Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Fri 4 September 2026 12:00, UK
Pete Townshend didn’t always want to buy into the glamour of being a rock and roll star.
The entire movement that he grew up in was all about creating art, and while raking in lots of money didn’t hurt in The Who, he didn’t want to be treated like some god among men whenever he played. His entire process was about sending a message, but there were more than a few people at the top who made him a little bit uncomfortable when he first came face-to-face with them.
But that’s also because Townshend was the last person to be thought of as a rock star. From the way he presented himself alone, he always seemed like the kind of person who was more of a writer than a proper musician, and while he could destroy any guitar that he came across, it was never a case of him breaking a guitar simply to put on a show. Anything that he broke came from the spur of the moment, and it came from him working his fingers down to the bone to leave the biggest impact on the audience.
He seemed to be one-of-a-kind, but the late 1960s wasn’t exactly the best time to claim that you made the best rock and roll in the world. This was the era when The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were still the major power players in the game, and even if you looked on the other side of the Atlantic, everyone from The Beach Boys to Bob Dylan were showing people new ways of thinking about the rock and roll hit.
And let’s not forget Jimi Hendrix, either. Townshend remembered feeling shaken to his core the first time that he saw Hendrix play, and while he shared the same bill with the guitar genius on more than a few occasions, he felt like he was never the person to stand in the way of him becoming one of the biggest stars in the world. Besides, there were plenty of other genres for Townshend to listen to as well.
He was steeped in all kinds of music when he first started working with The Who, but the thought of them being an R&B group would have been a stretch. But it is true, if you look at their back catalogue at least. A lot of the covers on My Generation are nothing but renditions of old James Brown tunes, but when you look at some of the biggest names in the genre, no one turned the genre’s voice up quite like Marvin Gaye.
Townshend had been on board with everything Gaye since before What’s Going On even came out, but he did have second thoughts when he met him in passing, saying, “Bill Szymczyk was producing Face Dances, The Who’s first album with Warner Brothers. He chose to work in Odyssey studios in London because he needed an American MCI board for recording. We did a test session there in March, and it proved to be a good studio for the project. It was there that I met Marvin Gaye. Marvin was in terrible shape – worse than me. He was my hero, and I found it hard to see him this way.”
Further reading: From The Vault
That’s without bringing up some of the harder moments throughout Gaye’s career as well. Townshend would have met him right as the soul legend was coming off of the depressing Here My Dear, and given that he was only alive for a few more years before being murdered, there seemed to be a spark that wouldn’t show itself until the final years of his life with songs like ‘Sexual Healing’.
The Who were already beset by tragedy by that point, following the death of Keith Moon, but the trials and tribulations that Gaye had to go through are still some of the hardest to watch in music history. He seemed dead set on making music that God wanted to give to the world, and yet he was never able to preserve that happiness towards the end of his life.
