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(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy \/ Olavi Kaskisuo \/ Lehtikuva)<\/p>\n
Tue 10 February 2026 16:00, UK <\/p>\n
At the peak of the summer of love, you weren\u2019t going to find anyone taking rock and roll more seriously than Pete Townshend<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n While he may have been in tune with everything that was coming out of the spiritual side of rock and roll, he wanted to make the kind of music that could help him reach a higher plane of existence without having to drop acid every single time he performed. He was focused on the songwriting behind all of the psychedelia, and he already had some of the best teachers to learn from when he started.<\/p>\n Then again, it wasn\u2019t going to be easy to teach anyone how to write as Townshend did. The Beatles may have been encouraging people to think outside the box and make music that was from the heart, but making entire albums that told linear stories across their runtimes wasn\u2019t something that came across the album charts every day. This was the dawn of a new age, and Townshend wanted to make his mark by making the first real rock and roll opera.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not like Tommy doesn\u2019t earn its spot as an operatic experience. \u2018A Quick One While He\u2019s Away\u2019 and \u2018Rael\u2019 had all been preparing the world for something more ambitious, but even if there were other concept albums out at the time, Townshend was the one who built characters within all of his songs. Paul McCartney could tell mini stories throughout his songs, but the tale of a deaf, dumb and blind boy had a lot more depth to it than meter maids named Rita or a bar brawler named Rocky Raccoon.<\/p>\n But even if Macca and Townshend were kindred spirits in some respects, The Who\u2019s mastermind was looking for something different than the Beatle\u2019s whimsical ditties. Bob Dylan had proved that lyrics could mean more than a silly love song, but when that kind of lyricism reached the other side of the Atlantic, Townshend was already interested in what The Kinks were doing on their records.<\/p>\n There was already a certain dangerousness behind \u2018You Really Got Me<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018All Day and All of the Night\u2019, but when Ray Davies brought things down a bit, he was telling the kind of stories that everyone else didn\u2019t have the guts to tell. \u2018Waterloo Sunset\u2019 may have been one of the finest pop songs of that decade, but looking at how far England had come in that time, Townshend knew that Davies was writing about a version of England that had been forgotten about for so long.<\/p>\n