Pete Townshend

Certain Songs #1531: Pete Townshend – “Give Blood”

May 7, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: White City: A Novel
Year: 1985

Before I leave Mr. Townshend for a couple of years (or so), I wanted to discuss something that struck me last night: he could have made one helluva Who album from the best songs on Face Dances, All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes and It’s Hard instead of the three non-helluva albums that were released.

(This obviously ignores Empty Glass, which stands up on its own and White City: A Novel, which is a few years later.)

So call it Face Dances, because that’s easily the best title of the three, put it out in 1982, and have the following track listing:

Certain Songs #1530: Pete Townshend – “Dance It Away”

May 6, 2019 by Jim Connelly

B-Side, 1982

In 1979, The Who toured for the first time since Keith Moon’s death. It was mostly Europe, and East Coast cities, with the centerpiece being five nights at Madison Square Garden, which was before the tragedy that befell in Cincinnati, where 11 people were killed in a stampede.

The week after Cincinnati, Time magazine put The Who on the cover with the caption “Rock’s Outer Limits,” which was both ironic describing a band that was was trying to rebuild after a key member’s death, and weirdly apropos given what had just happened in Cincy. If I’m not mistaken, the cover story had been planned prior to the tragedy, given that in 1979, The Who were very much in the spotlight, with the tour plus The Kids Are Alright plus the film of Quadrophenia.

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

May 5, 2019 by Jim Connelly

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.

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

May 4, 2019 by Jim Connelly

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.

Certain Songs #1527: Pete Townshend – “Empty Glass”

May 3, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Empty Glass
Year: 1980

I was going to call “Empty Glass” my favorite track on Empty Glass, but if that’s true, it’s just by the thinnest of margins over “Rough Boys,” and so it probably really is a tie. One thing is for sure, it’s the most musically exciting song on the album, probably because it has its roots as a song that was recorded for Who Are You.

That version was released as a bonus cut on a reissue of Who Are You, and you can hear why they left it off the album, as — if we’re honest, like many of the songs he was writing around that time — it just didn’t work with Keith Moon, who was the greatest drummer who ever lived, but most definitely had a lane, which was about five streets away from where “Empty Glass” was traveling.

Certain Songs #1526: Pete Townshend – “Let My Love Open The Door”

May 2, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Empty Glass
Year: 1980

I’m not going to lie: it took me awhile to come around on “Let My Love Open The Door.” After all, there were hardly any guitars on it, and it was an unexpectedly massive hit single, meaning it was all over the radio all over the time, while the far more deserving “Rough Boys” kinda got buried.

But at some point over the decades, “Let My Love Open The Door” wore down my resistance, and now I’m a total sucker for one of the most straightforward pop songs that Pete Townshend ever wrote. And I kinda consider it one of the rarest of birds: a non-danceable synth-pop song. (And indeed, because of The Who’s rhythm section, it wasn’t like Townshend wrote a lot of danceable songs, even though dancing was one of his lyrical motifs going back to when he declared he didn’t mind other guys dancing with his girl.)

Certain Songs #1525: Pete Townshend – “Rough Boys”

May 1, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Empty Glass
Year: 1980

In between the time that Keith Moon died in the summer of 1978 and the time Empty Glass was released in the spring of 1980, The Who had become my favorite band. Yeah, I loved The Clash and proselytized them to my classmates to little or no avail, but The Who were it for me.

They were also dead.

OK, well that’s harsh: technically, it was only Keith Moon who was dead, and in fact, part of what made The Who my favorite band at the time was the well-timed history-diggings of The Kids are Alright and Quadrophenia films, not to mention that they were soldiering on without Keith.

Certain Songs #1524: Pete Townshend – “Drowned (Secret Policeman’s Ball, 1979)”

April 30, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Secret Policeman’s Ball – The Music
Year: 1979

The Secret Policeman’s Ball was the name given to a series of concerts for Amnesty International in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1979, the show was directed by John Cleese, who not only recruited Peter Cook, but fellow Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Jones.

On the musical side that year were John Williams — yes, that John Williams — Tom Robinson and Pete Townshend, who was still in his post-Keith Moon’s death spiral, and in the middle of recording his first solo album, to boot.

Certain Songs #1523: Pete Townshend & Ronnie Lane – “My Baby Gives it Away”

April 29, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Rough Mix
Year: 1977

In late 1976, after what turned out to be The Who’s final full tour with Keith Moon (big fucking sigh), Pete Townshend was asked by fellow mod-turned-Meher Baba acolyte Ronnie Lane to produce Lane’s next album.

Ronnie Lane was a founding member and bassist for both incarnations of the Faces: the Small with Steve Marriott and the drunk with Rod Stewart, and he was also responsible for of one of the greatest songs anybody will ever write about growing older, “Ooh La La“.

Certain Songs #1522: Pete Townshend ft. Roger Daltrey – “Sally Simpson”

April 28, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Tommy Soundtrack
Year: 1975

I’ll always find it ironic that my first extended exposure to the music of The Who was via the Tommy film and soundtrack, which, as I’ve written previously, was primarily because of my love for Elton John.

And because the film was so-over-the-top and there’d already been an alternate version of Tommy — with the London Symphony Orchestra — I think that not a lot has been written about how Pete Townshend tricked up many of songs on the movie soundtrack with the musical sophistication he’d gained doing who’s next and Quadrophenia.