The Who – It’s Hard

 

The Who – It’s Hard

By

Jesse E. Mullen

 

You’ve achieved legendary status all over the world. You’ve released at least five albums which belong in anyone’s top 100 rock albums. And then the tragic loss of key member threatens to derail everything. How do you recover?

So was the story of The Who after 1978. Formed in London as The Detours in 1959, the group spent several years slugging it out on the club circuit before settling on a stable lineup, and a group dynamic that was all their own.

Of particular importance to the group dynamic was the tension between all of its members. Bassist John Entwistle didn’t play the traditional “backline” role but functioned as a de facto lead guitarist. His melodic lines worked against the pyrotechnics in human form bashing of drummer Keith Moon. And lead singer Roger Daltrey never got along with Townshend.

In spite of the tension – or perhaps because of it - The Who would go on to record classic after classic album of “Maximum R&B.” From the pirate radio tribute of 1967’s The Who Sell Out to the story of a troubled Mod in 1973’s Quadrophenia, the group were able to fully realize songwriter/guitarist Pete Townshend’s high concepts – thus taking rock ‘n’ roll in a more serious direction.

However, this is where things began to get messier. On the first night of the Quadrophenia tour, Moon collapsed onstage after overdosing on animal tranquilizers. The show went on – albeit with a fan behind the kit – but it was a harbinger of things to come.

Townshend was beginning to feel as if his glory years had passed him by. Despite only being 28 at the time, it appears that he was feeling middle-aged by rock standards. The next two albums – 1975’s Who By Numbers and 1978 Who Are You – reflected this weariness. Be it “However Much I Booze” or "Music Must Change," one can tell where Townshend’s headspace was. But none of this would compare to the difficulties which were yet to come.

On September 7^th, 1978 – just three weeks after the release of Who Are You – Keith Moon died from an accidental overdose of clomethiazole, a drug used to treat alcohol withdrawal. Moon’s death sent the group into a state of shock.

Ultimately, it was Daltrey who rallied the troops into carrying on, despite the loss of a seemingly irreplaceable drummer. After much deliberation, Moon’s replacement ultimately turned out to be Kenney Jones. The former drummer for Mod group Small Faces was also a drinking buddy of Pete Townshend’s.

Soon after Jones accepted the role, Phil Collins also offered his services. As no public announcement had been made, Collins assumed that he would be considered. Unfortunately for him, the role had already been filled.

With the drum stool settled, The Who were able to carry out their touring duties for Who Are You. At the conclusion of the tour, Pete Townshend recorded his first solo album of the new decade. Released in 1980, Empty Glass marked a shift in Townshend’s writing.

While still featuring classic elements of The Who’s sound – loud guitars, ringing melodies, choruses in a different tempo and key than the verse – it was very different than what was heard before. Musically, the tracks were influenced by the new wave movement of the time.

And while a weariness is still detectable in Townshend’s writing, he sounds almost settled here. There is the obligatory song dealing with Moon’s death – “Jools and Jim” – but Townshend seems to have found inner peace on the rest by looking inwardly.

Which isn’t to say that Townshend was “settled” in The Who. Their next album – 1981’s Face Dances – carried over some of the introspective elements of Empty Glass but received mixed reviews. And Daltrey’s relationship with Townshend was ever prickly, accusing the writer of saving his best songs for his solo albums.

With all of this in mind, The Who quickly entered the studio (in this case, Glyn Johns’ facilities) in June of 1982 to record another new album. But given their recent problems, how would this record sound? And could Townshend marry his new style of writing to The Who?

The ensuing album, It’s Hard was released in September 1982 on Polydor Records. From a production standpoint, it again featured the classic Who sound of loud guitars and clever synthesizer programming. And like Townshend’s recent work, it (again) featured songs dealing with more personal subject matter.

Opener “Athena” began its life as a song Townshend wrote called “Theresa.” The lyrics dealt with a situation at a Pink Floyd performance of The Wall, where Townshend’s advances towards actress Theresa Russell were rejected. However, the title was changed to “Athena,” a move Daltrey criticized as getting too far from the subject matter.

Nevertheless, it is a strong opener, with a bright major key melody played by Entwistle on the horn. Entwistle is omnipresent on the track, as his contributions on the bass are noteworthy as well. The rumbling, ping-ponging effect – which Rolling Stone noted upon release of the track – leads the song into its verse and back into its iconic “she’s a girl (she’s a bomb)” chorus.

Actually, Entwistle is omnipresent throughout the album, contributing three compositions: “It’s Your Turn,” “Dangerous,” and the skipping rhythm of “One At A Time.” A strong case could be made that this was because of the quick turnover rate between 1981’s Face Dances and 1982’s It’s Hard, giving Townshend less time to write. But that doesn’t mean that Townshend’s songs aren’t uniformly excellent.

“A Man Is A Man” features spooky synths and gorgeous rising/falling vocal harmonies between Daltrey and Townshend in the chorus. “Cooks County” fuses pulsating synthesizers and passionate Daltrey vocal in the verses with up-tempo drumming and high harmonies from Townshend in the chorus.

The title track is also a blast. While not part of a rock opera, “It’s Hard” captures the feelings of The Who’s grandiose concept albums in one song. With lyrics such as “Any tough can fight/few can play” and “Any stud can reproduce/few can please” it would seem that Townshend was defending his honor as a songwriter after the criticism of Face Dances. (The fast chord changes also gave Townshend plenty of opportunity for windmilling when The Who played it on tour.)

“I’ve Known No War” features eerie tremolo guitars, pounding “Kashmir”-esque drums, and a passionate vocal from Daltrey. As both Daltrey and Townshend were born at the tail end of WWII, the subject matter fitting. Both the lyrics and the music echo the anxiety they must have felt in the Cold War-era of the early 1980s.

But Townshend’s best composition on the album is “Eminence Front.” An anxious pulsating synthesizer sample opens the track, before giving way to Jones’ drums and Townshend’s guitar riff grooving along at mid-tempo, followed by Townshend’s lengthy intro guitar solo. By the time Townshend steps up to the mic, a minute has gone by.

The lyrics deal with familiar territory for musicians – rockstar excesses, particularly cocaine. But whereas other songwriters (Lou Reed, Mick Jagger/Keith Richards) wrote about the effects of drugs, Townshend instead dealt with the idea of using drugs as a façade to hide behind – thus hiding “behind an eminence front.”

The song was both a huge commercial and critical success, reaching number 68 on the Billboard Hot 100 upon release. It was later ranked as the 10^th best Who song by Rolling Stone.

But perhaps the best song on the album is John Entwistle’s “It’s Your Turn.” The bassist writes from the perspective of an aging rockstar giving advice to a younger musician.

At first the lyrics appears to demonstrate the elder musician’s status and superiority over the younger one: “I was a face in a magazine/When you were still playin' with your plasticine."

But the elder soon realizes that by looking the younger artist in the eye, he sees a younger version of himself in the lad: “I know you young and dumb/I know where you're comin' from. Don't know where you're goin' to/But I been there same as you.”

The young artist takes it in stride, also realizing that the two aren’t all that different, saying that he has “made the same mistakes” that the elder made in his younger years.

By the end the veteran rocker has sympathized with the young buck, even offering a few words of wisdom: "It's your turn, step up and take it/If you've got the guts to hang on, you can make it"

Musically, the track bears a strong resemblance to “Behind The Lines” by Genesis, with some very tight drum fills by Kenney Jones and bing-bing-biiiiing synthesizers played by Entwistle. There are nice tempo shifts and key changes from the verses to the bridge and to the chorus, which give the track a nice sense of variety.

Unlike other Entwistle compositions, this one is sung by Roger Daltrey. And as with Townshend’s greatest compositions, Daltrey makes this one his own vocally. He grunts, pauses on just the syllables, and lets loose with his upper-register wail on the final “ooooh… TAKE IT!!!”

It’s easy to imagine Daltrey identifying with both characters in the song, having cemented his legendary status in rock by the mid-1960s, but singing these words in 1982. While Townshend had (mostly) settled down and gotten away from writing about where he fit into the “new” musical landscape of the 1980s, it must have been cathartic for Daltrey – and the rest of the group – to exorcise the demons one last time.

Which brings us to the present. In the 40 years that have followed It’s Hard, The Who have released just two albums, 2006’s Endless Wire and 2019’s WHO. They’ve broken up, reunited, broken up again, and reunited yet again. Townshend damaged his hearing and had a brief brush with the law.

Most significantly was the death of John Entwistle in 2002. As the last studio album featuring his contributions, It’s Hard is lent an extra poignance through his absence.

While The Who have made better records in the past, this was the last time that they felt like a “group.” It’s Hard might not get the acclaim of the earlier records, but it is better than most remember it being. And on that merit alone, it is worth checking out.

Polydor/1982

 

 

Jay Bennett – Bigger Than Blue

 

Jay Bennett – Bigger Than Blue

By

Jesse E. Mullen

 

You’re a member of one of the most acclaimed indie bands of your time. You can play more musical instruments than can be counted a human’s fingers and toes. Your mind is overflowing with ideas. And then it all goes away.

So was the story of Jay Bennett in the summer of 2001. He had just finished work on the fraught sessions which gave birth to Wilco’s seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. He was likely looking forward to whatever came next with the group – touring, superstardom – but it didn’t happen that way.

Frontman and co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy summoned Bennett to the Wilco loft one evening in August 2001, and – according to Learning How To Die, Greg Kot’s 2004 oral history of the band – looked Bennett in the eye and strung together a metaphor that still lives on in infamy in Wilco lore: “a circle can only have one center.”

Whatever the truth of that may be, one thing is for certain: Bennett was no longer in Wilco. And while he quickly rebounded from that, releasing a new album with Edward Burch, The Palace At 4AM (Part 1) on the same day as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, he would soon have more grief to give him inspiration.

First was his divorce, which as Bennett himself said “there is no such thing as a happy divorce.” On a more public level however was his portrayal in the 2002 Sam Jones documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco which covered the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Whether through editing or slicing together footage from separate days, Jones cast Bennett as the villain. A pompous know-it-all who lacked the tact to deal with intra-band relationships. However, according to a new documentary – Gorman Bechard’s 2022 film Where Are You, Jay Bennett? – this was fabricated by only including footage where Bennett was acting this way and no other members of the band.

With all of this weighing heavily on his mind, Bennett dealt with it the only way he knew how – make another record. Or three. His creativity and inspiration was overflowing to such a degree at the time that Bennett had more songs than he knew how to deal with.

Always a prolific multi-instrumentalist, Bennett turned into a bit of a “mad scientist” during this period. He would frequently record songs with multiple basses, multiple keyboards, and random sound effects generated from vintage toys which he repurposed as musical instruments.

But prolificy is one thing. The real question is, how did all of this music sound? And could Bennett capture all of his sonic glory going it alone? The first album of the trilogy, Bigger Than Blue, was released on April 20^th, 2004. And it shows Bennett in his full glory.

The album begins with the quiet acoustic strumming of “My Little Wicked One.” Bennett sings in his warm baritone to a lost lover – presumably his ex – saying “I owe you everything, I owe you all of my pain,” and asking her “why can’t you control yourself?” It’s a slow, pretty tune which also manages to draw the listener in.

Next up is the irreverent “Charming And Plastic.” A jaunty rocker which manages to sound like The Byrds, Jeff Lynne, and George Harrison, it’s a lot of fun. The lyrics also manage to reference Billy Bob Thorton and Dr. Seuss in the same line.

On a more serious note, is “Let’s Count Our Losses.” A slower country-influenced track, with (more) George Harrison-esque slide guitar and electric piano, Bennett seems to be singing about excesses of a different, non-musical kind. He sings “this rut’s too deep, you’ve cut me down to scale this time,” and that “you could lay your heart down on that line/and I’d still cross it.”

Bennett also questions his sobriety on this track wondering if he’ll ever be so again. However, this seems to have a double meaning, as the previous lyrics deal with the end of a relationship. That relationship seems to be one where neither party is willing to admit defeat, thus Bennett waving the white flag in surrender. “We’ve wasted too much time/Let’s count our losses.”

Back to the Wilco saga, Bennett was heavily involved in the Mermaid Avenue project, where he, Tweedy and English songwriter Billy Bragg selected lyrics from the Woody Guthrie archive to turn into completed songs. As Guthrie dealt with a neurodegenerative disease for the last several years of his life, he was no longer able to play guitar or sing.

However, he wrote hundreds of sets of lyrics, with little notes on them, possibly instructing future songwriters how to “finish” them. One of the most famous examples was “California Stars” where Woody wrote “there’s not a ton of lyrics, so sing em twice.”

But just because Bennett was no longer in Wilco, didn’t mean he wasn’t going to continue the project himself. Bigger Than Blue featured the love song “Cajun Angel.” Set on a shrimp boat in Louisiana, Guthrie wrote a lovely set of lyrics describing a woman with lips like red berries and a voice like an angel.

In Bennett’s hands, the song is poignant and minimal on the sonic landscape, with just a finger-picked acoustic guitar, a national steel guitar, and Bennett’s warm vocal. Bennett also adds a melancholic element – which wasn’t apparent in the original set of lyrics – playing in the key of E minor. A wistful and soothing track.

Speaking of melancholy, perhaps the track which best fits that description is “Songs That Weren’t Finished.” Perhaps recognizing the overflow of ideas for songs that he had, Bennett uses his unfinished works as a metaphor for his inability to save a relationship. Could it be addressed to an ex? Or is this one to Jeff Tweedy himself? Only Bennett knows for sure.

Musically, it’s a sparse tune with keyboards, minor key acoustic guitars, and brush-stroke drumming. Bennett adds high harmonies in the bridge which sweeten the arrangement and make the track an almost-sequel arrangement-wise to “Poor Places” off of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

But perhaps the track with the strongest resemblance to that album is the closer, “God’s Coffee.” No Bennett album would truly be complete without at least one track which is draped in a sonic landscape. And this one fits the bill.

Bennett adds mellotrons (which move from the right speaker to the left), intentional audio dropouts (remember those on old tapes?), backwards guitars, and a rising/falling acoustic guitar melody. It’s a lot of fun to hear Bennett back in full “Wilco” mode, experimenting with recording technology and just generally having a blast.

But unfortunately, the good times wouldn’t last forever. Bennett died in May 2009, due to a leaky pain-patch while awaiting hip surgery. He was 45. But even if Bennett’s ending was a tragic one, his body of work and creative spirit lives on in Bigger Than Blue.

Undertow/2004

 

Gorman Bechard - Where Are You, Jay Bennett?

 

Gorman Bechard - Where Are You, Jay Bennett?

By

Jesse E. Mullen

 

I normally use this blog to write about albums which are – in my opinion – not properly appreciated by fans and critics alike. But today I would like to draw attention to a new film which does the same thing. A film which tells the story of a misunderstood genius who died far too young.

Gorman Bechard has directed a fabulous documentary about the life of late multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett. Utilizing audio recordings of an interview with Bennett, combined with new animations to go along with the discussions, it truly makes it feel like Jay is in the room with the viewer. This is often contrasted with interviews with Bennett’s mother, reminding us that he is no longer here.

Musical friends and collaborators also frequently pop up, and there is a healthy use of archival concert footage. But one of the great surprises is the footage of Bennett working on his beloved Toyota and talking about the glory days of his former band.

Or the little clips of Bennett harmonizing with a college friend on an apartment fire escape. Bechard masterfully weaves these elements into the patchwork of the overriding narrative – that Bennett was an ordinary man with extraordinary talents.

He was someone who would have so many ideas in his head for a song that he would often leave it in an unfinished state, only to move onto another song and repeat the process. This overflow of ideas was a treat for his fans but didn’t always make for easy collaboration.

It once took two different studios to sort through all of his multitrack recordings to finish mixing an album. (Bennett was known for playing most of the instruments on his solo records, adding a myriad of overdubs.) His kitchen sink approach didn’t just affect his solo work, however.

Bennett is most famous as a member of Wilco, contributing heavily to classic works such as Being There, Mermaid Avenue, Summerteeth, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. His work with the group is the heart of the film, culminating with his dramatic exit in August of 2001.

While a previous documentary about the band – 2002’s I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco – dramatized that event in a way which made Bennett appear to be the villain, this film makes it clear that Jeff Tweedy played an equal role in the end of the relationship. The big takeaway, the underlying goal of the film, is that there just wasn’t room for two geniuses in Wilco.

Bennett was the experimental mastermind, while Tweedy understood the commercial side of things. It was a great marriage while it lasted – something Bennett himself says in the film via audio interview. But it couldn’t go on forever.

The other major misconception about Bennett is that because he died of drug-related causes, that it was because of addiction. In reality, it was because of a pain patch which leaked, administering a lethal dose. Yet as recently as last week on Pitchfork.com, the prevailing narrative still states that he died of a fentanyl overdose and nothing more.

In the end, Bennett was always a misunderstood genius. A man who could play more instruments than the human hands can count. But thanks to this documentary, he can now be recognized for his incredible talents and lasting contributions to the rock music sonic landscape.

What Were We Thinking Films/2022