Pete Townshend “Psychoderelict”
Pete Townshend made his reputation on the concept album and he was not giving up on it. “Psychoderelict,” the 1993 solo album from The Who’s chief songwriter, begins with a reporter talking about a fictional washed up British rocker by the name of Ray High, who can’t make albums anymore. If it was tight instead of loose autobiography I guess his name would be Pete Drunk? The news report is interrupted by a ruckus of Rock: “English Boy” is the musical statement of purpose with guitars borrowed from “Achtung Baby.” It’s an almost classic Townshend anthem. The juxtaposition screams: “Yes I’m still here. Yes I can still rock! Yes I am still writing concept albums!” Then there’s some more news and talking.
“Psychoderelict” finds Townshend to his credit and failure, pushing the boundaries again. The twin impulses to both expand and coast on the success of “Tommy”, and “Quadrophenia” are the album’s undoing. The second track “Meher Baba M3” is one of three instrumental remixes of “Baba O’ Riley” featured. Between songs, Townshend suffocates the music with radio drama scenes between Ray High and his manager. Spliced on top of songs are journal entries from High, a letter between the rockstar and a young fan named “Rosalyn”, and on top of that, more narration from the journalist. You are forced to listen to the music in the context of this rock star’s conflict with his age, his public, and his head. It’s a perfect past prime misfire. “Psychoderelict” is located in theater, in the past, in allegory-- anywhere but in the present. I cannot overstate how much interruption there is in this album. Lots and lots and lots of talking. Dare I say, this might be the most theater every put on a rock album. It’s all quite exhausting.
In the deepest trenches of some shitty Jethro Tull conceptual work, I have still managed to ignore the concept and listen to the music. Townshend has finally achieved the Brechtian ideal - complete separation from the emotional experience. He forces the intellect up front. Okay, for arguments sake let’s say that’s not a horrible idea for a rock album. What is this concept? The chorus of track three “Let’s Get Pretentious” says “I don’t know much, but I know what I like”. Is this an admission that this doesn’t make much sense, he’s just into it? It sounds okay with some fat guitar chords behind it but it also sounds suspiciously like a conspiracy theorists defense for why chem trails are dangerous.
The story of the album turns out to be that old non-universal tale, a celebrity sex scandal with the rockstar’s 14 year old super-fan Rosalyn that ironically rekindles a public interest in his music. This fictional story eerily presages Townshend’s own brush with childhood pornography charges that threatened to ruin him. The 1993 interest in the subject matter likely stems from his own history with childhood abuse, and his experience with a prying press titilated by his alleged bi-sexuality. In 2003 authorities accepted Townshend’s assertion that his taboo internet research was a project to expose the links between Russian orphanage sexual abuse and the British pornographers paying for it. No one has cleared him for what he did in 1993 with the album “Psychoderilict” The problem with the album is that the specificity of the fictional Ray High singing about the Rosalyn scandal cannot reach the universal appeal of “We Won’t Get Fooled Again.” He’s not writing for the underdog, he’s writing for a small crowd of iconic musicians who’ve had their sex lives poked and pried into by the media. I wonder if Liberace liked this album?
Here’s the fictional plot: High tells his manager about nude pictures his fan Rosalyn sent posing on her mother’s grave. Her chest has “witches teats” on it. The manager later has sex with the journalist and sees these “witch teats” for himself and we learn that they were actually working together to create a scandal to boost record sales for High. Rosalyn is not Rosalyn - she’s the journalist and this grown woman is sending old 14 year old nudes of herself. (good thing she kept those around). If this all made sense it might be misogyny. It probably still is. As the story of “Psychoderelict” concludes, Rosalyn/the journalist becomes a rockstar based on the song “Flame,” which High helped her with. Whether this is justice or injustice, I have no idea. After doing some further Wikipedia research, I realized I missed the end reveal — High knew all along. What a twist!
Listening to “Psychoderelict” is to be drowning in story and you can easily miss that some of these tunes are not bad. Once they remove the narration, “English Boy” fares much better in its reprise at the end of the album. “Now and Then” is a revealing, vulnerable love song in Townshend's charmingly thin, revealing voice. “Don’t Try to Make me Real” and “Predictable” have the spark of Townshend's best songwriting, but both contain bitterness that stands in for the wisdom of middle-age.
Make me of shit in a two-tenner deal,
Make me of pornography in a pedophile wheel
Whatever I do, whatever I feel
By your double standard I will never be real
This last lyric really makes you wonder how long they’d been investigating him for his vigilante action against the cyberpedophiles. Regardless, Townshend and his own fame-trauma stand in the way of audience connection.
Here’s a hot take: “Psychoderelict” is a spiritual sister album to Michael Jackson’s “HIStory”, where the artists’ existence as celebrity plagued by sycophants and scandals is so un-relatable to the average listener, that the work becomes insular and impenetrable, tragically further isolating the suffering artist from help. Like “HIStory” there’s some fire here: craft, anger, rock, and a lot of distrust of the media put to music (some of Jackson and Townshend’s past-prime work could be repurposed as anthems for the rights’ war against “lame stream media”). Like with HIStory, I have a strange fascination, maybe even respect, for how weird it all is. This music can only be made by people in a very rare situation. They are rich, no one says no to them, and they are very damaged.
In the song “Early Morning Dreams” there’s a sci-fi element introduced about “The Grid”. I defy you to connect this to the main storyline. The song tells us “You are safe on the Grid”. Cool. Thanks. With a little internet research, I found out “The Grid” is a variation of Townshend’s “Lifehouse” concept. “Lifehouse” was the followup concept album to the Who’s hit “Tommy”. “Lifehouse” was so hard to explain it was canned. The gist of it seems to be about connecting everyone’s “song” to create the “one note”. This is different from the mythical “brown note”, which when played was supposed to make enemy soldiers shit their pants. This was the brown note’s opposite; when played you would connect everyone and achieve world peace. Sounds easy enough until you get mired in the details, which Townshend did. Most of the “Lifehouse” songs ended up on the “Who’s Next” album when the project was abandoned. In 1993 “Lifehouse” Is still very much on Townshend’s mind and it gets copy and pasted here as the spiritual savior to this tale of the femme fatale and the rockstar.
The second worst song on the album is “Faking it” which gives away its problem in the title, and segues to the the worst track, Rosalyn’s pop hit “Flame.” This fake hit meant to be Rosalyn’s triumph, is intentionally and brutally mediocre. Rosalyn sings to us of “desire, fire, and taking me higher”, like a C-rate Celine Dion. It is, I assume, there to emphasize High’s relative authenticity, like the pop hit Lady Gaga sings in “A Star is Born” that shows how authentic Bradley Cooper’s character is. You have to be pretty deep into your concept piece to put something like that on an album. And that’s the problem, or to be charitable, the marvel of “Psychoderelict”