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.]
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