The one singer Pete Townshend was too “bored” to listen to
It was going to take a lot more than the average pop song to get the okay from Pete Townshend.
He loved the idea of making great music every single time he made a record with The Who, but the lion’s share of his songs needed to mean something more than the same old tired schlock that the rest of the charts were about. Music needed to mean something more to him, and there are more than a few times when he felt like the softer side of rock wasn’t pulling the same weight that he was.
But it’s not like everyone gets into music wanting to read a lecture every single time they pick up an album. Some people want the chance to escape their problems every time they turn on the radio, and while Townshend was able to keep that side of himself in check every now and again, the best songs he ever wrote had only come from the frustration that he had towards the outside world half the time.
After all, all great punk rock music was about letting out that kind of aggression every single time you got onstage, and Townshend was no exception when he first hit upon the sound of ‘My Generation’. He wanted the chance to keep that ‘angry young man’ mentality for as long as he could, but the 1970s were also the time when some of the most commercially trite artists were coming to the forefront.
The 1970s were already one of the best decades for music in general, but even with the massive artists coming out, there were also groups like the Captain and Tenille to deal with. This was the same kind of pop that felt like the times had been dialled back a few years, and while John Denver was one of the few champions of folk during that time, that wasn’t enough to let him off the hook with Townshend.
The guitarist loved the idea of someone bringing new sounds to the charts, but since the rest of his career had been about unleashing his demons, Denver was way too damn happy for his taste, saying, “If you’re unlucky enough to be born John Denver, there’s not much you can do, really. But there are moments when I’ve listened to John Denver, and he has actually gotten across to me the joy he feels from standing in the Colorado mountains. It’s just that he does it in every song, and I get a bit bored with hearing about the mountains and the spring flowers and the trees and everything.”
Granted, there’s nothing wrong with making music that makes people happy. Paul McCartney seemed to make an entire career out of it after The Beatles, and even though Denver does have moments that are too wholesome for the rock and roll crowd, there’s not a soul on this Earth that doesn’t want to sing along to ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’ whenever it’s played over the loudspeakers.
Because that’s what all great folk music was supposed to do. Denver wasn’t folk in the truest sense of the word by any stretch, but the goal of any great folk musician was to bring people together, and the idea of millions of people united as one through a song is all that most musicians could ask for ever since the days of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie making their first songs.
So while Denver can be a bit too chipper for what most people would want to hear, it’s not like Townshend needed to outright reject him by any means. There are countless genres of music that are defined by the darker emotions that everyone feels, but there’s nothing wrong with someone trying to make the world feel better through their songs.
