I wonder whatever happened to good old-fashioned pop/soft rock bands. Like. Not the kind that only play on rock stations on the radio or only make the rock charts. Bands that play pop with actual instruments and not on a computer program. Where you can tell a real person is playing that guitar and having fun with it. Mainstream pop rock. Like in the late 90s and early 2000s. The kinds of Matchbox Twenty and The Script and Snow Patrol and Lifehouse. I think we should bring that sort of band back. You know, for the ecosystem.
One of my favorite things about Smallville, The Vampire Diaries and Supernatural is the soundtrack.
Especially with Smallville, they used to invite these amazing bands to play in live during some episodes such as One Republic, Lifehouse, All-American Rejects... and even the band that sings the song title, Remy Zero was the band's name I think.
Oh, the 2000's vibes... something that can't be replicated
Who's Next - 2003 Deluxe Edition linear notes by Pete Townshend
THE WHO’S NEXT ALBUM offers a tantalizing puzzle to certain people. A kind of Gordian knot. The abandoned Lifehouse project of 1971 is the focus of this interest. Music gathered together from various recording sessions made around the time promises to clarify matters but actually adds to the disarray. John Atkins has researched faithfully and generously to elucidate Lifehouse. It sounds like the Brabazon airplane of the ’50s: magnificent in concept and appearance but too big to get off the ground.
I could often sell crazy or grandiose plans, but I seemed to lack the ability to properly communicate to others how the end-product would look. This is partly to do with the way I write and formulate ideas: I tend not to start on paper. With song-writing, this is not a great problem, I simply make demo recordings. But when on Lifehouse I first started to grapple with screenwriting I ran into trouble. Kit Lambert had always helped me obtain from my co-workers the necessary act of faith required to see a project through. With Lifehouse he was missing.
Recently, Kit’s management partner, Chris Stamp told me a story that perhaps explains why Kit defected. Immediately after completing the Tommy recording in 1969 Kit put the finishing touches to a Tommy film-script which he had been drafting (without my involvement, but based on my own story) during the recording sessions in 1968. He and Chris took me to a restaurant and presented me with the script for approval; they had the nod from Universal to make a film based on the story. I would not even look at the script. As the primary composer I could block any such project. I don’t think Kit realized how close the Tommy story was to me, I was incapable of letting it go. To be honest I was probably drunk, a meal with Kit was always an occasion for great wine. I certainly can’t remember the occasion. I imagine I did not want my managers swanning off to Hollywood leaving me and the band to flog the album around the world. Looking back - however obdurate and childish I appeared - I’m sure I was afraid to lose their companionship as well. I lost Kit in any case. His response was dejection, frustration and a sense that I was being disloyal and ungrateful and he eventually moved to New York.
No one apart from Kit Lambert and myself is really able to explain how we worked together. Although an inspired and brilliant man Kit lacked the truly genetic creative process - born of ’60s British art-school Pop music - that I practiced. Separately we were merely babbling ad-men, together we were serene Wagnerian genius. I probably carried on writing believing he would function as he always had, and help me explain to the willing but befuddled people around me what I was on about. He had done it with Tommy, and I expected him to do it again with Lifehouse.
The international success of Tommy in 1969 and 1970 got in the way for a long time, but eventually I succeeded in trawling together something for a ragbag of paper, and an extraordinary collection of new songs, that was intended to be the Lifehouse film. I don’t think there was any confusion at all at this point. Lifehouse was to be a film, written by me, directed by A.N. Other, possibly Kit himself. I showed Kit and Chris the film script, and they seemed interested, but they seemed to do very little to help me apart from introduce me to Frank Dunlop, the artistic director of The Young Vic Theatre. (I was already a fan of the theatre.) I felt lost at the time but understand today that it must have been impossible for Kit to undertake the necessary editing and refining of my naive film-script when only a short time before I had thrown back in his face his own rather clever script of Tommy. The story side of Lifehouse failed because I had never developed a proper craft. I believed in genius, symbiosis and miracles. I needed Kit.
[continued under the cut]
The Lifehouse idea really was very simple: it was a portentous science-fiction film with Utopian spiritual messages into which were to be grafted uplifting scenes from a real Who concert. I was selling a simple credo: whatever happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world. The whole project started to get blurred after the impromptu press-conference called in January 1971 by Frank who was really confused about what I was trying to do. (Frank explained years later that Kit had told him we were really working on Tommy, not Lifehouse. Or that both stories were one and the same. I suspect now that Universal Pictures were equally deluded.) I described what I now know to be the workshop process I intended to pursue to ‘demo’ the project to the other band members. Everyone around me thought I’d gone mad and reading transcripts of what I’d said I’m not surprised. At least 90% of those around me were the press: my insanity was public knowledge.
At that time I missed Kit Lambert more than at any other time in my life. I’d dug myself in too deep. I didn’t know then why he would not come to my rescue, I know he could understand what I took to be the kindergarten notions that underlay the Lifehouse film-script, and even if no one else understood, they would trust the pair of us to come through as we had with Tommy. I dealt with my feelings of isolation in the usual way and drank lots of brandy.
The good part of all this is that after the unpremeditated humiliation of the press conference I slowly let the bubble burst. I had set in motion a lot of experimental work that took time to dwindle away through lack of money I thought I had been promised by Universal. But in the end I slowly let the whole thing go. It was a relief. We played some Who standards to invited guests and once to a small handful of unruly sub-teenagers Frank invited off the street, and it felt and sounded good. Later we heard recordings made by Andy Johns on the mobile I had forgotten was still outside the Young Vic and we were impressed with ourselves. The Who were still a good rock band. I was not suicidally depressed or anything, but I was very humbled and drinking more heavily than usual. Later Kit called me from New York where he was working at the new Record Plant producing Labelle (Patti Labelle and Nona Hendryx’s group). We said we should go to New York for two weeks and record the tracks with him. I remember being sceptical. Kit had been doing hard drugs (the rumour was that he had become a heroin addict). But he convinced me that he would co-produce with Jack Adams - a solid engineer I had worked with myself in New York. I felt as happy in that moment as I am capable of being.
The New York sessions were great fun. We were the first band to use the revolutionary new Studio One - an early Westlake design - which opened during our sessions. It was a great experience but very stressful. I remember drinking heavily and Kit was out of control. At one point during a kick jam sessions at the end of ‘Getting In Tune’ he ran out holding a little sign that said DON’T STOP! Of course by the time we’d all read his aristocratic but illegible scrawl we’d lost the magic. He was also disappearing to shoot up all the time. It soon became clear that other people in the team (including Keith Moon) were using hard drugs too. I just drank bottle after bottle of brandy as usual - probably imagining I was showing great self-restraint. I asked for a group meeting at the Navarro Hotel next day. As I walked into Kit's room I heard him raging to his assistant Anja Butler: "Townshend has blocked me at every front. I will not allow him to block me this time." Something inside me snapped. I suppose it was hearing this man that I loved so much calling me by my surname, and with such anger. Perhaps I deserved it, but it devastated me. During the subsequent meeting, as Kit stamped around the room pontificating and cajoling, shouting and laughing, I began to have what I know now to be a classic New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack Grade One.
Everyone in the room transmogrified into huge frogs, and I slowly moved toward the open tenth floor window with the intention of jumping out. Anja spotted me and gently took my arm. There is no question in my mind that she saved my life. I was by that time a kook.
Home to London we went and - as the pliable, defeated (but very well-rehearsed) anaesthetised basket-cases we had all become by this time - were easily processed in the Glyn Johns Hit-Machine of the day. At least I was. I think I procrastinated less than usual and Glyn and I hit off a long friendship and working partnership that amazed everyone who thought that two such hot-heads wouldn’t last an hour in the studio together.
With that I now think it would help to lay down the context of the recording sessions at the time. There were just four sessions in all.
The 1970/71 demo sessions at my home studio (and of course John Entwistle’s) that produced two reels of songs which related directly or loosely to the film-script I had written, or were intended as padding to be replaced by experimental music during the Young Vic workshop (original examples of which can be heard on Psychoderelict, my 1993 CD play and on The Lifehouse Chronicles, released in 1999).
The winter 1971 live recordings of the morale-restoring reality-facing performances at the Young Vic. Many of the tracks from one of those performances are available on this collection for the first time, unedited. On one of them, ‘Road Runner’, you can hear us slightly lose our way. This is because one of Roger’s ex-girlfriends in the audience was surrounded by a group of guys who were making her very uncomfortable. I remember Roger was about to dive into the crowd to come to her rescue during the song.
The spring 1971 New York sessions which fell into two parts: a two day warm-up in Studio Two with Felix Pappalardi at the desk and Leslie West on guitar; the four-day session proper in brand new Studio One with Jack Adams at or under the desk, Kit on the bathroom ceiling and me at the Rémy Martin bottle. You’ll notice that the version of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ included here has quite a different backing track to the one finally used on Who’s Next. This version used a non-taped backing track (The organ was processed in real time through a synthesizer, not taped). That is why it is a different shape and length.
The boozy Stargroves and subsequent highly disciplined and sober Olympic sessions of summer 1971 with Glyn Johns which produced the final album we all know and love.
Even after Who’s Next was released I continued to work on Lifehouse. I wrote new music which found its way onto later Who albums. I also prepared another film script, this time with Roger’s help. I finally managed to land Lifehouse late in 1999 when I released a 6 CD set The Lifehouse Chronicles on my own Eel Pie label. A radio play was developed from the story that was premiered on BBC Radio 3 in December 1999. The following February I presented two shows at London’s Sadler’s Wells theatre highlighting music from the project. It was the first time many of the songs had been performed live. A DVD containing music from those shows was released last year.
Lifehouse is far from abandoned. With the internet now promising a real life ‘Grid’ I am still considering a fully interactive project called The Lifehouse Method, which will incorporate all of my original ideas and more. In staging Tommy, Psychoderelict and The Iron Man in 1993 I learned some of the dramatic writing and stagecraft skills I need to go forward. Lifehouse - perhaps combined with Psychoderelict - will emerge as a kind of music, internet project or new-fangled opera rather than as a film. But I assure you it will make sense to you, just as in my mind it always had. Critics will probably call it naive. I hope so. I wrote it when I was a child.
-Pete Townshend, Sunday 7 May 1995
(Revised Wednesday 8 January 2003 by Matt Kent. Minimally further revised by Pete, 8 January 2003)
