Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes<\/a>,\u201d the lively and somewhat scattered documentary that just premiered at Telluride. As music docs go, it\u2019s a serviceable rock ride, with plenty of great archival footage that\u2019s never been seen before. (It\u2019s been culled from long-lost 16mm reels shot at Holmhurst Manor in 1972, as well as Townshend\u2019s home movies and outtakes from the Who\u2019s 1970 Isle of Wight performance.)<\/p>\n\n\tBut the power-chord side of Townshend ends up taking something of a back seat in \u201cBehind Blue Eyes.\u201d The movie is more interested in his anguished moody poetic side, the one that created the great rock opera \u201cTommy\u201d (a work nearly as pivotal as \u201cSgt. Pepper,\u201d and one built around Townshend\u2019s childhood trauma), as well as his desire to expand beyond it by making rock over into something bigger, bolder, more confessionally grandiose.<\/p>\n
\n\tTownshend was a Mod who grew up into a rock intellectual who still talked like a bloke. He\u2019s incredibly thoughtful, and always has been, but he could also be something of a doomy drama queen. He led the early Who with burn-it-all-down ferocity, yet was always concerned about the effects of rock, wanting it to stay positive. The film sketches in how Townshend got his start in art school, and in his case it really stuck. He wanted rock to be an art form. He swiped the idea of guitar-smashing from films he was shown as a student of avant-garde classical musicians destroying pianos. His days with the Who began as a lark (he never planned to make a career of it), but the group became a draw in West London. There\u2019s a great clip of them from 1965 playing \u201cI Can\u2019t Explain,\u201d with its tight chords that were so \u201950s yet so new, as Townshend bops out to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s strange, though, that \u201cBehind Blue Eyes\u201d skips over the epochal moment of \u201cMy Generation,\u201d one of the 10 most seismic and influential songs in the history of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. When punk finally came along, the movie talks about how Townshend, who totally dug the punk scene, tried to cozy up to Johnny Rotten and got nowhere. It notes how much influence the Who had on punk \u2014 but that would be \u201cMy Generation,\u201d which the film never got around to mentioning!<\/p>\n
\n\tOther jarring omissions: We\u2019re informed that Keith Moon, the Who\u2019s thrash genius of a drummer, died of a drug overdose (the drug was chlomethiazole, a sedative prescribed to alleviate the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal), but the movie never says a word about his drinking. (He might have been the biggest drinker in the history of rock.) And while we\u2019re told that Townshend was dead set against making a movie of \u201cTommy,\u201d the film leaves out the impact of Ken Russell\u2019s opulently feverish 1975 big-screen version.<\/p>\n
\n\tThere\u2019s already a definitive movie about the Who, the formative rock doc \u201cThe Kids Are Alright\u201d (1979), so Marshall and Sinclair may have felt that they could sort of skip through the band\u2019s career. Yet \u201cBehind Blue Eyes,\u201d though it is a film about Townshend, remains very, very Who centered. Townshend, who\u2019s 81 now, sits for an extended interview, wearing a red wool cap over his bald head. He is open and circumspect, with a disarming gentleness. He tells the Who\u2019s story \u2014 as does Roger Daltrey, who sat down for the filmmakers \u2014 with a ripe feeling for the heights they scaled and a wistful sense of how far away the feuds and valleys now seem.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cBehind Blue Eyes\u201d opens, quite dramatically, on the crisis Townshend was going through after \u201cTommy\u201d became a majestic success. Townshend had evolved his whole idea for a rock opera out of the two years, starting at age four, when he was abandoned by his parents and sent to live with his sexually debauched grandmother. He was never abused, but he says he was so distraught that he literally tuned out reality; he became that \u201cdeaf, dumb and blind kid.\u201d Townshend composed and recorded the music for \u201cTommy\u201d at home (in demos that were then built on in the studio). The band, at that point, had become entirely his. (He says the other three band members just wanted to party and sleep around.) But once \u201cTommy\u201d changed the game for the Who, how could they top it? In films from the time, we see the fear frozen onto Townshend\u2019s face.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Holmhurst Manor footage shows the members of the Who sitting around the Jacobean country house in East Sussex that was purchased by Roger Daltrey in 1970 (it was one of those aristocratic estates that noise-making British bands of the \u201970s loved to record in), hashing out where they were going to go next. Because they had no idea. And we see the chaos they were feeling. Success had left them stranded, creatively, the same way that U2 were before they pulled themselves together to go in a new direction and make \u201cAchtung Baby!\u201d We also see how testy and difficult Townshend could be. That can happen when you\u2019re the leader who doesn\u2019t know where to lead. Watching this footage, I kept wishing that someone had made a Townshend biopic 30 years ago starring the young Ralph Fiennes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut, of course, the Who pulled through and found a new level of sonic triumph. I\u2019ve often gone easy on the hagiographic side of music docs, and the reason is simple: While I prefer to get the full picture, if a movie plays down the dark side of an artist, but captures that artist\u2019s music and career with vibrant appreciation, that can be enough to make an enlightening and captivating film. But \u201cBehind Blue Eyes\u201d may be a special case. The movie centers itself on Pete Townshend\u2019s contradictions, his growing pains, his turmoil, and his complexity as a human being and rock artist. And that\u2019s all good. But given where it sets the bar, there\u2019s too much left out.<\/p>\n
\n\tWe learn a great deal about Townshend\u2019s struggle to make \u201cLifehouse,\u201d an unfinished science-fiction rock opera that he became obsessed with to the point that it starts to sound like something out of \u201cSpinal Tap.\u201d But we learn virtually nothing about Townshend\u2019s close relationships, notably his two marriages. In 1980, when \u201cRough Boys,\u201d his first solo single, was released, Townshend gave interviews acknowledging that he had, for a time, led a gay existence. Why isn\u2019t that in the movie? And though we hear the gritty addiction details of Townshend\u2019s dark period (when he\u2019d become a junkie and was, by his own description, drinking three bottles of Cognac a day), what I wanted from the documentary wasn\u2019t a bottoming-out-and-getting-sober narrative. I wanted the movie, and Townshend himself, to go deeper into why he descended into addiction.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs a rock biography, \u201cBehind Blue Eyes\u201d is \u201cexploratory\u201d yet fuzzy. It\u2019s not as riveting a portrait of the Who as \u201cThe Kids Are Alright\u201d was (though there\u2019s consistently great stuff in it), and for all its confessional aura it doesn\u2019t leave you feeling that you truly know and understand Pete Townshend. It\u2019s more like you\u2019ve glimpsed him around the edges, without quite touching the bad man, or the sad man, behind blue eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every rock god has his ultimate gesture of power, and for Pete Townshend it was not the way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206,354670,75574],"class_list":["post-837815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-pete-townshend-behind-blue-eyes","tag-telluride-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}