When Pete Townshend knew he could never match Jimi Hendrix: “No reason now why I shouldn’t try”
Rock and roll has never been about playing fair. Even though many artists can try their best to play whatever song suits them, there are always going to be people lingering in the background, figuring out how to either take over for you or make something that blows you out of the water. And while Pete Townshend had a cocksure attitude about The Who, his competition always made him want to play better whenever he saw them onstage.
Then again, Townshend was much more of a punk than any of the punk rockers that came after him. He was always about disrupting the established version of what rock and roll was supposed to be, and while he was friendly with Sex Pistols during his time in the spotlight, it wasn’t an accident that everyone clad in leather jackets and spikes could happily carry Quadrophenia under their arm and still hold onto their credibility.
Because looking at The Who’s live show, it was an all-out war between the band members and the audience when they played. Their show at Woodstock has gone down in history as one of their finest moments. Still, even then, Townshend seemed to be toying with the idea of what audiences expected, always making sure to give them a spectacle and not leaving a guitar intact once they were finished onstage.
If Townshend left audiences in awe with spectacle, though, Jimi Hendrix was the complete package. Whereas Townshend was a fan of many different flavours of music, Hendrix was the one who could translate all of them in real-time whenever he got onstage, playing blues in one minute, soul the next, and then creating musical colours that most people didn’t feel were possible at the time.
And especially in the era when Eric Clapton was being viewed as a musical god, Hendrix seemed to transcend anything ‘Slowhand’ was doing. Everyone loved to listen to a track like ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ but within the first few seconds of ‘Purple Haze,’ Hendrix broke down the layers of someone’s brain and started testing the parameters of the psychedelic movement.
But even when watching him from the wings in the early days, Townshend’s first reaction was to show Hendrix who was boss, saying, “I thought I’d never, ever be as great as he is, but there’s certainly no reason now why I shouldn’t try. In fact, I remember saying to Eric, I’m going to play him off the stage one day. But what Eric did was even more peculiar, he said, Well, I’m going to pretend that I am Jimi Hendrix!”
While anyone trying to copy what Hendrix did is fighting a losing battle, Townshend’s valiant attempts did make for some fantastic music. He cut his teeth being a rhythm guitarist, but watching him grow as a lead player on Who’s Next and Quadrophenia is forever indebted to what Hendrix did during his short time on this Earth.
Because for all of the gusto he packed into ‘My Generation,’ Townshend knew that rock was about more than a few good songs. It was about leaving an impression, and if anyone could leave an impression anywhere close to what Hendrix did, it would be enough for any average musician’s entire lifetime.
