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H E A R_ I T

Pete Townshend:
+ My Generation
+ Jools and Jim

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HIS GENERATION | PAGE 1,2
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But for all the acclaim and respect those projects earned, if you're going to try to trace the brilliance of Townshend and the Who, the best way to do it is to pick up the threads of individual songs. "My Generation" may have been an anthem for kids who were coming of age circa 1965, but it has more layers of complexity than most anthems: Townshend wrote, "Why don't you all fade away?" as a way of ordering his elders to step aside. Yet even as one of the fresh new voices of his era, he's borrowing (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not) their words to make his statement. Nearly a decade before, Buddy Holly had sung about not fading away -- he was talking about keeping a love affair alive, but his followers took the song to heart as a pledge to keep rock 'n' roll thriving, past the stage of being a fad. In that context, "My Generation" is more than just a fuck-off anthem; it's a way of picking up the torch -- but not before giving it a shot of gas.
In his career with the Who, Townshend's songs achieved a delicate balance of brashness, tenderness, humor, brittle anger and wily intelligence. The gravelly crunch of Townshend's guitar in songs like "My Generation" was only part of the band's hallmark sound. Although the Who were first and foremost a rock 'n' roll band, they knew how to be a pop band, too, and were never ashamed of it, spinning out surprisingly delicate harmonies in one of Townshend's most bittersweet masterpieces, "Pictures of Lily" (1967). "Lily" is a love song not to a real woman but to an image: She exists only as a pinup on a wall, until she drifts into the singer's arms, in his dreams. The song represents the flip side of what early feminists called "objectification": Sure, Lily is idealized, a goddess whom no real woman can match. But "Pictures of Lily" takes all that psychological stuff about how men are "visually oriented" when it comes to sexual excitement and puts it in undeniably human terms. How can you blame a kid for dreaming a beautiful woman up as a refuge from his loneliness?
Townshend and the Who pushed into new territory well into the '70s. "Live at Leeds" (1970) stands as a gorgeously rough-edged document of the band's ferocity as live performers, and Townshend's guitar is the thing that anchors the record's sandy swirl of sound. His broad metallic strokes are almost painterly -- big and bold without ever being sloppy, they have the shaggy grace of dandelions about to go to seed. His sweeping, woolly phrases could sound alternately prehistoric or futuristic (a sound beamed from another galaxy of pissed-off lads), and sometimes both at once. The 1971 LP "Who's Next" -- released two years after "Tommy" and shortly after Townshend's overly ambitious film project, "Lifehouse," fell apart -- is one of the band's most astonishing and consistent albums.
And on LPs like "The Who by Numbers" (1975) -- the very title an acknowledgment that the band members were aging -- Townshend sketched out his disillusionment and weariness with a heartbreaking purity and grace. For me, the exquisite beauty of "Blue, Red and Grey" -- featuring Townshend's eggshell-fragile vocals, backed by a ukulele and a cloud-soft horn section -- is more than enough to make up for the party-down clunker "Squeeze Box." On "Blue, Red and Grey" (written in the tradition of English music-hall songs), Townshend tells us with an almost childlike innocence, "I like every minute of the day" -- a thinly veiled assertion that there are benefits to growing older, that he now knows things he couldn't possibly have known when he was 20.
In the 15 years since the breakup of the Who, Townshend has released a handful of solo albums, worked for a publishing house, published a book of short stories, brought "Tommy" to the Broadway stage and reunited with the other members of the Who to perform a version of "Quadrophenia" (a scaled-down version, with Townshend playing acoustic guitar, since years of playing maximum-volume rock 'n' roll has left him partially deaf). Of his solo albums, two stand out: his first, the blissfully delicate "Who Came First" (1972), which was conceived as a tribute to his spiritual guru, Meher Baba, and the stunning 1980 "Empty Glass." The Who had recorded a version of the lovely "Pure and Easy," but I consider the solo version on "Who Came First" to be the definitive one: The song is broken down to its essential elements, a guitar sound at once bruised and resplendent and Townshend's quavery, fragile voice. "I listened and I heard/Music in a word/And words when you played your guitar," Townshend sings, a compact summation of the way words can sing and music can speak. And on "Empty Glass," Townshend summons a rage that sounds anything but tempered by age and experience, taking apart rock journalists Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons on the lacerating "Jools and Jim": "Typewriter tappers/You're all just crappers/You listen to love with your intellect," he sings, with acid in his voice, as a response to the obit the career-climbing Burchill and Parsons wrote for Keith Moon claiming there was no reason to care that such a decadent has-been had died.
Like no other performer of his generation, Pete Townshend stands for all the messy contradictions of youth, and for the necessity of figuring it all out as you go along. You could say he set himself an impossible task, making that one defiant statement so early in his career and then spending the rest of his days trying to outrun it, as if he'd carelessly made a pact with the devil -- with each passing year, he had to work harder to justify his own existence. Townshend was long ago paid up in full. Finally, the hellhound on his tail had best leave him be.
SALON | Nov. 17, 1998
Stephanie Zacharek is a regular contributor to Salon.

Visit BarnesandNoble.com for books on Pete Townshend


	H E A R_ I T Pete Townshend: + My Generation + Jools and Jim L A S T_ W E E K I N T R O Why we launched Brilliant Careers S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		HIS GENERATION \| PAGE 1,2 - - - - - - - - - - But for all the acclaim and respect those projects earned, if you're going to try to trace the brilliance of Townshend and the Who, the best way to do it is to pick up the threads of individual songs. "My Generation" may have been an anthem for kids who were coming of age circa 1965, but it has more layers of complexity than most anthems: Townshend wrote, "Why don't you all fade away?" as a way of ordering his elders to step aside. Yet even as one of the fresh new voices of his era, he's borrowing (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not) their words to make his statement. Nearly a decade before, Buddy Holly had sung about not fading away -- he was talking about keeping a love affair alive, but his followers took the song to heart as a pledge to keep rock 'n' roll thriving, past the stage of being a fad. In that context, "My Generation" is more than just a fuck-off anthem; it's a way of picking up the torch -- but not before giving it a shot of gas. In his career with the Who, Townshend's songs achieved a delicate balance of brashness, tenderness, humor, brittle anger and wily intelligence. The gravelly crunch of Townshend's guitar in songs like "My Generation" was only part of the band's hallmark sound. Although the Who were first and foremost a rock 'n' roll band, they knew how to be a pop band, too, and were never ashamed of it, spinning out surprisingly delicate harmonies in one of Townshend's most bittersweet masterpieces, "Pictures of Lily" (1967). "Lily" is a love song not to a real woman but to an image: She exists only as a pinup on a wall, until she drifts into the singer's arms, in his dreams. The song represents the flip side of what early feminists called "objectification": Sure, Lily is idealized, a goddess whom no real woman can match. But "Pictures of Lily" takes all that psychological stuff about how men are "visually oriented" when it comes to sexual excitement and puts it in undeniably human terms. How can you blame a kid for dreaming a beautiful woman up as a refuge from his loneliness? Townshend and the Who pushed into new territory well into the '70s. "Live at Leeds" (1970) stands as a gorgeously rough-edged document of the band's ferocity as live performers, and Townshend's guitar is the thing that anchors the record's sandy swirl of sound. His broad metallic strokes are almost painterly -- big and bold without ever being sloppy, they have the shaggy grace of dandelions about to go to seed. His sweeping, woolly phrases could sound alternately prehistoric or futuristic (a sound beamed from another galaxy of pissed-off lads), and sometimes both at once. The 1971 LP "Who's Next" -- released two years after "Tommy" and shortly after Townshend's overly ambitious film project, "Lifehouse," fell apart -- is one of the band's most astonishing and consistent albums. And on LPs like "The Who by Numbers" (1975) -- the very title an acknowledgment that the band members were aging -- Townshend sketched out his disillusionment and weariness with a heartbreaking purity and grace. For me, the exquisite beauty of "Blue, Red and Grey" -- featuring Townshend's eggshell-fragile vocals, backed by a ukulele and a cloud-soft horn section -- is more than enough to make up for the party-down clunker "Squeeze Box." On "Blue, Red and Grey" (written in the tradition of English music-hall songs), Townshend tells us with an almost childlike innocence, "I like every minute of the day" -- a thinly veiled assertion that there are benefits to growing older, that he now knows things he couldn't possibly have known when he was 20. In the 15 years since the breakup of the Who, Townshend has released a handful of solo albums, worked for a publishing house, published a book of short stories, brought "Tommy" to the Broadway stage and reunited with the other members of the Who to perform a version of "Quadrophenia" (a scaled-down version, with Townshend playing acoustic guitar, since years of playing maximum-volume rock 'n' roll has left him partially deaf). Of his solo albums, two stand out: his first, the blissfully delicate "Who Came First" (1972), which was conceived as a tribute to his spiritual guru, Meher Baba, and the stunning 1980 "Empty Glass." The Who had recorded a version of the lovely "Pure and Easy," but I consider the solo version on "Who Came First" to be the definitive one: The song is broken down to its essential elements, a guitar sound at once bruised and resplendent and Townshend's quavery, fragile voice. "I listened and I heard/Music in a word/And words when you played your guitar," Townshend sings, a compact summation of the way words can sing and music can speak. And on "Empty Glass," Townshend summons a rage that sounds anything but tempered by age and experience, taking apart rock journalists Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons on the lacerating "Jools and Jim": "Typewriter tappers/You're all just crappers/You listen to love with your intellect," he sings, with acid in his voice, as a response to the obit the career-climbing Burchill and Parsons wrote for Keith Moon claiming there was no reason to care that such a decadent has-been had died. Like no other performer of his generation, Pete Townshend stands for all the messy contradictions of youth, and for the necessity of figuring it all out as you go along. You could say he set himself an impossible task, making that one defiant statement so early in his career and then spending the rest of his days trying to outrun it, as if he'd carelessly made a pact with the devil -- with each passing year, he had to work harder to justify his own existence. Townshend was long ago paid up in full. Finally, the hellhound on his tail had best leave him be. SALON \| Nov. 17, 1998 Stephanie Zacharek is a regular contributor to Salon. Visit BarnesandNoble.com for books on Pete Townshend