The 1960s band Pete Townshend immediately fell in love with: “Attractive and sexually proactive”
It was going to take a lot to turn some heads if you were growing when Pete Townshend was.
Rock and roll was changing by the minute; every time a new band came out, and even though Townshend could blow out everyone’s eardrums when The Who performed, he already had his eye on more sophisticated bands whenever he had his ears opened to new tunes. But when looking through some of the biggest names in rock and roll, there were more than a few artists who were almost too perfect for him when he started falling in love with the genre when he was a kid.
But when The Who first began, a lot of their best songs weren’t about simply rock and roll. Some of the biggest names that they were pulling from included people like James Brown, and a lot of the Mod movement gravitated towards tunes that had a bit more of a soulful groove to them back in the day. Throughout every song, though, the main language between everyone was usually the blues.
‘Young Man Blues’ had become one of the staples of The Who’s live set whenever they played in their prime, but it’s not like they were the first to hit on that idea. The blues had become one of the biggest genres in London well before the British invasion had even started, and while The Beatles weren’t exactly the first band to wow everyone with their more sophisticated take on rock and roll, The Rolling Stones were one of the first bands that felt tangible to Townshend when he first heard them.
Which is kind of funny when he expected the band to be terrible right out of the gate, saying, “I was prepared to be cynical; without hearing them play, I’d decided their reputation must be based on their hairstyles. Instead, I was blown away. Our producer, Glyn Johns, introduced me to Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, who were courteous and charming. From the side of the stage I watched them play and became an instant and life-long fan. Mick was mysteriously attractive and sexually proactive, possibly the first such talisman since Elvis.”
Then again, what The Stones were doing wasn’t all that different from what the rest of the music scene was doing at the time. The Beatles had even helped get everything rolling when they made them their first songs, but Townshend understood that making songs was possible if it meant that Jagger and Keith Richards were pulling it off whenever they made one of their masterpieces.
But it was clear that The Who were always going to be a much different band than what The Stones had to offer. Jagger was the epitome of what a real rock star was supposed to sound and look like, and while Roger Daltrey did the exact same thing with The Who’s audience, Townshend wanted the band to focus on subjects that were a bit more cerebral than what everyone else was doing.
Not all of their songs needed to be about sex and the nefarious habits that they did offstage, and when he busted a hole in rock history on ‘My Generation’, he was accidentally creating genres like punk without even knowing it. The use of volume had a lot more to do with art than being raucous and loud, and when he hit upon rock operas later in his career, he had gone much further than anything that Jagger and Richards could have done with the story of Tommy and Quadrophenia.
That first step was absolutely necessary, but The Stones were only the first time where Townshend seemed to find his calling in rock and roll. They were taking rock and roll into unknown territory, and he was going to do the same thing once he had the proper tools to make his dreams a reality.
