Keeping with the Pete Towshend theme – I am listening to a lot of this right now – Pete Townshends’ first solo album Who Came First is my recommended starting point for complete solo works by Pete Townshend. The album has a a soulful funky vibe with some tracks sounding almost Shuggie Otis-like, plus you also get some beautiful acoustic work and you get early versions of Who classics such as Lets See Action and Pure and Easy – I actually thinks Pete’s solo versions of Who songs across his vast body of work are generally more interesting and melodic and complex than the Who versions themselves and make for great comparisons against the Who versiosn which do have incredible elements via Mssrs Daltrey, Moon and Entwhistle.
Listen below to his first single Forever’s No Time At All of the Who Came First LP in 1971 and sung by Billy Nicholls and go here for neat stuff
I first got into Pete Townshend’s demos and outtakes many years ago with a vinyl purchase of Scoop – a double LP featuring a pile of great music including a home recording of a very young Pete doing So Sad About Us direct to reel to reel and which starts of with background traffic music and Pete advising any future time-travellers that “this is a very special and very rare early recording of Pete Townshend performing solo with his guitar in his bedroom”. The Scoop concept expanded out over a decade to be 3 LP sets the original Scoop, Another Scoop and finally Scoop 3. The early demos of Who classics such as Pinball Wizard and Substitute are great but the real treasures are the more obscure tracks and musical experiments from throughout his lengthy career. More recently my interest was rekindled through three great pick ups – firstly a bootleg of Pete’s original Quadrophenia Demos which has amazingly different versions of some of the best tracks of the legendary Quadrophenia double album – then my purchase of the Who’s Next Deluxe Edition which apart from having two discs of incredibly remastered music also includes the story of Lifehouse which I discovered has a release available through Pete’s own Eel Pie online shop called Lifehouse Chronicles. A six-CD set that collects songs and other compositions relating to Lifehouse, a musical concept developed by Townshend in 1970 as a follow up to The Who’s highly successful rock opera, Tommy. Rooted heavily in the teachings of Townshend’s spiritual mentor Meher Baba as well as in science fiction literature, Lifehouse was meant to explore the idea that music is the fundamental basis of all life – that every human being on Earth has a unique musical melody that “describes” them, and only them, perfectly. Unfortunately Lifehouse as originally conceived never got to see the light od day – read they story here.
Buy Scoop, Another Scoop or Scoop 3
This mixtape has a selection of acoustic work and demos from the sixties right through to an awe-inspiring thundering instrumental 9 minute full take of Baba O’Riley that is so powerful Roger Daltey is not even needed in the room. This is just a taster for your iPOD and only skims the surface of this mans work – genius at work – I think I’ll get started on another.
Quadrophenia (unused piano)
So Sad About Us
Bell Boy
Love Reign O’er Me
Im One
Can You See The Real Me
Magic Bus
The Music Must Change
Sister Disco
Teresa
Recorders
Themes on Dirty Jobs
Baba O’Riley (instrumental)
The Claude Mono Blog 