The artists that Pete Townshend felt threatened by
At the beginning of the 1960s, rock and roll was progressing by leaps and bounds. Although the golden age of American artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard fell by the wayside at the beginning of the decade, The British Invasion ushered in a bold new direction for where the genre could go, with The Beatles paving the way for the wild experiments that the decade had in store. While The Who had their fair share of tricks up their sleeve, Pete Townshend saw more than a few artists as competitors.
Then again, Townshend never wanted to be in a rock and roll outfit for the rest of his life. Despite being one of the biggest emerging acts in the Mod scene, Townshend thought that the band would last for only a few years before he eventually went back to art school to continue his education.
Once the group released the hit song ‘My Generation’, though, Townshend found his calling in making rock and roll more caustic than it was before. As opposed to the rave-up music of his peers, Townshend channelled a visceral reaction whenever he played, culminating in the group smashing their instruments whenever the show ended.
Around the same time, Townshend recalled fellow British acts getting in his way, stating to Louder, “We had been a UK singles band who smashed guitars and wore funny outfits prior to Tommy. Jimi Hendrix and Cream – and even Pink Floyd in their very early days – threatened to expose The Who as a lads’ band who were failing to rise to the spiritual and subversive romanticism of the psychedelic era”.
Although The Who were impossible to ignore in their early days, it’s clear what Townshend was getting at when talking about their studio output. Regardless of their live shows, most of the band’s early output saw them mining the same flavours of R&B that the rest of the British blues scene was playing.
On the other side of the spectrum, Hendrix was lighting fires in the belly of every guitar player on Earth, creating different sonic textures that no one had ever heard. Likewise, Eric Clapton’s knowledge of blues through a psychedelic lens with Cream featured even more sonic vignettes, especially when paired with the massive clangour of Ginger Baker’s drum fills.
Townshend hit upon the idea of making music that told a linear story instead of the standard party song to make The Who stand out amongst their peers. Coming up with the idea of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who found his calling playing pinball, Tommy would be the second time that The Who reinvented rock, taking the idea of the concept album and blowing it up to monumental proportions, leading the way to what many would consider the rock opera.
Even though Townshend would admit to being intimidated by his fellow rockers, one of his contemporaries took that mould one step further, with Roger Waters expanding on the dramatic storyline of the rock opera format on The Wall in the late 1970s. Townshend may have felt the pressure to measure up to the other burgeoning artists in London, but with albums like Tommy, he had carved out a sound that no one else could match.
