into the Top Twenty for a few weeks, then disappeared. I felt stifled and a bit frustrated. I felt that if I had to say everything on a record in three minutes maximum, then I wasn't ever going to say very much, in spite of the fact that I respected the limitations. A parallel situation, I suppose, would be someone like Ken Russell being restricted to making commercials. Or a novelist being tied down to writing only short stories. I felt, in fact, that rock music was being tied down by its own limitations and I wanted to find a...