The 1975 album Pete Townshend could never relate to: “I felt detached from my own songs”
Not every album Pete Townshend ever made needed to be specially about his personal life.
Other songwriters liked to express themselves in that way whenever they made their records, but whereas someone like Joni Mitchell left nothing to the imagination when she got personal, Townshend was more than happy to create characters in the same way that someone like Paul McCartney did when he wrote his songs. The tunes were still heavy, but even after making groundbreaking rock and roll tracks, Townshend felt that he was completely disconnected from some of his songs half the time.
Because when you think about it, Townshend was working the same way a novelist would be whenever he created his rock operas. There was no real rhyme or reason for why someone would have wanted to make a record all about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who learns to relate to people through rock and roll, but Townshend could always throw in pieces of his personality into the songs, whether it was Tommy trying to express himself properly or Jimmy trying to hold onto his childhood on Quadrophenia.
Lifehouse might have never come to fruition, but when you look at the band’s life after Quadrophenia, it gets a little spotty. Townshend could still write a great tune, but by the time everyone got together to work on The Who By Numbers, the title of the record meant a lot more than a cheap joke. Townshend didn’t have the heart anymore, and he was wondering what he was even trying to say in half of his tunes.
Does that mean it’s bad? Not at all. It was going to take a lot for any record with Keith Moon on it to be objectively terrible, and tunes like ‘Slip Kid’ are at least decent commentaries on what it means to be a grown-up rockstar. But there are also more than a few times where tunes like ‘Squeeze Box’ make you wonder if you really are listening to the same band that gave the world tunes like ‘Love Reign O’er Me’.
The magic was still there, but Townshend felt that this was the first time in a while where he felt like the band were spinning their wheels a little too much, saying, “[Producer] Glyn [Johns] worked harder on The Who by Numbers than I’ve ever seen him. He had to, not because the tracks were weak or the music poor but because the group was so useless. I felt detached from my own songs, from the whole record. Recording the album seemed to take me nowhere. Roger [Daltrey] was angry with the world at the time. Keith seemed as impetuous as ever, on the wagon one minute, off the next.”
If there’s one unsung hero in the group at the time, though, it was John Entwistle. Aside from drawing the cartoonish album cover, hearing him come into his own as a songwriter on tunes like ‘Success Story’ was as good a sign as any that he was turning into the George Harrison of the group. And despite Daltrey’s anger at the time, he does put a lot of that to good use on tunes like ‘How Many Friends’.
Then again, considering Townshend had been juggling the idea of making solo records was a decent sign that he had other ideas for what he wanted to do. He was already cutting a new project with Ronnie Lane only a few years later, and while he still had some magic left in him when working on Who’s Next, it’s hard to listen to that record knowing how little time Moon had left on this Earth.
But even if Townshend didn’t have the same kind of energy behind The Who By Numbers as his other records, it’s a good indication of how far he’d come as a song craftsman. He didn’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty pieces so much, and if he could still write one of the goofiest songs about sex in the rock canon and still get away clean, it’s not like he was slowly himself down by any stretch.
