The Deep End of Pete Townshend's Genius

Pete Townshend was always too ambitious for rock ‘n’ roll. 

Not so much with the early hits he wrote for The Who, songs like “Can’t Explain” and “Substitute,” which were in essence point-and-click snapshots of the lives Townshend observed around him—songs that in turn gave the band’s youthful audience a collective voice and culture of its own. More so, rather, with the emergence of Tommy in 1969, when Townshend broadened his creative sweep into the realm of a rock opera, crafting songs with narrative themes and psychologically complex characters that when presented together achieved even more prescient significance. 

Evolving from a singles-oriented band to one which makes long-form albums was not a particularly innovative shift in and of itself, of course. By the same year as Tommy’s soundtrack release, the Rolling Stones had likewise moved on from casting such succinct aspersions of British society as “Mother’s Little Helper” and “Get Off My Cloud” to pursue grander (and darker) subject matter on such LPs as Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. 

What Townshend as the prime songwriting conduit in The Who was doing by this point, however, signified more than a mere intention to broaden a musical idea or even to render an album as some sort of cohesive piece of work. Townshend composed character sketches and thematic motifs, implemented plot devices and narrative constructions like a novelist or playwright, his lyrics laying the foundation that he and his bandmates—bassist John Entwistle, drummer Keith Moon, and vocalist Roger Daltrey—would then galvanize into song. 

Townshend could be obsessive about his art, but who could blame him? The expectations he unwittingly created—the benchmarks he and the band set in the studio, the mythologized behemoth The Who became on the concert stage—became a lot to live up to, with Townshend’s reputation as a songwriter dictating ever more genius with each new piece of music.  

In the throes of composing his most aspirational project yet, Lifehouse, Townshend grew increasingly overwhelmed and disillusioned, his intended magnum opus crumbling under his own madcap perfectionism. Scrapping all but the script, so to speak, the band’s producer Glyn Johns salvaged what he deemed the project’s strongest songs, culminating with the 1971 LP Who’s Next. An unmitigated classic, the album—which included a veritable haul of ageless warhorses like “Baba O’Riley,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”—offered perhaps the most ironic affirmation of Townshend’s artistic prowess. 

Only two years later Townshend redeemed himself with Quadrophenia, yet the specter of the Lifehouse debacle loomed over his head for decades to come. In fact, he didn’t put Lifehouse to bed for good until 1999 with the sprawling, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink box set, Lifehouse Chronicles—which, conspicuously, was credited not to The Who but to Pete Townshend.

And therein lies the crux of Townshend’s songcraft. For all the democratization that often makes a band better than the sum of its individual parts, Townshend’s best ideas came out of working alone. Sure, his initial ideas were then retooled and rearranged and implemented by one of the most ferocious rock bands on the planet. But the most crucial atoms of those classic Who anthems originated out of Townshend’s imagination.

Without the concerted collaboration of his band to shape his musical ideas, Townshend’s solo work (which he experimented with in the ‘70s before taking far more seriously in the ‘80s with albums like 1980’s Empty Glass and 1982’s All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes) seemed to be an endeavor wholly distinct from The Who.

Which is why, when on January 29, 1986, Townshend and a big-band ensemble dubbed the Deep End rolled into Cannes for a performance for the popular German television series Rockpalast in support of his solo album from the year before, White City: A Novel, the overriding impression—as witnessed on the Blu-ray and CD  Pete Townshend’s Deep End: Face The Face—is one of liberation. 

Boasting a five-piece brass cotillion and five backing vocalists, along with The Who’s stalwart keyboardist John “Rabbit” Bundrick and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour on lead guitar, the fast-paced set is chock full of raw R&B energy, yielding solo highlights like “Slit Skirts” and “Second Hand Love” alongside a few Who favorites (“Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Behind Blue Eyes”) for good measure. Oddly, Gilmour assumes more challenging and audience-thrilling passages on the axe than does Townshend, who seems to revel more in his role as entertainer—some rather awkward dance steps prove that point to a fault—than as a guitar god.

But perhaps that was the fundamental object of the exercise. Townshend had already, even by this point 31 years ago, composed one of the most enduring and imposing catalogs in all of rock history—he would return to The Who in periods of both ambivalence and urgency in the three decades to come—and he knew full well that the benchmark he helped set could never be eclipsed, much less by his own effort.

Townshend would never make a solo album without it garnering comparison to his most definitive work with The Who—take 1993’s Psychoderelict, for instance—but as a solo artist he has carved out a space wherein his genius can thrive with abandon. 

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An Interview with Wilko Johnson

“When I was real young I just played in bands because it was great fun,” says Wilko Johnson, recalling, “It wasn’t one of my ambitions to be a musician. It was in fact a few years later that again we started a band, Dr. Feelgood, for fun.” 

Out of the industrial malaise that characterized the band’s native Essex in the early seventies Dr. Feelgood emerged with the sort of vengeance and back-to-basics vitality that the punk movement would espouse only a few short years later, earning a reputation as an indefatigable live act armed with raw, ecstatic blasts of rhythm and blues. “It wasn’t fashionable or anything, what we were doing,” says Johnson. “We just wanted to play that good old music, and we did and it got successful.” 

Johnson continues to play music for fun just as he did in those early days, even as he approaches his final ones. Diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer last January he seems to have taken the news as but further incentive to cherish the here and now, embarking on a string of live gigs and teaming up with fellow rhythm-and-blues connoisseur Roger Daltrey on the runaway hit LP, Going Home. 

While it may be the last of his lifetime the album, which save for a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” is comprised of ten Johnson originals from throughout his career, offers no maudlin farewells. And neither does Johnson, who with his signature red and black Telecaster at hand continues to perform despite the specter of his diagnosis. “I’ve got this great big lump in my stomach, which irritates me a bit,” he says. “When I’m standing on stage my guitar is actually rocking on this thing, but apart from that I feel fine.” 

When his day-to-day wellbeing begins to decline he’ll stop performing for good, Johnson insists, adding, “I don’t want to come crawling on to the very last moment.”

Once you guys were in the studio, was there a particular moment when you and Roger both recognized some chemistry or spark between each other?

As soon as we started, really. I mean, we only had a short time to do this album—eight days actually. It was a good atmosphere in the studio. Everybody got on well. We just started working ferociously. Yeah, we got on well right from the beginning.

Being that you wrote the lion’s share of the songs that are on the album—and obviously you’re no stranger to these songs, having performed them live for years—did you gain any new perspective on your songwriting in revisiting them in this way?

Yeah, I think so. Roger treated each song… He really gets into it. He’s got to find his own way into a song. It was like hearing my stuff in a different way.

Roger sounds really engaged on these songs.

I think so. I think that was the kind of atmosphere of the whole thing. As I say, we had to do it quick, though, and everybody just got totally into it. It was good fun. 

Whose idea was it to do the Dylan song?

That was mine, actually. I really like Bob Dylan. It’s a great song.

Were there songs that you recorded that didn’t make the album?

Yeah, there were several that didn’t get on there for one reason or another. 

Are they going to be released in the future?

They may well be. I think Roger has been so pleased at the way things worked out that he wants to do some more.

I’ve read that you’d written some new songs within the past couple years. Are you still writing?

I haven’t been lately. Actually, when I got my diagnosis the beginning of last year I immediately started writing quite a lot of songs. In fact, I was intending to do a last album at the end of last year, but in the end what we did was the Roger Daltrey thing. So yeah, I’ve still got quite a bit of new material. I don’t know how much time I’ve got. Maybe I’ll get in there and do them, I don’t know. I hope so.

You’ve got some festival gigs lined up in June and July. How do you approach those sorts of things? They’re still a couple months away.

Well, exactly. Having the cancer as I have, I was supposed to be dead back in October. I’m still alive, but it does mean that I can’t look very far into the future, because I don’t know when I’m going to get sick. So anything more than a couple of weeks away is a bit of an illusion for me. 

It was heartbreaking to see your name misspelled on the Glastonbury poster.

Yeah well… How long has that festival been going, I ask you? And how many times have they asked me to play? I’ll tell you how many times! Never! And when they finally ask me to play they can’t even spell my name! 

Are you still enjoying playing live, though, as much as you seem to be?

Oh yes. These days I just really, really enjoy gigs because you never know if it’s going to be the last one.  

Not to get too philosophical, but it seems like the approach to a live concert is almost a metaphor for how you have to live now: you must live in the moment.

You’re exactly right. That’s all you can do. Here I am, I thought I was going to be dead six months ago and I’m sitting here looking at the sunshine and thinking, “Well, this is pretty groovy.” 

Going Back Home is available now on Hip-O Records (North America) and Chess Records (UK). For more information on Wilko Johnson, please visit his official website.

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Ricky Byrd: I Still Love Rock 'N' Roll

“I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” Ricky Byrd snarls before throwing his guitar into gear and careening it through “Rock 'N' Roll Boys,” the rabble-rousing opening track on Lifer (Kayos Records), his solo debut. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, nothing more than an impulsive quip, but it nevertheless underscores the time and effort it’s taken Byrd, a veteran on the axe for more than 30 years, to reach this point. 

“I always wanted to do my own record,” Byrd insists, “but I wanted to do my own record right. People would say, ‘Why is it taking so long?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, I know, but my meter’s not running. I have nothing to do with anything that’s on the radio. So I might as well do the record I want to do.’”

As lead guitarist for Joan Jett and the Blackhearts for over a decade, beginning in 1981, his irascible riffs and licks bolstered such rambunctious anthems as “I Hate Myself For Loving You,” “Talkin’ Bout My Baby,” and, of course, “I Love Rock and Roll.” Byrd left the Blackhearts in 1993 with an itch for new opportunities, touring and recording with the likes of Roger Daltrey, Southside Johnny, and Ian Hunter, among others. Over time, though, he sought to make the sort of music that had inspired him to play rock ‘n’ roll in the first place. 

“People now have no clue how neat it was to be lying on the beach in the summer in New York and hearing AM radio,” Byrd reflects, harkening back to the mid-to-late Sixties during the height of his adolescence, “where in one 15-minute time-frame you would hear, like, the Kinks’ new record, and then you would hear the Dave Clark 5 and the Stones and then Dean Martin and then “(Sittin’ On The) Dock of the Bay” and then a Sinatra song and on and on. It was all on one station.” 

And it all had a profound effect on Byrd, sealing his fate and ultimately — with a guitar, plenty of practice, and no shortage of his native-Bronx swagger — forging his path each step of the way. “There was a process to getting someplace when you were a teenager at a certain age, in a certain era,” he recalls. “You learned how to work a room. You started out playing church dances or little dive bars, and that’s really where you made your bones.”

Such formative influences and experience no doubt inform Lifer, with moments of riff-thick rockers (“Dream Big,” “Let’s Get Gone”), Stax-like-soul stirrers (“Married Man,” “Ways of a Woman”) and barrelhouse rhythm & blues (“Harlem Rose”) boasting a good-time-is-had-by-all enthusiasm. 

“There’s a lot of cool stuff now,” Byrd concedes, “but it’s not like this stuff. It’s got a different feel to it, a different groove. The snare beat is on a different beat. All the stuff I love is below the waist. That’s the kind of feel that I like. Whether it’s Otis Redding doing ‘Shake!’ or the middle part of ‘Midnight Rambler’ when they start doing it slow and sexy, it’s all below-the-waist stuff.” 

While he’s most known as a guitarist Byrd has long honed his chops as a songwriter as well, whether on his own or in collaboration with other artists. “I love writing songs,” Byrd explains, adding that on the album, “I didn’t edit myself or put any restraints on how I was going to write. I didn’t try to write a Maroon 5 song; I just wrote the way I write. The only thing I did on purpose was [to] make it so it would be able to be played live — I could play this record top to bottom live with no problem — and I picked certain feels and grooves that I wanted on the record.”

All told Byrd has succeeded in his effort, establishing his own voice as an artist while honoring the many mentors who’ve shown him the way. “My record is like a tip of the hat to the stuff that I grew up on,” says Byrd, adding, “I just wanted to do a record that explained why I’m the way I am.”


For more information on Ricky Byrd, please visit his official website. Lifer is available now on Kayos Records.

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The Who Throw Sparks In Tampa

photo by Donald Gibson // March 25, 2007

Thirteen days ago, Roger Daltrey walked off of the Ford Amphitheatre stage, shaking his head in frustration, unable to sing the first song of that night’s scheduled concert due to illness.

Last night, The Who returned to make up the gig, big time.

Armed with guitar, Pete Townshend surged into the opening riff of “I Can’t Explain,” setting Daltrey up to deliver the vocal goods. This time, the voice held up.

Ostensibly touring in support of their most recent album, last year’s impressive Endless Wire, The Who played but a few tracks from it, opting instead to treat a spirited Tampa crowd to more familiar material. Endless Wire’s mini-opera, Wire & Glass, was dropped from the setlist in favor of two surefire classics: “Substitute” and “The Kids Are Alright.”

Other highlights included “The Seeker,” “Eminence Front,” and an incendiary version of “My Generation” that segued into “Cry If You Want.”

The mightiest warhorses, “Who Are You,” “Baba O’Riley,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” predictably received the most rousing of responses, elicited not only by the anthemic quality of the songs, but also by the venom Townshend unleashed with his electric guitar.

Clearly not over his ailment, Roger Daltrey had admitted early on that his voice would not be at its best, but he offered to the audience, “What I’ve got is yours”. By the end of the night, Daltrey had more than lived up to his word and the Who lived up to their legend.

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