William Faulkner put it best in his novel, Requiem for a Nun, when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For Pete Townshend, for so long the creative force behind the Who, the past never seems to leave him. With good reason. It was Townshend who wrote the band’s legendary and groundbreaking concept album Tommy, Townshend who crafted the band’s only slightly less legendary Quadrophenia, and Townshend who will forever be worshipped as the man who made windmill strokes the ultimate rock and roll cliché.
He is also the man who, in 1970, lovingly created, and then reluctantly discarded one of rock’s greatest nearly projects, Lifehouse, the great abandoned Who sci-fi album that eventually surfaced as Who’s Next a year later. Intended as a follow-up to Tommy, a song cycle centered around “vibrations” inspired by the spiritual master, Maher Baba, that inadvertently anticipated the birth of the internet, Lifehouse has become the lingua franca of Townshend’s career; the loadstar, the jewel, the Rosebud.
