“What do we do?”: the bands that made Pete Townshend feel out of touch
When you’ve become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, what exactly do you choose as your next move? Do you quit while you’re ahead and say you’ve had a good run, swiftly moving on to the next chapter of your career? Do you rest on your laurels and continue to churn out music in the same vein as you have been, knowing that the stagnancy might result in diminishing record sales? Or do you push yourself to the next level, taking more ambitious musical risks that could either result in reaching stratospheric levels of success or the alienation of your fans?
These are the crossroads that The Who found themselves at in the late 1960s, having enjoyed huge amounts of success with A Quick One and The Who Sell Out in 1966 and 1967, respectively. Both records saw the band push their sound further, and guitarist Pete Townshend was, in particular, expanding his palette in terms of his guitar playing, becoming more and more adventurous with each new release. There were harder rock elements creeping through on A Quick One alongside some psychedelic tendencies, and Sell Out was littered with whimsical pop tunes.
There were signs that the band were capable of moving in many different directions, but because they hadn’t fully committed themselves to any particular direction on their previous records, they were faced with a dilemma on where to take their fourth record. Either way, they were showing gradual signs of moving away from their Mod and R&B roots, but where they would go next was a mystery to the band, and what was happening around them caused them to pay large amounts of consideration to their next move.
The emergence of other groups who were equally boundary-pushing in the latter part of the decade bothered Townshend, and while he was a fan of what his peers were doing, it left him pondering where the Who even fit into the landscape of rock music as it rapidly changed before his eyes. Something needed to be done to alter what the Who were doing in order to stay relevant. The answer, it seemed, was to release a grand and ambitious concept album in Tommy.
When asked about the shifts in sound that took place between their previous work and their 1969 rock opera in a 1994 interview with Guitar World, Townshend said that “it was a shift that was very much in key with the shift in my songwriting approach at that time,” saying that they had “suddenly found [themselves] lost in the world of Jimi Hendrix and Cream”.
The group were huge admirers of both acts and had even brought Cream with them to the US for their first tour of the country, but due to the fact that the Who were an older group that had been around for a few extra years and already made their mark, it left Townshend feeling as though they were “quite out of touch.”
Speaking about some of the acts that caused this worry for the Who, Townshend said that the problems were not down to his own incompetency or inability to write songs but that music was changing so quickly that he had to make alterations to how he was working to stay relevant. “We’re not selling singles anymore, and neither do we fit into this new psychedelic era,” he stated. “We’re not an experimental band like the Pink Floyd. We’re not a guitar-based blues band like the Cream. We don’t have the kind of extreme genius of Hendrix. What do we do?”
The answer was simple to Townshend, and he chose to “look at composition as a big issue”. If the emergence of other bands was only going to do one thing to the Who, it was going to turn them into an even better band, and their next string of three albums in Tommy, Who’s Next and Quadrophenia saw the band at their absolute best, and becoming one of the most immovable forces in rock music.
