Townshend's no longer guilty
NEW YORK - Pete Townshend is one of rock music's genuine icons, a fact he's long since learned to feel profoundly uncomfortable about. Always the brains behind the Who, Townshend has also led a tentative life as a solo artist.
There was some material released privately through the Meher Baba Society, a Meher Baba-influenced solo disc in 1972 called "Who Comes First" and a collaboration in 1977 with Ronnie Lane called "Rough Mix."
Townshend's solo ventures have apparently always been accompanied by a good deal of guilt. He was the chief songwriter for The Who, after all, and no band has had a greater mystique of communitarian togetherness - a mystique propagated in large measure by Townshend himself.
But Keith Moon's death in 1978 was apparently liberating for the rest of the band, or so Townshend indicated in an interview last fall. Moon's death had the effect of welding the remaining members closer together and also of making Townshend feel more relaxed about pouring his energies of the moment into a solo project.
In any case, his latest solo album, "Empty Glass," is here at last, and a most appealing record it is. This is not a disc in which an artist struggles desperately to create some new musical, poetic or religious identity for himself. "Empty Glass" is recognizably a product of Townshend, and the musical idiom sounds like The Who's sound of more than a decade.
Similarly with the lyrics: Townshend is not dealing with cosmic personal problems or trying to resolve the future of rock 'n' roll. Instead, he is concerned with themes that have long obsessed him: his own aging, the difficulties of love, the place of violence in modern life and the relationship between today's young punks and those of yesteryear (including himself).
He also manages a far more telling complaint about rock criticism than most rock stars who have dealt with this theme have done - in a song called "Jools and Jim," aimed at the British team of Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, who write for Britain's New Musical Express.
Musically, Townshend plays nearly all the guitars and keyboards, with a variety of drummers and a couple of additional musicians (neither Roger Daltrey nor John Entwistle of The Who appear at all). What's most interesting is Townshend's singing, which is every bit as strangulated as ever, but full of a passion and personal commitment that the more vocally lavish Daltrey sometimes lacks.
"Empty Glass" is a modest, direct rock record, lacking the ambition of some of Townshend's past efforts with the Who, but, fortunately, lacking some of his past self-consciousness as well.
--New York Times
