“So excited”: the band who brought out the best of The Who
So many legendary rock and roll stories surround the rivalries between bands. It’s hard to think of The Beatles without thinking of The Rolling Stones; Blur without thinking of Oasis or The Smiths without The Cure.
While many of those rivalries are actually manufactured, it’s still always nice to see a group go the other way and express how inspiring they find another band to be.
That’s exactly what happened in 1969 when The Who guitarist Pete Townshend fired off a typewritten missive to Rolling Stone reporter John Mendelssohn, eulogising about the gig they had played the night before and the group they had played with. Starting out his note, typed out on Holiday-Inn headed paper, Townshend wrote: “Played with The Kinks yesterday at Chicago and was so excited and thrilled that we played about the best performance we’ve done for a long time, despite really poor conditions.”
“Fucking hell, man,” he continued. “The Kinks just haven’t changed since the days we used to play back up to them on our England tours five years ago”. While they were both part of the British invasion – an onslaught of groups who took an American sound, gave it a British twist and took it back to the States – the two bands could hardly have been making different kinds of rock music from one another.
While their early success came with raucous tracks like ‘All Day and All of the Night’ or ‘You Really Got Me’, The Kinks were more sophisticated and experimental than many of their contemporaries. They incorporated elements of folk songs, British Music Hall, and even baroque music into their work through the use of instruments like the harpsichord and mellotron.
The Who, meanwhile, were an explosive, high-energy powerhouse rock band that arrived on the scene before rock groups were playing in stadiums and arenas but was ready-made for that kind of environment. It’s no wonder that Townshend was impressed with and inspired that night by The Kinks, with their out-there arrangements, song subjects and musical versatility. He went on to explain that the audience was feeling a similar way as he was and that many in attendance were getting their first live taste of The Kinks’ music in a long time.
“Ray [Davies] told me something that I wasn’t aware of, which explains a lot. He and The Kinks were banned from touring the States over some union battle or tax hassle in ‘64. Wow, man, it’s set them back,” he wrote, adding that “perhaps the prospect of discovering a new and sincere audience over here will affect them the way it affected us”.
While he wondered whether finding a new audience would affect The Kinks, it seems that the Kinks had affected the audience themselves. Their 1970 album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One climbed to Number 35 in the US album charts, with lead single ‘Lola’ reaching number nine.
Of the album, Townshend finished his message to Rolling Stone by saying that “it really does do things for me. I never thought they could ever beat [The Kinks Are the] Village Green [Preservation Society] for sheer Kink-ness, but they appear to have done it”.
