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The Rolling Stones threw it back to the ’80s and ’90s when they filmed their music video for Hackney Diamonds single “Angry.” Sydney Sweeney served as the video’s star, but after it premiered, some expressed concerns of her being sexualized for the shoot — claims that she addressed in her Thursday (Dec. 21) cover story […]
Five of the world’s most prominent rock ‘n’ rollers walk side by side through Times Square, just before performing three straight concerts at the Iridium nightclub. And almost nobody recognizes them. “I don’t remember anybody going, ‘Look at those guys,’” says Waddy Wachtel, guitarist for the Immediate Family, session musicians who have played with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Phil Collins, Carole King and hundreds of others since the ’70s. “It was just another semi-busy afternoon. People just doing what they do.”
Although giant-bearded bassist Leland Sklar clarifies that he did get recognized before those 2019 concerts, and snapped photos with three or four fans, the Immediate Family, stars of a new documentary, remains both unprecedentedly important and pointedly non-famous.
“If somebody stops me on the street and says, ‘Oh, I love your playing,’ yes, of course, I love that. How could you not?” says Danny Kortchmar, one of the group’s three guitarists. “But I don’t miss it. I certainly wouldn’t want the thing that Carole and James had. It didn’t do them any good, let me tell you.”
Denny Tedesco directed and produced Immediate Family to follow up his first film, The Wrecking Crew!, about an earlier generation of studio musicians who backed ’60s pop giants from Frank Sinatra to The Beach Boys. Tedesco’s late father, Tommy, was a guitarist for that band, and Denny made the film to “rediscover what he did,” he recalls via Zoom. Immediate Family was a natural next step, “like someone handed a baton over,” according to Tedesco. And while Tedesco and his wife, co-executive producer Suzie Greene Tedesco, went into debt licensing the classic songs for The Wrecking Crew!, its success allowed the filmmaker to secure financial backing for Immediate Family, including a rights-acquisition deal with indie giant Magnolia Pictures.
Shortly after Tedesco’s crew started filming in 2019, Wachtel, Sklar, Kortchmar and drummer Russ Kunkel, who’d been known for nearly 50 years as The Section, rebranded themselves as a new band called the Immediate Family. They began playing gigs on their own and added a longtime collaborator, guitarist Steve Postell, for a self-titled 2021 album.
“We enjoyed it a lot. It wasn’t a drag,” Kortchmar, 77, says of the new film. “We didn’t have to sit around for hours and hours, the way a lot of movies are made.”
Carole King, James Taylor, Danny Kortchmar in IMMEDIATE FAMILY, a Magnolia Pictures release.
Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Immediate Family begins with Kortchmar, known as “Kootch,” whose mother bought him a Stella guitar as a kid, although he didn’t take to it until he saw Elvis Presley on television. Vacationing with his family in Martha’s Vineyard, he befriended a 13-year-old Taylor; as Taylor evolved into a megastar, Kortchmar gigged in bands, first in New York, then Los Angeles, until producer Peter Asher hired him to play on Taylor’s second album, 1970’s Sweet Baby James, along with pianist King and drummer Kunkel. (Craig Doerge eventually replaced King on keys in Taylor’s band, and he was a founding member of The Section.)
After learning drums from his older brother, Kunkel played in his fifth-grade orchestra, which ejected him for playing too loud. He later joined bands in Southern California, evolving his sound into what Browne, in the film, calls “solid, but quiet, with these big toms.” Kunkel’s band, Things to Come, succeeded The Doors as the house band at L.A.’s Whisky a Go Go, and, supporting a wife and baby, he used his music-scene connections to secure studio gigs — including for Sweet Baby James. “From there, the dominoes started to fall,” he says in the film.
Sklar, a fast-fingered bassist influenced by Liberace’s piano-playing, met Taylor through a friend, and joined the singer-songwriter, as well as Kortchmar and Kunkel, at a Troubadour club gig in LA. “Next thing I know, it turned into 50-plus years,” Sklar says in the documentary. King then made her smash 1971 album Tapestry with nearly the same backup band. And unlike The Wrecking Crew or Motown’s Funk Brothers, The Section benefited from Asher’s decision to credit them on each record — drawing the attention of music fans everywhere, from future stars like Collins to Wachtel himself, who noticed Kortchmar’s name and wondered, as he recalls in the documentary, “Why is he on all these records? How does he get all these gigs?”
Wachtel, a long-haired, skinny, bespectacled guitar hero, began a lifelong collaboration with Kortchmar, a fellow New Yorker, when they played together on a Tim Curry session. Influenced by Les Paul as a five-year-old watching TV, Wachtel soaked up early rock ‘n’ roll, played in a band, moved to L.A. and sought out the studio musician scene. He was driving to a studio gig in his ’57 Chevy when he encountered another ’57 Chevy on the way out. That driver? Kunkel.
Wachtel’s car “carried me around for a while, and it literally died one day on the freeway and I just pulled over and left it there and walked away,” the 76-year-old guitarist says, in a phone interview from Ventura County, Calif. By contrast, Kunkel still has his Chevy, and, in a separate phone interview, he lovingly describes every detail, from its vertical chrome strips on the back to the original buying price of $400 to his sharing it with his adult son, Nathaniel.
“Waddy and Danny are two of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll parts-players of all time,” says Postell, 67, in a call from Marina del Rey, Calif. “Danny came up from the great R&B tradition of rhythm parts. Waddy has an incredible ability to find the right lines and the inner parts that drive a song along.”
Asher’s decision to credit the studio musicians on the album covers in the early ’70s was a “quantum change” from The Wrecking Crew days, says Sklar, 76, by phone from Pasadena, Calif. The Section, collectively and individually, went on to perform on Browne’s “Running On Empty,” Stevie Nicks‘ “Edge of Seventeen,” Hall & Oates‘ “Rich Girl,” Warren Zevon‘s “Werewolves of London,” Don Henley‘s “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” and thousands of other classic tracks. “Unlike the Wrecking Crew, we got credit for it as it was happening, not necessarily later,” Kunkel adds. “It changed all of our careers. It made us who we are today.”
The Immediate Family film documents the band’s evolution, complete with funny stories like Zevon insisting on 61 straight studio takes of “Werewolves,” before settling on the second take for his album. Conspicuously absent are the usual recollections of drug and alcohol excess that accompany many documentaries about rock touring in the ’70s and ’80s. “We did talk about drugs here and there, and there are things that are very painful for those guys,” Tedesco says. “They took in a lot of things and they survived — some did, some didn’t.”
Tedesco proceeds to tell a story about the band touring with Ronstadt in Detroit when a driver mistakenly takes them across the bridge to Canada. On the way back, worried about U.S. Customs, members of the band start throwing their drugs out the window. “One of the guys goes, ‘Probably thousands of dollars in drugs laying on the side of the road somewhere,’” Tedesco says. Sklar, a teetotaler and “real Type A kind of control-freak personality” who has never smoked or tried a single drug, wasn’t a fan of this side of his avocation. “I was never judgmental or anything,” says Sklar, also a prolific presence on YouTube. “The only time it would really get to bug me would be like we finished a gig and one of the guys would get really drunk on the bus and I knew we had eight hours in the bus and they immediately started saying, ‘I love you, man. I really love you.’”
Also absent from Immediate Family are references to the Mellow Mafia, a longtime Section nickname due to their work with Taylor, King, Ronstadt, Browne and others. A Rolling Stone 2013 profile of the group included the headline “The Knights of Soft Rock.” Wachtel, who has played in Keith Richards‘ raucous solo band, The X-Pensive Winos, for decades, is especially sensitive to this language. “These are just phrases you don’t really want to be associated with,” he says. “I’m a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player and I play all kinds of music.” Kortchmar is even more pointed. “My answer to that is ‘F— you!’” he says by phone. “Don’t ever call me ‘soft rock,’ man. I really hated that terminology and I still do. There’s nothing soft about me and about the music we play.”
When headliners Eric Wilson, Bud Gaugh and Jakob Nowell took the stage shortly before midnight at the Teragram Ballroom on Dec. 11 in Los Angeles for a benefit concert for Bad Brains frontman H.R., they didn’t officially have a band name. It wasn’t until the second song during the rousing set that Nowell announced he was now leading the band his late father, Bradley Nowell, first launched with Wilson and Gaugh in 1998 — the beloved Long Beach alternative, rock and reggae group Sublime.
One week later, on Monday (Dec. 18), Rome Ramirez, lead singer of the group Sublime with Rome — the Sublime spinoff that has performed classic Sublime songs and Ramirez’s original material since 2009 — announced he was ending his run performing with the group. The announcement followed news that the Nowell family, along with Wilson and Gaugh, had effectively laid the groundwork for the younger Nowell to take over his father’s role and lead the band into a new era.
Briefly, in 2009, Wilson and Ramirez toured under the name Sublime but were sued by the Nowell family and eventually reached a legal settlement and license agreement with Nowell’s wife, Troy Dendekker, to tour under the moniker Sublime with Rome.
While Wilson and Ramirez were touring and performing, Jakob was developing his own musical talents, forming the Long Beach band LAW in 2013. Earlier this year, Jakob and his mother agreed with Wilson and Gaugh to relaunch Sublime with Jakob at the helm under the management of Kevin Zinger and Joe Escalante.
What this development means for Rome Ramirez is not totally clear. In a statement, the singer announced that “after almost two remarkable decades, I am announcing my departure from Sublime with Rome at the close of 2024. The upcoming performances over the next year will allow us to reflect on countless incredible memories together!”
Sublime with Rome currently has four dates on its website scheduled for 2024: Feb. 16 at Cali Vibes Festival in Long Beach, April 12 at Cattle Country Festival in Gonzalez, Tex., April 20 at Hard Rock Live in Atlantic City, N.J., and an April 27 headliner show at Red Rocks.
“Over the last 2 years I’ve been spending countless hours pouring my soul into my solo music, and the excitement to share these songs with you is building up! I’ve got some really big news that I can’t drop yet. Just wait,” Ramirez’s statement continued. “Singing and playing guitar for this iconic band has been a lifetime opportunity and just flat out, absolutely epic. Carrying on the Sublime legacy has been a trust I’ll forever cherish. This is only the beginning…”
Sublime with Rome has put out a total of three albums, including its 2011 debut record, Yours Truly, which peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. They followed that up in 2015 with Sirens, which peaked at No. 34 on the tally, followed by Blessings in 2019. The band has consistently headlined festivals and in 2023 collaborated with Slightly Stoopid on the track “Cool & Collected,” along with a joint 27-date summer tour.
Colin Burgess, the original drummer for AC/DC, has died. He was 77. The legendary rock band announced Burgess’ death through social media on Saturday (Dec. 16). A cause of death was not given. “Very sad to hear of the passing of Colin Burgess,” AC/DC captioned a photo of the drummer on Instagram. “He was our […]
Brittany Howard reaches No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart as a solo artist for the second time with “What Now,” which rises to the top of the Dec. 23-dated tally. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The song rules in its ninth week on the […]
If you booked a concert lineup featuring The Go-Go’s’ Gina Schock, L7’s Donita Sparks, Suzanne Vega, Amanda Palmer and Heart’s Ann Wilson, the show would offer a pretty wide range of musical styles. The same holds true for the experiences and opinions those artists and 15 others share in Katherine Yeske Taylor’s She’s a Badass: Women in Rock Shaping Feminism, which Backbeat Books will publish Jan. 16, 2024.
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She’s a Badass is the first book for Taylor, a veteran rock journalist who also contributes to Billboard. (She’s currently collaborating with Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz on his memoir that’s expected to be published in 2025.) The interview collection documents the gender-based challenges each woman has faced in their career, as well as their determination and perseverance.
Their stories run the gamut from shocking to humorous to enlightening. (The author of this article also contributed a quote.) Joan Osborne, a longtime Planned Parenthood advocate, recalls being banned from Texas’ Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion after expressing support for the organization from the stage during a 1997 Lilith Fair tour stop. Cherie Currie — whose former group The Runaways gets cited as a cautionary tale about how the industry has exploited females — tells an unexpected story of forgiveness in her relationship with late band founder-manager Kim Fowley; his complicated legacy includes Runaways member Jackie Fox claiming that he sexually assaulted her. Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray, who grappled with self-acceptance as a lesbian during the act’s ’90s heyday, faced sexism and homophobia on the level of being underpaid for her performances, and getting punched by a drunk man who called her a “d–e.”
She’s a Badass began taking shape when a literary agent familiar with Taylor’s work approached her about doing a book. “We agreed that feminism and women in rock was a topic that really hadn’t been addressed in a book before,” she observes. “There are a lot of books about women in rock and a lot of books about feminism. But when I went to do the proposal for this, I couldn’t find another one that was about this topic.”
Courtesy Photo
Sourcing artists for the project wasn’t difficult; Taylor had previously interviewed some of them and put out asks for others. However, along the way, she revised the book’s thesis because she wasn’t expecting there would be “a certain number of women in this book who do not identify as feminists and have a real problem with some of the things that the feminism movements have done,” Taylor explains. “And it’s not because they don’t agree that women should be equal. It’s just that they disagree with the approach or what that label ‘feminist’ signifies now.”
She adds, “But I think that’s healthy. I think it shows more of the full spectrum of opinions that are out there about it. And I think the really important thing to note is that everybody was on the same page in terms of wanting to move women’s equality forward.”
Taylor also emphasizes that She’s a Badass isn’t “a male-bashing book,” for all the interviewees made sure to point out when men lent their assistance: “Everyone went out of their way to at least tell me one story where there was something where a man helped them.” Currie, for instance, cites touring mates Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Cheap Trick as being supportive; in high school, Palmer’s drama teacher let her protest a song in her senior year musical, Carousel, that normalized domestic violence by letting her perform her own tune during intermission. “So the message is pretty clear that these women don’t hate men. They hate that certain men treated them this way.”
She concludes, “I feel like with their honesty, they really captured the pretty full spectrum of women’s experience in rock. There’s no way to capture absolutely every single viewpoint, but I think that this group of women really did a good job of illustrating all the different kinds of good and bad things that can be encountered in this business.”
In the following excerpt from She’s a Badass, Ann Wilson recounts how her anger about sexism fueled Heart’s hit song “Barracuda,” and how an unsavory publicity stunt made her and her sister-bandmate, Nancy Wilson, break from a record label. (To preorder a copy, go here.)
Wilson certainly wasn’t submissive and quiet — but even so, she was taken aback by the misogynistic culture that permeated the music business at that time. Ironically, one of her encounters with this type of bad treatment also sparked one of Heart’s biggest hits, “Barracuda,” which was released as a single in 1977. Scathing and soaring, it has become one of the band’s signature songs.
“It was probably late ’76 or something, ’77, maybe,” Wilson recalls. “A guy who came up to me in the dressing room after our set said to me, ‘Hey, how’s your lover doing?’ I said, ‘He’s fine; he’s right over there,’” and she motioned to Mike Fisher. “And then the guy went, ‘No, no, no—I meant you and your sister. You and your sister are lovers, right?’
“I had this strange bunch of emotions that hit me right after he said that. At first it was like, ‘Wow, huh.’ And then it was like, ‘God damn it, this is a sleazy business after all. What was I thinking?’ Because Nancy and I really had this idea that we were songwriters carrying cool messages to the people. We had no idea that we would be perceived, even by a sleazeball, as two porno chicks together in a band. It made me really mad, not only at him but at the industry and at my decision to be so naive and consider myself some kind of spiritual pilgrim with these songs. I got so mad and confused, I wrote the words to ‘Barracuda.’ It was mostly just venom that I felt.”
Soon after, Wilson encountered another notorious example of how badly women could be treated in the music business. Forty-five years later, she still sounds irritated as she recalls this incident.
“Our record company was really good. They believed in us. But they had this publicist at the time; his idea was to put a full-page ad in Rolling Stone that looked like a tabloid cover, and for it they used an outtake from the Dreamboat Annie cover session where [Nancy and I] had circles under our eyes and we looked really kind of bad. And the caption was, ‘It was only our first time.’ So the way it looked was, we just got out of bed from having fucked each other. My parents were offended. We were offended. Everyone was offended—except for the record company, because they sold a lot of records because of it.
“All of it became so distasteful to me that I just thought, ‘No, this is going in the wrong direction for our dignity and for our souls. This is not how we want to be perceived. I don’t care if it sells records or not. This is just ugly. It’s the lowest common denominator, and I’m not going to go there.’ So we decided to change labels. Our producer, Mike Flicker, also left over it. We just went, ‘We’ll take our chances someplace else.’”
Breaking that contract prompted Mushroom Records to sue the band. The lawsuit was filed in Seattle, where the members of Heart had relocated. “That’s probably where we lucked out, because if it had gone in front of a judge that was more familiar with the music industry, like in L.A. or something, we might not have prevailed. But we did,” Wilson says. “This judge in Seattle went, ‘You can’t stop these local girls from doing their craft. So back off.’”
Despite winning the case, the Wilson sisters didn’t feel entirely victorious, as they were worried that standing up for themselves would get them labeled as “difficult” or otherwise hurt their long-term career prospects. “We felt that no one else was going to want to touch us because we were such divas,” she says.
Fortunately, that fear turned out to be unfounded, as Heart went on to ubiquitous radio play through the rest of the 1970s and on into the 1980s, when they became popular on the then brand-new MTV network. Though relieved that they had adapted to the times and remained successful, Wilson recalls that it was difficult for her and her sister to suddenly have so much attention paid to their looks, not just their music.
“It was sort of like you were put on a movie set with trained dancers and people who were actors and actresses, and expected to be one of them,” Wilson says of making music videos in the 1980s. “I know in my case, I’d just always been a musician. I’d never been a dancer or an actress or anything like that, so it was really uncomfortable at first to try and measure up to that. And,” she says with a laugh, “you can see it in some of the old Heart videos, the styling and the bad acting that both Nancy and myself did!”
MTV provided a new visual-based promotional medium for bands—but in truth, Wilson says, the focus on women’s appearance has been the case forever. “I think there’s always been an image thing, for all women. That’s always been an obstacle. There’s a very small window of acceptability that’s put on women, image-wise. Or if it’s not image, then it’s ageism, or it’s something else.” She says this is particularly true for women in music. “There’s always some reason why you shouldn’t be doing this if you are a woman.”
She worries when she sees how many young female artists these days seem to focus on appearance over talent in order to get noticed. “If you’re good-looking and you wear tiny hot pants and all this kind of stuff that is commonplace now for women in the music industry, you can only do it for so long before your body changes. The inevitable decline. So you’d better have a lot more than just your body.”
Five decades after Heart began their rise to fame, Wilson sees how women are still treated differently than their male peers — it happens “constantly. All the time,” she says. “Sometimes it’s disappointing because you’re sending the music from your soul, and why does it have to get hung up in the gender issue? It’s a human broadcast, not a gender one.”
Reprinted with permission of Backbeat Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield.
Patti Smith told fans on Thursday morning (Dec. 14) that she is “resting, as the doctor ordered,” following a brief stay in an Italian hospital to deal with what’s been described as a sudden, unnamed illness.
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“This is thanking all at the hospital for their help and guidance,” Smith wrote in an Instagram post in which she is pictured standing in the middle of a group of eight hospital workers in scrubs. “I am so sorry that we had to cancel concerts in Bologna and Venice. I will return to fulfill my happy obligations. This is also to thank all the medical teams globally, who attend to the people’s needs, especially those altruistically serving under fire, all healers, physicians, nurses, attendants,” she continued.
Italian media reported that Smith was taken to the Maggiore Hospital on Tuesday due to a “sudden illness” that resulted in the cancellation of her planned show at the Teatro Duse in Bologna that night; she was reportedly released after the short visit to the ER. “With great regret, we inform the kind audience that the [Patti Smith] concert scheduled for today 12 December 2023 at 9 pm will not be able to go on stage due to a sudden illness that struck the artist,” the venue wrote in an Instagram post.
The artist/poet’s planned show tonight at the Teatro Malibran in Venice has also been cancelled.
Hospital press officer Illaria Maria Di Battista told People that the head of the emergency unit, Dr. Alesso Bertini, told her that, “Mrs. Smith was very polite and collaborative with us which made it easier for us to do our job t the bet of our capabilities.” Battista added that Bertini also said, “She [Smith] is such a person of reference for us and for so many generations. We even had the opportunity to speak about music and our favorite songs.” Another hospital source said that Smith hugged and thanked the medical staff before leaving.
A spokesperson for Smith had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment at press time.
The “People Have the Power” singer shouted out her fans in the Insta post, writing, “Also I want to thank everyone for sending messages of love and concern. I am resting, as the doctor ordered, grateful to have had such care, though being painfully aware that many are not so fortunate.”
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is slated to perform in Chicago at the Salt Shed on Dec. 27
See Smith’s post below.
Releasing a groundbreaking debut album, touring the world and racking up a whopping six Grammy nominations are just a few of the accomplishments achieved by indie rock group Boygenius in 2023. But as band member Phoebe Bridgers tells it, there was nearly one other crowning achievement for the trio that didn’t quite pan out. In […]
Pete Townshend chased his white whale for more than half a century. The legendary Who guitarist and songwriter has been trying to bring his sprawling, dystopian sci-fi epic Lifehouse to life since he first wrote the follow-up to the band’s iconic rock opera Tommy in 1970. Through several re-writes, false starts and re-imaginings, Townshend has struggled to bring his epic vision of a future world in which music is outlawed by the tyrannical despot Jumbo 7 — and saved by a group of idealistic underground rock rebels via a massive, mind- and spirit-melding concert — to the masses.
“I’d gone back to it a few times and tried to get it to make sense and several times I’ve worked with other creative people, producers and writers who, in a sense, tried to ‘fix’ what they thought was wrong with it,” Townshend tells Billboard in a Zoom call from his London study. “But in the case of this graphic novel what happened is people who trusted the original idea and used those [original scripts I wrote in 1971 and a 1978 revision] to create the bulk of the story.”
Those people include the graphic novel’s authors, James Harvey (Doom Patrol) and David Hine (Spider-Man Noir), as well as illustrator Max Prentis, with lettering by Micah Myers and ink by Mick Gray. A limited-edition run of 1,000 copies of the project — which is being released in a square, vinyl-sized box — signed by Townshend and Who singer Roger Daltrey, will be released by Tower Records on Jan. 20 and Rockbox Studios (pre-order here), with standard and deluxe versions coming from Rockbox and Image Comics on Dec. 19.
The bulk of the original songs Townshend wrote for Lifehouse ended up on The Who’s 1971 album, Who’s Next, including such iconic tracks as “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and the song that provides the beating human heart of the graphic novel, “Baba O’Riley.”
Though the story appears to predict such future technology as AI, music streaming and attempts by despotic dictators to control what we see and hear, Townshend says he doesn’t see it that way. “The writers took the original script at face value and where it was a bit weak — or fantastic or beyond sci-fi — [and] they’ve made it mischievous and amusing and colorful and crazy,” he says of the brisk pacing and jump-off-the-page illustrations. Indeed, the creative team bring the story to vivid life with anime-style explosions, gripping drama and a story that Townshend believes is much easier to follow than his original take, which he says was “overloaded” and “overcooked” with too many ideas in an attempt to catch the Tommy fire one more time.
That original kernel of a story was inspired by the two north stars Townshend says have always stoked his creative machinery: the time he spent with his abusive grandmother as a child following his parent’s split — which made him retreat into a world of fantasy and imagination — and the inspiration he took from attending art school in his early teens.
It was there that he learned about the functions of early computers from IBM, as well as the first wave or analog synthesizers. “I got myself a couple of big synths and realized one of my missions I wanted to achieve with Lifehouse was to get some of the audience to be part of a real experiment with music in which they provided data through feelings, emotions, case studies and counseling sessions,” he says of the ambitious first iteration of the project, from which he planned to produce musical scores based on each person’s feedback.
The Who gave it a shot, setting up at the Young Vic Theatre in London — only to draw such a poor turnout (despite Tommy‘s recent success) that they ended up playing a fairly standard Who show featuring some of the new songs to a thin crowd. “It was a story on the one hand and an experiment on the other, so I very cheekily said, ‘Well, we ain’t got a computer, so I’m going to be the computer!’,” Townshend recalls thinking. The idea at the time was that Townshend would “process” all the music — and when a serviceable, affordable computer came long he would feed the data into it.
Despite how complicated that all sounds, Townshend is overjoyed at how uncomplicated the story in the graphic novel turned out. “The book has brought Lifehouse into the modern world, and when it arrives, the modern world it has caught up with some of it,” he says of the seemingly prescient technological bits he dreamed up half a century ago. “Now it feels understandable and easy to access and enjoyable and it really does add some essence to the songs.”
There is, indeed, plenty to love for diehard fans of the band’s music, including the masked Slip Kids rebel brigade and a mid-book concert by the “cryogenically frozen” band after a 200-year deep freeze. In a nod to the ravages of time, in the book Townshend’s joints and fingers have been replaced with the “best, most flexible materials,” allowing him to play faster than ever, as well as newly perfectly tuned ears; in real life the guitarist suffers from tinnitus and partial deafness due to the Who’s legendarily loud concerts. Singer Daltrey’s vocal cords — on which he has had surgery to help alleviate cancerous growths — are also spruced up, along with a fresh circulatory system for late bassist John Entwhistle and unnamed body part replacements for hard-hitting late dummer Keith Moon.
While readers might spot modern parallels to a few of the more outrageous characters, Townshend says they are all fabrications — with the exception of the nefarious person who controls The Grid, Jumbo 7. He says in the original script, Jumbo was a sound tech/roadie loosely based on Thunderclap Newman. “He first introduced me to recording from tape-machine-to-tape-machine and he was a great model of a crazy guy who invents ways to subvert the technological grid and take it over for a concert,” he says of the keyboardist of the eponymous group best known for the 1969 hit “Something in the Air.”
For Townshend, the central conceit of a strong-arm ruler outlawing music feels as fresh today as it did in the 1970s. “That was a testament to the force of modern music as an irritant against organized political factions who wish to use it for their f–king rallies or censor it for their purposes,” he says. “Bringing people together to listen to music can appear to the closed minds of autocratic and theocratic governments to be dangerous.”
Well acquainted with such pushback from the powers-that-be to songs of youthful rebellion (see “My Generation”), Townshend says the graphic novel is really the “ultimate reflection of the individual and their individual loving soul.” As for the idea in the book of creating a “One Note” that serves as a musical lifeline composed of the heartbeats and brainwaves of citizens — a noble, but perhaps also slightly ominous goal — Townshend says he sees it as a kind of “poetic meme.”
“The idea is that we all like different stuff, we all live different lives, but we are all human and we come from somewhere, which, when we boil it down to quantum physics, we’re all made of the same stuff that produces our consciousness and that’s what the Lifehouse story is about,” he says. “It’s about losing the individual ego trapped in our consciousness in return for finding a universal consciousness.”
And while Lifehouse ropes in mind control, artificial universes and the ultimate technological search for the music of the soul, when you boil it down, Townshend says it’s really the most basic, elemental story ever told. “If you grasp the idea of incarnation, karma and consciousness as being a big ocean in which we are all little drops,” he says. “When we try to get together you lose yourself in the ocean at the expense of for a bigger, grander, more universal [notion].”
When asked if he can finally put Lifehouse to rest now that the graphic novel has presented his knotty tale in a fashion that seems to elate him, Townshend is predictably restless. “The story is complete,” he says confidently, before adding a tease that the modern streaming age might provide yet another chapter to the story they said couldn’t be told. “But there are film people already interested in it as a series, or an animated movie.”
Check out an image from Lifehouse below.
Courtesy of Rockbox Studios/Tower Records
The Masked Singer season 10 is heating up, and the judges are trying to narrow down on their guesses for the celebrities behind the mask.
The Group C finals are taking place on Wednesday night (Dec. 13), and in an exclusive clip shared to Billboard, the judges panel tries to figure out who the Anteater is. In the one-minute clip, both Robin Thicke and Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg agree that the Anteater is a rock legend, but they varied on who exactly he might be.
While Thicke opted to guess Jackson Browne, McCarthy-Wahlberg suggested that maybe the singer behind the mask is Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.
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During the Group C finals, the finalists are set to perform songs representing key moment in their life, including “Georgia on my Mind,” “I’m Going Down” and “Johnny B Goode.” Two celebrities will be unmasked leaving only one to move on to the season finale.
So far, the stars eliminated from this season’s competition include Sebastian Bach, Ginuwine, Ashley Parker Angel, Metta Sandiford-Artest, Luann de Lesseps, Tyler Posey, Billie Jean King, Michael Rapaport, Tom Sandoval, Anthony Anderson and Demi Lovato.
In addition to Anteater, the contestants still in the competition include Candelabra, Cow, Donut, Gazelle and Sea Queen.
Catch the full “Soundtrack to My Life” episode of The Masked Singer on Wednesday (Dec. 13) at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. Watch the clip of McCarthy-Wahlberg and Thicke putting in their guesses for the Anteater below.
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