1980: Pete Townshend, Empty Glass
By Caryn Rose
Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend tells you everything you need to know about his first real solo album[1], Empty Glass, with the (literally) iconic cover image: Pete as an angel, with his sacrament (brandy) in front of him, flanked by acolytes, two beautiful women offering their best come-hither looks. It is a record both casually and deathly spiritual, with Townshend engaged in the latest plane of the spiritual inquest he’d been engaged in since 1968’s Tommy. Production-wise, it was sonically modern, or at least more modern than its predecessor, the Who’s Who Are You, released in 1978 just weeks before Keith Moon died from misadventure.
Unlike its predecessor, Empty Glass is an album full of fire and angst and clever turns of phrase; it is Pete Townshend at his most Townshend-esque. It is his response--both artistically and verbatim--to British punk rock and its leading lights that saw in Townshend and the early Who something that they saw themselves as standard bearers. Many of the punks sussed, quite correctly, that the band that dressed as Mods, who co-opted British style as an expression of individuality and a way of taking the piss, that made jackets out of British flags, that took auto-da-fe into rock and roll, had a similar esprit de corps. The Beatles had broken up, the Stones had become tax exiles, the Who were still slogging it out in jolly olde England. There was going to be a toreador-like pursuit and retreat with the man who wrote “Hope I die before I get old” and the kids embracing “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977.”
This is what I heard and knew and would have loved to talk about to anyone around me who would listen, which, in 1980, was exactly nobody I saw in my day-to-day life. I knew about the Who the same way anyone alive who listened to FM radio in the 1970s knew about the Who, with “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Pinball Wizard” on the radio approximately every 15 minutes. I was a fan of Elton John when I was, like, 11, so I was very excited to see Tommy in the movie theater. I had no idea what I was getting into, but that movie expanded my musical palette in unexpected directions. One of them was the Who, a band I liked well enough but didn’t really grok sufficiently until I went to see The Kids Are Alright and the tectonic plates of my life literally shifted. I didn’t take drugs but walking out of the theater afterwards I felt like I had ingested something life-changing. I had.
I wasn’t a rock and roll fan the same way the kids around me were; I had learned that ages earlier. I listened to everything, I read every article in every magazine I could get my hands on. I took what I had learned in school about using the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature (a pre-internet index) for research, and used for my purposes of learning everything I could about rock and roll music. So I would sit in the library on Saturdays or after school dragging out the microfilms and microfiches or those large enormous bound volumes of old newspapers some libraries had. I went to the library nominally to work on something for school, but mostly I went to the library because it was someplace I could go as a teenager in the suburbs where there was no public transportation to speak of, I wasn’t yet old enough to drive, and they were locations that would be devoid of the kinds of people that made my life hell. The libraries were also walking distance to various record stores. I could spend hours in a record store, and often did, more than once being late to the corner I had agreed to meet my mom at. (Eventually she would just park the car and go in and get me.)
This voracious reading habit was how I was in a position at the age of 16 to understand what Pete Townshend was talking about in “Jools and Jim,” his treatise against the New Musical Express’ enfant terribles, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons. This is how I knew about the story behind “Who Are You,” about Pete going out and getting drunk with the Sex Pistols and falling asleep in a doorway. This would be how I could try to dress as a Mod for Halloween of 1979, finding an old 1960’s suit in the Greenwich, Connecticut Goodwill, and pairing it with a New Wave skinny black tie and an old button-down shirt of my fathers, jeans and desert boots. On the lapel was a button with the old school Who logo, the arrow pointing up out of the O. I thought I was fabulous, that I had perfectly captured what Roger Daltrey had sung about, a zoot suit with side vents five inches long. The denizens of Westhill High School emphatically did not agree. Somehow, I had found a way to like a band that the general population liked and had heard of, and still get it wrong.
I cannot tell you how I knew that Pete Townshend had a solo album coming out in the Spring of 1980, whether I read it in Rolling Stone’s “Random Notes” or in some column in CREEM or Trouser Press (all of which I read cover-to-cover) or heard a DJ talking about it late one night as I assuaged my chronic insomnia as I did every night, lying in bed with my headphones on. But I was certain enough of this information to make sure that every Saturday I was at the library, that I left enough time to walk to the record store and ask if it had come in yet. Because that was literally what you did in ye olden days, unless there had been some kind of advertisement or you lived in LA in proximity to the Sunset Strip billboards or occasionally had access to the trade publications like Billboard or Cashbox (which I sometimes did - this is a longer story than we have room for here), you didn’t know a record was out until it was out or until the first single was released and you’d see the tiny “from the upcoming album” on the label underneath the title of the song.
Every Saturday, like clockwork, I’d finish up whatever I was doing and stroll down Greenwich Avenue to the record store.
“Do you have the new Pete Townshend solo album?”
“There is no Pete Townshend solo album. We tell you this every week.”
I would look at something else or buy a single or something and then stand outside and wait for my mom. Every week. It got to the point where I saw the clerks rolling their eyes in exasperation whenever I walked into the store. I pretended I did not see them rolling their eyes. This was a particularly unfriendly record store, but I did not have a driver’s license or any easy way to get to the stores who had clerks who liked or at least tolerated me, so I went to this establishment. Every week. I knew my information was right; I knew their information was, at best, incomplete. It now strikes me as extremely curious that no one ever asked, “Where did you hear that?” or think, “Here is a random teenage girl coming in every week with a very specific request, it isn’t like she’s asking for something obviously fictional like the new Beatles record or the Genesis reunion album, maybe we should look into it.”
Empty Glass was officially released on April 21, 1980, which was a Monday; of course, I didn’t know that, but when I turned on the radio and heard, “Here’s a new single from Pete Townshend” and bounced off the walls, I knew it was out. It had not previously occurred to me that I could have just waited for this to happen, but also, there was not necessarily any guarantee that a new record would be on the radio. But Empty Glass was made for FM radio, it sounded new and fresh and that guitar could only be Pete Townshend and that voice only belonged to one person. I went to the library and did a few things, mostly because going to buy the record wouldn’t make my sister’s gymnastics class end any quicker, and then I walked down to the record store. I walked in the door and up to the counter and asked if they had the new Pete Townshend solo album. The clerk rolled his eyes, but he also pointed to the rack closest to the registers that held the new releases. There it was, the halo around Pete’s head glowing, or maybe it was just my imagination. I picked it up, regarded the front image, rolled my eyes at Pete and the brandy and the “birds” (a British slang term for chicks that I had known since I was a 10 year old Beatles fan), flipped the cover over, perused the song titles, smiled. The tiniest smile. My heart was pounding, because it was here. This was my first Who-adjacent album in real time.
When I brought the record up to the counter, the manager dude was there. I knew he was the manager because his nametag said “manager,” and because the other clerks would push me in his direction when I walked in. He rang up my purchase and as he was putting it in the bag, he paused and reached under the counter. “You were a pain in the ass,” he said, “But you were also right.” He pulled out a t-shirt and a poster, and added them to my bag. I made eye contact with Mr. Manager Dude, and not really knowing what I was supposed to do here, nodded, pocketed my change, and walked out of the store to wait for my mother.
Once I was leaning against the outside wall, I exhaled, and grinned like the goddamned Cheshire Cat. I opened the bag and peeked at the tshirt, which I would save for special occasions only. I had the poster all through college, where I insisted it adorn a wall in every room I lived in. It came with me for a very long time, that poster, a reminder to myself that I knew what I knew.
Empty Glass has somehow fallen by the wayside, even in whatever wave of 80’s nostalgia we happen to be in. But I know every goddamned word to every goddamned song by heart, still. “Let My Love Open The Door” was the single (and cracked the top ten!) but the song I remember hearing on the radio was “Rough Boys,” scattershot golden Townshendian guitar riffs gloriously ricocheting off the inside of my brain. It’s not a record that the CD format helped, because it was deliberately programmed to be two halves of a whole, and going from “Jools and Jim” to “Keep On Working” in straight-ahead playlist times is jarring. You want to write off “I Am An Animal” because it has a meek and mild beginning but it ends with Pete yelling “Queen of the fucking universe.” He is chasing redemption and salvation but, again, he has been doing that since 1968. What I have always loved about Pete Townshend is his wholehearted embrace of his contradictions and his acknowledgement of them, even when he’s leaned on using them as an excuse. So on this record about struggling with spirituality and faith is accompanied by the most glorious guitar riffs, elastic vocals vibrating with multiple emotions, and production (courtesy Chris Thomas, perhaps best known at that particular moment for the Pretenders’ first album, which would be the most played record at every party in the summer of 1980) that just let you hear everything that was going on with crystalline precision.
The last two songs are part of the entire story arc but they are also their own emotional continuum: “Empty Glass” and “Gonna Get Ya.” The title track particularly encompasses the whole of Townshend’s struggles and agony over his devotion to his guru, Meher Baba; his failings as a husband; his disappointment in rock and roll, the death of Keith Moon, the Who’s disintegration into a nostalgia operation and not a vital force in rock and roll as he once knew it. It’s a mini-opera in five and a half minutes. But in case you thought he was getting too serious for a minute, Pete ends the record with his particularly Townshendian brand of self-conscious braggadocio with “Gonna Get Ya,” where he’s, again, trash talking romantic pursuits with the same level of fury and desire he attributes to religious devotion.
Empty Glass’ strengths ended up being the Who’s weakness, because Townshend took his best songs off of the top of the pile this time instead of saving them for the next Who project. In his tumultuous, kinetic biography of the band, Before I Get Old, music journalist Dave Marsh correctly noted that many of the songs on the record would have well-suited the band and been marked improvements in what was ultimately chosen to be on their final two albums, Face Dances and It’s Hard. He’s not wrong, and those were both terrible, deflating albums absent all of the qualities that made Empty Glass so electrifying; they were not records that were exciting purchases.
But by the time Face Dances came out a year later, I had my license and access to a car, and I also knew when the record was coming out because I had ingratiated myself with a cadre of record store clerks. So I could head downtown on a Saturday and walk into Discount Records where a copy of the record was waiting for me, already bagged and under the counter, because it didn’t come out until the following week, but no one was going to notice. “Yo, Caryn, that single? What is up with that?” said Danny, pulling the bag out from underneath the counter. That guilt-by-association, you’re representing the team aura is something from that time that I am glad to have experienced, because it made me make sure that I knew my shit, or at least be willing to cop to my hero’s defects: “You’re not wrong,” I confessed, “but what am I gonna do? It’s my band.” He nodded in understanding, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and handed me a tightly rolled-up poster that I rightly guessed was a promotional poster for the record. “It’s your band,” he said.
[1] Who Came First, released in 1972, was an assemblage of demos and other privately released recordings not much above demo status, and Rough Mix, the record he recorded with Ronnie Lane in 1977, was, well, a record he recorded with Ronnie Lane and not a solo record per se.
Caryn Rose is a music writer, archivist, and historian who has contributed to publications such as Pitchfork, NPR Music, Vulture, Salon, Pollstar, and Billboard, among others. In 2018, she authored five essays, ranging from Aretha Franklin to Joan Jett, for the anthology Women Who Rock, and in 2017, she contributed an essay on Maybelle Carter to the collection Woman Walk the Line. Her next book, Why Patti Smith Matters, will be published by the University of Texas Press in Spring of 2022. She currently resides in Detroit.