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All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes

Certain Songs #1529: Pete Townshend – “Slit Skirts”

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Album: All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes
Year: 1982

Of course, the real reason I played All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes as many times as I did was so I could get to “Slit Skirts,” which wasn’t just my favorite song on the album, but probably my favorite of all of his solo songs.

And while just like many of the songs on All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, “Slit Skirts” had too damn many words, somehow his meditation on growing older resonated with me, who was pushing the ripe old age of 20. Of course, while I couldn’t relate to the actual experiences he was describing, the overall theme of coping with the changes that growing older inevitably caused was something I could relate to: not only was KSFR was finally going on the air, I was also working towards the first real adult romantic relationship in my life. Terrifying.

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Certain Songs #1528: Pete Townshend – “Stardom in Acton”

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Album: All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes
Year: 1982

To call Pete Townshend’s 1982 album All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, difficult is to undersell the concept of difficult. It laughed at difficult. It stuck a secret knife in difficult’s gut. For the longest time, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of most of it. Songs like “Face Dances Pt 2,” “Uniforms” and “Exquisitely Bored” tried to be exquisite, but ended up being boring. And it still amazes me today how he could cover “Girl From The North Country” and completely ignore one the most gorgeous melodies in human history.

That said, I thought “The Sea Refuses No River,” “Somebody Saved Me” and even the dread “Stop Hurting People” (OK, if you say so, Pete) were good songs that were overthought, overlong — or both — but somehow got across because of his singing, which I’d come to love even more than Roger Daltrey’s. I mean, the dread “Stop Hurting People” is just plaine silly for the longest time, but god help me, when he sings “may I be matched with you again?” and his guitar shines like the sun out of a cloudbank of synths, it gets me every time.

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