The solo album Pete Townshend called a “masterpiece”
Nobody had survived the 1970s quite like Pete Townshend.
At the decade’s start, there were essentially three monster rock bands of the day, all hailing from the UK and muscling each other out of the way for the world’s premier arena filler. The Rolling Stones were strutting across their golden album run, perfecting the day’s roots rock with their American plunder of country and blues, with Led Zeppelin’s heavy mythos attack from the side as the era’s classic rock sensation.
Yet, while the two eventually creaked into self-parody at the advent of punk, The Who dropped 1978’s Who Are You, led by the canonical title-track and showing no signs that Townshend at the team were slowing down for the 1980s.
Founding drummer died three months after the album’s release, marking a mini hiatus until 1981’s Face Dances with Small Faces’ Kenney Jones stepping behind the kit. Responsible for much of The Who’s wieldy songbook, and keenly crafting their grand conceptual arcs across their various rock opera narratives, Townshend was still full of creative energy. Only two years after 1980’s solo Empty Glass, Townsend began preparations for a new album that soaked up the new wave trends around him, as well as eagerly defied expectations from The Who base.
Having been struck with a destructive alcohol problem that nearly upended his marriage and family life, Townshend pointed his lyrical pen inwards to dissect his inner turmoil, exploring everything from his fascination with Meher Baba’s spiritual teachings, the trappings of isolation, and the many meanings behind one’s uniform. Dropped in 1982, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes would doggedly pursue a contemporary pop sound amid its ornate compositions.
The atrociously titled solo effort—apparently a reference to actors like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne and their enigmatic squinting eyes, Townshend later claimed he should have won a “Stupid Title of the Year”—All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes was an album for the MTV age. Collating a series of promos for a whole bunch of songs beyond just the ‘Face Dances, Pt 2’ and ‘Uniforms (Corp d’Esprit)’ singles, a half-hour video short was released to accompany the record. Before long, Townshend was the face of a new pop climate, exclaiming “I want my MTV” on the cusp of the cable channel’s pop cultural domination.
“This LP is close to a masterpiece by my own terms,” Townshend boldly claimed. “Yes, some critics accused me of being self-indulgent. This is the moment you realise you’ve become a genius when a mere critic calls you self-indulgent or pretentious. The fact that critics found it self-indulgent made me realise that they couldn’t believe I could write a song about anyone but myself”.
Congratulating himself for taking a daunting creative leap, he added, “The difference between an artist and a journalist is that an artist deals in truth, whereas journalists deal in facts and opinions. If my process appears indulgent, it might simply be because I take the most embarrassing risks”. Take an embarrassing risk he did, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes a cumbersome and opulent affair, despite beating with a sincere heart.
