After the fire

The music of our teen years still has power - even if those who wrote it fall from grace

by Eric Marks

After the fire, the fire still burns
The heart grows older, but never ever learns
The memories smoulder and the soul always yearns
After the fire, the fire still burns
-Pete Townshend

W

hen I looked at the headline on the news story, it hurt. Not like a quick punch, but more like a slow stomachache - the kind you get after you¹ve swallowed something that¹s going to take a long time to digest.
The headline read, ³WHO rocker Pete Townshend arrested in kiddie porn sweep.²
To most readers, this must have seemed just another rock Œn¹ roll scandal - an entertainer caught with his pecadilloes exposed. But to me, it was as though someone had just yanked a record needle across the soundtrack of my life.
Pete Townshend? Kiddie porn? Screeeeeeeeeaaaaaaach!!!
Most people remember Pete Townshend - if they remember him at all - as the windmilling guitar player from The Who, the guy who was always smashing his instrument at the end of the hits ³Pinball Wizard² and ³Won¹t Get Fooled Again.² But I¹m a child of the 1970s, which means I wasn¹t old enough to really get into The Who as rock Œn¹ roll hellraisers. The Pete Townshend whose music means the most to me is the solo performer of the 1980s to the present - a hard-of-hearing, balding middle-aged guy with a moody streak who can still play a mean guitar.

There seems to come a time for most teenagers when they get as interested in music as they ever will be. For me, it was the year I turned 16. I can remember Grade 10 math classes that I spent writing out page after page of lyrics that I¹d learned by rote, singing along with my homemade cassette tapes until the music dissolved into hiss and pop. Most of those tapes were of Pete Townshend.

Let me flow into the ocean;
Let me get back to the sea.
Let me be stormy, let me be calm
Let the tide in and set me free

Townshend had been a lonely kid, not unlike the young Alden Nowlan. There was poverty, craziness and brutality in his childhood, but he found an avenue out through music. Like the deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard at the centre of The Who¹s rock opera, Tommy, he played by intuition and improved through constant practice, focusing his emotion and hammering it out through his fingers, achieving fame through the energy and dexterity of his performance.

Ill fitting clothes, and I blend in the crowd,
fingers so clumsy, voice too loud;
but I¹m one. I am one!
I will be; you¹ll all see, I¹m the one.

Pete Townshend, the raggedy child, created Pete Townshend, the rock star, out of nothing but desire and willpower. It was a pretty powerful example to a kid like me, who couldn¹t really imagine a place for himself in the future even though adulthood was looming on the horizon.

I heard a voice asking,
what happens after the fire?
and the sound of a breaking window, and the scream of a tire
and then the sound of a Brixton gun
and the scream of a child.
This night is hot, and nothing¹s going to stop
this gang running wild.

But the Gibson axe Pete townshend picked up cut both ways. He grew famous for abusing his guitars, but at the same time the excesses of life as a rock star were destroying him. Townshend¹s wild career in music killed two of his best friends, smashed his hearing, left him an addict, almost wrecked his marriage, almost killed him. It also produced some of his best music - the albums Quadrophenia, Empty Glass, White City and songs such as The Sea Refuses No River and After The Fire.

I saw Matt Dillon in black and white, there ain¹t no colour in my memories
He rode his brother¹s old Harley across the tv while I was laughing at Dom DeLuise
I¹m cycling all my video tapes,
I¹m crying and I¹m joking
I¹ve got to stop drinking, I¹ve got to stop thinking, I¹ve got to stop smoking
Œcause after the fire, the fire still burns

I don¹t know whether I found Pete Townshend¹s music when I did because I was starting to grow up, or whether I grew up a little faster because I discovered Pete Townshend.
I think his biggest selling point as a role model was that he had done every stupid thing you can imagine, and it hadn¹t killed him. He was a survivor, rueful and angry, but also wiser. His music - call it pop, pap or poetry - rocked. It was swift as running water, warm and salty as blood. His songs helped teach me that we have the power to transform our lives, that if we try we can get around every obstacle in the way of happiness, and must; and that the process of growing up never ends.

Rain fills the gutters;
no time for stutters.
Now is our chance to sing and to dance and to clown.
The sea refuses no river
and rivers were sprung to drown.

I never really stopped listening to Pete Townshend¹s music, though at some point, I found other guitar heroes with a similar outlook - Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Billy Bragg.
In some ways, each contributed to my decision to become a writer, Townshend maybe the most of all, when I learned that he had become a respected journalist and an editor with Faber and Faber.
Later, when I lived in England for a couple of years, it was Pete Townshend¹s London I sought out with the most curiousity - the ratty White City of his childhood and the upscale Richmond of his dapper Faber and Faber days. I thought I even saw him once, in the outdoor market at Shepherd¹s Bush.

White City! I finally grew up
to resist the temptations the gutters threw up
but I had to go back - I guess I¹m violence prone -
to remember the White City fighting.

When I listen to his songs now, it¹s like rereading passages of a favourite book - the music sounds just as good as it always has, and I usually find something new in it that I haven¹t heard before.
So, how do I feel about my musical hero getting arrested as part of a child porn investigation?
Surprisingly, not too bad. Pete Townshend may be guilty of dealing in pornography - or, as he maintains, may simply have visited the wrong Web site in researching his crusade against the kind of abuse he suffered as a child. He hasn¹t been charged yet, let alone convicted.
Whatever the truth may be, it doesn¹t alter the lesson I found in his life and music: that to err is human, and to struggle to overcome the smallest, meanest qualities of ourselves is both the hardest task we face and the closest we come to approximating the divine.
Sometimes we succeed in bettering ourselves; sometimes we fail spectacularly. What matters most is that we try our utmost. As Townsend wrote two decades ago, the sea refuses no river -

We're polluted now, but in our hearts still clean.
We tried not to age, but time had its rage;
we're washed over stones from babes into clones of the mean.

The sea refuses no river;
won't deny this sulphurous stream.

Eric Marks is an editor for the Telegraph-Journal. He can¹t even smash a guitar as well as Pete Townshend.