“Nobody was getting it”: The one album Pete Townshend said damaged him

Posted On October 23, 2024October 23, 2024

Making an album is never an easy task for any artist to reach. Having a collection of songs that organically speak to each other is far more complicated than throwing them in a random order, and if they’re particularly close to the chest, it can be hard for anyone to let those inner feelings out into the world. Because the minute that it comes out, the album takes a piece of you with it, but one project by The Who was enough to leave Pete Townshend with some permanent creative scars afterwards.

Although Townshend wasn’t the founder of The Who, he was the one who helped turn them into superstars. He was the mastermind behind them making music much louder than usual, and since most of their material was comprised of R&B covers in their early days, tunes like ‘My Generation’ were exactly what the London Mod scene wanted to hear after the British Invasion officially began.

But Townshend never felt all that comfortable playing strictly pop songs. He could have continued making three-minute tunes if he wanted to, but ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ was the first time he realised that he could make music that told a story. The formula for a hit song didn’t have to be linear anymore, so Tommy would be the first time where Townshend would go full operatic throughout an entire project.

When an album does the sheer numbers that Tommy did, though, Townshend was asked the one thing every record label says: “Can we have another one, please?” It wasn’t a hard task, but Lifehouse became so much more convoluted for anyone to understand while also being too much of a carbon copy of what had come before. Even though the protagonist, Bobby, was completely functional, having him live in the future and being fed entertainment was just another of making him dear, dumb, and blind like before.

Townshend had the potential to turn in great material, but the rest of the group wasn’t willing to sacrifice his mental health to turn a profit. After a nervous breakdown following another doomed session trying to find the story, Townshend rolled over and put out Who’s Next instead, which is probably one of the best creative mulligans in existence if it meant giving the world ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.

Still, that didn’t mean that the guitarist didn’t still feel burned from working on Lifehouse for so long, telling Guitar World, “By the time [Who’s Next] was recorded, for the third time in my life, with Glyn Johns at Olympic Studios, I had very little interest in it. I’d been fucking damaged by the Lifehouse project. I’d come up with this fantastic idea, and it was going to be the great follow-up to Tommy. Unfortunately, nobody was getting it.”

If Lifehouse never saw the light of day like it should, than Quadrophenia was proof that Townshend learned from his mistakes. While his second proper rock opera had a far bleaker tone than Tommy or the Lifehouse sketches, he had a full grasp on the medium at that point, leading to tracks like ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ and ‘The Real Me’ sounding absolutely massive coming out of the speakers.

Despite Lifehouse leaving some nasty memories in Townshend’s mind, sometimes artists have to go through that kind of creative turmoil to truly find their muse. We will most likely never find out what that version of the album would have sounded like if it were released in the 1970s, but Townshend can probably rest easy at night knowing he still had some of the best rock anthems in existence to his name.

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