“What am I gonna do?”: What song did Pete Townshend think would end his career?
Not every artist is meant to have the same kind of career as their heroes. As much as people like the idea of going on forever, sometimes they only have one good song in the tank and spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture that same spark or try in vain to grow into different shapes and fall flat on their face every single time. Although Pete Townshend helped show everyone there was more room for something different in rock and roll, that didn’t mean he didn’t get scared of those moments where things could go South.
But Townshend was never all that concerned with being a rock and roll star for the rest of his life. He liked the idea of being a lead guitarist as one facet of his creative medium, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to think the band would be over in only a few years and that he would go back to art school and figure out what he really wanted to do with his life.
That seems insane now, but having a rock and roll band that only lasted a few years was commonplace. Even Paul McCartney felt that The Beatles wouldn’t last more than a few years, but once the volume started getting kicked up at The Who’s gigs, people started paying a little bit more attention to what they were doing. This was a new kind of rock and roll, and now that he had a massive audience, Townshend needed to expand his craft a little bit more.
While we all know now that he found his calling by writing stories over the course of an album, that was still a pipe dream when making songs like ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’. Having a nine-minute song with four to five different musical episodes would have been a hard sell for someone only looking for a catchy tune, but since it worked like a charm on The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, it showed that everyone was at least curious about what that could be.
The Who Sell Out may have been the first time Townshend worked with a whole concept, but their third outing seems to be overlooked too much. There are moments that can be a bit hokey when they start making jingles for made-up pirate radio stations, but when looking at ‘I Can See For Miles’, Townshend had hit the watermark for what the band would sound like in the studio. But from the guitarist’s perspective, he worried he was in danger of tanking the band’s reputation.
“When ‘I Can See For Miles’ bombed-out in Britain, I thought ‘What the hell am I gonna do now?’ The pressures were really on me and I had to come up with something very quick.”
Pete Townshend
That sound that encapsulated The Beach Boys’ harmonies with blistering hard rock was a lot of fun at the time, but Townshend felt that he only got there out of desperation, saying, “When ‘I Can See For Miles’ bombed-out in Britain, I thought ‘What the hell am I gonna do now?’ The pressures were really on me and I had to come up with something very quick, and that’s how Tommy emerged from a few rough ideas I’d been messing about with.”
The charts might be the ultimate deciding factor, but there was no real reason to think Townshend was bottoming out by any stretch. He had made his answer to production masterpieces on ‘I Can See For Miles’, and had he not done the groundwork here, albums like Tommy and Who’s Next would have sounded significantly different without his understanding of playing the studio like it’s an instrument.
And despite all of the naysayers who didn’t understand what Townshend was going for, the idea of the band throwing in the towel after ‘I Can See For Miles’ would have been the real tragedy. Townshend was on the verge of something big, and if he wanted to make it happen, he needed to make sure that no one got in the way of his creative vision when entering his operatic period.
