Pete Townshend came into my sights this week by way of his appearance on Radio 4 (Baroque and Roll: Townshend on Purcell, 27/10/09) in which he discussed the influence of Purcell on his music. Such talk was notably absent from the 2007 film, Amazing Journey, a biopic of the band which I viewed on Sunday, though Townshend's penchant for an erudition teetering dangerously on the edge of pretension ('John [Entwhistle] and Keith [Moon] were geniuses and I was verging on it') was consistent. Amazing Journey plots the colourful history of The Who from their foundation as The Detroits and The High Numbers through to an elder statesman-style reconciliation, (between Roger Daltrey and Townshend, the only two extant members of the original band), which included a species of demythifying, faux candid profanity, that we might expect. According to the film, Daltrey supported Townshend throughout his trial by the media following his arrest for allegedly viewing child pornography. Clearly Townshend's appearance on Radio 4 heralds a prodigal return to respectability; his time spent as a media untouchable has been duly served.
The documented history of The Who would be a good choice for a time capsule information pack and a future needing to comprehend the course of popular music from the early 1960s to the late 1970s.
As The High Numbers playing Detroit soul to an Ivy League-
emulating audience of young Mods, the group looked, sounded and felt as exciting as the phenomenon of small club/pop group/dancing audience ever gets. The astonishingly clear and well-edited footage of a performance at The Railway Hotel, Wealdstone in 1964, captured by Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, who subsequently managed the band as The Who, is here:
The Who's first single, 'I Can't Explain', [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uFcPjILC7k ] was one of the best pop singles ever created, in my opinion, and a fine example of Townshend's perfectly tuned, introverted lyrics: 'Can't explain/ I think it's love/
Try to say it to you/ When I feel blue'. The fumbling, introspective, lovers' melancholy of the fledgling, adult male was never better expressed. Couple that with the staccato chop of dampened guitar chord and the enfant terrible expressiveness of Moon's drumming and you have the best of early '60s guitar band vitality bubble-wrapped. Further, there's the beautifully concise guitar solo with the unmistakeable Rickenbacker's (12-string?) harmonic overtones in the middle.The Who were, arguably, always more exciting, energetic and expressive of a generation's disengagement from establishment values than The Beatles, or even The Rolling Stones - and certainly The Kinks, though 'You Really Got Me' has a similar energy, musically. 'My Generation' became an anthem of youth culture's imagined disjuncture with all that had gone before. Daltrey's stuttered, rhetorical question, a thinly disguised expletive, 'Why don't you all f-f-fade away?', spat out amphetamine-fuelled contempt. Townshend's windmill, power-chord guitar playing, Entwhistle's high-held, top-end tone, lead-style bass and Moon's overhand, explosive engagement are perfectly married in an expression of magnificent malcontent. A pent-up anger about the 'values' espoused by parents and rammed down the throats of their young is finally and succinctly exporated. This song gave a name for the first time to a shared desire to break free from a miasma of greyness, austerity and deference to the travails of Second World War survivors; it also provided the momentum for anti-heroic reinvention.
Townshend explains in the film that an atmosphere of silence about 'the war' prevailed during his youth in the late '40s and early '50s in which all discussion on the topic was taboo. Yet the consequences of the war and the ideological imperatives of post-war rebuilding were all too apparent. It was down to this 'generation' and their technological inheritance to create a bright, new future on the back of the effort of the wireless generation, those conscripts to armies and factories. A potent emotional ambivalence, a mixture of instinctive love (I can't explain) and implicit resentment (I can't explain) for the privileges of a youth who would inherit an earth unbound by austerity and servile duty thus informed the necessarily inexplicable, regenerative atmosphere of the 1950s. Like Beckett's 'accursed progenitors' , a shell-shocked legion of parents had given birth to a gaggle of emergent aliens like Midwich Cuckoos in the nest. A generation 'gap' had arisen by way of a baby-boom birthing cauldron, an amniotic soup of complex expectation and ineluctable struggle.
The Mods were in self-styled opposition to a blanket of conformity and the projects of fathers and mothers who had inexplicably suffered in ways that were necessarily acknowledged at the same time as they were guiltily resented. A step on from Osborne's angry, young men,
a working class youth of the '60s exploited both individualism and solidarity by way of technological advance which included Lambrettas and Vespas, Dansettes and 45s, ITV and Ready, Steady, Go. For the budding musician there was Boosey and Hawkes, the Selmer mail-order catalogue and the possibility of a 'Hire Purchase Agreement' or 'HP' as everyone called it. 'Escape' was a keyword and one that became increasingly deployed as explanation in a similarly emergent jargon of pop psychology. The lack of respect for prevailing values and 'standards' existed both within a traditional cycle of supercession and within a new found land of snook-cocking postures of indifference. If the burden was on the kids, the kids weren't having it; 'The kids are alright'. Though the latter song, like 'Substitute', bears witness to a complex renegotiation of identity and gender roles which exceeds the slogan-like mantra of an 'anyway, anyhow, anywhere I choose' sentiment.The matter of war as backdrop, (reinforced by war comics and TV history programmes), as 'Cold' and deferred, and as it composed the increasingly implacable distance between parents and offspring became a repressed needing return. Battles were displaced and enacted on Brighton beach and other such loci of leisured conformity and promenade. Whilst the Mods adopted fashion and make-up, their counterpart, the Rockers, or Greasers as they were later known, represented a uniform resistance to such gender slippage and coquettry. As depicted in the Franc Roddam-directed film, Quadrophenia (1979), (part-written by Townshend), the Rockers appeared to represent some stuff that was good about an existing culture and worth hanging on to. The scene in which Jimmy Cooper (Phil Daniels) is helped by his erstwhile mate, Kevin (Ray Winstone), to fix his scooter conveys the idea that Rockers and their
hands-on approach to machines and a seemingly less agitated sensitivity to the matter of disinheritance constituted a more moderate relationship with existing values. Kevin's willingness to open a toolbox and help a mate resonates, not unsympathetically, with the ethos of 'Practical Handyman'. The Rocker is symbolically aligned with what is worthy and good about fixing things: repair and sustain. After all, their fathers had ridden and loved motorbikes. Scooters were somehow effeminate and accessorising; they weren't about speed and engineering. Many of the 'ton-up boys', however, became Hell's Angels as the decade wore on, and the Mods evolved into Hippie emulators or 'Freaks'; both sides of the debate came increasingly under the influence of psychedelic drugs.'Drugs' found a new life in the 60s. At the beginning of the decade there were 'pills' or 'blues', i.e. amphetamines, predominantly the 'slimming pill', dexedrine. Their use and their facility to induce paranoia and increase anxiety are well depicted in Quadrophenia. The desire for escape and its mediation by the press, the pop-psychologising 'escapism', constituted the only available explanations for an increasingly febrile reaction to a perceived politics of constraint. An atmosphere of non-conformism developed into an irrevocable rift with the apparently hypocritical values of an outmoded system by way of the psychedelic drugs, Marijuana and LSD, which were increasingly available as the decade went on. The doors of perception, the gates of heaven and hell, were flung open and, from the perspective of the new explorers of an altered mind, the 'straights' were viewed as the wicked gatekeepers or guardians. 'Far out' was considered desirable and 'out of sight' of 'normal' people or everyone who hadn't yet 'turned on'. The ambiguous territory of sharing a platform of power with an arrière garde politics positioned pop bands in an entirely novel position. The words of politicians were no longer to be trusted following national scandals like the Profumo and Poulson affairs. Meanwhile, the words of pop songs became the messages and anthems of a new aestheticism. The politicians of this new aestheticism were the rock stars; their platforms were the stages at rock concerts.
Late '60s and early '70s footage of The Who performing rock 'opera', Tommy, for example, demonstrates a spectacular transcendence from the solidarity of a shared spikiness to a kind of magical realist spectacle: a big production number. The clothes are bad, particularly Daltrey's Buffalo Bill jacket over a bare chest, and the music had reached a level of frenzied excess in which the guitar-smashing seemed less art-house anarchy, more wanton, token and pointless; even more so than it once did to the uncomprehending bystanders at the small clubs who could only dream of owning a decent Telecaster, let alone smashing it up. 'We won't get fooled again', though an epic aspiration, is undercut by the glitzy cheese of stadium rock. The arrival of punk, as has often been observed, was a necessary palliative: a rootsiness, albeit already partially commodified, of which The Who had been a model. In an interview with Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols in Amazing Journey, Jones describes how he and Paul Cook happened on Pete Townshend in a Camden pub in the late '70s. Apparently Townshend was pissed and asking 'who are you?' incessantly. Unwittingly, he had already handed on the baton.
The Who produced some great music throughout the '60s and '70s and the above seems less than generous in that regard. However, for an index of the evolution of pop music from American influence to home-grown hybrid to psychedelic impro romp to pretentious 'rock', The Who's career is paradigmatic. Then again, there are currents which are unique to the Mod sensibility or to its carnivalesque other as explored in songs like 'Happy Jack' or 'Bell Boy'. Comparable material caricaturing the harmless, because unwitting, emerged by way of The Small Faces and The Kinks. The cue to reconstitute Englishness by way of quasi-nostalgic portraiture perhaps came by way of The Beatles and the urge for a pop act of remembrance. The unlikely amalgam of comic grotesque and psychedelic fuelled the Magical Mystery Tour bus and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club with its parade of benign eccentrics, like so many aunts and uncles in the hinterland of the front-line conflict of parent/child relations.
Townshend was clearly a great writer and the mastermind within The Who, but such a band could not have existed without the phenomenal coincidence of musicians who were drawn to its original, energetic constitution.
So, what of Pete Townshend on the influence of Purcell? Everyone is prone to historic revisionism, but Townshend impressed with his account of hearing Purcell as a young man. It emerged that he commanded a much grander vision of his music and career than I had formerly understood; that he knows how music works and knows how to talk about it. The most telling remark, however, was on the topic of how he had been moved to tears by Purcell's sensibility and rendering of Englishness: its melancholy and its tendency to tragic resolution. The young man who wrote 'the things they do look awful c-c-cold/ I hope I die before I get old' has survived and is possibly still evaluating his own emotional ambivalence to growing up within the context of a post-War Britain which prompted him to wear a Union Jack jacket or sport an RAF insignia on the back of a parka.
I like this a lot - it has to be one of your best pieces of writing (... at least since that essay on the problem of distance in Joyce). The focus on The Who is compellingly retained throughout, and they do seem to be a way in to so many other things, partly because - like other big 1960s survivors - they changed their format and style as they went along (from Daltrey's shades at the Railway Hotel to his ill-advised bare chest at Monterey within 4 years). But the piece deepens by going beyond The Who themselves and into the post-war context - also suggested by Townshend at the start of the film. Admittedly, reconstructing the emotional landscape of that period seems to risk speculation and metaphor ... but I really like the way this piece tries to root The Who in that English class context that built up to the 1960s. Class seems so important here - could one even pursue class differences *within* the band, as existed in the origins of The Beatles (where Lennon's background was most affluent)?
ReplyDeleteThe great leveller or alchemic force here also is art school - you don't seem to make so much of it, beyond nodding references - but Townshend clearly says that at some point the band had achieved his goal of making Art - it's as though his aspiration wasn't really pop or rock as we know it, but something else - but could that be a defensive strategy somehow, a way of protecting what he'd done (in rock) by turning it into something else (art)?
[Note: I can't get this site to recognize a name - having to post as Anonymous - I can't explain ...]
That comment only scratched the surface ... a lot more to reflect on here. Let me mention a few other points of interest:
ReplyDelete1. the ending which circles back from WWII to the circles of the RAF symbol is terrific - as though the war is still being paid homage through a medium that's also opposed to wartime sacrifice and austerity - that ambivalence is what I think you're getting at earlier. Also, Townshend on Purcell and Englishness seems a similar echo. Ray Davies could surely fit in here also but he seems slightly slighted earlier in the piece. (But we need to know the chronology: Townshend or Davies, who influenced whom first?)
2. I like the idea of the 1960s using its 'technological inheritance' to make its cultural rebellion 'on the back of' the previous generation - and the para on the Selmer catalogue is a highlight ... is Wilson's 'white heat' an unspoken presence here?
3. I guess a road not taken is to link the Mod to the Modernist - do they actually correspond to any of our sense of Modernism as an earlier movement? Or is that more of a semantic accident and best ignored? Or rather, an echo in cultural history, between two different times.
4. One of the most moving passages here is about the Rocker. Your account of how the Rocker wanted to sustain earlier values, repair and rebuild, is very suggestive of another relation to the past. I must admit, though, I can't picture the Rocker here - what would he actually look like? Brando's Wild One?
5. This is ambiguous to me: 'The ambiguous territory of cohabitation with the bases of power as constituted by an arrière garde politics, positioned pop bands in an entirely novel position.' Are you saying the bands themselves were ultimately reactionary? Or is someone else implicated here?
6. You're generous to punk, as the Pistols sound dire in the film. I guess we look back favourably on this movement that may actually have sounded very bad live. But are you sure 'rootsiness' is the right word for punk, as it was also a kind of 'avant-garde'? Rootsy suggests blues to me.
Joe, thanks for your initial idea to write this piece, for all your comments and the interesting points you raise.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, on the matter of comment contribution logistics, there are three ways in:
1) You remain 'anon' but sign your name within your comment. Adding public contact detail is a further option here.
2) You become a 'follower' and go through a short registration process.
3) You become an occasional contributor and we share this blog site or create a new one.
We can discuss this.
Re: your comments:
I agree that I don't make enough of the internal divisions of class or of class in general. It's certainly relevant to discuss Townshend in relation to his Art School springboard. He shares this with Lennon, as you say, and Ray Davies, Jagger and Richards etc. I think Townshend's tensions with Daltrey are predicated on this difference - I'm not sure. There was also the Grammar School thing, though by the early 60s there was no longer a significant issue of stigmatisation and/or alienation that had been in place for working class writers like Storey, Potter et al. Nevertheless, education was tiered in such a way and I would consider that successful 11+ candidates were beginning to enjoy a sense of superiority over the poor sods who had to attend Secondary Modern schools with their prioritisation of 'Technical Drawing' and 'blue collar' stuff like Metalwork. The Art School thing adds another level of privilege and there's much more to think and write about all of this, not least the transition from Fine Art to pop music...
On the Davies/Townshend relationship, I have no idea. The Kinks were also considered to be a Mod band. But on their early appearances on TV, they were wearing velvet suits and cravates! They were truly dandyesque, and this is perhaps a link back to a kind of ur-Modernism, i.e. decadent, and on to Joyce's 'Two Gallants', e.g.
'Modern', as it relates to the Mods, I think, has little connection with a literary Modernism. It seems to me the word 'modern' as used in conjunction with architecture and design of the late 50s and early 60s connects with Bauhaus and an art history which is, in many ways, distinct from earlier literary experiment, though connections may be made.
Re: the Rocker. This stuff hadn't occurred to me before writing this piece, but I think there's some truth in it. Brando's character must have been an influence on the style, but there's also a practicality about wearing leather on a machine that can travel over 100 mph and which offers no protection if an accident occurs. There were a huge number of casualties from motorbike accidents at a time when you could legally ride a 250cc bike on a learner's licence - and without a helmet! From the people I know, the bikers went to Secondary Modern, the Mods went to Grammar School! Rockers were forever tweeking or rebuilding their bikes and getting covered in oil and grease - hence 'greaser'; Mods would prefer to hang out posing in shopping precincts or to buy clothes and records!
Re:'the ambiguous territory' stuff: you were right - it was ambiguous! I have tweeked it in the main text.
(continued)
Re: 'rootsiness' of punk. I meant that punk opened up the possibility of the home-grown, garage band once again. Though another way of considering 'roots' is by way of reggae, which was important also in the late '70s and crossed over into the music of The Clash, e.g.
ReplyDeleteOne problem with considering English punk is the phenomenon which was The Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten is a love or hate figure, and remains so. But there was much more subtlety around this time and punk wasn't actually the dominant form. Were The Jam a punk band, e.g.? I think not; indeed, if one wanted to consider a band whose major influence had been The Who, one need look no further than Paul Weller's combination of smart look, great music and brilliant, politicised words.
There was also a need for pop music to return to something less complex, high-powered and pretentious than, say Yes - though I know they are always branded with this prog burden. I have suggested that The Who had also become too big and too pretentious.
On the matter of ambivalence - yes, I had hoped to suggest this relation between generations on both sides. It wasn't easy to be critical of 'the war' or 'the war effort' - in fact it was blasphemy!
I enjoyed reading this blog, it's one of the best descriptions of life in the '60s I've read. I think further writing on the post-war baby boom and the consequences on modern life would be a natural addition to this blog. Eric Hobsbawm's 'The Age of Extremes' came into my mind as I was reading this.
ReplyDeleteAs you are aware, the media tends to patronise and dilute its explanations of those times. My memories of the fifties were of life in black and white, only turning into a gawdyish colour in the mid-sixties: a saturated colour exagerated by the 'tube' cameras in use at the time. This was very different to the digital ,'high definition' reality colour that we are now subjected to since the advent of the 'digital revolution' which is still in its infancy and, incidentally, also something Hobsbawm writes about. His 3 volumes are to me the definitive account of the 20th. century because he doesn't invade with his own opinion as a historian.
Colour or color or 'technicolor': all colour has a temperature, a heat that vibrates at different times of the day. Take the colour green and observe half an hour before sunset: a different temperature, more intensity. This is the golden hour, the kodak time, light at its most flattering. Then look at old photos from the early 60s, the standard school photo, for example, mainly black and white or colour photos but with only two primary colours, which would now be faded. School clothes were all black and white/grayscale tones: grey socks, grey shirt, black shoes etc. I never wore colour until I ordered my first pair of loons: deep purple from a mail order company in Melody Maker.
Then there are the memories of the fifties/early 60s: school, parents holidays etc. Those memories are different to those of the late sixties and early seventies. Suddenly somebody turned the lights on around this time.
After LSD perception was changed. Did we ever come back again? Some didn't if i remember: mates who became acid heads and were cast off into the loony bins. Those memories of acid trips, fragments of a memory of tripping, objects strobing, melting - and sound and colour. Those vibrations from nature: " far out man! That tree, it's like it's talking to me, man". Those bad trips: micro-dots, the pain in the stomach from the strichnine base - or flashbacks . 'Man like a real bummer in the summer '.
Ah, the heady days of youth, the innocence, the experimentation! I tried once with a mate to grill the inside of a banana skin, until his mum came home and asked what was burning.
Take a look at old TV footage of those times, say Top of the Pops , or Ready, Steady, Go. Don't look at the performers, look in the audience at the dancers, the innocence, flowery dresses, conservative hair etc. Compare this to say footage from now: Glastonbury and the crowd shots.
There's not a lot been written about those times, the changes we went through, the doors of perception opening, and the change from analogue to digital. It is frustrating to try and recall those times, as we did live through a very different period of history.
You are hitting the nail on the head, as I am becoming pissed off with the sanitised media interpration of that period, so any intelligent writing has got to be a winner.
Must get back to work. I can hear my father in my head:
"GOD Nicholas, you make me so exasperated, to think we won the war for the likes of you, eh? Play Play Play until the cows come home, that's all you know boy. If they did a degree in playing, Nicholas, you would get a first class honour boy, but you mark my words, boy. Pull your socks up!"
Great article Nigel. I agree with the other comments...you have really articulated the feel of the time...and described it in a way I feel I have wanted to but couldn’t find the right words.
ReplyDeleteThe added comments are excellent as well...rich food for thought. I cant compete with the intellectual level here so I will leave it at that (plus I might make a spelling mistake and we know how that goes...).
Sue
What are "snook-cocking postures of indifference"? (I thought i'd heard it all by now...)
I'm glad this piece has attracted such heartfelt response so far.
ReplyDeleteThanks Nicholas for your reflections on colour; that's certainly another very important way in to discussion of this time, and I'm inspired by your thoughts. I agree there's much more to consider and write.
Sue, thanks also; I'm pleased it chimed with some of your thoughts. Can't spot a spelling mistake in your prose, my fakebook fiend, so I have no desire to cock a snook!
Hi. Great discussion! To pick out one small aspect, you seem ambivalent about the idea of 'escape' in this context. In the part where you talk about 'drugs', it seems like ideology. But when it appears earlier in your post, it seems to refer to the experiential reality of the generation you evoke. Or have I misunderstood?
ReplyDeleteThinking about how this article seems to have struck a ... power chord ... it seems to be rooted in its attempt to tell a different story of the 1960s - a bit different from the very standard retro-doc version anyway - more rooted in domesticity, 'home', family and the mixed feelings about those things - rather than just the decontextualized 'escape' (or drugs!). Back to the minutiae of the hire purchase catalogue - or, in Nicholas's comment, the Kodak film. As others have said, it feels as though there is still more to say, because the article has opened up the period in its contradictions and perhaps its emotional ambiguity or tenderness. I would give The Who some credit as they seem to be the act that most clearly pinpoint, or allow a view into, this context - poignant and fragile with these mixed-up feelings ('I was born with plastic spoon in my mouth' ... 'at least I'll get my washing done') for all their immense strength.
ReplyDeletebtw: If you're going to talk about Colour (a rich topic for sure) then surely here you have to address the red, white and blue of that RAF insignia!
* JB
On the matter of 'escape', I think there is some ambiguity, as you have pointed out, SRM. I have suggested that there was a need/desire for a post-war youth to escape from under the burden of securing a bright new future. In this respect, 'security' became a 'dirty' word, a word incidentally that almost works as the opposite of 'escape'. A future which involved the security of a job, the security of the nation etc. seemed for some like a life sentence. There was also a natural need for youth to enjoy its own youthfulness; to have a 'dance palais' time of its own.
ReplyDeleteEscape and escapism, with entirely pejorative connotations, became part of the language of politicians and the press in discussion of the increasing use of drugs. There was little or no sociological analysis. Escapism remains a pejorative.
However, the use of psychedelic drugs opened up ways of viewing the world and, for many, a way of analysing the world which confirmed a prevailing condition of blinkered vision and systemic corruption. While the press continued to bang on about escapism, people who smoked 'pot' considered that they were the ones who could really see 'how things were'. There was a temporary alignment between use of such drugs and a political awareness which found a pre-existing, sympathetic home in a politics of the Left. Timothy Leary's infamous pronouncement: 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out' was a political statement at odds with all prevailing, political structures. Dropping out was partly, clearly, about escape, but it was also evolving into a new language which included phrases like 'finding an alternative'. 'The alternative society' was the phrase used by the inheritors of a transformed vision. Clearly there is much more to say here.
So, 'escape' and 'security' are perhaps part of 'a certain economy' (to steal a phrase from Derrida), which surely needs more unpacking. As language they are words in flux at this time, I think. It is perhaps part of the phenomenon which Volosinov described as 'the social multiaccentuality of the ideological sign':
'The very same thing that makes the ideological sign vital and mutable is also, however, that which makes it a refracting and distorting medium. The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgements which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual'.
I come in on this via Nigel's Facebook message and will only drop a few coins in the slot of a very beautifully made machine. An excellent article, for which many thanks. The coin-dropper, I should warn, is not typical of his generation in England for fairly obvious reasons, but reasons worth remembering.
ReplyDelete1. My first turning on to pop was through the Mersey sound, hearing - of all things! - Gerry and the Pacemakers singing 'I like it' on someone's transistor in the school corridor. It just sounded different and extraordinarily fresh. From there on to the others, to the Beatles and, later, the Stones and the Who. One of my close friends was immediately drawn to The Who, earlier than I was. His dad was a scoutmaster. He clearly hated his dad. The Who were a part of that. I never did hate my dad. The war meant something quite different to me. It wasn't austerity (I had come from more austere conditions). It was bare survival and occasional explosions of later trauma.
The Mersey sound simply felt English (I didn't notice the Irish bit then). It felt like a discovery. It wasn't antagonistic. It didn't have an agon with anything. It just appeared as a discovery of some native self I immediately recognised as essentially benign. A release that wasn't generational as such (My Generation) simply a way of singing that resembled the ways of speaking.
2. A corrective. I am not sure how we can get very far with The Who without consideration of Pop Art and irony. The union jacks worn by the Who were of the same vintage as union jack shopping bags, union jack pants, comic adoption of bowlers, John Steed in The Avengers. The irony was complex. Peter Blake, for instance, was not a satirist of any kind, but a knowing nostalgist. There was always affection mixed in with the irony. The original BritPop was the original Cool Britannia. There was an element of pride in this. Bond. The Ipcress File. A mixture of subversion and celebration.
3. My friend who loved The Who partly loved them because he wanted his dad to f-f-fade away. Speaking for myself I never believed - not for one minute - that Pete Townshend actually hoped to die before he got old. It was a gesture. (Roger McGough hoped to die a young man's death, but that was different. He wanted to be old at the time.) I took the smashing of guitars as a similar gesture. Jimi Hendrix was playing the guitar with his teeth. For me The Who were an aspect of Pop Art, with just the same intelligent complexities and poses.
continued..
ReplyDelete4. What was exciting about The Who was not the messages or the words. The words fitted the music and the music was fierce and grand and irresistible. The words were gestures to go with the music, much as the costumes were, much as the guitar smashing was. If you wanted the truth, you had to go to the music. Can't resist that stuff.
5. As regards rockers and grammar schools. I did pass the 11+ and did go to the local grammar school, which was at one side of a square park while the secondary mod was on the adjacent side. I never once consciously considered myself superior to the sec mod, the balance swung the other way, the sec mod kids (some of my primary school classmates) assumed our superiority and looked occasionally to punish us for it, mostly just verbally. That didn't last much beyond the first year. Furthermore, the grammar was just as likely to include rockers as mods. It was a question you were inevitably asked by other kids: are you mod or rocker, in much the same way as: are you steam or diesel. A doctor's son I got to know there was distinctly for rockers. A Pakistani boy I made friends with roared into school in his sixth form on a motorbike. The distinctions seemed more personal. In any case, if you are looking for verbal associations between Mods and Modernism, you could try Mods and Secondary Mods.
No great analogy in either case, I think.
6. People now tend to say The Beatles were good conformist kids. George Melly said so years ago in comparing them to The Stones. I don't think that is exactly the case. Why I loved the Beatles and still do, is because they kept opening doors, one after the other, and fresh air blew through each. They were, I suppose, a healing force rather than a disruptive one in many respects (Penny Lane, etc) but the healing potential was through freshness and a kind of distance, free of the more cloyingly sentimental aspects of un-ironized affection. And even Penny Lane employs surreal imagery and irony. (He like to keep his fire-engine clean / It's a clean machine).
6. Securing a bright new future? Any secure future would have done.
yours socially multiaccentedly,
G
Hmmmmm, i've read everything so far. It's a lot to think about. The art school thing is interesting because the fact that all these multi-accented, multi million dollar - pound - euro making enterprises owe their profits (arguably) to an engine room which is AKA 'art-skool' is something which should be made more of.... Roger Mcgough and Ronald Macdonald. I doubt the latter and most of his behind the counter conscripts would really know what art school is... or it's possibilities... Lennon, Davies, Townshend et al... Would they have had the 'X Factor'?
ReplyDeleteI read it all. I'm not working class anymore.
(my mum and her mate Diane used to go out with daltrey and his mate .. ??? - so.)
.. off to u tube 'purcell' now for further reflections...
Nigel,
Could I beg an offering regarding the contribution of 'creative industries' (and Creative Education) to the fast food market (or GDP) alongside a side dish of psychological studies around the rise or fall of class qualified attention spans?
cheers,
liam.
Thanks to George for some important perspectives and correctives. It's good to be reminded of the purity and positivity of 'Mersey Sound' material, and the significant healing power of music from this era in more general terms. I am also reminded how a kind of regionalism came into play. The Dave Clark Five, for example, were feted as. I think, 'The Tottenham Sound'.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Melly's appraisal of The Beatles reminds me of feeling compelled to choose between The Beatles and The Stones at the time, the latter being 'the bad boys' in the equation. This may have been invented by the media who devoted column inches to representing The Stones as all that was unsavoury and dangerously subversive about youth culture. A similar choice, between Blur and Oasis, was manufactured in the early 90s. Somehow The Beatles got off lightly, even when they became hairier and were associated with 'drugs' and so on.
Part of the attraction of The Who was their anarchic pose. I, and probably the majority of other young fans, didn't make the connection with an Art School project, although Townshend claims in the film that the guitar-smashing and all came out of this milieu. So, I, not unlike the hapless Jimmy in Quadrophenia, swallowed the myth! However, I am inclined to agree with the Wiki article on Townshend, which describes the original broken guitar as an accident, and Townshend's subsequent references to Metzger's 'auto-detructive' art as a kind of revisionism.
Also the wider context of 'Cool Britannia', Steed and Bond et al, is importantly noted. The whole issue of ambivalence towards nationhood is worthy of much more attention (and may inspire another blog). We begin to enter the realm of the postmodern ironic and its potential for conceptual repackaging/branding to which Liam refers.
George's comment about Sec Modern resentment and occasional verbal abuse during the first year chimes with my own experience. I regret locating Mods or Rockers in Grammar School or Secondary Modern; it doesn't hold water. By the time of Sixth Form in my school, we were all mostly would-be 'freaks'. As it happened, there were a large number of would-be rockers in the Sec Modern in the small town where I lived.
Jimi Hendrix was on the same bill as The Who at Woodstock. On this occasion, following Townshend's by-now-expected destruction of a guitar, Hendrix, simulating an orgasm, squirted lighter fuel over his Strat and set fire to it. As a guitarist myself playing an old Hofner, this was also hard to watch! I would even fantasise on occasion about picking up the pieces and rebuilding it (Practical Handyman)! There's a sequence in the film Blow Up in which Jeff Beck of The Yardbirds, playing The Marquee, smashes the neck off his guitar and hurls it into the audience. The crowd go mad to grab it. Significantly, David Hemmings's character wrestles for it and ends up with it. He departs the club and then dumps it in Oxford Street. It is picked up by some youths who look at it and discard it. Antonioni had The Who in mind for this scene apparently, but The Yardbirds got the gig.
Excellent article! "The Detroits" = The Detours, surely? Pete Townshend acknowledged his musical debt to Ray Davies when he admitted that "Can't Explain" was just a song to get The Who into the charts, by the way.
ReplyDeleteCheers, Frank