MARSH ON LIFEHOUSE

[PellegrinoLand@aol.com]

TO THE LIFEHOUSE
Dave Marsh
4/20/01

It's a blessing that so many records today describe the painful
realities of our society; it's a double blessing that so many describe
the pleasurable ones; and a joy and a relief that so many musicians
refuse to allow our musical past to be erased. 

But right now, no musician that I'm aware of dares to dream about a
future. As fundamental relations change in our global society, you'd
think somebody would at least speculate. Maybe the sort of future that
the architects of globalization make seem inevitable is just too
terrifying. Maybe when Johnny Rotten sang "No future, no future, no
future for you," he slammed the door.

Such a vision exists, all right, but everything conspires against
finding out about it. In the first place, it doesn't seem new-it seems
old, because it's Pete Townshend's Lifehouse, the storied rock opera
that he never was able to complete but which gave the Who the great
songs on Who's Next, released 30 years ago this summer. Second, you
can't buy Lifehouse in stores, only at Townshend's website
(www.petetownshend.com) and then only as part of a six record box set. 

The final two discs of the box set offer the three hour radio
dramatization of Lifehouse that the BBC ran in 1999. The show is a
revelation, even just as music, incorporating all those Who's Next
songs, such lost Townshend gems as "Pure and Easy," and even the Who's
last burst of glory, "Who Are You." This is some of the greatest music
Townshend ever made. 

Lifehouse always had that music, but it never had a coherent story.
Thirty years later, with the aid of some skilled collaborators,
Townshend has finally told the tale in a way that anyone can grasp it.
The BBC broadcast it just before the millennium and Pete was hailed for
having predicted the Internet (which he did, as  the Grid) and virtual
reality (which came in the form of "experience suits"). Partly, the
story has become intelligible because Townshend's dreams are now our
everyday experiences.  

But there's another side to Lifehouse. It is a very dark story, about a
world gone gray as people withdraw from one another, to blindly consume
and waste their lives while a world of waste and war thunders on.
"Teenage wasteland!" here is anything but the triumph Roger Daltrey made
it sound like-it is the baldest description of that future. 

Nevertheless, Lifehouse is not a story of despair. Hope presents itself
in the form of hackers, the equivalent of radio pirates, who cut through
the state-sanctioned Grid programming to offer an alternative vision, in
which people gather their forces and try to transform the world back
into a bright, colorful place. 

This is to be achieved, in part, by creating a gigantic musical
composition that uses the Grid to subvert the system that runs it-a
composition based on the unique personalities of those who've rebelled.
The aim is to create music so "pure and easy" that it explodes the false
gratifications to which we've become addicted, re-opening a sense of
human possibilitiy. 

In the radio drama, this vision turns into a spectacular failure, not
because it has to be, but because it is itself subverted, partly because
people who could have made a difference withhold themselves. Yet again,
this isn't a story about failure; Lifehouse creates a clear sense of
what needs doing and why. What matters most is that sense of an opening,
and that Townshend doesn't take succumbing for granted. It's a brave,
hopeful, powerful vision, rock'n'roll to its core. 

It needs to find a much larger audience. Please seek it out. I sure
don't want to live in the future Townshend describes and I can't think
of a better way to begin figuring out how to avoid it than by listening
to his dream, even if the part of it that's a nightmare.