Rock's dread legacy

It’s all over the sad news, how the aging Who guitarist, Pete Townshend, was taken in for police questioning for downloading images of child porn on the Internet. He wasn’t the only one, of course, but easily the most prominent and his hours-long detention the most publicized, as there were also dentists, judges as well other professionals who were apprehended in Britain’s vigorous crackdown on suspected pedophiles.

The explanation of Townshend, known for his windmill style of guitar playing accented by The Who’s Dionysian destruction of their musical instruments after performance, was that he was researching his own vague memory of abuse at the hands of an uncle when he was five or six years old, which episode we are given a brief glimpse of in the rock opera, Tommy.

Townshend’s work, and not just Tommy with its "See me, feel me, hear me, heal me" parable of a dysfunctional pinball wizard, is fraught with dark and foreboding images, imbedded deep beneath the din of guitars, bass and drums, not to mention Who vocalist Roger Daltrey’s mic twirling antics.

After Tommy there was Quadrophenia, which was like schizophrenia times two, although in many ways it could be considered an analogy of The Who’s four disparate personalities, two of whom have since passed on to the great beyond – drummer Keith Moon known for throwing television sets out hotel windows, and the brooding low-profile bassist John Entwistle.

In more ways than one it would be safe to say that The Who is no more, though Townshend himself has been busy putting out solo albums and writing his autobiography, certainly a much-awaited event since he has always been the more literate of rock stars, full of concepts both aural or otherwise. An early solo album, "White City," is subtitled as a novel, while the later "Psychoderelict" hints at sadomasochism in its narrated filler between songs.

It is precisely because of his tortured songwriting genius that can never put Townshend in the league of his more wholesome contemporaries who have since been granted the order of knight, whatever it’s worth – Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Elton John.

Townshend, forever the outsider, was never cut out for knighthood. Does the rap on our favorite suspected pedophile diminish the sheen on such works by The Who as the rambunctious "Live at Leeds," or the anthem-like My Generation or Magic Bus, or even the never fading Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again? It’s only middle-age wasteland, we might well say, paraphrasing a line from one of the abovementioned songs.

Aside from the seminal "Who’s Next," there’s also "Who by Numbers" of the late unlamented ’70s, with its reflective number Blue Red and Gray: "Some people go for those sultry evenings/ sipping cocktails in the blue red and gray/ but I like every minute of the day."

The controversy of Townshend’s Internet misadventures, however, pales in comparison with the news of the arrest of reclusive producer Phil Spector for suspected murder. Spector, admittedly a shadowy eccentric figure, has posted a substantial bail after he was named a prime suspect in the murder of a woman whose body was found in his mansion in the usual swanky but decadent Hollywood suburb.

It was Spector who pioneered the Wall of Sound in producing records, when they were still pressed into vinyl and rotated on the turntable at 33-1/3 or 45 rpm. His Wall of Sound literally left no breathing space for unwanted instrumentation or vocalization, everything deliberate and rushing at you in melodious acceleration courtesy of the sound engineer’s control room.

There were many imitators, but only one Spector. Neil Young tried and approximated the Wall of Sound in a few of his earlier albums; among them "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere." Leonard Cohen, writer and counter-culture pop singer, remarked that he never knew it would be an ordeal working with Spector on the album, "Death of a Ladies’ Man," according to wire reports.

And what to make of, say, Michael Jackson dangling a baby over a balcony just to scandalize some fans? Can we all consider it as another chapter of rock’s dread legacy?

For those closer to home and who believe that rock and roll went out with Eddie Peregrina and Little Anthony and the Imperials, there’s some comfort to be had with a documentary film by the independent filmmaker Roxlee on the equally dread Pinoy rock legend, Pepe Smith.

Batumbuhay is pure cinema verite, says Rox, who is a fan of both Smith and Townshend.

Roxlee couldn’t be bothered less by record producers killing their girlfriends, or white-looking black men dangling toddlers several stories from ground level, as he puts out on a surreal frequency the counter-movie rag, Cinema Regla, which is part Heavy Metal, part PTYK, and 100 percent irreverence, which dose we all need in this cusp of a stupid war.