by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 62: The Who, “I’m One”
In the Who show at the Barclays Center
the other night, “I’m One” stood out as fresher than anything
else Pete and Roger played, and at the same time as more permanent –
more than “My Generation” or “Pinball Wizard” or “Baba
O'Riley” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
I’ve had it in the mind’s ear since
then, hearing it, for the first time, as a country song – akin to
the country songs the Who’s London counterparts the Kinks were doing
on Muswell Hillbillies and
other records in those years.
Hearing
it as the answer to the question “Why did people find Quadrophenia
so confusing?” Here’s why: it was confusing because it was
supposedly about a kid who was double-schizophrenic, inwardly divided
four ways – quadrophenic — but its strongest song is about a
young man’s strong sense of himself and his inner unity.
Hearing
it as a kind of explanation of why so many artists’ personal lives
are such a mess. (Pete Townshend’s certainly was at the time.) Here’s why: they’re finding, or maintaining, an inner unity through
their art (“I’m One”) and this crowds out the quest for unity and order in their lives.
Hearing
it as a spiritual. More than Townshend’s avowedly spiritual songs – the ones inspired by Meher Baba and directed at God, or a god – this one touches the poles of
confusion and order, vulnerability and strength, that are the basis for
so much that we call spiritual.
The Who Hits 50: “I’m One” (and So Are About 60,000 Others)
On November 2, 1969 – with Tommy riding high in the charts and the Woodstock festival fresh in the memory – the Who played McDonough Gymnasium at Georgetown for a crowd of about 4000 people.
Wednesday night – thirty-three years after their last proper album and “farewell tour” – the Who played the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a crowd of about 20,000 people. Last week, they played for a similar crowd at the Nassau Coliseum, a few miles away on Long Island; Friday night they’ll play for another such crowd at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium a few miles away in Queens.
And therein lies a story of the scale of popular culture then and now.
I went to the Who show at the Barclays Center – as a guest of a friend who is a friend of Pete Townshend’s – and at several points during the set Townshend explained that when the Who first toured America they were playing tiny places: the Village Theater as part of a seven-act variety show; a bar in Michigan where the crowd, said Pete, was “about twenty-five people” (“And four of them were us,” Roger Daltrey chimed in). Even after they wowed the crowd of more than a hundred thousand people at the Monterey Pop Festival in California, they played the one-thousand-capacity Fillmore East in New York; even after bringing the dawn thunder for four hundred thousand people at Woodstock, they played for four thousand people at Georgetown.
It’s the conventional wisdom that the culture of the sixties was unified, “mass” culture par excellence, and that the culture of the present is atomized and fragmented by comparison. In many ways that’s the case. But the population today is larger, and wealthier, and more consumptuous (if that’s a word) than it was in 1969, so that the Who – with no actual occasion, such as a new record or a new stage act, only a silver anniversary – can sell 60,000 tickets at top dollar in the New York area even as reasonable people wonder whether anybody even listens to the Who anymore.
Seen one way, it’s an example of the winner-take-all culture: once you’ve cracked the mass culture, your fragment of the fragmented culture will always be disproportionately large.
Seen another way, it’s an example of baby-boomer dominance at its least attractive, because one reason other bands can’t reach a mass audience is that the boomers, instead of moving on to new bands and new sounds, keep paying up to see the Who over and over again.
See a third way, it’s simply evidence that truly great performers – such as the Who – have no sell-by date. They are perennials.
I sure was glad to see them again (having grown up fully in thrall to them and having seen them in 1982 and 1994). Hearing Pete Townshend play and sing “I’m One” made me think that it may be his best song – and made me remember what a model he has been, for so many of us – the very model of a person who strives for a kind of unity among the fragments of self and society.
The image is of a screenprinted poster for the Who’s concert at Georgetown by the master printmaker Lou Stovall, on display in Lauinger Library (where it is tagged 1970, not 1969). Here’s a bootleg of the concert.
Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 67: The Who, “Christmas / The Acid Queen”
It took 35 years of following the Who for me to hear “Christmas,” from Tommy, as a Christmas song, which in its barbed way it is.
It took hearing “Christmas” as a parent for me fully to grasp the obvious truth that Tommy is a drama about the conflict between parents and children, between the old ways (Christmas) and the new (Tommy’s insensate seeking). The song is sung from the point of view of Tommy’s parents, who wonder how, with no way to grasp their tradition, he can be saved. Partway through the father calls out, “Tommy can you hear me?” and the son replies as best he can: “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me …”
It took seeing and hearing this Who performance of “Christmas” from the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 for me to remember again just how phenomenally ambitious the Who were – acting out the conflict of a whole society at earsplitting volume, with the band members taking roles, adopting different characters’ voices, and the like.
It took finding this solo piano demo of “Christmas” for me to realize just how fully Pete Townshend – age twenty-three – identified imaginatively with Tommy’s flummoxed father.
It took seeing all this, hearing it, feeling it, to realize again just how determined a seeker Townshend is – and that his seeking, as much as his guitar playing, is what made him a hero of mine in the first place.
“Tommy doesn’t know what day it is / Doesn’t know who Jesus was or what praying is …”
Truly, he saw and heard the felt the vibrations of his generation and the ones to follow better than even he realized.