“He had real teeth”: How Howlin’ Wolf changed Pete Townshend’s life
It was Pete Townshend who once said, “Rock ‘n’ roll may not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” It’s a pithy little quote that outdoes itself. With 17 words he distilled the history of a cultural movement down to a single sentence. The original pioneers propagated the art form as a way to push through exultant liberation despite the problems surrounding them. Townshend himself has picked up that very mantle. How can you listen to something like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and have a single care left in this whole damn world?
When it comes to the heroes who have made him dance, Townshend is usually quite reticent. Iconoclastic criticism, on the other hand, is his forte. “When you actually hear the backing tracks of The Beatles without their voices, they’re flippin’ lousy,” he once said. As for Led Zeppelin, he opined: “I don’t like a single thing that they have done, I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them.”
That all might sound incredibly harsh, but it certainly proves that Pete craves the real McCoy when it comes to music. Townshend didn’t just recognise the beauty of music when he was growing up; he also seized upon its importance. “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band. He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy,” he told Apple Music.
Continuing: “Music even today is about much more than that. It has a function which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us.” Howlin’ Wolf provided something to cut his teeth on in this spiritual sense.
“I was at Ealing Art school in 1961 and some time in the following year I met a young American photography student Tom Wright,” he recalled of his musical introduction to Wolf. “He had a big collection of R&B, including Howling Wolf. I’m afraid I can’t remember the album, but ‘Smokestack Lightnin’ was one of the tracks. I have to say that I loved the guitar sound on these records, and the drummer played in a New Orleans style I was unfamiliar with until then.”
Beyond the guitar, it was Wolf’s overall style that Townshend adored, and just as he said in praise of Chuck Berry, there is no point in being a good guitarist if you haven’t got the rest of it. “He is not just some guy with a band, he helped to change our view of the world and to harden up this new way we have found to express our deepest feelings,” he said of Wolf. “Unlike the radio pop of that period Howling Wolf had real teeth; he showed us we could let our music be unapologetically masculine without being chauvinistic.”
This is something Bob Dylan agrees with him on. “Howlin’ Wolf, to me, was the greatest live act,” Dylan explained, “Because he did not have to move a finger when he performed — if that’s what you’d call it, ‘performing.’”
This adulation has seemingly been ratified by just about everyone who ever saw the howling blues monolith, who took to the stage at well over six foot and a hefty 300lbs. As fellow bluesman Cub Koda testified, “No one could match Howlin’ Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.”
As an early signifier that rock ‘n’ roll could have a healthy dose of soul within the make-believe of rock ‘n’ roll, Wolf was a spiritual force. His influence is still being felt through all the artists that he helped to boldly inspire.
