The Toy Box: Pete Townshend

Despite only being 1985, Pete Townshend's, White City: A Novel, would be his last. A concept album at its core, focusing on the story of low-income housing, and the families within White City, a district near where the artist grew up.

To support the record, Townshend starred alongside Andrew Wilde, and Frances Barber in the film, White City: The Music Movie, directed by Richard Lowenstein. Though it was dubbed an interesting movie, overall, it was critically panned, widely considered a poor movie with an incoherent story. To be fair, most critics felt the same way about The Who's Tommy, which became a cult classic.

While the guitar work on the opening track gave me the feel goods, and hooked me, admittedly, the overall premise was goofy and fell flat. I'm sorry, but singing for five minutes about, Give Blood, comes off more as a commercial for the Red Cross than a serious song.

As the album played out, I frankly lost interest in it, instead more interested to peruse the many Christmas related cartoons which would soon fill my television as December 2025 approached. I checked in mentally here and there, and while I could appreciate the solid instrumentation, the songs just weren't doing it for me.

When White City ended, I was actually a bit surprised, because the whole listening session felt relatively short. This wasn't a bad thing, all things considered.

It's a flat ending for me in my trip with Pete Townshend, but it's also something I'm not too upset about. I picked this album up for a buck on a whim at a local used CD store. It's not like I actively sought it out, so I'm okay with this outcome. Would I have like something hidden within it? Sure, but no big loss.

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Pete Townshend's 1980 solo effort, Empty Glass, really came out of left field for me, and hit me with a solid listening session with quite a few hidden gems that I simply wasn't expecting. It got me super excited to immediately jump into his 1982 follow-up, All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, a n excessively long title I've typed so many times that I really look forward to never having to do so again.

Unlike its predecessor, upon its release the album was critically panned. Pretentious, meaningless, failure, and mess, were all words used to describe it.

I suppose the best way I would explain it is that if you took everything Empty Glass brought to the table, strip it away, but keep the same deep composition and melodies of music, you get this record. It's definitely not on the same level as its predecessor, and in that right, it's disappointing. It's overall lackluster punch quickly drained my enthusiasm for hearing it, and by track three, I fell deeply into fatigue.

Granted, while definitely a contributor, that may not have been the full responsibility of All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes. I was, at this point, on a six-album marathon of Retro Spins on a lazy Saturday. Perhaps it was destined to fail in that right.

By the end of track four, I opted to hit the pause button and walk away for the rest of the day. Doing so was potentially to the benefit of the album because returning to it with a refreshed mind, I found some tracks to grab. These included Exquisitely Bored, Communication, and Uniform. Slit Skirts was also okay, but I'm not 100% on board with that one as of this writing. These tunes took on that familiar Who sound, in fact pretty much the remainder of the album did, leaving me all the more convinced that a break was definitely the right call.

While I initially thought this was going to be a bust, I'm happy to say that All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, does redeem itself, and once again invigorates me to continue forward with Pete Townshend. In doing so, I come to his final 80's entry, White City: A Novel, which I'll check out tomorrow.

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