“I conceded”: Pete Townshend on why he would never trash The Kinks
It’s never easy for any artist to define what makes them a fan of their favourite artists. Even though anyone can get behind a catchy tune every now and again, any musician’s favourite artists normally feel like they have come down from the musical heavens and made a song that seems to be written solely for them without even knowing it. While that can certainly apply to everyone who couldn’t get enough of The Who’s ‘My Generation’, Pete Townshend said that there was no way of knocking some of the storytellers that came before him.
While Townshend did have a better handle on the written word than most people in his field, he was far from the first person to start working with different methods of songwriting. Bob Dylan had already kicked down the door for what rock and roll could be by going electric, and once The Beatles started dabbling in psychedelia, they were opening people’s minds to avenues that had never been explored before.
That wasn’t what Townshend was after, though. He had his spiritual side, but while many of his friends got immersed in the world of LSD, he always gravitated to acts like The Rolling Stones, who were more interested in what was going on on the ground floor in the world of rock and roll. Not everyone can relate to the weirdness of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, but anyone who has experienced angst in their life knows exactly what Mick Jagger is talking about in ‘Satisfaction’.
If The Stones were known as the inverse of what The Beatles stood for, The Kinks were in a different league altogether. While Ray Davies had a firm grasp on what he wanted the group to sound like, they struck the perfect balance between nastiness and proper English songwriting, whether that was inventing heavy metal to an extent on ‘You Really Got Me’ or the beautiful story in ‘Waterloo Sunset’.
Even though Townshend was developing his taste for heavy rock and roll, there was always something about Davies’s approach to songwriting that appealed to him. In fact, it’s easy to see Townshend using The Kinks’ model for The Who, only this time moving in a separate direction once Tommy became a cornerstone part of his life.
And while Townshend has set up his own institution at this point, he still admitted The Kinks blazed the trail for him to take things in a more wild direction, saying, “When we supported The Kinks, Dave Davies was adamant: ‘I invented [feedback], it wasn’t John Lennon, and it wasn’t you!’ I worshipped The Kinks and never let a bad word about them pass my lips, so I conceded.”
But there’s hardly any debate that Dave is correct. Lennon may have tried to claim the feedback loop for The Beatles on ‘I Feel Fine,’ but whereas that song was a nice feature to introduce the tune, hearing ‘You Really Got Me’ was a lot more primal than anything else on the radio, especially when Davies came screaming out of the gate with a guitar that sounded like it was snarling.
Even if there is still a debate going on about who started everything, Townshend had to give it up for the band that helped him find his footing in the early days. Many artists may have taken volume and feedback even further, but there’s no doubt that Who’s Next and Quadrophenia wouldn’t have existed had The Village Green Preservation Society not happened first.
