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I had been waiting for something for a long time. I had read a book a long time ago, but it was just a timeline of the band's history, and the book on Keith Moon was never translated (with my English, I would have understood perhaps a third and with immense effort!). So Pete Townshend's autobiography was welcome. I'll be clear: among the four members of one of my all-time favorite bands, the guitarist was always the one who, "at first glance," I liked the least. I couldn't focus on him; he often seemed out of place, not in tune with what he represented and with the rest of the group, the most enigmatic and with a personality that didn't stand out.
If Daltrey had the charisma of the quintessential frontman, Moon the talent and recklessness of a damned genius, and Entwistle the calm and coldness painted on his face, I couldn't grasp Townshend; he seemed to be enduring these three great, different personalities. However, if The Who achieved everything we all remember, most of the credit is his, the true soul and author of almost the entire discography.
If someone, like me, wants to know Pete Townshend better, this book is as much as one could imagine. Almost 70 years of life and 50 years of career recounted with the awareness of someone who knew he had to unleash many repressed emotions. What stands out throughout the story is a sense of general personal unhappiness and a chronic state of loneliness. Childhood, as we know, determines much of what each of us will become, and his, especially during the period spent with an aunt during which he suffered abuse from her man, will forever undermine his self-esteem and make him a person full of doubts. Unsure of his sexuality, his talent, and on what values to base his existence. All this will make him obsessive about work, meticulously to the extreme (the stories about the genesis of "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia" are mind-blowing and intense); in music, in work, he vented his insecurities.
No real friendship with others in the band, a sense of inferiority that emerges page after page; all spiced with alcoholism, cocaine, heroin, a "near-death" experience due to overdose in a nightclub bathroom, sexual desire felt for Jagger, progressive deafness (a real tragedy for him as a musician), infatuation with the doctrines of guru Meher Baba, destroyed marriages, to the real personal drama of involvement in an online pedophilia scandal (precisely him who wanted to combat it for what he had suffered as a child!). A man of a thousand contradictions, with depression problems, fears, obsessions. Pete has truly laid himself bare, in a real, raw book, full of personal reflections. A man who still doesn't seem to have found a minimum of inner peace and serenity.
A very long book with the only defect sometimes, perhaps, of excessive detail. However, this was the part that interested me the most; trying to understand the person hiding behind that guitarist who has given me so much joy musically but whom I couldn't focus on.
Then there's Townshend the musician, a formidable author and guitarist of a legendary band that lived as a protagonist in the sixties and seventies. Yes, the sixties... even they disappointed him greatly. I've always thought that even The Who were a bit forced in some of their situations: they had nothing to do with the Mods, but those who pulled the strings of the game made them the reference group, nothing at all with the hippie ideals but they participated in all the festivals of the era, and the group, as I said, was anything but cohesive off the stage. But what they gave us is enormous, hardly equaled, especially in their extraordinary live performances.
For all those who love the band and wish to delve deeper into this person, to say the least, complex, this book will be a pleasant surprise.
A little while ago, a couple of friends went to see the two "old lions" in Milan and told me about the concert and the amazing atmosphere; I want to think that Roger and Pete (as they stated) in their old age have managed to establish that healthy and true relationship that, for many reasons, had never been such.
Thank you Pete for so much, even uncomfortable, truth; I hadn't understood you, but admit, it wasn't easy.
Happy reading.
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