I'M FREE . . . IIII'M FREEE-HEEE!

After an investigation that lasted nearly four months, police in London cleared Pete Townshend yesterday on charges that he downloaded child porn from the Internet. Computer equipment seized by officials from Scotland Yard at the time the Who guitarist's arrest in January failed to turn up any illicit downloads, police said. Investigators did confirm that Townshend had accessed a site containing such images in 1999; as a result, he was listed on a national register of sex offenders.

"From the very beginning," Townshend said in a statement, "I acknowledged that I did access this site and that I had given the police full access to my computers. As I made clear at the outset, I accessed the site because of my concerns at the shocking material available on the Internet to children as well as adults, and as part of my research toward the campaign I had been putting together since 1995 to counter damage done by all kinds of pornography on the Internet, but especially any involving child abuse." (full story)

This was my sense the whole time, slighly born out of hopeful thinking (if not wishful), but also that Pete just doesn't seem like the kiddie-porn type. Anyway, this is good news for us rock musicians and fans.