I’m no musicologist, but would lay odds (gentleman’s bet, don’t need Shohei trouble), that The Who’s songs are played in more TV shows and movies than any other “classic rock” band—discounting Martin Scorsese’s OCD tic of including the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” in almost every film he makes.
I was reminded of this the other night while watching an episode of Waking the Dead and a snippet of The Who’s “The Seeker” was in the background. Forgot how much I dislike this song, with its uncharacteristically jejune Pete Townsend lyrics, and it’s doubly odd that the song was the first single released after the band’s still-exceptional 1969 double-LP Tommy, and in the midst of their exceptional run from 1964-73. Quadrophenia was the last gasp of brilliance from Townsend and Roger Daltrey, although I doubt that’s a common opinion. (Incidentally, while eating lunch at the Huntington Woolworth’s counter in ‘69, I somewhat unscrupulously convinced Mark Stilwell to swap his new copy of Tommy for the The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, a dog I played just twice. Pang of guilt? No way, all was fair game in record collecting on a tight budget.)
“The Seeker” came out in 1970, and it was a puzzler. Some lyrics: “The call me The Seeker/I’ve been searching low and high/I won’t get to get what I’m after/Till the day I die/I asked Bobby Dylan/I asked The Beatles/I asked Timothy Leary/But he couldn’t help me either.” Townsend said later it was a crummy song, but unlike most print newspaper and magazine articles from that era that’ve been erased by the internet, the song won’t disappear. At the time, I wondered why Pete was name-dropping so promiscuously and for no purpose. By contrast, at the end of 1970, John Lennon’s “God,” from his best solo record John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, angrily sang that he didn’t believe in Jesus, Kennedy, Elvis and The Beatles, “I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality.”
Nevertheless, The Who’s bomb (I can’t think of a similarly embarrassing dud by the Stones during their 1964-72 blitzkrieg; and The Beatles, up to the half-baked Abbey Road, rarely issued clunkers, usually with Ringo on lead vocals, although “Michelle” stands out), once it entered my consciousness for the first time since I was 15, proved valuable, tangentially, in relation to current events.
I applied it to a garbled Maureen Dowd column in The New York Times, misleadingly (SOP now) headlined “Criminal Fights Crime,” in which she’s confused, one-gummy-too-many, exhausted or just sick of trying to get under Trump’s skin. It was nominally about The President’s deployment of federal troops in D.C.; that much I figured out. She writes (cliché alert, italics mine): “City officials and many liberal residents are outraged over Trump’s painting D.C. as a hellscape and flooding the zone with law enforcement and troops. Protesters around town held up signs reading ‘Fascists’… It’s also true that many D.C. residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what the statistics say, they don’t feel safe.”
Maybe Dowd, in her I’ve-got-Bette-Davis-eyes way, paraphrased the 1970 Who song and sang to herself (like Diane Keaton in Shoot the Moon): “I asked Peter Baker/I asked Susan Glasser/I asked Ambassador Clooney/I asked Dana Milbank/But he couldn’t help me either.”
She throws in an obligatory line about Trump as the “biggest” crook in town, but admits that she’s once again carrying pepper spray in her jaunts around D.C. She tells the story of her sister Peggy’s Byzantine experience with local city cops after her car was stolen, then found, along with speeding tickets racked up by the joy-riders/punks, which she had to waste time at a police precinct spooling up the red tape. Not long after, Peggy’s Buick, while she was shopping at Bloomindale’s, was t-boned in the parking lot.
Dowd’s perplexed, concluding: “Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend everything is fine here. Because it isn’t.” If Mr. Diabolical was permitted to seek a third term in 2028, it’s not so far-fetched (at least in secret) that Dowd would tick her ballot for him. After Trump’s melancholy speculation of getting to heaven (paraphrase: “It’s not looking good, I’m pretty low on the totem pole. But maybe if I bring peace to Ukraine, that’ll do the trick”), why would anyone deny America’s First Comedian another four years?
The picture above, from the pre-social media age, is of my friends Mike Lacey (when he was on top of the weekly newspaper world and not a victim of vindictive, malicious government prosecution), yours truly (with an engineer cap because who didn’t dig Choo Choo Charlie) and Patty Calhoun, a tough cowgirl from Denver. We weren’t seeking anything but the next beer at, I believe, Tortilla Flats in Manhattan, after a day game at Shea Stadium. We tipped generously, with no prompt. Freedom of choice.
Look at the clues to figure out the year: Doug Williams is Super Bowl MVP; Detroit Pistons lose the NBA Finals; Curtis Strange is PGA Tour money leader (over a mil); The Baffler and Poetry London publish first issues; Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood and James Michener’s Alaska are published; Brady Corbet is born and Divine dies (much to the amusement of now-cancelled Howard Stern); Who Framed Roger Rabbit is released; National Park of American Samoa is established; Bernardo Bertolucci wins Best Director Oscar; Gavin Newsom is a junior at Santa Clara University; and The Pet Shop Boys top the UK charts with “You Were Always On My Mind.”
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
