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I really having a ‘eureka!’ moment early on in creating Alan’s
Album Archives when I suddenly realised what The Who ‘were’. Musicologists tend
to put them as a rougher, rawer version of bad boys ‘The Rolling Stones’ and
figures they must be permanently ‘angry’ what with all that windmilling guitar
and exploding drumkits. There was a time, too, when people realised just how
big and bold and beautiful and complex Pete Townshend’s music was and figured
he must be another Brian Wilson or Lennon-McCartney, maybe both in the same
body. Surely, then, The Who were a secretly uplifting band – after all, didn’t
the audience always feel better after Tommy came to the [120] ‘See Me, Feel Me’
bit? Ray Davies added to the hysteria by claiming that he’d seen the High
Numbers up close when they shared a bill with The Kinks and that by the end of
the tour the fledgling Who sounded more like them than the Davies brothers did!
In their heads, of course, The Who were ‘pretending’ to be hip young mods – The
Small Faces if you will, but in slightly less sharp suits.
Perhaps none of that is true though. For I don’t think The Who
ever quite knew who they were and everything Pete Townshend wrote is to some
extent an attempt to discovery identity. I really should have seen it – I mean
it’s in the band’s bloody name for a start, a perfectly chosen band name full
of confusion and uncertainty. ‘They’re The Who?’ Said the parents, not
realising the joke, ‘They sound awful’. ‘That’s right’ said The Kids. Not to
the awful bit obviously. ‘They’re The Who – and they understand what it means
to be a confused kid trying to make his way in a world that doesn’t want him
there’. You see even though The Who themselves wrote a song about being
referred to the [44] ‘Substitute Stones’ they didn’t have any of Mick Jagger’s
certainty and poise. They didn’t have the self-belief of The Beatles. They
didn’t have the quirky characters of The Kinkis, busy doing their own thing in
a world that was going the other way. And they certainly didn’t have the
magnetic charisma of The Small Faces. Instead they were a lost little boy and
his mates trying to work out who they were and how they fit in, appealing to a
generation of music listeners who were also lost and trying to work out how
they fit in.
I love The Who because they work in an entirely different way to
any other band out there. A search for identity is after all a major part of
music and a major part of this website – but not done like this. Usually when
bands are lost and confused they sound small and humble, unwilling to make
their voices heard (The Moody Blues sound like this to some extent, Simon and
Garfunkel too). Other bands that are lost and searching don’t have Roger
Daltrey as their frontman. Roger, you see, doesn’t sound lost or vulnerable at
all. He sounds as if he knows exactly what he wants – and if you have what he
wants then he won’t mind stepping on your toes to get it. Though the elder
adult mature Roger is a true gentleman of rock and roll, the face of the
teenage cancer charity trust that does so much to help young people and eager
to help out friends, fans and strangers alike, that wasn’t the way when he was
first in The Who. Roger was the school bully everyone was afraid of, growing up
in the ‘wrong’ end of London, skiving school every chance he got, getting
teenage girlfriends pregnant at will and addicted to cigarettes and alcohol
early on. Everyone was afraid of him – especially his younger classmate Pete
Townshend (other classmate John Entwistle never showed any emotion one way or
another). In any other band Roger would be the dominating presence – confident,
cool and fully in charge.
However Roger wasn’t the writer for The Who – barring two or
three actually quite promising songs. Pete Townshend was. The moment when The
Who truly became The Who wasn’t when the band started as a James Brown covers
band or even as a quirky writer of pop singles, it was when they started having
ginormous hits with Pete’s songs. Till then he had been an uneasy presence in
the group, unsure as to why he was really there. Townshend was nervy and
vulnerable in the early days, fully aware that his gangly height and his beak
nose made him an unlikely role model for impressionable kids. However without
knowing it Pete held the keys to the band’s fortunes: back in 1965 there were a
million kids out there who could cover the latest American R and B songs. However
few if any wrote their own songs, even in the wake of The Beatles. For Pete the
songs came easily. For a time he tried to write for The Who through the eyes of
Roger and pretend to be confident and it didn’t always work (though second
single [6] ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, written with Roger’s help, was a rare
exception). However Pete soon hit upon a style that really did work for him: he
was angry, frustrated, misunderstood, confused, frightened, vulnerable, scared
by a world that was bigger than he was and unsure how he would ever survive it.
The songs pour out of him expressing the unexpressable that he felt from his audience
and himself: [4] ‘I Can’t Explain’, for instance, is the perfect debut single
(The Who are the only 1960s band still performing their first single a half
century on rather than outgrowing it and pretending it doesn’t exist) the
perfect three minute pop song about not being able to write a three minute pop
song because there’s too much to say and no easy way to say it. Without knowing
it Pete tapped into the parts of a generation who hadn’t found a niche with the
confident Beatles and sexy Stones and quirky Kinks because they didn’t know who
they were and they couldn’t explain it either. That’s why, I think, Who fans
have a particular bond with ‘their’ band that even other obsessed fanbases
(such as The Beatles or Pink Floyd fanatics) can’t approach. This is a band who
‘get’ how it feels to be weak and vulnerable.
However the genius of The Who is that Pete Townshend is not
their lead singer, Roger Daltrey is. Suddenly the bullied weird nerdy kid in
the playground whose forever losing his front teeth can use the voice of the
school bully to sing with. A year or so in, when things calm down and The Who
is clearly Townshend’s band, Pete really makes the most of this gift, which is
what every quivering wreck every wanted: to stand up for what they want to say
with the voice of someone who knows how to say it and the results sound HUGE!
There’s something about Roger’s confident sexy swagger singing those lines
about vulnerability and neediness that adds an extra layer to Who recordings
that you don’t get from Pete’s demo recordings alone (however great and
under-rated they are) and which Roger has no hpe of finding on his solo albums
(however enjoyable parts of them may be). A roaring voice screaming ‘I’m scared
and vulnerable!’ is so much more effective than Mick Jagger purring ‘I’m fully
in command’ or Simon and Garfunkel whispering ‘I feel sick with nerves’ (and I
say that as a huge fan of both. Sometimes, a few albums in, these pair of
opposites even get to sing together and its no coincidence that many people’s
favourite Who songs ([122] ‘Baba O’Riley [123] ‘Bargain’ [130] ‘Won’t Get
Fooled Again’, large sections of Tommy, at a push [188] ‘Music Must Change’) feature
Pete singing the kernel of the ‘real’ song quietly in the middle of Roger’s
shout. ‘Don’t cry, don’t raise your eyes, it’s only teenage wasteland’. ‘I look
at myself in the mirror, I know I’m worth nothing without you’. ‘Is this song
so different, am I doing it all again?...’, a sudden switch to Tommy crying out
‘See Me, Feel Me’, even a simple ‘Do ya?!?’ hidden in the middle of ‘Fooled
Again’ – they’re what the song is ‘really’ about behind the brave front Roger
is putting on to the world as it throws everything at the narrator.
Pete, though, is not fooled again – he’s only acting, using
Roger as a human shield against the mayhem and might of a world who can’t
resist throwing everything it can at him and his kind. Backed up by John
Entwistle’s bass (the loudest in rock when it’s recorded right) and Keith
Moon’s drums (the loudest in rock even if he’s playing across the room in
another studio!) and The Who suddenly sound HUGE and completely unstoppable.
However they never ever lose touch with the vulnerability in the lyrics. So
many Who songs can be boiled down to roughly the same thing. ‘Why are you
hurting me? Why is everything so hard? You just wait until I’m strong enough to
fight you back!’ It’s the sound every bullied kid has ever longed for – the
sound of a bully speaking up for them. Seeing Pete grow in confidence to the
point where he becomes one of the world’s greatest frontman, big on sarcasm and
high on banter with the crowd, in no way negates the fact that he remains the
band’s scared and vulnerable voice. He is after all in front of ‘his’ people.
So much for the sound, then, but what about the songs? Well,
many seem to deal with identity directly. Fifth single [55] ‘Substitute’ is a
key Who song, written for a world who assume – in the wake of [22] ‘My
Generation’ – that The Who have all the answers. In their shoes every other
band would be celebrating being accepted and accept it as a confidence boost,
but Pete had a life-long phobia of yes-men who thought everything he did was
perfect and he cuts away all our perceptions of him on this very clever single.
It’s not so much a song about who the band are (compare to any period Beatles
song except ‘Help!’ and every single Stones song) as what they’re not. The
character sounds as if he knows what he’s doing – people tell him he ‘looks
good’ with his girlfriend and that he’s tall, with the walk of someone who is
‘simple’ and direct, that he walks in posh leather shoes so must be ‘rich’,
even that he’s ‘white’ (and therefore given what people would now term ‘white
privilige’). But it’s all a myth: he feels hopelessly lost next to this pretty
girl, he walks around in heels so he only gives the impression of being tall,
he was born not with a silver but a ‘plastic spoon in my mouth’ and he knows
he’s so complicated. He even throws in that ‘my dad was black’ (itself a line
substituted with ‘I walk forward but my feet walk back’ on personal appearances
on radio and TV stations afraid of mentioning race or colour on air). On
‘Substitute’ appearances can be deceptive and Pete doesn’t feel any more
confident with a #2 UK hit single behind him than he did before.
Other Who songs follow: [46] ‘I’m A Boy’ is another deeply
confused narrator, but this time confused over his gender. In the original idea
for the song (which, naturally for Pete, was intended to be an entire concept
album that sadly got whittled down to a mere three minute single) we are living
in a future where children aren’t born through pro-creation but ordered, so
that a family can have exactly what they want. A family think that four girls
would be nice but when the order arrives they end up with three girls and a
grumpy boy named Bill. The family don’t want to send back their order so poor
Bill is stuck being treated as a girl for all eternity, yearning to break free
of his dresses and scrape his knees and play in the mud, singing ‘I’m a boy!’
over and over to a world that doesn’t want to hear it because they’ve
pigeon-holed him. Society – maybe even God – doesn’t make mistakes about gender
so he must be mistaken; I’ve always been surprised that this song wasn’t picked
up on by the ‘trans’ movement (one half of it at least) because it’s the
perfect song about being a boy born in a girl’s body and your confusion at
being treated differently to how you perceive yourself. Bill is a lone voice in
the wilderness trying to re-claim his identity, even though identity is such a
personal thing no one has a right to tell you who you are except yourself.
One key album track of the period is [59] ‘I Can’t Reach You’, a
rare track entirely sung by Pete from ‘Who Sell Out’. In this song the narrator
isn’t struggling to be himself but struggling to project that to other people.
This is one of the 1960s’ most messed up love songs of them all – the couple
both love each other and want to be with each other. But they can’t connect at
all – they’re apart in time and space, seperated by a million miles and a
million years (and a million pounds). They long to be together, they yearn to
be together, but society says they can’t be (because they belong to different
cultures, different classes – and if the lyrics are literal they are never
alive when the other is anyway). The ‘real’ them goes together so well when
Pete catches a ‘glimpse of your unguarded untouched heart’ and sees the real
person he loves so much. But he’s too ‘late’ – society has made his loved one
feel she has to act as a different person altogether, guarded and controlled in
the face of a cruel world. He isn’t prepared to act and she isn’t prepared to
drop her act, so they can never ever be. It’s a heartbreaking song, filled with
such loss and heartbreak and devestation, so unlike the other unusually
confident songs on ‘Who Sell Out’ with the memorable image of the couple
running towards each other with outstretched arms (and missing).
You can hear this search for identity in 1970 standalone single
[118] ‘The Seeker’ too. Pete is desperate to find out who he is, but rather
than search within himself he latches on to other people, hoping that they will
tell him who he is. However all Bob Dylan and The Beatles can tell him is who
they are and that doesn’t really help him much. Pete realises with a sigh that
actually the only way he’s going to know who he really is and what he’s
searching for is when he dies. Only of course he’s impatient to know the answer
now. There’s a development of sorts, though. All Pete knows on this song is who
he is at different moments, when different emotions run through his heart – ‘I’m
happy when life’s good and when it’s bad I cry’. He only knows who he is in any
one moment though, not who he is for any stretch of time.
This puzzle over identity is there in the whole of ‘Tommy’ too,
a work which is more autobiographical than perhaps most fans realised. It took
Pete a long time to come out and say it, but he was forever warped by his
parent’s decision to briefly split up and palm Pete out to one of his aunts.
The last person who should be taking care of a lonely culnerable child, she was
more interested in the stream of steady boyfriends who came through the door
and poor Pete had to call ‘uncle’ (like Uncle Ernie). Building up a wall around
himself, Pete found that his mind blocked out what happened next but figured
that involved something sexual he was too young to understand. An already shy
child lost his ability to speak about what happened, he closed his eyes to
seeing the world around him and he closed to his ears to what people told him –
like many abuse victims he was encouraged to play up to a fantasy world so that
nobody got into trouble, too small to speak up for himself and unlikely to ever
be believed if he did. Thankfully his ‘story’ will right itself – Pete’s family
will get back together, he ends up back home and even has a beloved and much
younger (by fifteen years) brother Simon (who still plays in The Who to this
day, or at least whenever the last reunion gig happened to be). What, though,
if that hadn’t happened? He’d have ended up like poor Tommy, who in the concept
album sees his mother having sex with her new boyfriend when his father, long
thought lost in the war, walks in on them and shoots the new man (other
variations of this story have the lover killing the husband, which is more
plausible if people think the father is dead already). Tommy witnesses this but
is told to keep quiet, losing his ability to navigate between the ‘real’ world
and the fantasy he’s been given in the process. He turns inward, isolating
himself because nobody around him understands him and he can’t trust anyone,
his only companion being his mirror image – the only person who re-acts in a
way he understands. Throughout the record we hear Tommy’s name repeated over
and over like a talisman too – the only link he has to his own identity
separate form other people. Other people know exactly who they are, even when
that person is awful and can easily switch personalities depending on what
people need to hear (Uncle Ernie and Cousin Kevin). Poor Tommy, though, doesn’t
know how to be anyone but himself and doesn’t know who that is anymore, unable
to ‘act’ and live a lie. Everyone around Tommy tries to cure him with sex,
drugs and rock and roll but none of it works, only love as Tommy’s mother
becomes so infuriated with her son’s suffering that she loses control and smashes
the mirror, at last caring more for him than for herself. This changes Tommy
and it all rather goes to his head, but by Tommy’s final act everyone whose
desperate to hear what he says for himself figures its all a great con and he
really isn’t ‘the new Messiah’ (but a very naughty boy). They all move on to
the next big thing, but Tommy never can – because this isn’t some new fad but
his real true self.
Another important Townshend track sadly got relegated to mnere
B-side status even though from the title alone it’s the most Who-ish song ever!
[131] ‘I Don’t Even Know Myself’ is Pete’s statement to the outside world who
think they can pigeon-hole him. How can they know who he is when even he is
confused by himself? An update og ‘Substitute’, Pete admits his words can’t
give him away because he just makes them up, his dress can’t give him away
because it’s just what he wears and his walk can’t tell us where he’s going
because he himself is lost. Pete is trapped in a ‘dream’, fighting to hold on
to his real self and afraid that he’s lost it. ‘I see Tommy is the way I’m
staying’ he sighs too, hemmed in and pigeon-holed by his most famous work even
though ‘Tommy’ is itself a whopping great search for identity. There’s even one
of the single greatest Who-ish lines in this entire book: ‘Don’t shiver as you
pass me by – because I’m the one whose frightened’. Pete’s identity here is
that he doesn’t know who he is, even years on from his first success.
‘Lifehouse’ is sketchier, given that we never did get a fully
finished version of that story, but it is too about identity. Pete’s original
unweidly idea was that The Who would play in front of a select audience every
night and would gradually get to know everyone in the crowd. Eventually their
personalities would be ‘fed’ into his synthesiser and would be turned into new
songs (in the end the only two people to ever be ‘fed’ into the machine were
Mehere Baba and synth inventor Terry Riley – see [122] ‘Baba O’Riley’ if you
hadn’t guessed already). Set against this was a future totalitarian society
that said people couldn’t intermingle and had to be separated into their homes,
without any communication to the outside world. Inevitably some people escape
this regime and eke out an existence in the outer worlds; better yet they
broadcast an illegal radio station and have something known as ‘the grid’ where
they can communicate their real and personal thoughts – every fan coming to
this work since the 1990s immediately recognises this as an early version of
the internet and indeed Pete used the internet a lot when he returned to this
work around then, turning it into a radio play and a pricey box set full of
odds and ends from the work. If ‘Tommy’ is about discovering yourself, then
‘Lifehouse’ is about discovering who you are in relation to other people –
there’s a love story, of course, but the real heart of this story is central
character Mary’s discovery that she is a ‘different person’ depending on who
she is with – at work, with friends, with her new rebellious boyfriend. This
leads to a further discovery that society is wicked and awful and should be
destroyed ([130] ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’) but the really identifiable identity
song is [123] ‘Bargain’. I’d gladly lose me to find you!’ snarls Roger on
Pete’s behalf. ‘I look in the mirror’ rejoins Pete, ‘I know I’m worth nothing
without you, in life one and one don’t make two one and one make one…I’m loking
for you!’
Next epic ‘Quadrophenia’
takes elements of both. Jimmy the Mod seems at first to have his shit
together. He has a gang, he has a girlfriend, he has a scooter, he’s a hit down
at the local club scene, he has access to a stash of drugs, he even has a job
which he doesn’t much care for but helps pay for the stuff he does need. In
short, he’s a mod, one who could have been any of the kids in The Who’s
audience in the mid-1960s (even if, technically, any true mod would be more
likely to be watching The Small Faces than The Who). However he’s not like the
other mods who are eager to move onto the next big thing (folk-rock or
psychedelia, take your pick) and who were only wearing sharp suits and
listening to mod records because it was in fashion. Everyone else is in it for
‘fun’ but for Jimmy mod is a lifestyle, an identity he can’t take off like a
coat. He loses his girlfriend to a kid whose much cooler than he is. He loses
his scooter in a freak accident. His mother discovers his drug stash and kicks
him out. He loses his job. He doesn’t know who he is anymore and he’s hurting,
confused, vulnerable for the first time in his life. He decides to return to
the scene of the last time he was happy (the mods versus rockers riots of
Brighton) when he had a gang around him, but alas he sees the ‘ace Face’ (the
kid every mod looked up to) reduced to working as a bell-hop for a living,
under the thumb of ther grown-ups. What’s worse is the Ace Face (who sounds
oddly like Keith Moon) doesn’t see this as a comedown – he was always going to
have to knbuckle down and get a job as that’s how the real world works, but it
was fun being a mod while it lasted. Jimmy is devastated: he doesn’t want to
give up the only identity he’s ever had and flees to the sea in a boat drugged
up to the eyeballs and working out what to do next. This album, much more than
the others, is Pete’s message to ‘us’ the fans and everyone in a similar boat
about having to forge their own identity beyond their anorak music obsession.
Jimmy has an ambiguous ending and may either drown or be re-born in the sea,
realising that he has to be loved for who he is and find people he can love for
who they are in turn. Finale [161] ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ isn’t just about
finding love but about finding identity too, while songs like [153] ‘Is It In
My Head?’ are about Jimmy’s low self-esteem and [150] ‘I’m One’ about how he feels
lost alone but feels like he has an identity as part of a ‘gang’, with his
fellow mods. The piece is also named, of course, for Jimmy’s split personality
– other people can become schizophrenic when they are confused who they are,
their characters split into two, but Jimmy is bleeding quadraphonic, four
separate people living in the same body and unable to work out who he really
is. ‘Can you see [146] the real me?’ is the painful opening cry of the entire
work, but we only find out at the end when Jimmy is frightened, vulnerable and
alone.
This leads into an interesting sub-culture of Townshend songs,
the link between band and fans. There’s a whole great pile of them as Pete reaches
out to the Who’s audience and tries to give his struggling fans the identity
they lack. They are ‘Who fans’, nothing more nothing less, and have identity
simply by being part of something bigger than themselves. [135] ‘Join Together’,
at one stage a key part of ‘Lifehouse’ is an under-rated Who single and a key
moment in their discography. Other songs by other AAA bands urge their fans to
‘come together’ with them, but only The Who make it sounds like a matter of
life and death. It doesn’t matter who you are either – everybody is welcome, no
matter how hopeless, hapless or how much of a misfit you are. We can follow or
lead the way, we don’t have to pay money to belong, we are part of something
bigger than ourselves. Pete also, you see, gets something out of this
‘bargain’, for by giving him a mandate to speak on behalf of ourselves we
provide him with an identity, a chance to show who he is at last. That’s why,
too, the finale to Tommy is so moving: Pete gains his identity along with
Tommy, not because of any sudden thing he says or realises but because he gets
it from ‘us’. ‘Listening to you I hear the music, following you I climb the
mountain, from you I get the story’. That’s especially true of Quadrophenia, of
course, which is the story of so very many Who fans. However as early as the
band’s third and most famous single [22] ‘My Generation’ they were listening to
‘us’ and reflecting our hopes and dreams and fears. The Who weren’t singing ‘hope
I die before I get old’ for themselves but for everyone who had only just
discovered their identity through music – and had to then give it up to join
the ‘adult world’.
Music, too, is the one salvation for The Who that continues to
give Pete an identity. There are many glorious Who songs that are about nothing
more than the glory of songs to lift you up and put you back together again
when you’re feeling miserable, that songs can express the inexpressible that
you can never say. A song like [144] ‘Long Live Rock!’ says this simply and
joyously, a tongue-in-cheek piece about the gulf between the reality and
premise of the world of performing that nevertheless still makes it sound like
the best job in the world communicating with people. [162] ‘We Close Tonight’,
a Townshend song cut from Quadrophenia at the eleventh hour, fills in the only
real bit of character for Jimmy we ever get – he’s a jazz fan, an anorak who
defines himself through the records he owns. A more complex song like [190] ‘Guitar
and Pen’ is probably close to the truth though – Pete thinks he has something
to say, gets it wrongt, flings his guitar and pen away in digust and vows never
to write again – but something makes him pick them both up and start writing
again, his desperate hunger to express what’s in his soul. [188] ‘Music Must
Change’ too is his heartfelt plea that music has become too up itself and
caught up with character by 1978 (ironically it was probably written in early
1976 a few months before punk came along to do just that, but it is one of the
most prog-rock and un-punk like pieces The Who ever made). Perhaps the truest
take on music though is [149] ‘The Punk and the Godfather’. Audiences know when
the performer in front of them is a ‘fake’ and is no longer speaking directly
to the ordinary people from the heart as one of them. And that’s inevitable
when a performer is hailed and celebrated and adored and his head becomes so
big that he no longer feels ordinary at all. It’s the great dilemma all
successful bands haver to face – when do you stop writing for the people you
represent and are now only writing for yourself/ And who is the ‘real’ you
anyway?
By 1975, though, even Pete Townshend has to join the adult
world. ‘Who By Numbers’ is a scared, paranoid album where nothing works
anymore. Pete’s band is disintegrating, his marriage is cracking under the
strain, he’s no longer being true to himself but living a life of lies, using ‘brandy’
as a front to be the person everyone wants him to be. On this astonishing and
under-rated album he goes back to writing for the self, stripping away every
possible crutch to show us what his identity really is. And the result doesn’t
make for pleasant listening: Pete is a mess, suicidal, aware that he ‘got old’
and broke his promise of ten years before by reaching the tipe old age of
thirty with so much of the world still suffering, dreaming of a time when he
can be true to his principles and ‘lose control’, sarcastically denouncing all
of his so-called friends for never loving him for who he is and pitying the
tramps who look through his dustbins not for souveniers but for food, starved
of even the basic necessities to live. Suddenly all his pontificating and deep-thinking
seem for nought and he has no more idea of who he is then he did when he
started. Yet again he’s envious: everyone is in ‘love’ except him and he hates
himself and who he really is. ‘Who By Numbers’ is an extraordinary album coming
after so much hard work by pete building himself up to be something but at
least its ‘real’ again, without the artifice or characters of the recent Who
albums.
From then on until the end in 1982 Pete is in an uneasy
situation. He needs to be true to himself but is aware that he doesn’t like who
he is anymore; equally The Who are a bloated middle-aged band still singing
about teenage identity crisis and drustration. By their mid thirties most
people (supposedly) know who they are with careers and families (not sure I do)
– The Who aren’t singing to their target audience anymore. So more and more
Pete writes for himself; [192] ‘Who Are You?’ is one last great outpouring as
Pete tries to work out who he is and who is audience are. He recounts the
real-life tale of meeting The Sex Pistols in a club and pleading with them to
be real this time, to stay true to their principles and finish off bands like
The Who which he now sees as artificial and false. When they say that they are
Who fans he’s disgusted and goes off to get drunk, ashamed when his celebrity
status means a policeman recognises him slumped in a Soho doorway and sends him
home. But even if the policeman knows who he is, Pete doesn’t anymore – the fact
that Roger is barking this song with the cool confident control of a man who
knows exactly who he is doesn’t undercut the uncertainty at the heart of this
troubled song at all.
Even John Entwistle gets into the act, taking up more album room
as Pete’s confidence stutters and stalls, writing his own rock opera about
identity condensed into a three minute pop song in [186] ‘905’, a song so
Townshendesque John even gets his friend to sing half of it. Like ‘I’m A Boy’
identity has been reduced to mail order, but this song goes further by having
humans bred with special characteristics in test-tubes. Usually in Who songs a
name is something that ‘belongs’ to you and you wear like a talisman until you
find a personality to go with it, but here John even takes that away. His
character doesn’t have a name but a number and reflects that, born fully aware
into a world he isn’t ready for, ‘something deep inside is missing’. He isn’t
ready to be the person he is programmed to be.
By and large Pete keeps his personal songs for himself and his
solo records from now on, Roger struggling to sing such nakedly openly
vulnerable songs as ‘I Am An Animal’ with his usual force. There’s one great
exception though and its saved till last. [217] ‘Cry If You Want’ puzzles many
fans as the last track on the last Who studio album (‘It’s Hard’) – shouldn’t
the end go out with a bang not a whimper and why is it all so miserable? But
for me this is Pete’s great coming of age song as he realises that he’ll have
to live the rest of his life without the band (he doesn’t know about John
Entwistle’s desperate need for money and the endless reunions just yet). He
turns on himself like never before, pointing out all the things ‘wrong’ with
him – his imability to get close to anyone except his teddy bear, his pretence
at being a ‘famous star’ when he doesn’t feel special at all, his endless
affairs that were putting strain on his marriage to his teenage sweetheart, the
‘innocence, fresh ideas and insolence’ that have given way to artifice, the
fact that he became the rich distant rockstar he once hated, his general
paranoia, the fact that for all his life achievements he still feels like a
miserable nobody. However for the first time in his life, after seventeen years
of using Roger as his human shield to fight the rest of the world with, Pete
turns his best friend on himself. Roger is let loose on his bandmate, tearing
him to shreds, pointing out his mistakes and vulnerabilities and everything he
got wrong and for the first time Pete is brave enough to listen. After
seventeen years of acting tough and hiding behind the sheer noiuse of The Who
he can now affiord to be who he really is – a scared and lost little boy. A
moving middle eight literally lets the tears flow, Pete allowing himself to
truly feel for the first time in years, even his bully giving him permission to
cry – something he’s never been granted before in a world that demands he act ‘tough’.
The Who surely had many other great albums in them after this (and unlike most
fans I’m rather fond of the last trio of albums, even if they arebn’t as
multi-dimensional as the run that came before them) but the band just has to
end here, the moment that Pete has been building up to the band’s whole career
wrong.
Does Pete have an identity now? You would hope so. The Post-Who
Pete Townshend may not be anywhere near as creative as he used to be (his solo
albums get further and further apart until stopping for good in 1993). His
autobiography (titled, of course ‘Who I Am’ although I still say ‘Who Am I?’
would have been a better title) However Pete now seems so much happier in his
own skin than he ever was before. He does a ridiculous amount for good causes,
be they for his beloved guru Meher Baba, disabled children or world peace, he
continues to stick up for those who don’t have a voice, is a humble and
gracious man with fans (when he’s in the right mood) and he found true love
with his second wife Rachel – the fact that he started seeming much more
comfortable from almost the minute he met her in the early 1990s speaks volumes
to me. Pete knows who he is now – a good kind spiritual emotional man (the two
aren’t as opposite as some people think), desperate to connect with people and
make the world better for them. You sense that, in the last twenty years, he no
longer finds that he can’t explain the unexplainable (and indeed no longer
feels the need to write to discover how the world works as much as he did).
Pete, you could argue, has found more peace at the end of his life than John or
Keith ever did. Funnily enough one of the few musicians who also found an inner
peace that makes his younger self seem unrecognisable these days is…Roger
Daltrey, who (particularly after Tommy made him a star in 1969) found the
success and contentment he had been searching for all those years,
self-identifying as ‘Peaceful Perc’ after a youth spent lashing out at people
for not having what they had. The Who, against the odds, seems to have a happy
ending – for half the band at least.
A complete collection of Who reviews:
'The Who Sing My Generation' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-who-sing-my-generation-1965.html
'The Who Sing My Generation' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-who-sing-my-generation-1965.html
'A Quick One While He's
Away' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/news-views-and-music-issue-67-who-quick.html
'Sell Out' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/19-who-sell-out-1967.html
‘Tommy’ (1969) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-who-tommy-1969.html
'Live At Leeds' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-33-who-live-at-leeds-1970.html
'Lifehouse' (As It Might Have Been) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/news-views-and-music-issue-81-who.html
'Who's Next' ('Lifehouse' As It Became) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-14-who-whos.html
'Quadrophenia' (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-60-who-quadrophenia-1973.html
'The Who By Numbers' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-69-who-by-numbers-1975.html
'Who Are You' (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-72-who-who-are-you-1978.html
'Face Dances' (1979) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-137-who-face.html
'Empty Glass' (Townshend solo 1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/pete-townshend-empty-glass-1980.html
'It's Hard' (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-who-its-hard-1982-album-review.html
'Endless Wire' (2006) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-who-endless-wire-2006.html
‘WHO’ (2019) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-who-who-2019.html
'Quadrophenia' (Director's Cut Box Set) (2012) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/abeach-is-place-where-man-can-feel-hes.html
'Quadrophenia' (Director's Cut Box Set) (2012) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/abeach-is-place-where-man-can-feel-hes.html
Surviving Who TV Clips
1965-2015 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-surviving-tv-and-film-clips.html
Non-Album Recordings Part
One 1964-1967 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-non-album-recordings-part-one.html
Non-Album Recordings Part
Two 1968-2014 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-non-album-recordings-part-two.html
Pete Townshend “Scoop” 1-3
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-who-pete-townshends-scoop-demo.html
The Best Unreleased Who Recordings https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-best-unreleased-recordings.html
Live/Solo/Rarities/Competition
Albums Part One 1965-1972
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities.html
Live/Solo/Rarities/Competition
Albums Part Two 1972-1975 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_9.html
Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation
Albums Part Three 1976-1982
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_16.html
Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation
Albums Part Four 1983-1990 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_23.html
Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation
Albums Part Five 1991-2000 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_30.html
Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation
Albums Part Six 2001-2014
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities.html
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities.html
Landmark Concerts and Key
Cover Versions http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-who-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
Essay: Who Are You And Who Am I?: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-who-essay-who-are-you-and-who-am-i.html
