“Embarassing”: The Who cover Pete Townshend hated so much he wanted to club it
In 1969, The Who took to the stage at Woodstock. The legendary festival is now often perceived as the pinnacle of the counterculture revolution, the last party of society’s prelapsarian youth, the final firework of a halycon revolution that fought for innocence. Pete Townshend didn’t exactly see it that way.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—and The Who had the worst of the latter. They arrived at the pearly gates of Woodstock, but were delayed for hours owing to the logistical nightmare of the festival—hippies have never been known for their meticulous organisation. While waiting, Townshend was spiked—hippies have, unfortunately, been known to do that from time to time.
So, when he was later asked about what Woodstock changed in the world, Townshend explained: “Well, it changed me, I hated it. I took my six-month-old child, and it was very weird. I didn’t like it all. They dumped us out of a limousine into six feet of mud, and we stood there for five hours waiting to go on.”
Continuing: “I drank a cup of coffee, and five minutes later, I’m on an LSD trip, unwillingly. They put LSD in the coffee, LSD in the mud, if you fell over and accidentally drank some muddy water, you were on a trip.”
The equipment provided was also so shoddy that poor old Roger Daltrey couldn’t hear a word he was singing and later said, “Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters. People were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home.”
However, the most incendiary incident happened on stage when Townshend hit Abbot Howard Hoffman. The Yippie founder and member of the famed Chicago Seven, known as Abbie Hoffman to his followers, strolled onto the stage uninvited. With security lapsed, Townshend, who was deep into the existential pacifism of Meher Baba at the time, was not in the mood for intruders and decided to take matters into his own hands.
The cover Pete Townshend hated
He yelled, ”Fuck off! Fuck off my stage!” Before chasing Hoffman down, yielding his guitar. He would be reminded of this addled outburst in 2003 when he first heard Limp Bizkit’s cover of ‘Behind Blue Eyes’. The nu-metal interpretation of the classic Who track felt, once again, like an unwanted invasion of stoned nonsense upon their stage.
“Suffice it to say that when I first heard it I thought of the time I clubbed Abby Hoffman,“ Townshend would comment when a Rolling Stone poll saw the public rank the song as the second worst cover of all time behind Miley Cyrus’ version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. “It was an embarrassing effort, and one that discredits a fine song,“ he added.
Perhaps if you’re eight or have an underdeveloped mind, you might not concur with Townshend and find great enjoyment in the Mission: Impossible drama with which Bizkit imbued the track. But it certainly wasn’t a track written with that in mind. As the windmilling guitarist recalled of the writing of the song to Uncut: “I went downstairs to the kitchen to get some tea and my wife said, ‘That song’s beautiful.’ I said, ‘Oh dear, is it?’ It’s about a guy who’s treacherous and lies and cheats, then he gets his comeuppance.”
In essence, he was reflecting on the fact that it was lonely at the top. The pressures of success and temptations of the road were digging their claws into his ailing will, and then to top it all off, once the mournful song was written, on the day they went to record it, Roger Daltrey’s first dog was flattened by a truck. The vocal take captures him “desperately trying to hold it together”.
So, on reflection, maybe it wasn’t the perfect song choice to cover for a fellow renowned for wearing backwards baseball caps and a record called Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water.
