Did Pete Townshend really invent punk?: “Yet it’s left me behind”
Rock and roll has never been known to be kind to its legacy acts.
There are often artists that thrive in whichever generation they find themselves in, but even for someone who helped launch millions of garage bands in the 1960s, Pete Townshend knew there were times when he felt like the entire rock world had passed him by.
Then again, it’s not like The Who were going to be on top forever. That wasn’t even the plan when Townshend started. He had envisioned the group going on for a few years before he went back to art college and started pursuing a career in any other vision rather than rock and roll. But for a group that had kicked down the doors of heavy music with ‘My Generation’, Tommy and Live at Leeds were when things started to get a little more serious.
The idea of a rock opera was still relatively new, but given the thunderous drums of Keith Moon and Roger Daltrey’s amazing voice, Townshend had half the tools he needed to turn his music into something bigger than the three-minute single. He was now interested in turning ramshackle rock and roll into high art whenever he could, but there’s a fine line between looking like an innovator and coming off as pretentious, and Townshend knew he was bound to cross it in the eyes of some fans.
Because listening to Quadrophenia, Townshend was definitely going the extra mile compared to other major rock and roll bands. It wasn’t exactly a prog record by any stretch, but it was getting much further away from the garage than what many people were known for. And given how punk would be coming only a few years later to bring bands down a peg, Townshend found himself lost in the lurch a little bit.
While the prime targets for people like John Lydon were bands like Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Townshend felt it was unfair to be painted as a lavish rock star in the age of punk, saying, “I’m sure I invented it, and yet it’s left me behind… I am with them. I want nothing more than to go with them to their desperate hell, because that loneliness they suffer is soon to be over.”
Although Townshend saw bands like Sex Pistols as the clear successors to The Who, it’s not like they were going to stand the test of time. In fact, the flameout of the band on their US tour was closer to what Townshend had in his mind for his own band’s development, but the ones who were taking things seriously to see where the guitarist was coming from and built their own legacy on top of it.
Joe Strummer wasn’t going to be throwing lavish horn parts on any of The Clash’s albums, but the punk icons’ willingness to experiment on records like Sandinista was proof that they were pushing rock forward as Townshend did. Even bands like Pearl Jam were taking cues from the rock icon later down the road, with Eddie Vedder practically looking at him like the father figure that he never had.
So despite Townshend feeling like he was lumped in with every other dinosaur rock act of the day, he was anything but washed up. The idea of The Who may have stuck around for only a few more years before fizzling out, but when it comes to the greatest voices in rock and roll, Townshend said a whole lot more than his contemporaries for daring to make his musical stories rooted in reality.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Punk Newsletter
All the latest Punk content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.