How Pete Townshend’s two favourite albums of all time irrevocably re-shaped The Who
When Pete Townshend was growing up, music was everywhere, and it did little to comfort him.
He recalls a childhood in which his sensitive nature saw him mercilessly bullied as a young boy. His home life was different. It was full of upbeat music. Yet, it still left Townshend wanting. It left him searching for something more, something deeper.
“I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band,” Townshend explained in an interview with Apple Music. “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”. But it wasn’t for young lads fearing that they might never be as lucky as that.
This realisation set Townshend off on a lifelong mission searching for… more. “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, so the purpose and the duty of somebody who makes music is very different to the way it used to be,” he continues. ”And I think I was the first to articulate that and try to explain it.”
Yet, while he might declare himself to be a pioneer, his early attempts also left him wanting. ‘My Generation’ certainly conveyed the angst of, ‘There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear’, to borrow a phrase from their peers, but while there was plenty of pop and fizz that might’ve inspired a young and tortured Townshend, he was also aware that there maybe wasn’t mountains of sustenance to sustain that inspiration.
However, Townshend would only have to wait a matter of months to see music that did amount to magic you could pull over yourself like a blanket and disappear into. Two albums came along in quick succession and had a revolutionary impact on The Who.
Which albums inspired Pete Townshend?
In his 2012 book Who I Am: A Memoir, the guitarist recalled the unrivalled listening experience of hearing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the very first time.
“The shock-wave it caused challenged all comers; no one believed The Beatles would ever top it, or would even bother to try,” he wrote.
It arrived at a period when he was transfixed by music that offered far more, in every which way, than the mere dance that his father had once doled out down the local. ‘God Only Knows’ had a profound effect on him just a few months earlier.
It remains a song he considers “perfect“, and he has reserved the loftiest praise of all for Brian Wilson, commenting, “I think he’s a truly, truly, truly great genius.“
The Beach Boys’ poignant work in conjunction with The Beatles changed his outlook. “For me, Sgt. Pepper and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds redefined music in the 20th century: atmosphere, essence, shadow, and romance were combined in ways that could be discovered again and again,” he wrote.
Amid the chaos of the counterculture era, and, frankly, simply being in The Who, there was something so appealing to the Baroque depth of these two records that you could plunge yourself into. “Neither album made any deep political or social comment, but ideas were not what mattered. Listening to music had become a drug in itself,” he recalled.
“I loved smoking a little grass and listening to my two favourite albums, Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, and every time I listened, I heard something new, but I wish I could say I heard something important,” Townshend continued.
“These two great albums indicated the future but passed on no tools, codes, or obvious processes that would lead to a door,” he added. “I ached for more than just a signpost pointing to the future, which is what these albums were to me.” So, he endeavoured to follow them up with mystical concepts of his own.
While ‘My Generation’ and an array of early Who songs can throw their hat in the ring for masterpiece status, offering a visceral punt of pure rock ‘n’ roll anarchism, they are worlds apart from the likes of Tommy. Inspired by Pet Sounds and Pepper, old Pete was now looking to transmute the teachings of Meher Baba into a musical odyssey that coupled the thrills of colourful imagination, the punch of pumped-up rock, and the intellectualism of meaningful allegories into his own concept albums.
From that moment on, he seemed to revel in empty rock ‘n’ roll. Even The Who came under fire, with Townshend largely dismissing some of their antics as infantile. ”With music, I find myself wanting to stay in my box for a while,” he later said, and with that maturation comes an expansion of an idea into something fuller, an earthquake with lasting ripples rather than a firecracker thrown into a pub.
