HAPPY BIRTHDAY PETE TOWNSHEND: The Who -- 1921

In 1968, The Who were at a crossroads. The four lads were well known in England but considered a definite second class to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In the U.S., they were still an enigma to the masses. The year prior they had released one of the most successfully ambitious and entertaining records to ever hit the bins, the quasi-concept album, The Who Sell Out. But nobody in the U.S. bought it and few in the UK appreciated the album beyond the one single to come from the album, I Can See For Miles. (it didn't help that the theme of the album was an attack on state-run radio). For a very frustrated Who, success on the charts was as elusive as modesty is for Kim Kardashian. But their live performances were winning fans over one at a time. One was John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas who picked The Who to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival for the final night. Their blitzkrieg performance served not so much as a coming out party in the US, but more as a full frontal assault. After the American musicians and critics regained their hearing they asked, "who was that and what's next?"

The pressure was on and Pete Townshend, like a dog with his first taste of blood, began trying to expand on his nascent steps of writing a single thematic for an entire album. The result was 1969's hugely ambitious, Tommy, the so-called rock opera. This was not about flowers in your hair, love, and peace. This was about murder, pedophilia, false messiahs and the life affirming power of music. This self-produced album, with french horns and copious amounts of acoustic guitars was quiet, dark and brooding. This album effectively ripped the band-aid off of Pete Townshend's fragile psyche and exposed performances that are as gentle and complex as the subject matter is troubling and complex.

On the first side of the four sided album is a humble little song that introduces us to the central plot of Tommy. The song is called 1921 and it is our Song of the Week. Even certified Who fans might have to pause to recall this song...and it certainly won't ever make any greatest hits double disc. The Who often dropped it from their live performances of Tommy. But that is part of the beauty of this song. 1921 is one of those many intricate Pete Townshend songs in which he lays his soul out for all to see. But as he had done before with deeply personal songs (think Sell Out's Sunrise), the song is obscured from the listener with its shy demeanor and elliptical lyrics.

Let's linger over those elliptical lyrics for a second. As mentioned earlier, they tell our central story through which the rest of the album must be understood. But in typical Townshend fashion, he forces the listener to work for it with a constant sleight of hand. His central tool in this musical prestidigitation is the constant switching of narrator.

(Allow me to pause and give a Cliff's Notes version of the scant few lines contained in the six minutes of sublime music which precede 1921 on the album). Mr. and Mrs. Walker are a newly married British couple in love. Captain Walker soon heads off to do his duty for the Empire at the outbreak of World War I. In the father's absence, his son, Tommy, is born. Around this time Mrs. Walker is told that Mr. Walker has gone missing with a number of men, and that he is presumed dead.

It is at this point that we pick up our song sung from many different perspectives, all of which, except one, are sung by Townshend at his most vulnerable. It's New Year's eve and Mrs. Walker has found a potential new father for her young child. Mrs. Walker's unnamed lover opens the song (verse 1; PT) as he whispers words of proposal in the mother's ear while making love. Presently Captain Walker miraculously (and mysteriously) returns home to find his wife entwined with the lover. An enraged Captain Walker confronts the lovers (verse 2, PT) and, in one of Townshend's most susceptible vocal performances, turns to the wife and says "I had no reason to be over-optimistic, but somehow when you smiled I could brave bad weather." And with that the Captain violently kills the lover. Unbeknownst to him, his son (at least we think it is the Captain's son), witnesses the murder while looking through a mirror in the next room (we learn the particulars of this part later). And in verse 3, PT still singing, takes on the roll of the mother as she pleads "What about the boy, he saw it all"? Here is where things get interesting, both narratively and musically. Pete Townshend now plays the part of both mother and father as they turn to the juvenile Tommy and insist to him that he "didn't hear it, didn't see it, won't say nothing to no one ever in his life." Roger Daltrey, makes his debut as Tommy as he rebuts his parents and futilely argues against the orders ("I heard it", "I saw it"). Browbeaten, the young Tommy succumbs to his parents' wishes and resigns:  "I won't say nothing to know one...never in my life." And so it is, in this one verse with three narrators singing over each other, Tommy is psychologically programmed to be deaf, dumb and blind.

Mission accomplished, the Walker's turn their attention back to each other as the father now apes the words of the dead lover. Mrs. Walker, in turn, looks for forgiveness as her unsteady voice betrays the limits of her optimism. Townshend's bittersweet voice hits that perfect balance of sad and happy as the mother struggles to make sense of what is. A coda of distinctive chords (Eb - Absus4/Eb - Abm/Eb) rings out before we are represented with the central question of the album. A largely auto-biographical question, "what about the boy?" That is a question best answered by the rest of the album. 

Pete Townshend was only 24 years old when he wrote the groundbreaking 4th Who album that would shoot to the higher echelons of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The Who took their album on the road for nearly two years where it would transform from a soft, sensitive, introspective confession into a brash, bold, powerful statement of the healing powers of music. It was the end of one turbulent decade, and the beginning of another. It was the end of an innocently self-conscious mod band and the beginning of the most articulate pilgrims of rock. And it was the end of a commercially tenuous band, and the beginning of one of the most successful in history. It was The Who. Enjoy! Until next time, we'll see you on the Flip-Side.

Remembering the "5" Royales

"Life can never be exactly like we want it to be"

So begins the bridge of Dedicated to the One I Love, a song that is familiar to most listeners from two different but equally popular hit recordings, by the Shirelles in 1961, and the Mamas and the Papas in '67. Both versions are likable enough examples of the quality girl group and LA harmony-pop proffered by those groups, but neither ever impressed me as anything beyond a typical example of Sixties pop fare.

A few years ago I read an interview with the great Steve Cropper, Telecaster master of Booker T and the MGs. When the inevitable "Who influenced your guitar playing?" question was asked, the Colonel was eager to say he basically took his whole early style from a guy named Lowman Pauling, who had played with a group called the "5" Royales back in the Fifties. Well, before long I had tracked down an out of print low budget cd release of the "5" Royales 1957 album called "Dedicated to You." This prize was worth the eight bucks it cost me for the cover alone, which featured four of the red tuxedo jacketed quintet falling like dominos away from the front and center figure of Mr. Lowman Pauling, who practically lunged toward the camera proudly cradling his TV-yellow Gibson Les Paul Special. This was his group.

The "5" Royales hailed from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The quotation marks around the "5" in their name have at times been attributed to an early dispute with another similarly named group, but it has also been suggested that there were actually six members of the group for a time, requiring the winking quotation marks. Formed in the early Fifties, their initial gospel-influenced doo-wop style occasionally featured saxophone on instrumental breaks. Lowman Pauling sang bass and quickly emerged as a songwriter. This formula yielded moderate success on the R&B charts. But by the time they made the"Dedicated to You" album for King Records in 1957, Lowman Pauling had brought his guitar to the forefront of the group's sound. As it turned out, this phase of the group peaked on that record, and the centerpiece of the new style was a song penned by Mr. Pauling and Ralph Bass: Dedicated to the One I Love. My familiarity with the hit versions of the song did nothing to prepare me for the first listen to the original. The words and the melody, even the harmonies, were in place, but threaded through the whole song was a raw and determined lead guitar that seemed at once completely at odds with the song as I knew it and quite riveting. So this was what Steve Cropper was talking about. The overdriven, obviously cranked tube amp, the aggressive attack, and best of all, the pause at the beginning of the solo, where you can almost feel Pauling take in a breath and dive in; well this is why I collect music. The album features that guitar sound on most of the tracks, which also include Think another Lowman Pauling original that would later be a hit for James Brown. It's not that Pauling's style was particularly complex, or even original. Echoes of T-Bone Walker and Guitar Slim, among others, are clearly there, but the audacity of the playing in the context of a pop-vocal group (as opposed to a blues setting) goes a long way to explaining why I dig this record so much. Apart from the album itself, the best example of Pauling's fierce guitar style is the single, The Slummer the Slum, (great title, incomprehensible song, beautifully distorted guitar sound), which is found on various collections of the group's work.

For some reason the later sides cut by the "5" Royales tended to tone down Pauling's guitar playing, and by the mid Sixties they had faded in the wake of the new soul styles from Atlantic, Motown and Stax. Legend has it that at some point a down-on-his-luck Lowman Pauling sold his interest in Dedicated to the One I Love for a few hundred dollars. At any rate, by the early Seventies he was basically forgotten and worked as a custodian in a Brooklyn synagogue. It was there that he suffered a fatal seizure on the day after Christmas, 1973. He was 47.