“I’ve never invited comparisons”: the guitarists Pete Townshend doesn’t respect
Certain musical talents are so great that respect for them is just assumed. Whether you like their music or not, it hits a point where their skill and influence are so looming that any subjectivity goes out of the window; you have to bow down regardless. However, Pete Townshend never subscribed to that.
What else would really be expected of a co-founder of the Who, one of the most infamously rebellious bands around? When they emerged in the mid-1960s, it didn’t take long for their reputation to spread. Book the band, and they’d smash up the stage, send the crowd into a frenzy, and then head back to their hotel room to cause carnage there, too. Their power was all energy, and that always came before skill.
It was certainly ranked that way for Keith Moon, the man who partly inspired the Muppets character, Animal, for his crazed, flailing playing that was all aggression and power over technicality. Pete Townshend was much the same back in the day, often leaving the stage with bleeding fingers and a bloodied guitar from playing so hard.
On the other end of the scale, there sat some of their other 1960s peers. Around him, there were some of the most technically skilled players in history who understood everything you could about their instruments, production, how to get certain sounds and how to experiment beyond that. Decades on, those players are some of the most universally respected guitarists around, sitting in that objective tier of greatness. But Townshend never really cared for them.
“Is it important for you to have the technique of a Jeff Beck?” an interviewer asked him, randomly, in 1980. In response, Townshend near enough scoffed, stating, “I suppose I’ve never respected them that greatly.”
Picking out Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page as another super technical player that he didn’t really care about, he added, “There are only sort of odd records that Beck and Page have come up with that I really liked. And I’ve never invited comparisons to that kind of player.”
It all comes down to the hows and whys of Pete Townshend’s love for guitar. He doesn’t play because he loves the technicality of the instrument, he doesn’t care all that much about that. He doesn’t even really care about crafting a perfect solo or an impressive moment in a song – it’s all about the energy.
“I feel myself in a slightly different place,” he explained. “Even today, I would never want to get into a guitar battle with people of that calibre. Because for me, ultimately, the joy I would get from expressing myself through a solo would never be as great and would never be as fulfilling as the joy I get from expressing myself through a song.”
For a while, he even seemed to see Jeff Beck as a kind of enemy to music. “I said some really shitty things about Jeff Beck a couple of years ago, which I now regret. I kind of went through a punchy period right before the new wave thing happened because I was getting fed up with the way music seemed to be getting very boring and the same old stuff,” he said as if Beck epitomises that “boring” sound.
But while Townshend said he regretted it then, the point rings true that someone like a Jeff Beck or a Jimmy Page, with their technical obsession, is not the same as a player like a Pete Townshend, who puts feeling above all.
