Lifehouse - The Times Opinion

[Brian Cady <cadyb@home.com>]

Well the tall weed of Pete Townshend has poked up his head, so now it's time for
The Times to chop it down.  Prepare for a turned-up nose at the idea of a rocker
(indeed!) invading the halls of classical music.

		-Brian in Atlanta

Allan Brown 
Pete Townshend sure plays a mean crystal ball 

News just in: Pete Townshend predicted the internet 30 years ago, says Radio 3.
You remember Pete Townshend?  The guitarist of the Who? The one that didn’t end
up running a fish farm or moonlighting as the drummer in the Muppets’ house
band. An intensely prolix fellow, with a big nose.  Took a variety of perfectly
blameless Gibson Les Paul Specials and reduced them to varnished toothpicks. A
trendy-vicar-with-plectrum who has filled a much-needed void in the rock world
since 1964. Last heard of working as an editor at Faber & Faber, wiping the
feathers and entrails off Ted Hughes. 
Admit it. You thought all the Who ever did was write anthems about the Kids that
started fast and clattery, slowed down for a spot of yogic breathing in the
middle, then built up in a crescendo that culminated in the band members kicking
each other insensible. 
But no, thanks to Pete, the Who had a sensitive side, with Pete himself acting
as the Madame Sosostris of the R&B boom. 
And, lo, he foresaw the rise of a global network of computers and then wrote a
rock opera about it. Pete was fond of rock operas - in fact he invented those,
too. He wrote Tommy, the story of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure played a
mean arcade game, and then he wrote one about talking computers. 
He might have titled it Hope I Die Before I Get AOL. Or Pixels of Lily. Or I
Can’t See For Mail. But he named it Lifehouse instead. 
Sadly, though, Pete neglected to release Lifehouse at the time of its creation.
So now, when Pete says he envisioned the rise of instantaneous digital
communication by means of fibre-optic technology, during the period when
eight-track cartridges were still the stuff of a madman’s dream, he sounds,
well, a bit sketchy - a bit post hoc, ergo propter hoc. 
The year was 1971. The future was an unwritten chapter of a bad Eric von Daniken
book. As the rest of us wondered whether rocket booster packs would come with
tie-dye straps, Pete was scattering chicken bones. 
With the singularity of purpose, the same intensity of vision he called upon to
compose A Quick One While He’s Away, Pete intuited that mankind’s salvation in
the years to come would lie in the vigorous, unrestrained exchange of
information across frontiers. He took this information and he filed it in a
shoebox under the bed. Technology continued its march, of course, but without
Pete’s music to keep it in step. 
Until now, that is. Thanks to the hand-cranked, steam-age technologies of Radio
3, we will soon be able to hear the finally completed glory that is Townshend’s
Lifehouse. Radio 3, as you can imagine, is very excited about this, so rarely
does it get to play music by someone who’s still breathing. 
No, the station conceded, Pete hadn’t actually used the word internet, or web.
Spamming, cookies and dongles had not occurred to the great man, nor had he
predicted that Tomb Raider II would be a disappointing sequel to Tomb Raider I. 
But he did write songs concerning "the grid", a "vast global network" that might
be required should mankind be forced to spend a lot of time indoors thanks to "a
necessary curfew to avoid the effects of radiation or pollution". 
Hang on, though. A vast global network of what?  Televisions? Christian outreach
missions? Pigeon lofts? Pete didn’t even mention computers. Why are those at the
trashier end of popular culture so keen on predicting the future? And why does
it always seem to end in apocalypse, with mankind huddling beneath the
onslaughts of radiation and pollution? 
Ah, that’s the thing, you see. They tend not to predict the future - rather they
predict the end of the present. Given that rock musicians, science fiction
authors and conspiracy theorists are more numb of skull than most of us, perhaps
it’s hardly surprising they’re whitewashing the windows and jumping under the
kitchen table en masse. 
But what is Radio 3 up to, giving house room to such a rune-gazer? It must be
attempting to fulfil the promise made by Roger Wright, its new controller, to
make the station an undaunting, ecumenical, one-size-fits-all swap shop that
reaches out not only to the hardcore Stravinsky groupie, but also to the
philistine who thinks Mahler was the character played by Humphrey Bogart in The
Big Sleep. This way, the argument runs, the station will expand the age range of
its audience. 
It has also resulted in the music of Frank Zappa and Randy Newman being played
on the station, which is bad, but not that bad; at least they had classical
training and could write with a smattering of musical grammar. But the Who
coming over all previous about grids and radiation attacks? That’s the underside
of the barrel being scraped, to the accompaniment of ravaged timpani and
exploding guitars.