Replies

Pictures of Lily struck me funny the first time I heard it too. It took me a while to put it all together (Pictures of Lily, Tommy, Quadrophenia, Rough Boys, etc.). It all added up to someone who was probably molested as a child. When he said he knew how it felt to be "loved like a woman," that was enough. I put all the old Who vinyl into storage, never to be heard again. Someday, I hope to sell them to an aging hippie for some serious money.

Before we return to arguing about the unimportant stuff......please give another thought to why you put the old Who stuff away. Pete Townshend is a writer, and like all writers he creates stories and characters. That doesn't mean he is that character or even approves of what that character does. Satan is the coolest character in Paradise Lost, but that doesn't mean we should shut Milton away. I'm sure much of what Townshend writes about does come from personal experience, but if he was molested as a child (which I also believe), why should that make you think less of him?

As you might have guessed, Quadrophenia is my favorite. It came out when I was in high school, but even though I was a Who fan I didn't buy it because I thought you had to have a quadrophonic stereo system to listen to it (stupid boy that I was). In college, I started listening to my roommate's eight-track version of it, and I played it so often that the people on my floor bought me the album for my birthday. I had the great pleasure of seeing The Who perform the entire album on tour in 1996 and 1997. I also saw them just last September, and despite the sad losses of Moon and Entwistle, they still put on a kick-a** show.

And speaking of Entwistle, by the way, he is actually the one who wrote both Cousin Kevin and Fiddle About (Uncle Ernie). The Ox was one disturbed dude!

My disillusionment with the Who went through several phases. The realization that Peter Townsend is a deeply disturbed person was only the final straw.

I started out believing that both he and his band-mates were musical geniuses--and cool, to boot. Of course, I was 15 or so at the time and thought Rolling Stone magazine was the ultimate arbiter of good and bad, quality and junk. Inevitably, I grew up and my horizons broadened. I got beyond "rock opera" and discovered real opera--Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven. Then I found religious music--Mozart's Requiem, Bach's Masses, Handel's Messiah, Palestrina, etc. In comparison to these enduring works of true genius, Quadrophenia and Tommy appeared as kitchy pieces of ephemera produced by a truly sick individual with no sense of the transcendant.

Of course, I didn't stop liking the music at that point--it still had a certain "rebellion" value attached to it that appealed me as an 18 year old. Then I saw the Who in concert in 1989. They were lame. Peter Townsend's years of ultra-loud riffing had destroyed his hearing and he was forced to perform behind glass with an electrified accoustic guitar. They looked old and tired--an act mailing it in in search of a paycheck.

But the last straw was all the homo-stuff that I never put together until his "loved like a woman" comments. Now, the Who was no longer even cool--just pathetic.

That said, wanna buy my Who vinyl? $50 a pop and they're yours.