Sept. 6, 2010

I can’t think of another classic rock icon who exasperates me more often than Pete Townshend does— only Mick Jagger comes close, but Mick’s such a prancing CEO by this point, I’m well beyond regarding him as a musical artist, at least not in the here and now. Townshend, however, still appears to be trying, even though far fewer people are listening at this point...unless, of course, they caught him during the halftime show at the Super Bowl.

My problem is that, although Townshend’s career, both with the Who and as a solo performer, is peppered with some of the more inquiring, passionate singles in rock & roll history, he consistently over-intellectualizes his ideas to the point of absurdity. On several occasions, I’ve actually stopped reading interviews with Townshend because my initial enthusiasm had transformed itself into low-level loathing for a big blowhard.

“Tommy” is what gave Townshend a lifetime pass to uninterruptable pontification, I suppose. But I don’t care what anybody says, outside of a couple fairly breathtaking passages, “Tommy” is a load of bullshit. And, even though Townshend himself insists the description was supposed to be a joke, you’d have to be more than a wee-bit self-important to ever call a collection of confused Messianic guitar blatherings a “rock opera.”

“Messianic” is the key word here. Townshend has had a tendency to overreach throughout his career - which is admirable; he certainly doesn’t have to try so hard - but he repeatedly does so in a manner that implies he’s much more than just a talented songwriter-guitarist with a theatrical bent.

Pete Townshend, sorry to say, likes to pretend his fans view him as Jesus, or at least someone a lot like Him, and nothing’s more embarrassing than people who assume they’re swinging from the hem of that particular garment, especially when they’re alternating between amphetamines, pints of Guinness, heroin, and industrial strength pretentiousness.

Oddly, then, it was the failure of yet another round of arch Messianic overreach that led to Townshend’s greatest achievement as a recording artist. The Who’s 1971 album, “Who’s Next,” is a certifiable major piece of work, all the way from its opening synthesizer beepity-beepity-beepities to its final delirious yelp. But if you know what you’re listening for, you can hear the album “Who’s Next” was supposed to have been embedded within the lyrics of its songs.

                                                ***

After the critical success of “Tommy,” Townshend decided to hitch his cart to even more elaborate theoretical concepts than a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who’s come to save the unwashed masses. So he started obsessing over an interactive science fiction project he eventually named “Lifehouse”…not that he or anybody else in the Who’s inner circle could readily explain the “Lifehouse” concept.

It would take me a couple thousand words to run through all the convoluted notions Townshend (who may or may not have gotten his tongue on some powerful acid) was hoping to work into “Lifehouse,” so I’ll just try to give you the general, mostly incomprehensible idea.

Townshend has said he often noticed a moment during the Who’s live performances when the band and the audience reached such a mutual state of euphoria it seemed as if they had more or less achieved a sort of communion on a higher plane of existence, and he wanted to explore the possibilities of the connection.

His hope with “Lifehouse” was that he could gather an audience in a theater for a live Who concert featuring all new songs that convey a storyline about a futuristic society in which rock & roll is a raw, elemental force that’s suppressed by the powers that be, then feed data about each audience member’s personal worldview into a computer, and…this is where it gets really dicey…somehow generate a single note from both the data and the Who’s pounding that would transport the lot of them to a new, ecstatic consciousness.

Or something.

The plan was that the Who’s interaction with its audience, whatever it entailed, would be spliced into a narrative sci-fi movie to be scripted by Townshend. The band was actually invited by the inexplicably enthusiastic management of a London theater called the Young Vic to carry out their bold experiment for a week or so, even though Townshend was the only one involved who really felt something groundbreaking could be accomplished.

Recordings of the songs the Who played during their tenure at the Young Vic were included with the 2003 re-issue of “Who’s Next,” and, I have to say, this version of the pastoral epiphany, “Love Ain’t for Keeping,” which is one of my favorite tracks on the official album, rocks the joint and then some. Lyrically, “Love Ain’t for Keeping” is perhaps the most open-hearted thing Townshend has ever written; it's just a lovely, hopeful song. And the band is in top form here, especially when they suddenly kick it into high gear near the end.

Love Ain't for Keeping

That’s first-rate stuff, no doubt about it. As good as it is, though, it’s not too hard to recognize that Townshend and the boys were up against it if they aimed to bring an audience to permanent rapture via a series of carefully selected power chords, and Townshend reportedly had a nervous breakdown when he couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. (To be fair to Townshend, John Coltrane was into a similar universal triad concept in the latter part of his career. But Coltrane just ended up making a bunch of critically over-praised racket after a while, then bypassed the nervous breakdown and actually died.)

After licking his Unknowable Genius wounds for a while, Townshend decided to salvage several key tunes from “Lifehouse” and record them as a straight-ahead rock album, which eventually entered the world’s pop consciousness as “Who’s Next.” The album sold in heaps, and disc jockeys rewarded the Who with more FM airplay than any other band, outside of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, ever managed.

                                                ***

The tracks that bookend “Who’s Next,” “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” were such persistent radio mainstays when I was in high school, you could barely scan the dial for an hour without hearing one or both of them, and that was almost 10 years after they were released.

People tend to forget, though, the consistently thrilling songs that are stuffed between the anthems on “Who’s Next.” One of the album’s more powerful tunes is the cynical lament, “Behind Blue Eyes.” Originally intended as the theme song for “Lifehouse”’s sci-fi villain, in its “Who’s Next” context “Behind Blue Eyes” can be read as a survival guide for the modern rock star, a person who isn’t required by society to hem in his negative impulses, but will quickly become a burned-out shell (or worse) if he doesn’t control himself. As I’ve already mentioned, Townshend would have known all too well about that sort of thing.

Behind Blue Eyes

Daltrey, if you didn’t notice, sings the hell out of “Behind Blue Eyes,” and he’s in top form throughout “Who’s Next.” Along with everybody else in the band, he delivered the best studio work of his career on the album. Nevertheless, the real anarchic heart of the Who is Keith Moon, whose drumming, though utterly unschooled and often too much by half, adds a unique, tumbling urgency to the songs.

Here’s a clip from a documentary on the making of “Who’s Next” in which assorted collaborators marvel at Moon’s unhinged inventiveness. I remember Daltrey’s eyes lighting up when he briefly spoke with me about Moon during the week I worked on that Carnegie Hall Show. You can see in this clip everyone involved genuinely loved Moonie, and got a big kick out of him.

Aside from the lyric, “Searching for a note, pure and easy/Playing so free like a breath rippling by,” which appears at the end of “The Song is Over” and was intended by Townshend as a encapsulation of his “Lifehouse” ideal of musically fusing with the audience, the “Who’s Next” track that was most obviously designed as a part of “Lifehouse” is “Getting in Tune.” It’s a prayerful, piano-driven piece that’s soothing enough to make you wish Townshend’s ambitious dream of rock transcendence could have become a reality.

Getting in Tune

                                                ***

Given the overwhelming power of its final tune, it seems silly to end a discussion of “Who’s Next” without really ending it. So, rather than making you simply listen to a song that you probably can’t “hear” anymore due to happy over-familiarity, here’s a cool British TV broadcast of the Who playing a more viewer-friendly shortened version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

When you see how exciting these guys are while packed onto a cramped TV stage trying to push a new single, it makes Townshend’s belief in a metaphysical hook-up with the Who’s audience members seem a little less absurd. But just a little less.

“Won’t Get Fooled Again,” of course, is still making Pete rich as the theme song to the popular cop show, “CSI: Miami.” It’s a good thing Townshend didn’t actually die before he got old - another dumb-dumb Christ concept for which he gets too much credit - or he would have missed out on all those residual checks. “Long live rock” makes more sense anyway.

Download: “Who's Next” (1971) by the Who, every single track. And crank that baby up.

Paul Tatara