With jolting honesty, Townshend explains Who and why
I was just 34 years old and I was still wandering in a haze.
I was wondering why everyone I met seemed like they were lost in a maze ...
— Pete Townshend, “Slit Skirts”
Part of the received wisdom of rock ’n’ roll is that drummers don’t really matter; they are the ultimate replaceable part. Spinal Tap’s could spontaneously combust without causing much trouble; Lorne Michaels assured the other Beatles they could divide up the $3,000 he was offering them for a reunion on Saturday Night Live any way they wanted — if they wanted to “pay Ringo less,” Michaels said he’d understand.
But The Who died with Keith Moon.
That was all right, really, though it was a shame and a waste that Moonie died young, because we were really done with the Who by 1978. Who Are You was a great album to go out on, right down to its cover photo with Keith in his jodhpurs, with his riding crop, sitting in the chair stenciled “Not to be taken away.”
I suspect Pete Townshend was done with The Who, too.
Not that Townshend has said this, though he has hinted at it over the years. He confides in his new book, Who Am I (Harper, $32.50), that he spent the early ’80s — when The Who were releasing indifferent albums like Face Dances (1981) and inexorable ones like It’s Hard (1982) — that he felt he’d lost his edge. He felt that punk has rendered his main gig irrelevant.
“I began seeing myself as a party man, an honorary senior punkplayboy-cum-elder-statesman,” he writes. “I took to wearing baggy suits and brothel creepers, piling my thinning hair on top of my head like a rocker .... I ... danced like Mick Jones and Paul Simonon from the Clash. At 34 I was still just about young enough to pull it off.”
At 34, he was an old man, a relic. And he was doing some of his finest work.
I can make the argument that “The Kids Are Alright” is possibly the greatest pop song of its era and Who’s Next is high up on my list of all-time most played albums. But the truth is I prefer Townshend’s solo albums, Empty Glass (1980) and All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (1982) and his 1977 collaboration with Ronnie Lane, Rough Mix, to any of his work with The Who.
That’s probably a minority opin-
ion among people who think about such things professionally. But there was something about Townshend’s songwriting, which could seem oblique and confessional at the same time, and more prone to an admission against self-interest than the usual bad boy bluster. I was intrigued by his voice as well, which first struck me as a whispery, featherweight version of the bellow Roger Daltrey employed. (Though it’s obvious to anyone who has heard Townshend’s demos — available on the 1976 album Who Came First and in the Scoop recordings — that the noise we were hearing was that of Daltrey attempting to reverse-engineer Townshend’s remarkable phrasing.)
Townshend was my favorite singer-songwriter in the early 1980s and I remain very much interested in his music and his career. Of course I would read his memoir. I am a fan. I would
read his liquor receipts.
Townshend was always the thinking man’s rock star. Even when he was playing the guitar-wrecking “yobbo” (hooligan) on stage, there was a point to that. It was what Gustav Metzger would describe as an act of auto-destructive art, a gesture with the potential to communicate something of the adolescent fury and frustration. While the first incidence of guitar breaking was an accident, Townshend realized he had “stumbled onto something more powerful than words, far more emotive than ... white-boy attempts to play the blues.”
Who I Am isn’t anything like the standard rock autobiography. Though it has its share of drugs, drink, sex and famous names (hi, George Clooney!) — it’s about as far as one can get from Keith Richards’ selfcongratulatory Life. And it’s not only because it’s written by one of the few rock stars who can actually write.
Townshend’s lyrics were always smart, even when they were playing dumb.
Of course I would read his memoir. I am a fan. I would read his liquor
receipts.
He wrote a weekly column for Melody Maker in the ’70s and dabbled in publishing. In 1983, he took an acquisitions editor’s job with the venerable Faber and Faber. He edited Eric Burdon’s autobiography, Charles Shaar Murray’s remarkable book on Jimi Hendrix, Crosstown Traffic, and worked with Prince Charles on a collection of his speeches. It was at Faber and Faber that Townshend became acquainted with the poet Ted Hughes, a friendship that led to The Iron Man, Townshend’s musical adaptation of Hughes’ story of the same name.
Townshend’s semiautobiographical collection of short stories, Horse’s Neck, first published in 1985 and now out-of-print, was a first-rate work of impressionistic fiction. While it was uneven, some of it — such as “Champagne on the Terraces” (a fictionalized account of Townshend’s unrequited crush on the actress Theresa Russell, the inspiration for the Who song “Athena”) — evidenced a remarkable aptitude for self-observation and critique.
In Horse’s Neck, Townshend wrote that he “had never wanted simply to tell [his] own story.” Who I Am is hardly a simple tale. Townshend, writing in a style that is calm, reflective and less mannered than Horse’s Neck (he was trying to “smash words” the way he used to smash guitars), recounts how he came to be who he is, at least as well as he understands it.
One of the things about Townshend that impresses is his lack of certainty. He isn’t sure he has been as good a husband, father or artist as he might have been. He is honest to a fault, admitting things that you might have omitted — Mick Jagger is the only man he has seriously wanted to have sex with — but one doesn’t get the feeling that he’s the least protective of whatever rock star cred he might retain. He doesn’t pretend he isn’t intelligent, that he doesn’t want to be thought of as an artist.
Though the book is light on tour anecdotes and doesn’t provide track-by-track recollections of The Who’s recording career, Townshend does offer some startling insights on the nature of British rock, the noise made by children who grew up playing in the bombed-up rubble of London and its suburbs.
The Who wasn’t something that could be captured on a record, the band worked as a kind of kinetic sculpture, intricate and murderous, with microphones and pick hands windmilling dangerously, an ox of a bass player glowering as he pumped out molasses black notes, with a banty lead singer who, by his own admission, liked to fight.
Townshend was just part of that show and not even the heart of it. Daltrey was, he writes, the “unquestionable leader” and the mad ape behind the drum kit was its heart. Townshend might have been its head, its conscience, its superego. But he was but part of it.
The Who died with Keith Moon.
But Townshend lives.