The film includes a lot of great footage of the Who, but it's most interested in Townshend's anguished moody poetic side. Every rock god has his ultimate gesture of power, and for Pete Townshend it was not the way he liked to smash his guitar (though that came close). No, the quintessential Townshend power sign was his giant circular windmill strum, arm outstretched and twirling, gathering centrifugal force to slam that pick up through the guitar strings, creating the loudest chord humanly possible.
The impulse behind that gesture — the destructive fury of it — is the same one that gave rise to Led Zeppelin and punk. And you get to see Townshend do it a bunch of times in Frank Marshall and Nigel Sinclair’s “Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes,” the lively and somewhat scattered documentary that just premiered at Telluride. As music docs go, it’s a serviceable rock ride, with plenty of great archival footage that’s never been seen before. (It’s been culled from long-lost 16mm reels shot at Holmhurst Manor in 1972, as well as Townshend’s home movies and outtakes from the Who’s 1970 Isle of Wight performance.) But the power-chord side of Townshend ends up taking something of a back seat in “Behind Blue Eyes.” The movie is more interested in his anguished moody poetic side, the one that created the great rock opera “Tommy” (a work nearly as pivotal as “Sgt.
Pepper,” and one built around Townshend’s childhood trauma), as well as his desire to expand beyond it by making rock over into something bigger, bolder, more confessionally grandiose. Townshend was a Mod who grew up into a rock intellectual who still talked like a bloke. He’s incredibly thoughtful, and always has been, but he could also be something of a doomy drama queen.
He led the early Who with burn-it-all-down ferocity, yet was always concerned about the effects of rock, wanting it to stay positive. The film sketches in how Townshend got his start in art school, and in his case it really stuck. He wanted rock to be an art form.
He swiped the idea of guitar-smashing from films he was shown as a student of avant-garde classical musicians destroying pianos. His days with the Who began as a lark (he never planned to make a career of it), but the group became a draw in West London. There’s a great clip of them from 1965 playing “I Can’t Explain,” with its tight chords that were so ’50s yet so new, as Townshend bops out to it.
It’s strange, though, that “Behind Blue Eyes” skips over the epochal moment of “My Generation,” one of the 10 most seismic and influential songs in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. When punk finally came along, the movie talks about how Townshend, who totally dug the punk scene, tried to cozy up to Johnny Rotten and got nowhere. It notes how much influence the Who had on punk — but that would be “My Generation,” which the film never got around to mentioning!
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