Townshend biography review
Who I Am: A Memoir
Let me say that on finishing Who I Am, my admiration for Pete Townshend both as an artist and as a person has only deepened. Who I Am is an honest, unvarnished account of an artist's life - of the art he makes and the struggles he faces behind the stage curtain. Townshend, it must be said, is a spectacularly successful musician in anyone's terms - he has had all the gold records, critical acclaim, and financial success that any of us could wish for. True too, he emerged at one of the most interesting and vital moments in British music history. All of this territory is covered with enough detail to satisfy fans of 60's music/history and The Who.
What is most interesting and unexpected though, is Townshend's revelation of the personal cost of being this luminary, wind-milling rock god of legend. How can a marriage or family life be sustained when one is away touring for months on end on a regular basis? How can one reconcile the public's image of a rock star with one's own unresolved personal traumas and profound insecurities? What shocks here is the sense of loneliness, of a man always on the periphery: adored by millions, yet alone in endless hotel rooms; the supposed wild man of rock who watches his bandmates' antics from the sidelines and worries about his marriage. It is in the tension between these two worlds that Townshend reveals his humanity and vulnerability, and also the impossible position in which we place those whom we idolise and set apart from the common throng.
Townshend does not flinch from his infidelities, his addictions, his psychological s
Book Review: Pete Townshend’s ‘Who I Am’ Could Be the Most Conflicted Rock Memoir of All Time
Pete Townshend
Who I Am
HarperCollins Publishers
Four and a half Stars
After all his years of musical confessions, Pete Townshend still has secrets to get off his chest. And in Who I Am, he finally lets loose. His long-awaited memoir is intensely intimate, candid to the point of self-lacerating. It’s a rock god opening up his most human frailties. Throughout the book, Townshend makes himself uncomfortably vulnerable, especially in his deeply saddening memories of childhood sexual abuse. He sees those early years as emblematic of his postwar English generation, left parentless, at the mercy of predators. He turned this trauma into the 1969 breakthrough Tommy. Those feelings of rage, shame and inadequacy never left him, even after he fought his way to the top of the music world.
Townshend provides plenty of stories about the Who‘s hotel-trashing days and the insanity of Keith Moon. He dishes about sex (“Mick is the only man I’ve ever seriously wanted to fuck”) as well as drugs – there are quite a few empty glasses and smashed mirrors. But he’s not concerned about preserving his rock-star myth. Instead, it almost seems he wants to undercut it, exploring his defects and contradictions: the “Angry Yobbo” guitar hooligan he plays onstage versus the introspective composer, the spiritual seeker versus the hedonistic drug addict. He becomes a devotee of Meher Baba, yet loses years to cocaine and alcohol. As he says, “My spiritual longings were constantly under siege by all-too-worldly ambitions, undermined by scepticism and ambivalence, and challenged by my sexual yearnings….I could also behave, frankly, like a complete arsehole.”
He reminisces about his longtime mates, evoking Roger Daltrey as “the unquestionable leader,” and John Entwistle as his link to the old days:
Who I Am
Let me say that on finishing Who I Am, my admiration for Pete Townshend both as an artist and as a person has only deepened. Who I Am is an honest, unvarnished account of an artist's life - of the art he makes and the struggles he faces behind the stage curtain. Townshend, it must be said, is a spectacularly successful musician in anyone's terms - he has had all the gold records, critical acclaim, and financial success that any of us could wish for. True too, he emerged at one of the most interesting and vital moments in British music history. All of this territory is covered with enough detail to satisfy fans of 60's music/history and The Who.
What is most interesting and unexpected though, is Townshend's revelation of the personal cost of being this luminary, wind-milling rock god of legend. How can a marriage or family life be sustained when one is away touring for months on end on a regular basis? How can one reconcile the public's image of a rock star with one's own unresolved personal traumas and profound insecurities? What shocks here is the sense of loneliness, of a man always on the periphery: adored by millions, yet alone in endless hotel rooms; the supposed wild man of rock who watches his bandmates' antics from the sidelines and worries about his marriage. It is in the tension between these two worlds that Townshend reveals his humanity and vulnerability, and also the impossible position in which we place those whom we idolise and set apart from the common throng.
Townshend does not flinch from his infidelities, his addictions, his psychological struggles,
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I first became aware of Pete Townshend’s prowess as a writer when I read a witty record review he had written about The Who’s greatest hits collection, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy way back in 1971 for Rolling Stone magazine. It was evident then that this was an intelligent and articulate man. He had begun writing record reviews in 1969 – for the British weekly music paper Melody Maker; and then its editor, Ray Coleman, invited him to contribute regular articles. He also submitted letters intermittently to the London newspapers about topical issues that caught his attention. And then in 1983 he was asked by Robert McCrum to join the editorial staff of the prestigious publishing house of Faber and Faber – working for its popular arts division. In 1985 they released a collection of Townshend’s short stories called Horse’s Neck.
Who I Am is Townshend’s recently-released autobiography. It has been about 15 years in the making (commissioned back in 1995). After two years of fitful work on the book, Townshend had asked the publisher – Little, Brown – to release him from his contract because he “found it too hard”. Eventually, however, he got back into the project and worked at it steadily for a decade. Why so hard? Primarily, I would imagine, he has struggled to find the correct tone – to balance, on the one hand, the public voice of a well-known former rock ‘n’ roll raver – the creative force behind the great English rock band The Who – with the private doubts of an often introverted recluse, driven by creative ambitions, but often beset by a deep sense of unease and, even, self-loathing. “Can you see the real me, can you?” he wrote back in 1973 in Quadrophenia. As you read through this often searingly honest autobiography, you do wonder exactly who this Pete Townshend really is. He calls the book Who