Why Pete Townshend on why The Who did not make real rock and roll
The concept of whether something counts as rock and roll should have been put to bed a long time ago. For every artist who comes out claiming to be the next big rock band, there are still going to be those few who keep insisting that they aren’t real rock and roll and that people should listen to some other group to hear what classic material really sounds like. Although no one would argue with someone like Pete Townshend being a rock and roll god, he didn’t even consider The Who to be the definition of a rock band.
Then again, rock and roll probably means something very different to Townshend than it does to the world at large. For Townshend, he remembered a time before there was true rock and roll, back when everything that you had to listen to at home was old records by everyone from Bing Crosby to Rosemary Clooney.
Once Bill Haley and Elvis Presley started making inroads into the business, things would never be the same. As the British invasion followed suit, every band in the world was brandishing guitars and wanting to take music further than just the typical pop songs that they heard at home.
If anything, The Who went out of their way to be as unsophisticated as possible. For every great pop song that Townshend wrote, he was quickly becoming the godfather of punk rock, either swinging his hand like a windmill during ‘My Generation’ or breaking his guitar at the end of every performance.
As far as he saw it, though, Townshend didn’t think that The Who was fit for rock and roll, telling Guitarist, “The interesting thing is that rock and roll was denied to The Who in a way. The Who were more of a pop band than a rock band. Some people get confused when they read the history of The Who, or they hear me talking about ‘rock’…The fact is that rock and roll itself lasted as long as pundits said it was…a couple of years”.
While Townshend is absolutely correct in that his brand of rock and roll went out of style, even he probably didn’t realise how much of an impact that music would have on the rest of the world. Once artists started to follow in their footsteps, many of the greatest musical movements that came afterwards were indebted to rock and roll, from punk to power pop to grunge to various strains of hip-hop.
More than anything, rock and roll helped define a certain attitude toward the typical pop music on the radio. As much as people like to debate what constitutes rock whenever someone gets inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the aesthetic of rock is more about being able to get up on stage and be yourself without worrying about what anyone else thinks of you.
Given that description, Townshend might be the ultimate example of what a rock and roller is supposed to be, even if he doesn’t exactly see it that way. You can take the sound of a band and dissect it for whatever it’s worth, but you can never take away the spark they have to dream bigger than their predecessors did.
