Word: townshend
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...well-tooled pop that beats The Who in the charts. There are even other hard-rock groups, like Led Zeppelin, that lay down a kind of sugar-lined bombast that can razzle-dazzle the record buyer. The Who's cumulative sales exceed 20 million records. The members' individual wealth?Townshend, Entwistle and Daltrey are all millionaires several times over?is nothing to sulk about, even if the band is not in the highest OPEC aristocracy of rock. This is a matter of no particular moment to the group. It coasts past trends and floats over sales curves just by staying...
...occurred when Keith Moon died of drug overdose at 31; he was replaced on drums by Kenny Jones, 31. The group still puts My Generation across with enough swagger and insinuation to get you giddy or make you feel like you are being stalked down a dark street. When Townshend, 35, called himself "the aging daddy of punk rock," he was not being entirely facetious. Who music can match the tough street impact of punk, especially as Daltrey dishes it out. At 35, he may be one of the oldest kids in the playground, but he is still...
...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...