Fever (14 page)

Townsend's presence as an early guitar hero who transcended machismo was nearly obscured by his musical sparring with the Who's zealous drummer, Keith Moon. Call him the Art Tatum of rock drumming—his playing constantly persuaded you that more
is
more, and his rhythmic punch always worked on more than one level; he never played an inexpressive beat. Moon was a perpetual soloist in the confines of rock's tautest format, that of the hard-rock trio. Townshend had his own work cut out for him, both writing material and creating enough guitar flourish to fill out the top end of this manic sound—a feat, since he was more of a rhythm than a lead player. But Moon more than overcompensated—he made it sound like his drums defined the very spaces the band explored, as if the others were there to fill up his rhythmic ideas. He got away with it because his ideas were so thrilling that you didn't mind him stealing the spotlight in nearly every bar. During stage performances of “Behind Blue Eyes,” which starts out soberly, the band had roadies literally hold Moon away from his drums for the first acoustic half of the song.

If Townshend was the Who's ego and superego, Moon was the band's id. To Townshend's formal impulse, Moon injected an overdose of adrenaline that made the band sound as if it came hurtling toward the listener with chthonic force, like a meteor. A relentless prankster, troublemaker, and “invincible” drug addict, Moon's legend loomed at least as large as his playing. His hotel antics were notorious, like driving a Cadillac into a swimming pool. There was nobody else in pop culture like Moon, and sometimes he seemed so keyed up he came off even bigger than the music itself. With an endearingly shit-eating grin, he could make any semblance of rock show-biz propriety (such as it was) seem ridiculous.

But as out of control as his offstage behavior was, the greatness of Moon's playing stems from the tension of sounding anarchic and yet remaining tightly controlled, squeezing as much hilarious energy as possible into rigid pop forms, making every measure sound as if it might suddenly splinter into a thousand tiny fragments. Moon brought the Who this careening energy, as if being the loudest, or most aggressive, or most theatrical stage band around hardly satisfied him; he was always kicking the next door down. Long before Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison died, and way before Keith Richards had his notorious blood transfusions from prolonged heroin abuse in the early 1980s, Moon was on everybody's short list of great talents most likely to die young. In a way, Moon's death only makes Richards's survival that much more impressive.

*   *   *

The Who earned their wildman stripes by performing “I Can See for Miles,” then smashing their instruments to smoke bombs and TNT on the Smothers Brothers' TV show in 1967. Although the dress rehearsal went smoothly, Moon snuck back in afterwards and rerigged the explosives way beyond what the stagehands were expecting. He essentially set off a bomb on national television, albeit a bomb that could only echo those in the music. By then, the Who's cyclone didn't need an exclamation point—but Moon always had trouble with the concept of “enough.” (Townshend later cited Moon's explosion as the start of his battle with tinnitus.)

Another of the Who's defining moments took place in August of 1969 at Woodstock. The band recast Eddie Cochran's 1958 hit “Summertime Blues” as a political ultimatum; it's an adolescent's version of “We Won't Get Fooled Again.” No longer just about simple teenage frustration, the Who's version rewired Cochrane's song with the righteous anger of young men who were sent off to fight a war for their country before they were even allowed to vote. These events molded the Who's symbolic power to convey the strength and ferocity men could find in expressing their confusion about manhood together.

Once the band clawed its way onto the charts with vehement anthems like “My Generation,” and “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” Townshend began mapping his own thematic turf: how powerless and insecure men felt even as they stalked the earth as rock gods making gigantic, excruciating noise. “Pictures of Lily” is about how a father teaches a son to whack off to girlie magazines, but lurking beyond the high testosterone level of Moon's onslaught is the careening emotional imbalance of a kid who seeks out his own father for tips on the most natural impulse. “The Kids Are Alright” is Townshend's version of Eddie Holland's “Leaving Here,” a friendly nod toward the extended fraternity rising up all around him.

It's easy to pull song titles out of the Who catalogue to make the case for Townshend's obsession with gender themes. “I'm a Boy” (1966) isn't just a silly song about how an overweening mother makes an adolescent feel stunted into perpetual boyhood at the dawn of manhood; it seeded two rock operas and a massively successful Broadway revisionist denial well into the 1990s. But some of the lesser-known Who material finds Townshend grappling with these themes long before he began toying with narrative forms.

The Who Sell Out
(1967) sent up the chatty Top 40 radio genre of the era, but it's also a campy look at the foppishness of pop in general—the disposables it sells (including pop hits), the way it sells them, and how bands succumb to the charade. For the album cover, Roger Daltrey posed in a bathtub full of baked beans. Jingles were written to interrupt the album's song sequence, so that out of a song like “Glittering Girl,” a peppy soda-pop hook would descend and the record would nosedive back into the hilarity of capitalism at its crudest. One of the ads enticed men to enroll in an exercise course: “The Charles Atlas course with [in deep reverb]
dynamic tension
can turn you into … a
beast of a man.
”

That album's hit single, “I Can See for Miles,” flaunted the Townshend-Moon musical rapport as signature. There are actually two drum tracks throughout: the basic rhythmic track on the left, and the added snare and cymbal kicks to the right. That's Moon dodging and prodding Townshend's guitar right from the opening moments, hammering away at rhythmic ideas like he's boring a hole into the sound. Just as the climactic moments at the end of the refrain leave Townshend repeating a single high note above the rest of the band, Moon's galloping snare drum becomes a locus of aggressive momentum—he's funneling his passion for tom-tom swirls onto a single snare. Each time the refrain comes around, Moon leaps out to race ahead of the band by whipping off gleeful sixteenth notes like a sprinter blithely streaking over a string of absurdly difficult hurdles.

The cacophony of the Who's sound echoed their backstage reputation for squabbling. Townshend and lead singer Daltrey were in a perpetual feud for leadership, especially since critics were writing things like: “Even if Daltrey were God himself, you'd have to watch Townshend.” Keyboardist Al Kooper remembers the July 1967 session for “Rael” in the liner notes to its 1995 reissue.

When we cut “Rael,” it was all very focused, and Townshend knew exactly what he wanted, every beat of every measure. Moon and Entwhistle were capable of playing it. Moon especially understood how to play what Townshend wanted, and he also had that lack of boundaries as a drummer that no rock drummer before or since has had.

But it was interesting: Without Townshend, they were lost. I hung out with them after we got done in the studio and invited Moon and Entwhistle down to these jam sessions that I would frequent at night. They were simply incapable of playing in a jam situation. They sucked so bad that you couldn't believe that they were in the band they were in. They played magnificently in context. But they couldn't play out of context.

With Townshend, however, they were brilliant. Those two guys specifically, I was involved with them on more than one occasion, and it just did not work outside the band, and yet it worked amazingly well inside the band. But as late as the mid-1980s, I'd see Entwhistle get up in a club with way too much equipment, play louder than everybody onstage, and not understand where everybody else was headed. It was an unusual situation. Entwhistle and Moon were one-trick ponies; but it was such a great trick, that one.

On one level,
The Who Sell Out
is about the band's naked ambition, and its faith that enough hilarity and sustained tension could lift them from a singles band into an album act. But this is all done with an allegiance to the themes that made their singles great. “Tattoo” spins out ideas that Townshend had been flirting with since the beginning. The song snubs the idea that the tattoo makes the man, or even works as a hood ornament to a man's intentions while he continues to struggle with the matter. With long hair serving as the symbolic dividing line between the generations (“Our old man didn't like our appearance/He said that only women wear long hair”), two boys confront the classic question of what constitutes manhood (“Was it brain or brawn or month you were born?”). The brothers borrow money from their mother to get themselves tattooed, only to get beaten up by both their parents: the mother complains that the nude tattoo on one son is tasteless, the father decries the “Mother” tattoo on the other:

My dad beat me cos mine said “Mother”

But my mother naturally liked it and beat my brother

Cos his tattoo was of a lady in the nude

And my mother thought that was extremely rude …

Again, the boys have no idea what manhood entails, and can only copy the other examples around them; like the father in “Pictures of Lily,” this father provides no clue as to what manhood is all about. The denouement comes in the last verse, when the narrator brags that he now rides a chopper and his lover has a tattoo too:

Now I motor I'm tattooed all over

My wife is tattooed too

A rooty-toot, tooty-toot tutti
[etc]
to you
 …
tattoo …

This is all delivered with utmost sincerity, which only makes the sarcasm clamp down harder. Along with the Charles Atlas ad, “Tattoo” parodies the idea that manhood can be bought and sold like deodorant.

*   *   *

In 1969, Townshend penned his first rock opera,
Tommy,
followed by
Quadrophenia
in 1973, which while not as celebrated is actually the better work. Both pieces deal with manhood as refracted through the rock experience.
Tommy
is about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who finds enlightenment through pinball. He attracts followers, but when they mistake the messenger for the message, he renounces them. This is all a thin metaphor, of course, for the shamanlike power of rock musicians and the response of their audience, and by extension the responsibilities of being a rock star. But because the plot is simply a train wreck of traumatic experiences, it's a better idea than story.

Tommy is struck deaf, dumb, and blind by witnessing his mother in bed with a lover after his father, presumed dead, fails to return from war. Along the way his uncle molests him, an acid queen performs drug therapy, and his stunted condition baffles the experts. Finally, after years of ridicule and bizarre medical therapies, Tommy smashes a mirror (how symbolic) and discovers pinball, which magically frees him from his stupor.

Through his fanatical devotion to pinball and the legions he inspires, Tommy experiences a spiritual awakening and becomes a guru, hosting summer camps for pinball wizards and preaching transcendence. But as an enlightened adult, he bumps into some of the same problems most rock stars endure: many of his followers don't get it, they follow him heedlessly, and he's ultimately frazzled by the weight of their expectations even as he exalts the good nature of his lackeys (“Listening to you, I get the music…”). The triumphant finale of “See Me, Feel Me” heaves with irony: it's both a renunciation and a benediction (like “We Won't Get Fooled Again” would become).

As a narrative,
Tommy
was a mess. But the music is magnificent, and full of ideas Townshend had been kicking around for years, beginning with experiments like “Rael” and awkward song quilts like “A Quick One While He's Away,” about a perverted London engine driver. The intensity of these tall tales was laughable on the surface—the lyrics would have been served well in anybody's condemnation of rock songs as “poetry.” But you couldn't deny the music's pull; it over-took the words with implacable force. Just as Roger Daltrey, the supposed front man, came to seem like the group's fifth wheel, the lyrics served as mere apparel to the band's feral energy. Townshend pulled off his larger concepts, but only because he was a terrific arranger and a bandleader who invested everything in his ideas.
Tommy
solidified the Who's stature as album artists, stringing out a succession of discreet radio songs into a larger montage. Onstage, the Who threw themselves into their stage sets with an aggressiveness that was matched only by the rabid energy of punk.

The lingering question of
Tommy
was, of course, what kind of hero was this who would renounce his own followers? (“What kind of God would kill his own son?” was the trendy refrain of nonbelievers at the time—chalk Tommy's dreaded Christ ID up to counterculture hubris.) And with all that passion packed into such an ambivalent ending, what kind of hero did Tommy represent as a man? Rock's first successful long-form narrative boasts a title character who doesn't even get a romance and whose primary relationship is with his mother. (The only female perspective in the piece comes from a groupie named Sally who fails to seduce Tommy at one of his lectures.) The prevailing image of a son struck dumb by his mother's sexuality transcends its hackneyed surface; it's Townshend's way of saying how utterly limited and obtuse society's signals are concerning manhood, and how redemption is available only through immersion in pinball (or rock 'n' roll). Townshend was much more interested in posing the questions than in preaching any answers—with manhood in great flux, all he had to do was chart its swerves and twists.