Word: townshend
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...right clothes and shoes was important. Riding the right motor scooter was important. Gobbling the right pills in the right quantities and listening to the right music were important. All this has been captured well in Quadrophenia; there is a kind of masquerade Mod revival in England right now. Townshend, however, points out that the original Mod movement "was about fashion, but that doesn't mean it was superficial. Fashion, in a sense, is description of events after the fact. And the Mods had great taste in music...
Meaden wrote two Mod anthems, Zoot Suit and I'm the Face, for the group's first single, which was no particular success. Shortly after, the band switched managers, changed its name to The Who, and Townshend started writing his own tunes, widening the focus past Mod to take in all the audience. I Can't Explain, My Generation, The Kids Are Alright were as fresh and nervy as battle reports from the front lines where youth was locked in a tag-team match with the forces of the Establishment...
That was the period when Townshend started to push. "I thought we had to do something grand, almost daft ... and possibly pompous." That was Tommy, and The Who finally had what it was after: a general audience success to match its reputation among rock fans...
...Daltrey left, vowing to form another group, and came back a week later. "I thought if I lost the band I was dead," he says now. "I realized The Who was the thing, the reason I was successful. I didn't fight any more ... for a couple of years." Townshend, however, was not trying as strenuously to keep to the path of nonviolence, and, after one disagreement in the recording studio, brained Daltrey with his guitar. Daltrey responded by punching Pete into the hospital...
...better than stewing about for months," Daltrey says, but by 1967, Moon and Entwistle were both fed up, and took a walk together. "I was always breaking up fights," Entwistle remembers, "pulling Roger off somebody, usually Pete. Keith and I were fed up with all the punching, and with Townshend's being so bigheaded, thinking he was a bleeding musical genius." Moon and Entwistle had eyes for a new group, and had even come up with a name and a rough design for an album cover. It was abandoned when Moon and Entwistle returned to The Who soon after...