Pete Townshend
The Seeker: Diving Down for Pearls, Reaching for Stars
On the occasion of his 75th birthday.
Isaiah Berlin famously said that there are two types of artists: foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing. Townshend is a hedgehog. Or rather, maybe he doesn’t know one big thing. Maybe it’s not even “big” in the scheme of things. But, all his life he has been diving down for a pearl that he could catapult to the stars.
In “Pure and Easy,” he says, “There once was a note, pure and easy, playing so free like a breath rippling by.” In all of his songs you can just hear him striving for that one note, that perfect note, or perhaps, that perfect chord progression, that utterly simple sound that contains in its wholeness everything. The musical note of the spheres.
This essay, purportedly about Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend, is really about the artistic process, “the project,” and what Pete means to me.
As he awaited the death penalty in jail, Socrates said that he had repeatedly had a dream throughout his life that commanded him to “practice music.” For years he believed that the “music” his daimon had spoken of in his dreams was the muse of philosophy. But, just to be sure, in his final hours he took to composing actual music.
Similarly, throughout my life (at this point, I don’t know for how long), I’ve had a repeated dream, with some slight variations, in which I meet Pete. He and I are together at his home studio and we jam — he on the guitar and I on the drums. I’ve often puzzled about this dream. It is certainly a wish fulfillment dream, as Freud would say. But it is more than that as well. It is a call, a reminder, a beckoning for me to practice music. Not literally music, but my art. It is saying to me, “Jason, you’re getting all wrapped up in this other stuff you’re doing. Don’t forget why you’re doing it. You’re doing it for your art. You haven’t done your art in a long time. Don’t forget. Don’t forget.” Like Hamlet’s ghost, Pete implores me to fulfil my promise.
And so, it is only fitting that I celebrate and laude this pretentious artist with an equally pretentious essay that has already invoked Isaiah Berlin, Socrates, Freud, and Shakespeare in its opening five paragraphs.
I actually have met Pete. It was 1989, I believe, or around then. He was on tour with The Who. A fanzine dedicated to the group was throwing them a party in Washington D.C. My best friend and I drove down from N.Y. and, in an intimate little bar by Dupont Circle, we met John, Roger, and Pete. I shook his enormous hand — that hand that had swung so many pinwheels, smashed so many guitars, composed so many immortal melodies, and penned lyrics that come alive in each of us — you know who you are.
There was a cake for the band and, as we all sung happy birthday (whose birthday? Maybe The Who’s 25th birthday), Pete looked over the candles at me — looked into me, pierced me with those incredible blue eyes of his. I was 18. He was 44. He seemed ancient to me then. Past his prime. Basking in the afterglow of a distant creative fire.
Of course, that was only my naïve take on things. It was the eighties and my friend and I were fanatics of a band that had risen to the top in the sixties and peaked in the seventies. By the eighties, our peers were into Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Men at Work. We wore denim. They wore narrow ties. We were out of sync. Our heroes were our parents’ age.
Yet, in 1989, Pete was still jumping further on stage than most high school track stars in the long jump. In 1989 he was also still actively working on many solo projects, including Iron Man, and soon he would be collaborating to make the incredibly successful Broadway adaptation of Tommy. In other words, he was far from over the hill.
There is a powerful scene from the movie Tommy in which the deaf, dumb, and blind Tommy beholds a mirror and in it sees a version of himself all in white. This vision beckons him to come on an amazing journey. Tommy follows. It is symbolic of Tommy’s creative, pure, and dynamic inner life, in contrast to his sullied and stifled outer appearance. The vision of himself beheld in the mirror is his daimon; his destiny and inner spirit.
Is it merely coincidence that Townshend, in the ’70’s, used to dress in an all white jumpsuit? Maybe. But in any case, he represented for me that same call.
He was a bundle of contradictions. He professed peace and harmony with his Meher Baba pin, yet ruthlessly destroyed guitars on stage and viciously fought and antagonized the members of the band, the press, and audiences. He was the center of attention, yet he preferred to be alone in his studio creating new music, playing every instrument, seemingly independent of anyone or anything. He sought purity, but repeatedly defiled himself with drugs and alcohol. You could say he was tearing himself apart. And all of the outward contradictions were symptoms of his inner demons. He was suffering and his inner tumult manifested on stage with live shows that were not only powerful because they looked like human explosives detonating, but were physically punishing. Not only was the guitar a sacrificial victim in Pete’s hands, but Pete’s performance itself was a sacrifice. He incurred injuries and contusions for the sake of art, the audience, or perhaps due to masochism.
Yet somehow, as in a good Greek tragedy, or a religious ritual, everything was redeemed and resolved through the music. Pete Townshend, spiritual guide for the suffering, granting absolution through his own pain, redeemer of rock music.
Later in his career he would write the lyric, “Don’t try to make me real.” Perhaps this is a caution to avoid doing exactly what I’m doing in this essay — projecting into his iconic figure my hopes and dreams while missing the mark. And, in some sense, I’m adhering to the injunction — I’m not making him real, but exploring what he means for me. Perhaps that’s the best any of us can hope for — fans and friends alike.
It’s an old adage that physics is a young person’s profession — all the best and most brilliant discoveries were done by physicists under 30. This belief, no matter how unfounded, had haunted me since I first heard it. In youth I was literally teeming with thoughts, ideas, grandiose artistic projects. Yet I lacked the power, talent, perseverance, and perhaps time and money to see any of them through to completion.
By contrast, Pete, by 1969, at the ripe age of 24, had created, with The Who, four albums — the last one being Tommy. It is debatable whether Tommy is the greatest album by The Who. It is up for argument whether Pete reached his creative pinnacle in 1969. What is not debatable is that the album is both revolutionary and brilliant. Conceived as a “Rock Opera” before one ever existed, composed of complex, subtle, and original music, and rounded out by a story both reminiscent of Hamlet, yet infused with modern meaning, Tommy, is a masterpiece. The story melds the spiritual longing for a vital religion with the artistic quest for self-expression, connection, and impact. These two drives are united in the universal desire to feel and give love. All of this is expressed in the deceptively simple lyric, “See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me.”
As I said, it is up for debate whether Tommy is Pete’s/The Who’s apogee, but even Pete has said that the live performances of The Who at that time, around the time that Live at Leeds was recorded, were The Who at peak performance.
Further, when you listen to the entirety of The Who’s discography and also that of Pete’s solo projects, in conjunction with the narrative Pete gives in his memoir, Who I Am, I think it is undeniable that Tommy represented an achievement for Pete that he spent the rest of his career trying to at least equal, if not surpass. The failed Lifehouse project, Quadrophenia, and the handful of other “concept albums” that Pete made in the wake of Tommy are a testament to the struggle for a successor to Tommy. One can view that struggle as a failure, for each project always fell somewhat short of the mark. Or, one could view the struggle itself as the real beauty of Pete’s post-Tommy creativity.
I believe, starting with “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” we first hear a snippet of a chord progression and rhythm that will be repeated throughout Pete’s songwriting. It is a short piece of syncopation where the guitar animates the music, propelling it forward with a strum on the downbeat of one, followed by two up beats on three and four for three measures. This same refrain, or variations of it, occurs in “Bell Boy” and through the album Quadrophenia and elsewhere. One could characterize this riff as a comfortable, yet powerful groove that Pete falls into on occasion. I, however, think that Pete is too careful and conscientious a songwriter to do that. I think that this, along with the variations of the keyboard sequence that introduces “Baba O’Riley,” “Fragments,” “Meher Baba M3,” and appears elsewhere in various ways, are Pete’s way of striving for that “singular note, pure and easy.”
If one characterizes the creation of art not as expression, but rather as discovery, then these refrains that cross albums and decades are not so much echoes of an earlier brilliance, but forays into the same dark mystery. Pete is “The Seeker” whom he sings about (and portrays in the musical Siddhartha). When I hear these familiar sounds and when his lyrics occasionally cover territory he has explored before, I don’t think that he is plying a tried and true formula, but rather striving to find that elusive pearl. He dives down and down again, trying not to drown, and eager to pluck that pearl from the depths and elevate it to the firmament where it can shine along with the other gems of his oeuvre.
When I was a young man, Pete was an inspiration, but, as I have said, to me he also appeared as an artist past his prime, trying to rekindle a little of that sixties spark that burned so brightly so early. But, now, some thirty years later, I see that his creative genius neither burned out, nor faded away. It has continued to burn, relatively consistently, right through to his seventies. As I write this, he is currently on tour with The Who, preparing for a new Who album to be released, and also preparing for a new novel to be released. He has collaborated with his wife to create a new musical by another one of my hero artists, Hermann Hesse, and he collaborated with Roger Daltrey on his latest solo album.
As he approaches his seventy-fifth birthday in May of 2020, Pete is still going strong, full of creative powers and, believe it or not, potential. Perhaps this short homage to the artist got it wrong. Perhaps this is just the Pete Townshend of my projections. Maybe who Pete Townshend really is eludes us all. But, as he tells us in the song “Mirror Door” (another allusion to the daimon figure in Tommy?), “You will find me in this song.”
