(Personal reflections inspired by Who songs)
Song: “Pure and Easy”
Album: Who Came First
Release Date: October,
1972
When was the last time you did something for the very first time where
you said to yourself afterwards, “Man, I
never thought I’d get around to that”?
Often it is something that’s been sitting out there for quite some time,
stirring your curiosity, but not to the degree where you feel you have to act
on it anytime soon. And so that
something remains out of your realm of concrete comprehension. In turn, you end up conjuring up your own
alternate reality of what fills that space.
It could be a street you drive by every day on the way to work, but have
never veered onto. It could be a classic
novel you have never read or a nearby town you have never visited. It could be an Oscar-winning movie you have
never watched, or a seldom-seen neighbor you have never greeted, or an activity
you have never taken up.
Or, it could be an album you have never listened to. Now, I’ve been pecking away over the years at
my own personal disc-bucket-list. My
“Stepping Stones” blog series of 4 years ago included listening to Between the Buttons from beginning to
end for the first time. The “Forever
Young” series included a personal baptism with On the Beach. In the last
three decades I have also tackled Astral
Weeks (Van Morrison), What’s Going On
(Marvin Gaye), Squeezing Out the Sparks
(Graham Parker and the Rumour), Blue
(Joni Mitchell), Sweetheart of the Rodeo
(The Byrds), Sail Away (Randy Newman)
and John Wesley Harding (Bob Dylan),
among many others. But The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars (David Bowie) remains outside my own personal plane of
knowledge, as is the case with This
Year’s Model (Elvis Costello and the Attractions), Solid Air (John Martyn), Arthur
(The Kinks), Paradise and Lunch (Ry Cooder), Kate and Anna McGarrigle (self-titled debut), Rock ‘n’ Roll (The Mekons), and Shoot
Out the Lights (Richard and Linda Thompson), among many others.
There are also the odd-duck records and intriguing deeper cuts of
the most popular of Rock musicians that have remained elusive. These include John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins, George Harrison’s Wonderwall, Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait, Keith Moon’s Two Sides of the Moon, Ray Davies The Storyteller, and John Entwistle’s Smash Your Head Against the Wall. But I have conquered Neil Young’s Trans and Re-Ac-Tor in the past 2 years, and the Rolling Stones Her Satanic Majesties Request. In terms of those last three albums, there was
some pain in my week-long dedicated listening (for my blog entries), but I did
pull it off, and in the process found a few lonely little petunias in the onion
patch.
This week I tackled another one of those outliers, Pete Townshend
“debut” solo album Who Came First. I put the word debut in quotes here because
many, including myself, consider this more as a specialty disc of demos (with
contributions from others), and not what one would think of as a professionally-produced
studio album. Regardless, it felt
strange popping Who Came First into
my cd player on Monday and then tuning in; similar to how I felt when I peered
out the plane window on my decent into Whitehorse, Yukon last year: A long imagined concept becoming real. The album cover was already unmistakable to
me: Pete Townshend in his Woodstock-era
white jumper-suit standing on a supersized batch of whole white eggs (which
begs the question; Who came first, the chicken or the egg?).
As was the case with Young’s Trans,
Harrison’s Wonderwall and
Lennon/Ono’s Two Virgins, Who Came First was a very personal album
for the songwriter, which centered on the teachings of Pete Townshend’s
spiritual “avatar”, Meher Baba. Now, I’m
not going to delve any deeper into the Eastern religious spirituality of
Townshend and Baba (and several other celeb-type followers, including the Small
Faces Ronnie Lane and Tommy cover
artist Mike McInnerney), other than to say that everything I’ve read reminds me
of the teachings of Jesus, and so it’s all good. Yes, Who
Came First is an overtly religious album, along the lines of Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and - pivoting a bit closer to Rock and
Roll home - George Harrison’s All Things
Must Pass and Bob Dylan’s Saved. This was an opportunity to see the peaceful
man behind the stage destruction and guitar demolition, and to connect the dots
with the intense songwriting Townshend was showcasing on Who albums up to that
point (1972); particularly songs on Tommy
and Who’s Next.
In listening to Who Came
First this week, the biggest take home message for me was that the music on
it is further confirmation that Pete Townshend is a musician fully willing to
bare his soul to the public. In fact, I
think he sees this as his duty. Later in
the decade, that soul-baring would also play out in ever more humble and
confessing ways, as Townshend would acknowledge long periods of substance abuse
(i.e. “However Much I Booze”) and spiritual depravity (i.e. “Empty Glass”),
among other wayward ways (he would eventually get through this period of
transgression, and remains a Meher Baba devotee to this day). And so, of all Pete Townshend’s albums, Who Came First is the only one in the
Who/Townshend catalog that comes across as unabashedly uplifting. Its core messages are love, faith, and redemption.
Many of his other albums are too, but it takes a while to get there; there’s a
struggle you have to go through first.
Not so with this open-hearted record.
Who Came First opens up with “Pure and Easy” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfFh0h1IF20
), which four years later would appear on the Who’s Odds and Sods, with Roger Daltrey singing the lead. * Side Note: Ideally, “Pure and Easy” should
have made it’s Who introduction on Who’s
Next in 1971. Combined with other
omissions, including two more songs on Who
Came First - those being “Let’s See Action” and “The Seeker”- would likely
have vaulted that record from a top 20 all-time Rock album to a top 5). Pete Townshend has written a laundry list of
soul-searching songs and ”Pure and Easy”
may be the epiphany of them all (along with “Drowned”, which I still need to
write about). I recall in Townshend’s
autobiography Who I Am, where he
reflects on a childhood memory while in a small boat during a storm, where the
intensity of the moment suddenly connected him with a musical sound like no
other he had ever heard. Reading this,
it came across to me as a life changing moment for him. “Pure and Easy”
captures that sentiment in song.
I believe all faiths have a musical component: Hymns, Psalms, Gospel, Pow-wows, chants, a
cappella, etc. It appears that with Who Came First, Pete Townshend and his
compatriots were hoping to make a musical case for their new religion. Although I have enjoyed listening to Who Came First, I’m not connected enough
to the teachings of Baba to understand if they made a compelling case. But I do understand the power of music and on
this album and many others, Townshend found a way to combine musical and
spiritual beauty: Now that is something I can relate to. And that combination just may be the cathartic
moment that Townshend experienced on that boat as a boy, and later put into
words and music in the song “Pure and Easy”.
I’ve alluded to the fact several times in these blog entries that
I tend to like loose ends; mysteries that remain unexplored. Perhaps it’s a personal bias; that fiction is
stranger than fact (or better yet, stronger).
I believe this thinking is tied to the notion that if something has not
been discovered, the possibilities remain endless. This week, I ‘discovered’ Who Came First, and as my connection
transitioned from abstract to concrete, I came to the realization that for any
qualitative artistic expression, my bias is proven wrong: Fact can on rare occasions be stronger,
stranger and even more surreal than fiction.
Do I leave things that I alluded to in my opening paragraphs of this
entry hanging out there because I don’t want to be disappointed? That’s
part of it, and more often than not this becomes a truism when I finally do dip
my toes in. But then, despite the
setback, that curious side kicks in again, and I dig, delve, veer, probe, and
listen until suddenly I am rewarded with a rare diamond in the rough.
- Pete
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