Review: Horse's Neck by Pete Townshend

   In the introduction to Horse’s Neck, his mid-80's foray into short fiction, Pete Townshend writes a thesis statement, or perhaps a muttered excuse for authoring fiction instead of the autobiography that fans had long been demanding of him. (It didn’t come to pass until 2012: see Who I Am.) “I have never wanted”, he claims, “simply to tell my own story.”

   The irony is that Townshend might, in fact, make quite a decent short-story writer if he would just stop being so autobiographical. In one story he writes about a nameless alcoholic who is obviously him, but who can’t be him because the nameless one is a simple town-dwelling laborer and his dramas happen at football matches and pubs instead of at rock concerts and riotous afterparties. (Also, this man has two sons where Townshend has two daughters—a cover-up doubtless designed to protect Townshend’s cringing offspring, whatever their gender.) In the next story he writes from the point of view of another nameless alcoholic man who can’t possibly not be him, as he’s with a well-known band and trapped in an ongoing riotous afterparty that can be described by no less banal a word than “banal”. (“Layers upon layers of cheap nightclub hypocrisy” is Townshend’s phrase, and later down the page he adds, “The boredom was really quite exquisite.”) In the story after that, he gives up altogether and calls his main character “Pete.” (Sample sentence, written without a shred of irony: “Pete was a singer with a band.” Perhaps he went back and changed “guitarist” to “singer” with the sole purpose of putting a Saran Wrap-thin layer of fiction between himself and the main character.) As a composer, Townshend once spent a whole album, Quadrophenia, diving into the mind of a man with four separate personalities; as a writer, he dips into a thousand meaningless minds, all exactly the same.

   It may seem paradoxical to describe the writing as “unpretentiously pretentious”, but that’s exactly what it is. Pete Townshend writes, and has always written, pretentiously; he does so with no pretention, because that’s the way he actually thinks. At times his writing has exactly the awkwardness one might expect from a lyricist clumsily attempting fiction; at other times he pulls a cracking sentence from seemingly nowhere: “He was fulfilled as usual, heart ginger-warm; but the feeling on this particular evening was different, like finding a new finger among the familiar five.”

   All this would be fine and curious, even wonderful, except that Townshend has perhaps downed a bit too much James Joyce before the outing and vomited it up the wrong way. He gravitates toward the incomprehensible like a moth toward a candle, seemingly unaware that the power of his interviews and his lyrics always lay in their accessibility. That line about exquisite boredom applies neatly to just about any diversion from the narrative, and Townshend’s main character, like all of us, is easily distracted by any shade or symbol of himself, whether it be a childhood memory or a reflection in the mirror. If any girl, of any make or model whatsoever, enters the story, you may be sure that sex is immediately forthcoming, whether casual, dissatisfied sex or the longed-for encounter with a target of obsessive love. But the line of girls becomes pretty same-ish as Townshend fails to access the soul of a single one of them. In fact, he fails to access the soul of anyone save himself.

   And of himself he extracts nothing but the darkest and dreariest. “Each story”, his introduction claims, “deals with some aspect of my struggle to discover what beauty really is.” Of struggle there is plenty, but it’s all personal and mental struggling rather than up-front responses to problems; the book, having confined itself to one psyche, reads something like one of those confused, dissatisfying dreams where the goal is never quite accomplished. The chapter in which he actually discovers beauty is never written. He takes a crack at it in the final “story”, “Laguna: Valentine’s Day 1982”, but the result is embarrassing and deeply off-putting. I can only conclude that Townshend meant the stories—written at a time in his life when he was estranged from his wife and struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction—as personal carthasis, an exorcism of rock-star demons. Maybe they were something he needed to write; most of them are not, by any stretch of the imagination, something we need to read. They should have remained buried somewhere among his private papers, though I suppose I have little room to berate him for the fact that they’ve been out in the open since nearly a decade before I was born; the book has been out of print almost as long. We all make rash decisions, and maybe Pete regretted his.

   On that note, the constant graphic sexual references and themes found in Horse’s Neck are disquieting at best and mortifying at worst. The same loose-cannon style of conversation that makes Townshend fascinating and challenging as an interview subject here verges on Tourette’s Syndrome, and if there was any editor in the house, he was asleep. The worst sketch as far as this goes is perhaps the seemingly interminable “Plate”, which starts out as a shallow detective fiction and becomes a disgusting and meaningless tale about watching a girl while she dresses and undresses. A male fan of Townshend might read it without feeling violated. For me, a girl (and not a squeamish one), the story, and one image in particular, have rather spoiled the taste of my Who music for the time being. (See: James Joyce’s gross-out love letters to Nora Barnacle, which I have little doubt Townshend read.)

   It isn’t all abstract: Townshend ventures vaguely homeward in “Fish Shop” (the story with the nearest approximation of a plot), refers obscurely to the deaths of manager Keith Lambert and drummer Keith Moon (“Pancho and the Baron”), and recalls past Rolling Stone interviews in “A Death of the Day Of”, which ends on a near-suicidal note that eerily foreshadows the demise of Kurt Cobain.

   Quite rightly, the most critically-praised sketch in this distended muddle is a little number called “Champagne on the Terraces”; although, like most sequences in the book, it’s more extended monologue than short story, it does a good job of delving into Townshend’s tortured personal life as a blissful alternative to his tortured thoughts, giving the book some much-needed reality. The gem of the wreck, however, is “Winston”—a Ray Bradbury-styled spilling of words which congeals as a maddening and revealing meditation on the murder of John Lennon.

  [I must end this review by noting that, as a musician, Pete Townshend apparently prefers to be known as simply “Pete”: his last straw during the Lifehouse sessions was having fatherly manager Kit Lambert coldly refer to him as “Townshend”. However, the Pete of Horse’s Neck is a Townshend treading, as during Lifehouse, into the wrong waters, and thus well deserves the cold water of his surname to bring him to his senses.]

Album Review: Oh, Inverted World by The Shins

"You've got to hear this one song, it'll change your life I swear."

That's not a Shins lyric. I know it sounds as if it should be, with the scansion and everything, but if you want a second line you'll be left hanging. It's a well-known quote from the film Garden State about The Shins' song "New Slang". "New Slang"--that's a memorable title, right? Just like Oh, Inverted World. In fact, memorable, rhythmic titles are a bit of a thing with our friends The Shins. I run my eyes down the track listing and see, not only "New Slang", but "Caring is Creepy", "Weird Divide", "Know Your Onion!", "Girl Inform Me". In a modernist way, they could almost pass for the names of classic theatrical cartoons. "Lady Play Your Mandolin" would be a good name for a Shins song.

I've got a couple of sisters and a mom who are all cooler than me. They all, at variant times, got into The Shins. I never did, even though we all use the same iTunes. Not even the titles enticed me, and you all know titles are my favorite thing. I didn't know one Shins song. So I lazed through life, listening to cheap stuff like The Killers, while the rest of the womenfolk gushed behind me, as if they were blossoming, about tracks like "Girl on the Wing" and "The Celibate Life."

However, when my sisters go to concerts we go together, and when they obtain concert tickets they get me one, too. Thus it was that I ended up at Green Day directly after midterms just as I was digesting the news of a less-than-satisfactory grade, feeling subway-weary and battered about the skull, and thus it was that Clair ambled up to me one morning less than two weeks ago and told me I had two weeks to get into The Shins. Okay, I'll take it.

They've got four albums, all of which we own, and Oh, Inverted World is only the first. I thought I'd take them in order. Yet here I am, nearly two weeks later, and still I'm listening to Oh, Inverted World. Just listening to it over and over again, like a stoner.

So why, you want to know? Did it change my life?

The opposite, actually. It isn't sticking. 

It's sugar on the tongue--I think I like it, but it melts away as soon as I've heard it, and then I forget the way it tasted.

I feel as if I'm cramming for one of those exams where cramming doesn't seem to have any effect. Or maybe I feel as if halfway through a day I remember a great idea I had, and then with a sinking feeling I remember that I only had it in a dream and promptly forgot it when I woke up. No traction, no purchase. If it were a vinyl and I were a needle I'd slide off it without making a sound.

Yet even now as I check the track listing to identify the song currently playing (it's "Know Your Onion"), I can hear Clair singing along in the other room, to words that even her high voice isn't making clear to me.

I thought that was my difficulty at first--the words. Oh, Inverted World has that frustrating Nirvana quality--the vocals are, just barely, too murky to be made out. But at least Kurt Cobain put all his slurred singing on top of leaden tunes so heavy they stuck in your head, so if you didn't know them you could snarl along: "rahrah rah rah, rah rahhh rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah, she's so rah rah, and sellllllf-assuuuured…" And that way, everyone knew Nirvana's songs, even if they never did.

I looked up a few of The Shin's lyrics, and they were lovely stand-alone pieces--rhythmic and abstract, the sort of things that I'd repeat to myself all day long if I read them in a poetry book, or in The New Yorker, or on the back of a Simon and Garfunkel album sleeve. But try as I might, I couldn't connect a single one to a tune.

And it's not as if I don't know the tunes. I can hum snatches of them to myself, little fabric-swatches of melody, but I can't remember what songs they go to. I only know when I can look at my phone while the song is playing and see the title. It's that feeling like when you have a box of fancy chocolates and they give you a little map to identify which is which, but you're holding it backwards and you have the sneaking suspicion that it's your other left, and then you turn it around and reach for one and find yourself wincing as you bite into one of those horrible strawberry things when all you wanted was a truffle.

Only imagine if you bit into those chocolates and all of them were made of thin air, and that'll give you a pretty good idea how I'm feeling right now.

In fact, maybe I'm writing this review just to feel some sense of ownership of the band. If I write the review, I'm thinking, I'll get them on paper and they won't slip through my grasp. I'll be able to go to the concert and actually know them, own them!

(My sister Mary just came in, heard the unidentifiable track I was listening to, said softly, "'Your Algebra'," and sang along in a low voice, too quietly for me to hear.)

I don't know if this is really a review of the album. After all, it's only me to whom this happens. Maybe it's more a review of myself. I've worked okay up until now, but I seem to be a bit defective. Send me back.

I'm learning not to apologize for going through phases on different blogging platforms.

You write in the notebook you've got in front of you, ain't it the truth? You pour your tea into whatever mug is most convenient.

I don't mind it if I've got my brain backed up on a million hard-drives, because you know what? It wouldn't fit into one notebook anyway.

Anyhow, if you're crazy enough to miss me then stagger on over to Tumblr and read this review I wrote of The Who's album Tommy. It's a long-winded and overwrought review, but that's okay. Tommy is a long-winded and overwrought LP.

Clair and I have a nice evening planned with a book to read (probably The Great Gatsby because we want to see the movie next weekend, although East of Eden and In The Woods are also options) and snickerdoodles in honor of Astrid Kirchherr's birthday (one of Clair's favorite photographers--she bought the cookies first and then retroactively made them about Astrid when I informed her of the occasion. We're going to maybe make Kirchherr cookies a yearly tradition now).