Pete Townshend on why The Rolling Stones were the original punks
Before there was punk, there was The Who. Britain’s favourite mod group preferred the term “maximum R&B” to describe their sound, but the power, aggression, and attitude that The Who played with were unmistakable precursors to the punk explosion that would break a full decade after they had started. Of the first generation of rock and rollers, The Who remained one of the few acts that the punk elite could cite as a true inspiration.
Pete Townshend certainly embraced the changing music scene. The Who were responsible for bringing The Clash into stadiums, which actually wound up adversely affecting the group’s longevity. A rollicking night with members of the Sex Pistols and his subsequent misadventures the following morning wound up inspiring The Who’s ‘Who Are You’. But ultimately, Townshend had been around long enough to see punk before the genre had an official name. So, who was Townshend’s version of punk? That would be the first bad boys of rock music, The Rolling Stones.
“The Stones really affected me very, very deeply, their wildness on the stage, the fact that they didn’t wear uniforms,” Townshend told the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio broadcast in 1979. “This kind of thing was very just outrageous, you know. Jagger’s stage performance and Keith Richards’ stage performance, which is just very, very wild and unkempt. They were the first, I think the closest to sort of a latter-day punk image. But I don’t know, you know, how many American kids really know what happened in London with the punk bands.”
“I mean it was unbelievable. It was absolutely unbelievable,” Townshend continued. “What I’m saying really is to actually compare a band with any stage of their career to what the punks were doing is impossible, really. Because the punks were just a really total anarchy, the audience and the bands. It was completely anarchistic, not destructive, just completely outrageously free and of course The Who’s music was never like that.”
To Townshend, The Who didn’t quite have the same energy or philosophy as the punk bands of the 1970s. He conceded that Keith Moon had plenty of similarities with punk musicians and even found traces of punk in some of the early British Invasion bands like The Kinks and The Yardbirds. But to Townshend, punk had nothing to do with The Who.
“We used to break up a few instruments now and again. We used to play, I mean, particularly Keith’s [style] was very loose and loud. My style was very heavy. But there were a lot of bands playing that kind of music at the time,” Townshend explained. “The early Kinks were pretty raucous outfit. And the band that Eric (Clapton) used to play with, The Yardbirds, they were pretty outrageous outfit as well, sound-wise.”
Check out ‘Who Are You’ down below.
