H E A R_ I T Pete Townshend: + My Generation + Jools and Jim   L A S T_ W E E K   I N T R O Why we launched Brilliant Careers     S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK | There's a secret part of all rock 'n' roll fans that likes to see our old-time heroes doing well: recovering from their addictions; finding love and happiness or at least a kind of serenity; winning awards for recent work that they've done, even though we know that perhaps their best work is already behind them. Maybe these earnest vapors of well-wishing, something we send out across the land like weak radio waves, are about the best we can muster for our idols after years of making demands on them, entreating them to give us another hit song that will make us feel as good as the last one did. People who love Pete Townshend -- and I count myself among them -- should all be happy that he won a Tony Award in 1993 for the Broadway resurrection of his 1969 rock opera "Tommy," that he now keeps himself busy with solo touring and concept albums like 1993's "Psychoderelict." We all want to be reassured that it's possible to be a happy, productive and hip member of society even past age 30, if not 21. But there's no escaping the brutal truth: When you have a sustained burst of greatness, as Pete Townshend did with the Who from the mid-'60s well into the '70s, it seems like misguided charity to applaud something as mundane as a Tony. What I love best about seeing the present-day Townshend -- even though I accept that like all of us, he had to grow up -- is how readily I can conjure the bratty kid with the big nose, wrapped in pre-punk Union Jack bunting. I love the look of the older Townshend (as well as the voice, if not always the material) precisely because I keep needing to see how he's turning out, now that he's had to live all these years with his most famous line trailing behind him like a comet's tail. When Townshend, the guitarist and premier songwriter in one of the groundbreaking bands of his era, wrote that line in 1965's "My Generation," he didn't really hope he'd die before he got old. The lyric wasn't even an act of misguided, youthful bravery. It was nothing but brashness, a kid throwing down a challenge that he could never take back. And it sounded great. Plenty of fans, cranky about the fact that the Who ultimately lost steam (the same kinds of people who never recover from the news that there's no Santa Claus), have held that lyric against him. But the line is smarter than even he probably knew at the time: Youth may be touching, but it isn't inherently interesting. Townshend was interesting. When a very young man is bold enough to write a line like that -- to make you believe that he'd really throw everything away rather than let himself be numbed; a line that's a time bomb set to go off in his face -- you immediately want to know: What kind of a man will he grow up to be? Townshend was born in 1945 and grew up, like fellow future Who bandmates John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey, in the middle-class London suburb of Shepherd's Bush. He was an art-school kid who, like many of his contemporaries, immersed himself in American pop and R&B records. In 1959, at age 13, he'd started out playing banjo in a Dixieland band with Entwistle, later switching to guitar; he and Entwistle eventually ended up in Roger Daltrey's band the Detours, playing around London clubs in the early '60s. In 1963, the group landed a record contract and changed its name to the High Numbers; it also recruited Keith Moon, who'd been playing with a local surf band. Although the band began to draw a following among the young mod audience -- stylish, scooter-riding kids with a predilection for American R&B, a group Townshend especially felt an affinity for -- they went nowhere until they met Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, two young filmmakers who took over as the band's managers. The group changed its name yet again to the Who (a name they'd used briefly earlier in their career) and began to build a bigger following, earning a reputation as brazen, pissed-off kids who played a particularly potent brand of R&B and smashed their equipment on stage. In 1965 the band released three U.K. top-10 hit singles, two written by Townshend (who wrote nearly all the band's material): "I Can't Explain," "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere" (co-written with Daltrey) and "My Generation." From there, the band's popularity soared in Britain; in the States, the Who were revered mostly as a live band, and didn't sell an exceptional number of records until the release of the ambitious (and overblown) "Tommy" in 1969, which remained on the U.S. charts for nearly two years. The Who -- which kept its original lineup intact until Moon's death in 1978, at which point Small Faces drummer Kenny Jones joined the band -- was a group of strong-willed individuals who often clashed (Townshend and Daltrey's bitter spats, sometimes played out onstage, were legendary). Townshend earned the reputation of being the brains behind the group. It's probably more accurate to say that the band together formed a collective soul, and it was Townshend who figured out ways to articulate its secrets, spinning them out into words and music. Townshend was the mastermind behind the ambitious, high-flying projects that the band took on -- first "Tommy" and later the more challenging "Quadrophenia" (1973), which actually makes a fair stab at the complexity that was always claimed for "Tommy." N E X T_ P A G E .|. Why don't you all fade away?   Visit BarnesandNoble.com for books on Pete Townshend

 

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