Camilla Aisa – Review of 'A Band With Built-In Hate'

Camilla Aisa

Review of ‘A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who From Pop Art To Punk’

Popular Music History, published March 24, 2022

https://journal.equinoxpub.com/PMH/article/download/21897/24797

Cook’s Ferry Inn, Edmonton – learning to lead by following

To anybody who might feel like letting out a sigh and following it with ‘what else is there to say?’ as they face ‘The Who’ in big and bright lettering on the cover of a new book—you have this writer’s sympathy, completely. However, I have some good news for you. Peter Stanfield’s A Band with Built-in Hate is far from being yet another book on The Who. It is much more than that. And Stanfield’s investigation of the band is so consistently wider than simple Who-centred narratives that the book ends up achieving quite a few rare goals (more on this below).

screen grab from Pete Walker’s The Big Switch (1968)

Whilst historiographers and fact-boasting fans might expect the book’s journey to start from Shepherd’s Bush or Acton, it is (rather tellingly) Soho that Stanfield chooses as a starting (and most recurring) location. We’re invited to travel to Whitechapel—where pop music makes its UK ‘debut’ in 1956 at the Independent Group-curated This Is Tomorrow exhibition—before arriving in West London’s well-known (W)holy Land. That’s the thing with Stanfield’s book: from the very first pages he makes it clear that he has no interest in the uninspired retelling of the kind of trivia a quick visit to Wikipedia can take good care of. A Professor of Film at the University of Kent, Stanfield considers The Who—as well as their peers who surrounded the band in their early stages—through a multidisciplinary, dexterous perspective. Crowded Soho is conjured (dirt included) through the posters that populated it, promoting B-movies or upcoming gigs in local clubs.

Portsmouth’s Birdcage Club . . . ‘the pop-art, guitar smashing epic’ and a target to boot.

The very relevance of cinema and visual arts in The Who’s early life is an often-overlooked aspect that Stanfield brilliantly reconsiders. It is thanks to forgotten flicks with nouvelle vague pretensions (and, of course, thanks to Who managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp’s foresight) that we have some of the band’s earliest footage. And thanks to keen attention to contemporary graphic art and its potential, in the mid 1960s The Who were able to offer a palatable preview of both the punch-in-the-gut quality of their live performances and their bespoke take on pop’s developing self-realization: ‘I found Townshend compelling and touching in both his cynicism and self-awareness, but couldn’t help wondering if pop music which, with all its faults, had started as a spontaneous and committed movement, could survive such candour’, George Melly noted in Revolt into Style (1989: 116).

Keith Moon . . . Bridget Riley’s best canvas

The book’s originality in narrating The Who isn’t limited to time (those decisive early steps of UK pop, before the band even came into existence) and place (Soho’s youthful buzz). It also concerns people, or, as one might feel inclined to say reading printed pages, characters. It is clear from the introduction that we’re invited to take our journey hand-in-hand with a few keen observers. Not the band itself, as it might prove either too obvious or short-sighted. Our guides are larger-than-life writers, critics, astute chroniclers, real-life dandies. We meet George Melly (music, television and film critic) right away. And, most importantly, we meet Nik Cohn (considered by some to be the father of rock writing). Perhaps even more than the band themselves, Cohn is the book’s most constant presence.

Bridget Riley ‘Blaze Study’ 1962

Sunn amplifers advert

Revisiting times and places with their most insightful early champions and commentators, it turns out, is more effective than the usual sequence of ubiquitous footage. When it comes to pop creatures as gargantuan as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or in this case The Who, adopting an outside perspective can be revelatory.

Tour programme USA, 1967

Looking at The Who from an angle that is extraneous to what we might call a rock documentary-like mythologizing approach, A Band with Built-in Hate opens itself to two intriguing prospects. First, it treats its subjects as captivating provocation. The Who’s, and in particular Pete Townshend’s, volatility in embracing the attitude, vocabulary and signifiers of mod or pop art is thoroughly examined. ‘What the Mods taught us was how to lead by following’, Townshend candidly reveals at one point (37). We watch his band enthusiastically identify as mod early on, then dismiss the scene altogether, then proudly reintroduce themselves as pop practitioners: ‘from valueless objects—a guitar, a microphone, a hackneyed pop tune, we extract a new value. We take objects with one function and give them another’, Townshend theorizes in 1966 (76). Now, where exactly does artistic evolution end and well-timed appropriation begin? Stanfield’s book is too discerning to make a point of asking that. Rather, it makes sure that the matter is left open to discussion. Neither apologetic nor accusatory, it gives the reader enough material to thought-fully consider both positions.

The other welcome consequence of Stanfield’s multifaceted approach is that the book proves an absorbing read for avid fans and casual listeners alike. Much like this writer, you don’t need to be a fan of The Who to eagerly devour these pages and their stimulating arguments. At the same time, there is more than enough to consider and explore for completists who have already seemingly read every publication on the band. Also, and importantly, the book sits evenly between the scholarly and the deftly flowing page-turner: a most appropriate middle way, when you remember Nik Cohn praising Who songs for being an ‘obvious reaction against the fashionable psychedelphic [sic] solemnity, against the idea of pop as capital-letter Art [...]. It is all mainline pop, bright and funny and blatantly commercial’ (1967: 13).

As for equally pleasing fans and not-necessarily-fans, here’s where Stanfield’s secret might lie. Often looking from the outside, far from the front row, he treats the non-musical, un-obvious material as much more than mere pretext to explain The Who better. As a result, the reader is more likely to understand the band and their music—as well as the constantly evolving pop culture around them—better.

Where A Band with Built-in Hate’s journey ends is a brilliant insight in itself. ‘My personal motivation on stage is simple’, Townshend told the London Sunday Citizen in 1965 (as quoted in Gary Herman’s The Who, the first publication on the band):

It consists of a hate of every kind of pop music and a hate of everything our group
has done. You are getting higher and higher but chopping away at your own legs.
I prefer to be in this position. It’s very exciting. I don’t see any career ahead. That’s
why I like it—it makes you feel young, feeding insecurity. If you are insecure you
are secure in your insecurity. I still don’t know what I’m going to do (1971: 94).

It is fitting, then, that a book about ‘the new forms of cultural crimes The Who carried out’ would wave its subject goodbye around Quadrophenia. Which is to say, when The Who had indisputably morphed into classic rock and secured a career. When compilation albums and concept albums had become the norm, when stage moves had long been codified and (most dangerously) well accepted. When, arguably, wealth had replaced style. The degeneration of ‘My Generation’, we might call it. It didn’t come without irony or consciousness: ‘I’m desperately trying to sleep off the results of the last leg of the Who tour with a little meditative Mercedes buying’, Townshend would quip after up-and-coming Eddie and the Hot Rods convinced their label to get in touch with him and seek a possible collaboration (229).

Would the Mod Who or the Pop Who hate what The Who had become? And how inevitable was that? It might feel tragic, but that’s not the point. Being a brilliant writer and an acute observer, champion of pop Nik Cohn couldn’t write an obituary. The book leaves us with some words of his that were printed on a promo picture for the band’s 1967–1974 back catalogue: ‘from Shepherd’s Bush Mods to time machine mystic travellers. The Who played longer, harder and straighter, for the people, than anyone else’. What that dash between 1967 and 1974 signified, mattered most to him. Stanfield agrees: ‘The Who made the simple things complicated and the complicated simple; they put pop and art together in a set of couplings which rode the lines between authenticity and artifice, self-determination and co-option, the low and high, the intolerant and the permissive’ (240). When it comes to The Who, duality is key. Thanks also to its own above-mentioned dualities, A Band with Built-in Hate handles this dichotomy in a unique way.

Camilia Aisa blogs at https://psychedelicsidetrips.wordpress.com/

An Introduction to Flash

When he described his pop ideal, Cohn invariably labelled it ‘flash’. The adjective had a peculiarly English application; it was not much used in the pop vernacular of the day by American critics. But it summarized the perfect pop attributes, suggesting in its two syllables the flaring, pulsing surge of the ephemeral pop moment: the splashy, garish display of the pop star; the sharp, concise impression left by the hit of a pop single; the sham, counterfeit emotion used in pop marketing; and the illicit, underworld attraction of flash-men, flash-coves and flash-Harrys who occupied the pop world, especially those trespassers who tunnelled under or climbed over the cultural and social borders of the suburban greylands that restrained others. To have ‘flash’ meant you lived in the moment, without regard for yesterday and without thought for tomorrow. You thrived in an accelerating world, ahead of the game, blazing brightly enough to leave an impression – to have made your mark with attitude and style.

A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk

April 1971 edition of Esquire, ‘the magazine for men’, Richard Woodley provided ‘An Introduction to Flash’ for American readers

The ‘flash’ – what others might call ‘style’ – is important on the street. It’s in the clothes, it’s in the cars, it’s in the eyes, the walk, the talk. “you got to have flash”, Jimmy said. “I guess it’s like acting. We all know it’s acting, but people recognise the flash on the street. People get to know you by the flash. They suspect you’re somebody. Like, a lot of people on the street sort of know who I am. They know but don’t know. They know a little. Who’s that? Somebody will say. That’s Jimmy, they tell him. Oh yeah? The dude will say

Woodley’s piece is the story of a Harlem hustler who sells “top-shelf coke. Super-fly.” Whether or not his article was a source for the 1972 film starring Ron O’Neil, directed by Gordon Parks jr., it was certainly part of the cycle of blaxsploitation. Jimmy tells his inquisitor how the game works and as evening falls he looks down on Lennox Avenue where “the pimps’ Cadillacs were beginning to gather and double-park.” Getting ready to join them on the street, Jimmy primps himself before a full-length mirror,

Touching his Afro, smoothing his trousers, touching the butt of his automatic. He started toward the door, then came back to the mirror. He looked straight ahead at himself, icily. Then he opened the apartment door and looked down the hall. He strode to the elevator, got in, pushed the button, and rode down into the Harlem night.

Though sold as an authentic report, the piece reads more like fantasy and not so very far removed from Nik Cohn’s ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’ (1976) that formed the basis of Saturday Night Fever. It hardly needs retelling that Cohn was cavalier with the facts about the Brooklyn disco scene and imported the language, style and attitude of Goldhawk Road Mods to boost his story. Woodley’s introduction to ‘flash’ feels like he was doing much the same thing.

The story was expanded for Dealer: The Portrait of a Cocaine Merchant (Hardback 1971 and a 1972 pulp paperback the following year). Yeah, you gotta have flash.

Lou Reed Told Me . . .

Photo: Bill Ray (from Life magazine’s 1965 Hells Angels assignment)

Lou Reed, the leader of the Velvet Underground, told me that the 1965 Who electrified him into writing songs for the Velvets, which connected with the street lives of the kids around the jukebox, rather than with their fantasies – whether plastic or plausible.

Geoffrey Cannon, ‘The Who on record’ The Guardian (September 3, 1971), 8.

The Who – electronically violent, deafeningly strident

The Who This Month @BrianInAtlanta Tweeter feed tipped me to this Melody Maker review, which perfectly captures the band as both ordinary – tea-shirted [sic] Keith Moon and soberly dressed Townshend and utterly otherworldly. Hawkwind would have nothing on the Who at Yeovil:

The Who have a kind of bizarre science-fiction appeal – electronically violent, deafeningly strident, all rather removed from reality. There is no other group on the current scene remotely like them. . . there was a sort of sensual excitement about the performance – this in spite of the group’s doleful, deadpan expressions.

A Vicious Strangeness: The Who – Punk As Fuck

This bootleg could provide an alternative title and cover image for A Band With Built-In Hate, still might if I live long enough for a second edition. Discogs has it listed as a 1982 release, which I thought was fanciful as pretty much everything seemed to have been sourced from Thirty Years of Maximum R&B and subsequent CD reissues, but Jon Savage Tweeted that he’d bought his copy at the tail end of the 80’s (his is on the Brunswick label, mine is on Reaction). Consensus now appears to be early 90’s with a failed 1990 MCA box set as the source. Whatever, it doesn’t much matter, because this is not about rare cuts, instead it is all about surplus value: it’s the object itself that attracts me.

The image is, I’d guess, from around the time of ‘I Can’t Explain’, Spring 1965. Daltrey has moved back from the microphone, leaving a void at the centre that is now filled by the bootlegger’s rubber stamp. Here are four malcontents, utterly at odds with the conventions of pop promotion. Neither smiles or moody introspection, but a combined look that says not only ‘who gives a fuck?’ but more directly ‘who the fuck are you?’ How did that get translated into the pop conversations of the day?

In June 1965, Alan Smith writing about the band in the NME described the ‘four beatsters from Shepherd’s Bush’ as exuding a ‘sort of vicious strangeness’. But that conversation wasn’t taken up by others for another 11 years.

photograph by PTMadden sourced here

Book Musik Podcast 045 – A Band With Built-In Hate

“The Who – colourful to see and hear, and probably the only group whose records disintegrate half way through”

– Record Mirror Nov. 20, 1965

Find out why by tuning into the latest episode of Kimley and Tosh’s Book Musik Podcast: http://bookmusik.com

Pop Conversations – The Who Meet Nancy Sinatra

You’ll find few advocates for The Who’s ‘Call Me Lightning’. In fact, I’ve never read a word in its defence. Released it seems on not much more than a whim, a stop gap exercise between The Who Sell Out and Tommy or between ‘I Can See For Miles’ and ‘Magic Bus’. It touched #40 in the American charts, but was hidden beneath ‘Dogs’ on its first UK release, so doubly damned as that’s another forgotten 45. It was dismissed by Townshend at the time as ‘unrepresentative’ of the band’s current sound.

For me it is precisely its outlier status within The Who’s oeuvre that makes it a small treasure. I like their quirks, the second side of Ready Steady Who EP and things like ‘Waspman’. Their ephemera keeps the canon fresh, stops it from going stale. Anyway, Townshend was wrong. It was perfectly representative of what the band were doing in 1968, at least an aspect of what preoccupied them. It sits well alongside the Eddie Cochran covers, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, ‘Young Man Blues’ and the like. ‘Call Me Lightning’ is part of that return they made in ’68 to teenage pop, a restatement of the ethos of rock ’n’ roll as deadly fun.

For many commentators it remains no more than a throwaway homage to Jan and Dean, but like Townshend they too are wrong. The song’s  ‘dum–dum–dum–do-ays’ are more Dion and the Belmonts, New York doo-wop, than California surfing harmonies, equally loved by the band though they might be. The recording has an aggressive masculine spirit that is shared with ‘The Wanderer’ and is not there at all on ‘Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)’ or ‘Dead Man’s Curve’; it trades in a braggadocio wholly avoided by the West Coast duo.

The Who had already borrowed wholesale from Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’ for their Talmy produced, yet at the time, unreleased novelty record ‘Instant Party Mixture’, which is a hoot; a paean to wacky cigarettes. The subject matter undoubtedly as responsible for its nixed release, coupled with ‘Circles’, as was the copyright implications of its pilfered tune.

The song had been in Townshend’s portfolio since at least 1964, the reason for its return, I like to think, was that it now had contemporary currency. In the Autumn of 1967, Nancy Sinatra released ‘Lightning’s Girl’. Lee Hazelwood’s composition would have been a perfect number for the Ronettes or the Shangri-las, which is to say it is as late to the party as the Who’s tune. ‘Lightning’s Girl’ is a warning from a girl to a boy, whose attention is unwanted, to stay away, otherwise he’ll have to answer to her boyfriend – Lightning.

Here comes Lightning down the street
While you just stand there talking
If I were you I'd start to move
And tell my story walking
About a hundred miles an hour!

If you want to know more about this cat called Lightning, well Roger can tell you:

See that girl who's smiling so brightly
Well I reckon she's cool and I reckon rightly
She's good looking and I ain't frightened
I'm gonna show you why they call me Lightning

And his ‘XKE is shining so brightly’, which if you know your Jaguars, as Pete certainly did, then he also has ‘grace . . . space . . . and pace’, which is another good reason to call him Lightning.

Maybe I’ve misheard what this is all about, but to me it sounds like a great pop conversation: ‘Call Me Lightning’ is best taken as an answer record to ‘Lightning’s Girl’. It’s the kind of exchange pop once had around Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ with Rufus Thomas’ howling out ‘Bear Cat’ in return, or ‘Judy’s Turn To Cry’ as Leslie Gore’s answer to her own ‘It’s My Party’, or Neil Sedaka singing ‘Oh Carol’ and Carol King responding with ‘Oh Neil’, or, my favourite, The Satintones telling The Shirelles it’s ‘Tomorrow and Always’ in answer to ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’.

Great pop is always in conversation with itself

Light In The Attic have just released a double album of Nancy’s best. After having only ever heard these recordings on budget label releases, it is a sonic revelation. As always with LITA the packaging is to die for.

1967/8: Summers of Love Blues with The Who and Eddie Cochran

April 1968, The Who have added three, count ’em, three Eddie Cochran numbers to the set-list for the Filmore East gigs – ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘My Way’ and ‘C’mon Everybody’. In 1967, between the release of ‘Pictures of Lily’ in April and The Who Sell Out in December they laid down two studio versions of ‘Summertime Blues’, the first as a potential single, the second, alongside ‘My Way’, for possible inclusion on the album. What was it with The Who and Cochran that led one American journalist to report that Townshend carried tapes of the rocker wherever he goes?

The band were not alone in making a down shift in gears back to rock ’n’ roll as a reaction to the swerve taken during the high-days of psychedelia. The Beatles, the Stones and The Move, among others, felt the curve away from the music’s founding roots was too steep and attempted a recalibration, but if The Who were following a general trend then their latching on to Cochran, if not unique, had a depth and reach that exceeded the likes of Blue Cheer.

Nik Cohn thought Cochran played ‘pure rock’, whatever that might be, and he was ‘a composite of a generation . . . a generalised 50s blur’. Greil Marcus considered ‘Summertime Blues’ the ‘grammar book of rock ’n’ roll language’, but you might say the same of Gene Vincent and ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. Or maybe not, Vincent was too much of a greaser, much more of the pool hall punk than Cochran, whose performances and songs spoke more clearly to a suburban teenage dissatisfaction than to an urban disaffection. Cochran wrote teenage anthems, he worked the high school beat and the soda hop, Vincent came from the world of juke joints and honky tonks, he smelt of reefer and whiskey. In Cochran’s world, dad busted up your fun. Vincent was sui generis, without parents: it is unimaginable to think of him sitting down to Sunday dinner with mom and pop. The differences are there in their individual performances in The Girl Can’t Help It. Cochran is projected into the family home via the television set, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps are playing in some downtown rehearsal space uninvited to the party.

You might pull on Vincent’s leather jacket, like countless British rockers did, but you could only mirror back his stance and hang on to the microphone stand in a pose that mimicked him. You couldn’t better Gene Vincent at being Gene Vincent. But Cochran, his stance and pose, The Who could own. They could remake him to fit their purpose, with Townshend incorporating, as Charlie Gillett wrote, the rock ’n’ roller’s ‘chunky, resentful guitar’, while Daltrey and Entwistle could play teenage parts with a knowing wink as a counter to Moon’s arrested development.

a very rare tri-centre promo edtion . . . a homage to the original London release I believe