Word: townshend
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rush is the path into the music. The way to the center and out again is a good deal more complex and subtle. Townshend's obsessions are the audience, music itself and a certain evasive, almost evanescent kind of spirituality that has its roots in the teaching of the Indian mystic Meher Baba, to whom Townshend is devoted. Tommy, which became the most widely known Who work, was a two-record "rock opera" about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champ who was raised into a kind of pop artifact and rock-'n'-roll godhead. It sold more than...
...midst of all these pyrotechnics, it was easy enough to lose sight of the fact that The Who stood in defiance of the Woodstock generation. "You've got to remember that Tommy was antidrug in 1969," Daltrey recalls. Townshend, who had been through his own phase with drugs, was not only using Tommy as a mirror for Baba's antidrug strictures but was also putting refractions of Baba's teachings into a rock context. Tommy ended by pulling the rug out from under false idols, directing the search for salvation inward and out toward the audience. What Tommy sang...
Another project, conceived after Tommy but so far unrealized, is a futuristic tale about the rediscovery of music in a society that is totally programmed and controlled. Called Lifehouse, the piece was intended to be a kind of environmental theater event. Some of Townshend's best songs were written originally for Lifehouse: Baba O'Riley, with its synthesizer line running like cold water down the spine, mixing with an old Irish fiddle reel and the memorable lyric refrain, "Don't cry/ Don't raise your eye/ It's only teen-age wasteland"; the aching, almost elegant poignancy of The Song...
...individualistic as those Townshend compositions are, they remain a group statement. Townshend, who has no use for modesty, insists, "I can still use The Who more effectively to speak to people heart to heart than I ever could on a solo album." Daltrey observes, "Did you ever notice that nobody ever does Townshend's songs? The Who are the only people who can play them. That's one reason we've survived. None of us is very good on his own. It's only as part of The Who that we're great...
...little bit of nasty," as Daltrey calls him. Moon died of an overdose of Heminevirin, a drug he was taking to combat his alcoholism. Moon's passing forced a crisis within the group, the three surviving members re-examining their loyalty to rock, and to each other. Daltrey told Townshend: "Keith's life and death were a gift to the group. A sacrifice to allow us to continue." Townshend recalls thinking at the time, "How can I agree with something as 20th Century-Fox as that? But I felt it too. That besides being a sacrifice, Keith's death...