“Sad and fucked up”: The two icons Pete Townshend couldn’t stand watching
Since as early as 1985, The Who’s Pete Townshend has been a vocal advocate for better drug support and rehabilitation. Having been at the very heart of rock and roll, he’d simply seen enough tragedy.
While it’s easy to rose-tint the whole sex, drugs and rock and roll attitude, buying into the fun and hedonism of it all, that same bravado has also led to some of the biggest losses in music history. Especially during the 1960s and ‘70s, when counterculture was king, there were so many icons who were then gone all too soon due to misadventure.
Almost every major band of the moment seemed to have a story, either of a loss or of a friend or bandmate that went so far off the deep end that they simply couldn’t work anymore. The Rolling Stones had Brian Jones and his descent into drug-fuelled violence before his death, Led Zeppelin faced the loss of John Bonham, and with Pink Floyd, the situation with Syd Barrett was devastating as they watched their friend become unrecognisable.
Sitting at the centre of it all with his band The Who, Townshend was watching this happen time and time again, attending funeral after funeral.
Later down the line, in the 1980s, this would lead to him actively campaigning for better treatment for addicts. He wrote articles, hosted benefit concerts, campaigned in parliament, and raised funds. He didn’t want addiction to be stigmatised, but to be helped, noting that a change in attitude might have saved some of his friends back in the day.
Then, drugs and rock and roll went hand in hand, depicted as this fun duo that makes everything all the more exciting. But from where Townshend was sitting, he actually felt quite the opposite, as witnessing people he cared about or admired struggle made it so he couldn’t even enjoy the music.
“I like to watch a band with a punch, with drive, who know what they’re doing, with a tight sound,” he said, and drugs became a huge hindrance to that. “I used to like to watch Jimi Hendrix,” he picked out as one example in 1968, but added prophetically, “Sometimes he worries me now because he often gets amplifier hangups and stuff, I can’t stand that, it kills me.”
Two years later, Hendrix would die of an overdose. Another band he was beginning to struggle watching almost went the same way as he said, “I used to like to watch Cream until they got sad, and fucked up”. Luckily, all three leading members of Cream eventually turned themselves around. But at the time, they split because all three were being crippled by drug addiction, and no band can make it work when its members are collapsing.
For Townshend, drugs were the major tragedy of his time, both through the deaths they caused, and also the way they affected the music for the worse, while everyone seemed to pretend that party supplies made it all better.
