Pete Townshend Summary

Critical Essay by Lenny Kaye Quadrophenia is the Who at their most symmetrical, their most cinematic, ultimately their most maddening. Captained by Pete Townshend, they have put together a beautifully... Read more

Critical Essay by John Swenson The Who have always been a full-blown enigma in a business normally insane to begin with. Of all the pop groups that surfaced in the British Isles almost a decade ago, t... Read more

Critical Essay by E. Ira Childs The nicest thing about Odds and Sods is that it gives us a chance to hear The Who working in the various versions of their evolving style sans Townshend's supers... Read more

Critical Essay by Steve Simels [Tommy raised some complicated questions.] Like, for instance, what the hell was it, anyway? If it was, as they were claiming, an opera, how come the plot was so hard to... Read more

Critical Essay by Lester Bangs The Who may be painfully aware of their elder statesmanship, but they are aging gracefully and they ain't sold out yet. That's the concisest assessment pos... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Christgau Since Townshend is a master of commercial usages, the indifferent success of his group [before 1969] is a curiosity. Despite his creative equipment, he has always re... Read more

Critical Essay by Dave Schulps On Who by Numbers, perhaps the most intensely personal recording ever made by a major group, Townshend's bitterness toward his role in the rock world was unsettli... Read more

Critical Essay by Chris Welch [The Who's] music is their own easy tribute and memorial and not a flood of words. And yet the Who are about words, and images, and memories. They are about succes... Read more

Critical Essay by Billy Altman Who Are You is an album that has troubled me ever since I brought it home and listened to it for the first time. It is especially disconcerting that it should trouble me... Read more

Critical Essay by Ted Whitehead [Quadrophenia] is a splendid wallow in ferocious nostalgia: 1963 teenagers stuck in dead-end jobs, lumbered with beaten parents, and trapped in the suffocating British ... Read more

Critical Essay by David Walley [Seeing the Who live, one is] overpowered by the sheer musicianship and raw power of the group. The more I think of the Who as a group, the more I feel that they make th... Read more

Critical Essay by Patrick Carr Finally, the Beak has exposed himself. With the alter ego Moon-clown dead and the Who alive and running at a healthy commercial clip, Townshend has at last constructed a... Read more

Critical Essay by Alfred G. Aronowitz The Who is a group that was nurtured on gimmickery. I remember five years ago Brian Jones calling me up on the trans-Atlantic to play me the Who's first re... Read more

Critical Essay by Dave Marsh Who's Next is to the Who what the White Album must've been to the Beatles. After Tommy, which was a concept-rock summit, not, as commonly supposed, an introd... Read more