Townshend’s Cut Lauded

All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (Pete Townshend, Atco SP 38-149; Produced by Chris Thomas).

SIDE ONE: Stop Hurting People; The Sea Refuses No River; Prelude; Face Dances Part Two; Exquisitely Bored; Communication.

SIDE TWO: Stardom in Action; Uniforms; North Country Girl; Somebody Saved Me; Slit Skirts.

Rock ’n’ roll and its legitimate heir, rock, is thought to be traditionally a young man’s medium — just name the performers who have been electrified and vital past the age of twenty-five.

Which is why the rare great albums by rock’s aging superheroes always come as a rude slap across a drowsy face. Last year, the Rolling Stones — 20 years on, mind you, and with Jagger knocking on age 40 — gave us "Tattoo You."

This year, in a different vein, Pete Townshend delivers a bona fide brilliant masterpiece, “All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes.” Its title is explained by the peculiar habit that heroes or cowboys, like Clint Eastwood, have of squinting their eyes.

Townshend is by far the most intelligent musician to work with rock music, constantly playing off his own smarts against the limited forms of rock music that both delight and enlighten. Composer of the most popular rock opera of all time, “Tommy," you get the feeling that he could toss off a long philosophical treatise set to rock music if wanted to.

He doesn’t want to because it wouldn’t sound like fun.

While “Chinese Eyes” is Townshend’s reaction to his hard bouts with marital separation, drinking, drugs, and the younger London set, the songs are both tight and expansive, allowing him absolute freedom of expression without pushing into babbling blatherdom.

Side one offers the jumpy Beach Boys-inflected “Face Dances Part Two” with its difficult 5/4 time signature. The 50’s choral counterpoint breaks in and lifts the song up.

“Stop Hurting People” and “The Sea Refuses No River” both originate in Townshend’s religious leanings, but extend beyond mere religious mouthings. Besides, his comment in “Stop Hurting People” that “it’s a clammy tale” is worth the album.

The sea is the zone of forgiveness, which refuses nothing — not even refuse itself. “But now I’m like a sewer channel — running lime and scag," the song goes, referring to the composer’s mess-up with drugs, “the sea refuses no river.” The sea offers hope and whole understanding, rather than the blind rage and empty love that marks the lower echelons of the rock world over the past five years.

But Townshend does not strike a hollow or false note with the song. It is as purely heartfelt and difficult as a religious song can be — open and controlled, like a taste of good cold well water after a hangover. Has water ever tasted so good or been so important? Has the past ever seemed so wasted and pointless?

Side Two takes us into more glimpses of the myth of the aging rock star — the empty quest for fame (“Stardom in Action”), the temptations and miseries of the road (“Somebody Saved Me" ; “Every show there’s been more faking it”) — and a quiet, understated song for the nuclear war, "North Country Girl," based on old English ballad — “I’ve hoped and prayed...She didn’t suffer when the fall-out sprayed."

For all their gem-like clarity, Townshend’s lyrics are not an open book. Chinese Eyes treads the line between nailing down a thought in iron-clad mail and babbling inchoate nonsense.

A song like “Somebody Saved Me” expects reflection and thought on the part of the listener who is drawn into the story of rock star and his encounter with an aggressive groupie. It is Townshend’s maturity that saves this album and gives it a peculiar grace.

Side two closes with “Slit Skirts,” a painful but generous reflection of growing old and out of fashion — and out of romance. Townshend touches in specific, novelistic detail on the wounds and scars of his generation — the lovers who have to get drunk just to learn new dances, the victims of sexual liberation, etc. The wife seeks romance in affairs, but becomes even more depressed as the lovers become bored with her, presumably because she too has gone out of fashion.

The narrator of the song stands aloof, apart, allowing her her own mistakes and problems, offering the “sympathy not tears people need."

The beauty of these songs is that they wander, deep in the mind, unfulfilled in the listener’s ear, exploring possibilities and memories. Townshend himself stands aloof, apart from his audience, pointing out with a rare and beautiful conscience the details of our lives with his open heart and his broad music.