The Big Green House

Monday, November 10, 2003

 

The Who sell out. Again.

I went to court over it, you know... You know, you see a bathroom-tissue commercial, and you start hearing "Let The Good Times Roll," and the paper thing's rolling down the stairs. Why would anybody want to mortify and humiliate themselves? Well, it's just business, you know? The memory that you have and the association you have with that song can be co-opted. And a lot of people are really in it for the money. Period. A lot of people don't have any control over it. I don't own the copyrights to my early tunes. So it is unfortunate, but there are a lot of people that consciously want their songs exploited in that way, which I think is demeaning. I hate it when I hear songs that I already have a connection with, used in a way that's humiliating. I mean, in the old days, if somebody was doing a commercial, you used to say, "Oh, gee, too bad, he probably needs the money." But now, it's like hocking cigarettes and underwear with rock 'n' roll. I guess that's our big export. It's like how a good butcher uses every part of the cow. I don't like hearing those Beatles songs in the commercials. It almost renders them useless. Maybe not for everyone else, but when I hear it I just think, �Oh, God, another one bites the dust.�
-Tom Waits, on the plague of pop songs in advertising

I have finally lost my last few tattered shreds of respect for Pete Townshend.

In the past, I was a very big fan of The Who. Just absolutely dug everything they did, up through Who Are You?, anyway. I wore out two copies of Empty Glass, and one of All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (although I still remain perplexed by the title). Pete was the perfect combination of the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of rock & roll for me, if you�ll allow me that little lapse into rockcritspeak. He was the guy who busted shit up and had a functional brain. Granted, he had a tendency to overthink some things, but that�s not always bad.

But the solo albums grew ever more pretentious and the Who albums became increasingly bad. Can anyone explain to me WHY THE HELL THEY DIDN�T JUST KNOCK IT IN THE HEAD WHEN KEITH MOON DIED? I found myself scratching my head. Still, I saw them on their first post-Moon tour. And on the first farewell tour, with The Clash. What can I say? I was a fan. When the farewell tours became a semi-annual tradition, though, I stopped buying tickets.

And then we had the Broadway musical of Tommy.

You have no idea how much it pains me to write that sentence.

Rock & roll and Broadway are antithetical to one another. To maintain otherwise is to miss the point of both, as far as I can see. However, there are people out there who would argue that statement, I guess. (I�m grateful that I don�t know any of them, but they must exist. Somebody bought all those tickets.) At any rate, the appearance of the Tommy musical caused me to seriously rethink my fan status.

This situation was only exacerbated by the Claritin ads featuring the overture from Tommy. I can almost justify them in my mind, since anti-allergy meds are a necessary part of the lives of many, many people. Still, my preferences are similar to those of Mr. Waits, as quoted above. Yeah, the work belongs to its author, who is free to do with it as he/she sees fit. I understand that. What I wish more authors understood is that when they sell those rights, they�re also selling the memories and associations of their fans.

The decision to continue last year�s tour after the death of John Entwhistle was yet another disturbing Townshend move. If the tour absolutely had to go on, as I�ve heard argued (and I�m certainly in no position to comment on the financial realities of such a thing), they should have at least retired The Who as their name and carried on as, I dunno, Who�s Left. For my money, it ceased to be The Who when Moon died, doubly so with the passing of Entwhistle. At what point does a band become diluted into extinction by the subtraction of original members?

The very last straw crippled the camel this weekend. Science Girl and I went out for lunch Sunday afternoon, to a bar near Science Manor. They were showing the Raiders/Jets game on the various TVs scattered around the place. I was on my way to the men�s room when I heard the familiar bass rumble of �Happy Jack� coming from the nearest TV. I stopped in my tracks, to see what the commercial was for.

It was an ad for the Hummer.

If my life were a movie, I would have run to the restroom and vomited up my lovely lunch. Thankfully, such is not the case.

I did feel queasy, though. I can turn a blind eye to a lot of the other stuff, but this shameful pimping of Hummers is beyond the pale. There�s just no excusing it.

bmarkey 11/10/2003 08:49:00 PM