RE: Another brick in the herb

["Brian Cady" <cadyb@home.com>]

> Ah, a fine net of logic you've spun here. But Lambert had little
> to do with
> the Lifehouse project, and nothing to do with Quadrophenia, and both works
> were increasingly superior to what had come before.

DEFENSE NO. 2

Except Lifehouse didn't happen. Who's Next happened and Pete, quite rightly,
puts the blame for Lifehouse failing to Lambert's abandonment. Pete also
desperately tried to pull Kit back in as producer on Quadrophenia and,
although Quad now looks like a success, it certainly didn't to either Pete
or The Who at the time and the reason for that also goes to Lambert. Here's
how.

Everyone talks about how incoherent Pete was on Lifehouse but if you go back
into the early drafts of Tommy you'll find Pete was just as incoherent on
that project as well. It was Kit's guidance that brought Tommy about. If Kit
had been enthused about Lifehouse (or could have forgotten about the Tommy
film for two seconds) we'd be talking about The Who's follow-up opera
Lifehouse that made everyone forget about Tommy.

The big problem about Quadrophenia from Pete's perspective is that, not only
did he have to write everything, he had to shepherd it through The Who's
punishing gauntlet and take the blame for every thing, big and little, that
went wrong. So he gets Roger screaming at him about the mix, he has defend
himself against critics that call it pretentious (Dave Marsh, et al.), he
takes the heat for how difficult it is to play live, etc. No Kit to share
the blame, massage the ego, get the artist and the band to the next hurdle.
The result? Pete quickly begins to back away from The Who, does albums about
how much pain he's in, crawls within himself.

Now true, rock was also collapsing at the same time. The kids at the end of
Tommy won and the youth revolution and mind expansion is left behind for
sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and fighting for your right to paaaaar-tay. The
rock stars (even The Who) quickly jump into the pool of decadence and make
themselves easy targets for the punks to come.

But what if Kit had stayed on track? Pete and Kit's last project together
was Pete's orchestral rock experiments of 1977. Imagine a Who Are You album
built around Football Fugue, Brooklyn Kids and Street In The City. Of course
Who fans would have loathed it, but what a challenge it would have been to
the status quo! The Who would have plowed up new ground instead of coming
out with an album of "new songs" in danger of being the same old songs.

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm