Which albums inspired Pete Townshend?
Pete Townshend and his songwriting for The Who sum up the mind-boggling state of cosmic horror, which is the concept of masculinity, better than just any other band around.
There are two sides to the band constantly at war with each other. One is the rough and raucous rock ‘n’ roll side that has deafened millions of concert-goers over half a century and destroyed even more guitars. This is a side summed up by defiant, angry hits like ‘My Generation’, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ and ‘The Real Me’. On the other hand, you have a tender, vulnerable and artistic side.
Neither side exists without the other: the angry and volatile is more progressive and explorative with the raw vulnerability. This is where the ideas for rock operas like Tommy and Quadrophenia come from. Where you get Roger Daltrey’s impassioned, raw vocals begging people to see him, feel him, touch him, heal him. The high points of The Who’s music, the likes of ‘Baba O’Riley’, ‘Go To The Mirror’ and ‘I Can See For Miles’ are when those two sides come together. Not in perfect harmony, perhaps, but in the way they exist in Townshend himself.
So, what kind of music inspires an artist like that? After all, Townshend was part of the vanguard that created rock culture, so it’s not like he could have grown up with it. Fortunately, this was the late 1960s, when there was inspiration all around him, and his favourite albums were being released left and right. Two keystones for the rest of his artistic output were arguably two of the best albums of the 1960s, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the album it inspired, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In Townshend’s book Who Am I: A Memoir, he writes a typically eloquent piece about discovering those albums and not just what he learned from them but what he felt could improve them. He says the albums “redefined music in the 20th century: atmosphere, essence, shadow, and romance were combined in ways that could be discovered again and again. Neither album made any deep political or social comment, but ideas were not what mattered. Listening to music had become a drug in itself.”
He elaborates: “These two great albums indicated the future but passed on no tools, codes, or obvious processes that would lead to a door, I ached for more than just a signpost pointing to the future, which is what these albums were to me.”
Perhaps what he was waiting for came a decade afterwards, when the Sex Pistols released Never Mind The Bollocks, and Townshend found another of his all-time favourite records. In an interview with Time magazine in 1995, he spoke about the leap forward that bands like the Pistols signified.
He said, “Three extraordinary artists like The Sex Pistols, The Clash and Elvis Costello under the banner of Punk is really an indication of how categories fail miserably to attend to. What was actually happening at the time was the need for another tidal wave. I suppose that everybody wanted one band to do it like it happened to The Beatles. It turned out not to be one band but a lot of bands.”
It’s telling that The Who was one of the very few bands that could actually bridge the gap between the hippy-dippy ‘summer of love‘ of 1967 and the summer of punk a decade later, which approached hippies the way a lion approaches a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti. By embracing both the vulnerable and aggressive sides of his personality, Townshend created music that spoke just as equally to the times they were created in, and in every decade forward.
If that doesn’t show the kind of artistic achievement The Who was as a project, I don’t know what does.
