The two bands Pete Townshend hated being compared to: “And both groups I hate”
The worst thing that anyone can do for an artist is put them in a box. There are a ton of avenues for people to explore once they have their first album under their belt, but expecting them to sit down and write the same style of song whenever they play is practically a death sentence for any creative person. Pete Townshend was more than capable of taking The Who in different directions after Who’s Next, and he loathed the idea of being associated with two hard rock icons.
Townshend may be struck down by the genre’s trademarks when talking about the concept of hard rock. He certainly had the potential to be another run-of-the-mill rock and roll guitarist, but once he started cranking up the distortion on his amp on ‘My Generation’ and tearing up his guitar, he was more than happy to see where that sense of chaos could take him.
What he was doing was carrying on in the same tradition of other eclectic musical icons before him. Sure, there was a lot of pure reckless abandon in there, but Townshend was also looking to channel the kind of avant-garde ambitions that he heard in art college, only this time using a rock and roll approach to everything.
While he managed to mould his visions into rock opera like Tommy, the stage was where he left most of the damage. Throughout the entire Live At Leeds performance, many of the band’s best moments include him bouncing off of Keith Moon and blowing up his songs to mammoth proportions, whether that was taking the basis of ‘My Generation’ and extending it for minutes on end or turning their cover of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ into one of the first heavy metal tracks.
But Townshend wasn’t alone in making the genre sound heavy. However, Led Zeppelin started going in a bluesy direction with their brand of thunder, and bands like Deep Purple and Ten Years After had been fine-tuning their own takes on the genre. While both acts had jam band characteristics behind them, they both seemed to use the basis of the track to make sweeping solos, like how Ritchie Blackmore turned ‘Highway Star’ into a tour de force for his arpeggio technique.
Despite Townshend remaining friendly with some of his contemporaries, he would have rather kept his music far away from either band, saying, “A lot of people used to come and see us and in Britain it was, ‘You are our favourite group with Deep Purple,’ and I used to go, ‘Huh?’ And over here, it used to be, ‘You are our favourite group with Ten Years After.’ And both groups I hate! I admit that all the people in the bands are very good friends of mine, but I hated their music. And it was very hard to live with in a way that we were being lumped in with these very heavy metal bands.”
It’s not hard to see where Townshend is coming from, either. It would be easy for casual fans not to see too much difference in all three acts, but Townshend had no time for bands that used their songs as an excuse to show off. For them, the tune was only an excuse to have a hit on the radio and play something completely different every night, but The Who’s mastermind wanted to set up a scene whenever he played.
Even if Tommy had its own brand of heaviness whenever it met the stage, it was never about making something that people would headbang to. It was trying to have an epiphany go off in the listener’s mind whenever they heard it, but Townshend didn’t even realise that some of that message was falling on deaf ears.
