The 1960s band Pete Townshend said The Who could never compete with: “They stole our mantle”
When it comes to rock and roll history, being one of the original punks wasn’t exactly what Pete Townshend signed up for with The Who.
He could certainly make the loudest rock and roll that anyone had ever heard at the time, but when looking at their history, he was far more interested in making music matter more than a bunch of ringing power chords and partying every single night. This was serious music, but somewhere along the line, Townshend got his credentials as one of the heaviest guitar players that the world had ever seen when looking at records like Live At Leeds.
Which is strange because Townshend’s greatest strengths were as a storyteller rather than a guitarist. He would be the first person to say that he couldn’t play like Eddie Van Halen or have the same songwriting chops as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but when listening to an album like Tommy, there’s no way that any piece of the puzzle could be improved. Rock and roll operas might not have been commonplace at the time, but it was something else for the band to perform everything live.
Because while the studio keeps everyone honest, there was no way to prepare for what Keith Moon could do when he got behind the kit. He was a true madman, but whenever Townshend hit those ringing power chords on Live At Leeds, he had a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the band. They could follow him on a dime, but long before Black Sabbath first started to test the waters of heavy metal, the hard rock sphere was already dominated by people like Jimi Hendrix.
Compared to every guitar player in the world, there’s no sense in trying to match anything Hendrix did at his peak, but he wouldn’t have been introduced to England properly were it not for the rest of Cream. And while Townshend could look on in awe at what Hendrix could do whenever he sang ‘Purple Haze’, there was a lot more muscle behind what the English power trio could do when Eric Clapton plugged in his guitar.
‘Slowhand’ was already being treated like a rock and roll god long before Cream even formed, but their jams onstage are the stuff of legend. ‘Crossroads’ may have had a firm foundation when they first started playing it, but by the time they stretched it out live, it felt like every single person was soloing alongside each other, and in terms of heaviness, Townshend said he may as well have given up trying to sound heavy.
Despite Ginger Baker not liking the tag of heavy metal, it was impossible for Townshend not to think of them as the true godfathers of heavy music, saying, “Cream, with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, they came along in ‘67, same year as Jimi Hendrix, and they kind of stole our mantle in a sense. So people who want to hear that old heavy metal sound there are plenty of bands that can provide it. So it’s not really what we can actually do today.”
Then again, Townshend did manage to swap out one great talent for another once he started working on his first epics. Tommy was the proof of concept, but even if Live at Leeds was the last hurrah for their life as a hard rock outfit, Quadrophenia shows the band at their peak form, with Townshend penning some of the greatest songs of his career, like ‘The Real Me’ or ‘Love Reign O’er Me’.
It wasn’t exactly heavy, but it was something much more personal for Townshend, and that was all that mattered. And given the fact that even Clapton had to move on from what Cream did, there’s a good chance that those few years were a magic moment where all three of them managed to be on the same page whenever they blasted listeners’ eardrums out.
