Song of the Day 12/2: The Who, “All This Music Must Fade”
Pete Townshend of the Who sat for a fascinating interview in yesterday’s New York Times magazine in which he looks back on his career, the history of rock and what it all meant. He just released a novel, “The Age of Anxiety,” and he’s also promoting a new Who album, released in September, which kicks off with this classic-sounding Townshend song. The big revelation is that Roger Daltrey sounds almost as good as ever since his operation to remove pre-cancerous growths from his vocal cords.
The interview is much deeper than what you normally get in a rock interview. A sample:
Rock ’n’ roll was a celebration of congregation. A celebration of irresponsibility. But we don’t have the brains to answer the question of what it was that rock ’n’ roll tried to start and has failed to finish. Neither do our journalistic colleagues, no matter how smart they think they are. Greil Marcus is not going to write the book that has the answer. He’s not going to come up with the goods. For God’s sake, neither could the Rolling Stones or the Who. That’s not going to happen. That postwar vacuum that we tried to fill — we did fill it for a while, but then we realized it was fizzling out. The art proposed the questions without offering solutions. …
What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it. I do believe, for example, that if I were to go to an Ariana Grande concert — this iconic girl who has achieved so much, and rose up after the massacre at her concert in Manchester with dignity and beauty — that I would feel something of that earlier positivity and sense of community.
Fans should be pleased to know that Daltrey just had another throat treatment in preparation for a 2020 tour.
That song is so classic townsend that it could have been written in any of the past 47 years. That’s not a knock on it.
“We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial.”
Interesting take. I’ve read some who mark the begining of the end of western christianty at the end WWI. If it was The Great War, then the rock era was just another shot in dark at trying to find something substantial.
His statement made me see the phenomenon of people singing along through entire concerts in a new way. I had gotten tired of going to concerts and hearing the fans next to me better than I could hear the musicians, but I never looked at it the way Townshend is talking about, that it’s more like everyone singing the hymns in church along with the choir.
I don’t think you’re going to get this kind of analysis from Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney. Ray Davies, maybe.
It makes sense. I recall a teacher I had being very shaken up by the The Who’s concert stampede disaster (Chicago:December 3, 1979). Looking back at the way he talked about concerts – it was very much a secular religion for him.
Cincinnati, tho, right?
Oops, yeah.