One of the key tenets of being a late-seventies, early eighties musical “rebel” was rejecting not only the bland corporate rock and jet-set superstars of the seventies, but affecting a studied boredom with the sixties. The Beatles were fun, but they were old news. The Stones had turned into a multinational enterprise more famous for their glam lifestyle than any actual music they’d done since 1972 or so. Don’t even start talking about the Moody Blues, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, The Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers…
But there were two survivors of the British Invasion that still demanded respect. The Kinks (of whom more later), who were sort of like the garage band we all wanted to have, run by Ray Davies, the same too-clever, too snarky, too-cool-to-be-a-hipster kind of guy we all aspired to be (or better yet, little brother Dave, the guitar anti-hero who spawned many a punk imitator)…
…and The Who.
And while I paid dutiful homage to the Kinks into my twenties (when I really dug into their backlog), The Who were one of my obsessions in high school.
Part of it was that their greatest work – Who’s Next and Quadrophenia, from ’71 and ’74 – seemed to zone in on the angst of being a teenager…
…well, no. Not a “teenager”, per se. A pretentious teenager given to trying to think big thoughts and give off big aggression.
They smashed things.
They spanned the generations:
(I know – it’s Kenny Jones on drums. Don’t hate).
They stared into the face of the punks, and recognized…themselves!
He looked at the generations who came before and said “I’d rather die before I turn into you!”, and blew things up!
And they not only sang about kids like us – well, in a rhetorical, symbolic sense, anyway – they did it almost by name!
And so well through high school, The Who was what I cranked to 11. Townsend, all untrammeled angst and windmilling, hand-shredding aggression and smashing guitars and and Hiwatt amps cranked to 15 (not to mention John Entwhistle’s superhuman bass lines and Keith Moon’s improbably anarchic yet precise drumming), was what I aspired to be. Only cooler.
And I was probably well into my thirties when I realized – the reason I, the overheated adolescent rebel without a cause or much of a clue liked The Who much was that Pete Townsend, all the way through his thirties, was still an overheated adolescent himself. Townsend may have been the first pop star in history to have gone straight from adolescence to middle age without an intervening young adult stage.
And as I outgrew that tortured time of my life – or at least let the energy channel itself elsewhere – I can’t honestly say that I outgrew The Who – but it turned into something different; a look into a time capsule that helps me remember exactly where I was and what I felt like when I was 15 and bashing my head against…
…well, something. Always something. Because in my mind, that was the lot of the teenager outsider. To smash things – guitars, amps, conventions, heads against the wall.
Just like Pete Townsend.
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