1965 – The Who have their first concert outside the United Kingdom at the Club au Golf Drouot in Paris
1966 – The Who play the Gröna Lund in Stockholm before 11,000 fans. Along with their usual fare, they essay a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight.”
1968 – Paul Nelson writes a long rave review of The Who Sell Out in The New York Times.
Transcript:
‘Rock Is Too Serious,’ Say The Who
By Paul Nelson
It may or may not be true that “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” has made the themeless rock LP all but obsolete, but certainly no one can minimize the influence of The Beatles’ masterwork in terms of album conceptualization, intellectualism and structure. Although the death notices for the random rock collection may be greatly exaggerated, it is more than coincidence that such recent releases as The Who Sell Out (Decca DL 74950) and The Vanilla Fudge’s The Beat Goes On (Atco SD 33237) fit squarely into the mainstream of the new “concept album” genre.
Whether this growing trend in pop music toward formalism is positive or negative is arguable. Some say that too much emphasis on the cerebral can only kill the basic joy and vitality of the music, while others see the new intellectualism as the coming of age for rock as an art form. Obviously, this question of Art with a capital A has no answer. Either side can be right or wrong depending upon the ammunition used to attack or repel. Pro: The Who appear to wear their classicality naturally so the trend seems both inherent and logical. Con: The rigorous pseudointellectualism of The Vanilla Fudge positively overwhelms any free-flowing niceties the group might otherwise present.
Ironically, Peter Townshend, the lead guitarist for The Who and one of rock’s most brilliant and influential songwriters, takes a curious and often pragmatic position on the growing formalism. He feels that “there’s no bloody youth in music today.” One of the group’s main purposes in “The Who Sell Out,” said Townshend when I interviewed him, was “to lighten up, to take away some of the seriousness which seems to hang around the band, which isn’t really there . . . We wanted to change the fact that so many fans approach us so seriously.”
Why then, the “concept” approach?
“It’s got a slight formalism because we thought we needed a form throughout the album to make it stand up within the terms of the other albums coming out today. Having a form for an album seems to be what is happening, and we wanted a form for ours which would be . . . very humoristic.
“Our title, ‘The Who Sell Out,’ is not meant in the usual terms of ‘selling out’ or sales. It referees to the fact that we’ve ‘sold out’ to a concept of advertising. We’ve got commercials on the album which we composed about genuine products like Heinz Beans, Medac, Odorono, and stuff like that. We’ve written songs about them and stuck them in. And that led to another idea: that of making the whole album into a radio program.”
*
The “Radio London” format comes complete with all the accoutrements of Top-40 radio: the aforementioned commercials, station identifications, never-a-silent-moment sound montages, an express-train pace. This mock unity casts a lovely satiric spell over most of the record.
Some of the depth and humor is apparent in the ideas Townshend has on the use of commercials within the LP:
“Some of ’em are short and some of them take the length of proper songs. The must successful one is the one I wrote, I think. It’s called ‘Odorono.’ This is the nearest to the idea which I originally had, which was to make songs about real products — but real songs as well, you know. It’s about a mor is apparent in the ideas a star. She’s taking an audition and an impresario is coming to see her about one of her jobs and everything goes fantastically well.
“What arises out of it is the fact that the impresario is quite a fantastic guy and that another relationship occurs. She’s singing, he’s watching, and they kind of fall in love. He rushes backstage to congratulate her and it looks like she’s all set not only for stardom but also for true love. And then, underarm perspiration cut the whole thing out. And, you know, without getting too serious about it because it’s supposed to be very light, that’s life. It really is. That really is life.”
Townshend’s textual craftsmanship and the musical inventiveness of The Who are clearly illustrated in “Odorono.” Written in the language of the dime romance (with such clichés as “She was happier than she’d ever been” and “He really was quite handsome,” the song utilizes some ironic choral work (“Triumphant!”) and a wonderfully apt and economic guitar figure which comments on the action from the outside and provides sharp Brechtian distancing. In “Rael,” Townshend’s brilliant philosophical parable, the repetition of legend-simple verses
Rael, the home of my religion
To me, the center of the earth
sets up mythological tensions as real pragmatism defeats Rael idealism with a straightforward announcement by the underlings that seekers are crazy and should be abandoned, especially for personal gain.
There are other fine songs. “Armenia City in the Sky” surpasses its beautiful title, while “I Can See for Miles” proves once again that Keith Moon is perhaps the best drummer in rock. “I Can’t Reach You” is very moving, as is the lovely “Sunrise” (“You take away the breath I was keeping for sunrise”), accompanied by a single acoustic guitar. “Cobwebs and Strange,” that Charles Ives-like marvel from the “Happy Jack” album, reappears in slightly altered form for baked beans!
The Who have always created perfect and true children’s songs. Sentimental but not saccharine, they blend nostalgia with psychology to build a tough-tender, childlike magic that consistently refuses the targets of the hack, soft-focus idyllist. The best of these songs — and my favorite number on the record — is the childhood hymn of wonder, “Tattoo.” Two small boys decide they have found the secret of manhood. The results seem grand to the boys, not so grand to others. The exuberant joy and innocence of the choruses (the second line changes) conjure a very special magic not easily forgotten, and the final defiant, take-that! couplet adds just the right note to the song’s years-later ending.
If “The Who Sell Out” exemplifies nearly everything that a good “concept” rock album should, what kind of a disaster is “The Beat Goes On” by The Vanilla
Fudge? The worst kind, I fear: A record so filled with overblown emotionalism and Gothic pretentiousness that whatever creativity the group may have is strangled by a smog of pseudointelligence work. The Fudge should never have heard “Sgt. Pepper”; their idea of a “concept” is a sort of B student’s essay on world history, which guitarist Vinnie Martell describes as “The beat of life goes on, ever changing. . . This album is people throughout the world — their hopes, their dreams, their emotions. We hold only the truths. . .” And the beat goes on.”
The LP is divided into four phases, each one worse than the last. Phase 1 takes us from the 18th century to The Beatles, from slavery to the movement to the cities; in short, essentially meaningless song fragments. Phase 2 is terrorized Beethoven. Phase 3, an aural equivalent of a Stanley Kramer antiwar movie, uses actual historical voices. But the real bomb is Phase 4, “Merchant/The Game Is Over.” After Martell has told us What It All Means, bassist Tim Bogert demonstrates the art of unintentional self-annihilation in an interview so smug (“I just hope the trek gets lighter”) and full of platitudes (“Sex is a very beautiful thing”) that it is difficult to believe.
As an example of gargoyle rock, “The Beat Goes On” is perfect. As an example of music with real meaning, it is nothing, nothing at all.
1973 – Keith arrives at the BBC straight from Ron Wood’s birthday party to record a radio show. He has to be carried in by his minder “Dougal” Butler and has some difficulty reading his lines.
1975 – Roger goes to Shepperton Studios for the first day of a two-day shoot of music videos to promote his forthcoming second solo album Ride a Rock Horse.
1977 – Rolling Stone magazine carries an article titled “Who’s still angry? Roger Daltrey is” by Mick Brown
Transcript:
Who’s still angry? Roger Daltrey is
By Mick Brown
LONDON—“IF I wanted to get anything out of this business,” Roger Daltrey says, “it was never to have to go back and work in a factory again. And I’ve got that. But the one thing I’ve learned is that money never buys you out of being working-class. The middle classes don’t ever let you forget where you come from.”
Daltrey has no intention of forgetting. Despite the 12 years that have passed since the Who’s apocalyptic “My Generation” and the criticism from today’s punk rockers that the Who have lost touch with their roots, Daltrey is adamant that—as the title of his latest solo album insists—he’s still very much One of the Boys. The album’s title track, written for Daltrey by Steve Gibbons, begins: “He speaks with a terrible stammer/Doesn’t have much to say,” and, sure enough, the song is marked by the Who’s classic amphetamine stutter. Daltrey, in fact, describes the song as “a 1977 ‘My Generation.’ ”
Daltrey’s conflict with the middle class also stems from a more immediate personal experience. When he recently erected an eight-foot penis (a prop from the film Lisztomania in which he starred) on the grounds of his 200-acre farm in Sussex, complaints from outraged neighbors led to a visit from high-ranking police officers who requested that the offending organ be removed. “It could only happen in England,” sighs Daltrey. “There were probably banks being robbed and people being murdered, and the police force were concentrating their efforts on my eight-foot penis.” Unbowed, the singer simply planted another next to it.
Today, lounging in his £90-a-day luxury hotel suite in threadbare jeans and a silk shirt, Daltrey looks tanned and healthy from time spent on his farm. But suggests that he is merely a landowner after all and Daltrey holds up hands that have obviously been turned to hard labor: “Do these look like they belong to a gentleman farmer?”
Daltrey has taken advantage of a six-month sabbatical from the Who to work on his farm and record his third solo album. While his previous two LPs were commercial successes (the last, Ride a Rock Horse, went Top Ten in Britain and America), Daltrey feels that One of the Boys will be the first to establish a coherent musical direction for his solo career. “It’s always been difficult for me to do that up till now,” he says. “I’ve always said that if I wanted to make a rock & roll album I’d do it with the Who, because that’s the finest rock & roll vehicle in the world. It would be pointless to do second-best to that. But there are all kinds of music the Who don’t touch.”
Certainly the album showcases an eclectic and well-balanced collection of songs—ballads, tough rockers and even some country-flavored tunes (although Daltrey insists he is “too British” to consider a full-fledged Nashville album)—by such writers as Andy Pratt, Colin Blunstone and Paul McCartney, whose “Giddy” was written especially for Daltrey. The album’s three original compositions, which mark the singer’s belated songwriting debut, were done in collaboration with the album’s producer, Dave Courtney. Daltrey says he was always inhibited by Peter Townshend’s prolific output, “but a solo album seemed a good opportunity to put my own material to the test.”
His first attempt as a lyricist includes a song about life in jail, “The Prisoner.” It was inspired by the autobiography of John McVicar, who is currently serving a 26-year term in an English prison for armed robbery. Daltrey was so taken with McVicar’s account of prison life that he acquired the film rights to the book. “McVicar doesn’t make any excuses,” he says. “He is a criminal, no question of it. But the book really illustrates how prison isn’t the answer to anything. It really made me think what it must be like. I’ve been in the nick for a maximum of a week out of my life, and every day of that week seemed like a year. To think of a [Cont. on 16]
Daltrey
[Cont. from 15] guy who’s doing 26 years, and nobody cares . . .”
Daltrey leans forward on the leather couch, his voice rising with intensity as he pummels his leg with a clenched fist. “Where I come from, anyone with the least bit extrovert tendencies either became a footballer, a boxer, a rock musician or a thief. If I hadn’t found rock & roll I would have ended up like McVicar,” he allows a laugh, “ ’cause I’m not very good at football.”
Daltrey is currently having McVicar’s book scripted, and filming should begin sometime next year. Daltrey is keen to play the lead role himself, but insists that neither the film work nor his career as a solo artist will detract from his commitment to the Who:
“When the Who are working I’m totally involved with them; when they stop working I get into my own things. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to be a big solo artist; to be that I would have to be 100% self-indulgent. I would never go out and perform live on my own; I’m not prepared to do the things that go with being a solo artist, like Rod Stewart did for instance. In the end he had no choice but to leave the Faces. I wouldn’t want that situation to arise; I won’t do anything that would infringe on the Who.”
With Peter Townshend also having completed a solo album (in collaboration with Ronnie Lane) and now working on a new batch of tunes for the Who, Daltrey anticipates a renewed burst of studio activity from the group within the next couple of months (in Switzerland or France, to avoid England’s tax laws) and a tour by September. “If anybody’s got any sense, we’ll be back in Holiday Inns for the next tour,” he says, glancing around the room. “I feel more at home in them than I do in some poncy place.”
Never a band to have enjoyed the closest of personal friendships offstage, the members of the Who, according to Daltrey, have been mixing more frequently of late—although personality conflicts have not lessened because of it. “We’re just fighting more often,” he laughs. “Conflict has always been an important part of the group’s makeup.” He points to the last album, Who by Numbers, by way of illustration. “Pete was incredibly down when he first played us those songs, and very cynical about what he had written. When I first heard them it made me unbelievably angry. His cynicism and my anger combined made Who by Numbers a good Who album, though I didn’t think so at the time. Without the anger it would have been unbearable.”
The stability of the group has not been helped by the self-imposed exile of drummer Keith Moon, now a resident of Los Angeles. “It doesn’t feel so much like a band with him over there,” Daltrey admits, “and it’s not going him any good either. He’s the only guy I know who’s not over there for tax reasons. He always wanted to be a silver surfer and now he’s doing it, but I really feel it’s killing him. He should be back here with us.”
Despite the air of pessimism and doubt that pervades much of Who by Numbers, Daltrey insists that the group is as potent a force as ever. “I think the Who have sustained their credibility more than any other band I can think of. We’ve always been an accurate reflection of what’s happening socially. The one thing we’ve always had is an instinct, mainly from Pete. Keith, John and I are all working-class, but Pete never really was; he came from a musician’s family. Because he wasn’t working-class he could stand back from the whole Mod thing in the Sixties and look at it objectively—and he’s always done that. The Who’s rock & roll is still really working-class, and Pete still has amazing perception as to what people are thinking and what they want—nine months before they realize it themselves.”
Nonetheless, Daltrey seems gladdened by the upsurge of enthusiasm and anger among English punk bands. “It’s taken the pressure off us in a way,” he says.
“I’ve learned that money never buys you out of being working-class. The middle classes don’t ever let you forget where you came from.”
“We’ll still be aggressive, but maybe we can explore other areas of music we’ve never dared to up until now. If we look old now it’s because we’ve been waving the fucking flag for the last 15 years. We were the punks of the Sixties. They’re like I was; I was trying to find me. I’ve found me now; it’s not perfect, but I’m very happy. I’m not going to cut off my hair and dye it pink; that wouldn’t prove anything. I feel the same inside as I always did. To me, the importance of the punk thing is what they’re angry about—the fact that there’s a lot of people on the fucking dole and getting a rough deal.” Again Daltrey’s voice rises again and his fist pummels his leg as he drives home his final point:
“And I’m still angry about the same fucking thing . . .”
2001 – Pete is interviewed in The Daily Telegraph. He says “I hope I die before I get old was obviously ironic.”
Transcript:
A Lifetime Achievement award is silly – there’s still so much to do, Pete Townshend tells Neil McCormick
Ten days ago, on a hot, sun-drenched May afternoon, many of the leading lights of the British music business could be found assembled in a gloomy, windowless, basement ballroom of a hotel in central London. The occasion was the Ivor Novello Awards, an annual event in which the achievements of British songwriters are celebrated over a three-course lunch.
Contemporary stars such as Craig David, Sonique, All Saints and Neil Morrissey (on behalf of his plastic alter ego, Bob the Builder) had all made copious expressions of gratitude for their recognition and the ceremony was dragging on into its third hour when Pete Townshend was summoned to the stage to accept a Lifetime Achievement award.
Despite enthusiastic applause, I think it is fair to say the rock legend was not particularly overwhelmed. Casually attired in short-sleeved shirt and jeans, Townshend announced to the designer-clad assembly: “I did all this crap so I could have my own swimming pool. And I’m not in it.” He suggested that if they speeded proceedings up a bit, he might still catch a few precious rays of sunshine.
You could be forgiven for thinking the one-time angry young man had turned out to be a rather grumpy old one. Townshend was joking, of course, but there was a tangible edge to his remarks. As soon as the last speech was made and the lights in the ballroom went up, Townshend could be spotted pulling on his denim jacket, brushing off the attentions of well-wishers as he made a beeline for the exit, with his beautiful young girlfriend clinging to his arm.
“I am happy to get an old-lads’ award,” he told me the next day, though adding that it was sales that really mattered because “Craig David and Bob the Builder pay the party bill”. The note of sarcasm adds to the impression that Townshend is reluctant to accept the designated role of respectable elder statesman. “The problem is they seem to have forgotten they gave me a very similar award at the end of my career 20 years ago,” he added, referring to a 1981 award for Outstanding Services to British Music. “As for Lifetime Achievement – I’m far from dead.”
At 56, Townshend is positively sprightly lean, tanned and bristling with energy. “I look my age,” he admits, acknowledging a drastically receding hairline, baggy eyes and sagging jowls, “but I certainly don’t feel it.”
For much of his adult life, Townshend has been dogged by over-literal interpretations of his most famous line, a pithy, nihilistic epigram written at the age of 20 for the Who’s 1965 single My Generation. “I hope I die before I get old” was obviously ironic,” he says, unable to disguise his irritation with the (admittedly rather shallow) critical notion that simply by surviving into middle age he has betrayed his youthful idealism. “Irony is vital to the pop process. There can be double meanings, or multiple meanings when irony is at work. It is reduced to a silly pop song if you analyse it literally.”
Although he will sporadically claim to “not give a shit” about critical perceptions of him, Townshend seems eager to establish that he is still as creatively active as ever. The day after our encounter, he emailed me a résumé of his copious current projects, which include preparations for solo shows in New York later this month, work in his home studio compiling material for the third release in his Scoop series of oddities and outtakes and developing a theatrical version of Quadrophenia with award-winning playwright Joe Penhall.
The email itself was an indication of how Townshend has kept up with the times. Always something of a technophile, Townshend has become an enthusiastic silver surfer, keen to expand and exploit the artistic, social and commercial possibilities of a virtual medium that — as he likes to point out — he foretold back in 1971 with his Lifehouse project.
He is deeply involved in running his own innovative and award-winning website, www.petetownshend.com, for which he provides video clips, segments of music and a fascinating online diary (which he uses as a forum to engage in a passionate dialogue with fans and critics, providing a remarkable insight into his mindset).
But for all Townshend’s eagerness to remain a contemporary artist it is his remarkable past that defines him. On Monday, Edel Records releases Substitute — The Songs of the Who. Produced and compiled by the band’s live engineer, Bob Pridden, this is an album of specially recorded cover versions of classic Townshend songs, featuring an all-star cast.
Second generation Mod Paul Weller contributes a blistering version of the obscure B-side Circles, David Bowie breathes new life into Pictures of Lily with colourful Ziggy Stardust stylings. Sheryl Crow lends a feminine perspective to Behind Blue Eyes, Stereophonics deliver a muscular rendition of Who Are You? and Pearl Jam blast their way through The Kids Are Alright.
And if many of the cuts emulate rather than improve upon the originals, it only serves to emphasise the qualities of artistry, musical craft and passionate performance that established the Who as perhaps the definitive four-piece rock line-up.
Although he gave his blessing to the project, Townshend declines to be drawn on it, his only comment being: “It either stands alone or it doesn’t.” He is not so reticent when it comes to discussing the quality of contemporary rock bands, however. “Travis and Stereophonics are lovely,” he says, somewhat archly, “but you put your hand in and what you get is not very much.”
It is Townshend’s conviction that, by bringing an art-school perspective to American rock and roll, the first wave of great British bands (whom he cites as The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, the Kinks and the Animals) almost completely exhausted the potential of the medium.
“Last year, I bought a whole stack of new albums, including Oasis, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Travis and Asian Dub Foundation, and there were some really interesting, inspiring moments there, but the rest sounded like filler. You could probably put one or two great CDs together out of all those bands,” he says, delivering his put-down with the amenable if ever-so-slightly patronising air of a professor assessing the work of promising students.
“That Beatles-probably style of Oasis is brilliant when it comes off, but it would be very difficult to make a whole album’s worth of it because the Beatles did it and they left an empty ice-cream carton! I think it gets harder as we get further away from the source. We’re now 50 years away from Chuck Berry and Little Richard’s original.”
Townshend concedes that what younger artists bring to the post is “new energy’, a hear a lot of songs that I think I should have written… he admits. “But the fact is I shouldn’t have written them. It’s their turn.”
Townshend’s reputation as one of rock’s most visionary thinkers and creative artists is not in doubt. But talking to this articulate, passionate man one gets the impression of tapping into a raging internal debate concerning how best he should employ his talents.
“I have to face the fact that I am 56 and a lot of my early writing was, if not for teenagers, certainly about teenage adolescent rites of passage,” he says. “I suppose it’s part of my nature, an issue the kids I grew up with carried with them.
“Maybe because we were an immediately post-war generation, when we were really young we were kind of disenfranchised. And I don’t mean that in a wailing, whinging way. We were genuinely disenfranchised because society hadn’t yet decided what it was going to do with its young men.”
He points out that he was 25 in 1970 when the Who released their classic Who’s Next album, on which he coined the phrase “teenage wasteland”.
“Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood. Without ques-
where I was most successful. And, you know, I have never got close to that standard of writing again.” If this seems a telling admission, Townshend makes it abundantly clear that he does not feel remotely redundant.
“My creative energy is located elsewhere,” he insists. “It’s a bit like being a painter who suddenly decides to change colour or change process. I don’t get out my electric guitar and start thrashing away at four in the morning with a bottle of brandy in my hand. I don’t allow myself to be that angry any more. These days I’m more likely to get worked up and write a “swing string quartet or something!!!”
None the less, he admits that the sheer musical and emotional spirit of last year’s live Who revival has provided him with inspiration. “I have my usual clutch of daft ideas,” he says. “Probably the daftest is to try to write some grand new project that might suit the Who. We shall see.”
In the meantime, there are plenty of other matters to occupy the reluctant elder statesman’s attention, as a visit to his website makes plain.
“There seem to be two young, pretty, topless women in my swimming pool,” he notes, in a recent posting to his online diary. “Am I really a rock star or what?”
To claim your free ‘Substitute’ album go to www.petetownshend.com
“I hope I die before I get old” was obviously ironic,” the 56-year-old Pete Townshend says now. “Irony is vital to the pop process.”
“Travis and Stereophonics are lovely, but you put your hand in and what you get is not very much.”
2001 – John Entwistle plays Atlantic City at The Shell Trump Marina Casino
2007 – The Who play the Rose Bowl in Southampton, Hampshire