FACE DANCES

Tiptoeing into high school, around fourteen going on fifteen, I had a bedside clock radio with embedded cassette player: a little box in faux wood veneer that sang me to sleep, woke me in the morning, and kept me tapped into Top Forty pop on the AM band. I followed the hit parade for a while, listened out for singles I especially liked, and began, slowly, to buy mainstream pop albums. This was the early 1980, and I'm still embarrassed by some of the records I liked back then. When I was not quite sixteen, one single I keenly listened out for was The Who's "You Better, You Bet," or its abridged AM version anyway, a song that has been on my mind ever since. I couldn't wait for that song to come round on my clock radio again and again. Frankly, I didn't understand the lyric; it was a hymn to hedonism with a desperate edge, a giddy, decadent thing about nightlife and sex and things I knew nothing about. Very adult. I might have thought I understood the lyric (I prided myself on getting the reference to a razor line), but no way could I have understood what it took to get Pete Townshend to write it. It's a song about a man who's a mess, after all.

The record sounded great to me at the time, and so Face Dances became my first Who album (unless it was Who Are You, which I got around the same time?). The Who may not be a prog band, but to my mind much of their work is progressive rock, and my interest in them helped nudge me out of Top Forty pop into album rock, so that, between sixteen and seventeen, I became a prog devotee. I listened to Face Dances a lot -- though, again, I'd say that I didn't really know where it was coming from, or what it made it so decadent and weird. I knew it had to do with Pete Townshend being unhappy, even unhappy with the business of being a rock star, but what could that possibly have meant to me?

In hindsight, I think Face Dances' main value was that it got me to listen to The Who. Alas, as an album it doesn't hold up. I started to figure that out long ago, and for years, I've faulted the production by American AOR ace Bill Szymzyk (of Eagles and Joe Walsh fame). The record sounds muffled and airless, deadened. But I have to admit that the songs too are a problem: a mixed bag, including several well-polished duds. Elaborately arranged, and awash in Townshend's and John (Rabbit) Bundrick's keyboards, the songs swirl and bubble, but percolating synths can't hide the general air of dissipation and anomie. Nor can the muscular playing of bassist John Entwistle and new drummer Kenny Jones, who ought to cut through the enveloping fug but can't, quite. The sound is bland and felted over, but more importantly, the songs are often wan, bemused, and self-regarding -- fatally self-conscious navel-gazers, at a time when Townshend was nearly killing himself with drink and drugs and clubbing, all to the tune of damn, I really hate being in this band that made me famous.

Tellingly, Townshend's solo albums from this period, produced by Chris Thomas, are way better than Face Dances or the Who albums that came right before and after it. They sound tighter and punchier despite Pete's self-absorption, and they boast many grand and piercing songs (Empty Glass is one of the great rock albums of the early 1980s). What's more, the demos for Face Dances that can be heard on Townshend's Scoop compilations are better than the final Who versions: Pete's "You Better, You Bet" sounds drunk and nuts (the piano glisses are insane), his "Don't Let Go the Coat" sounds like effervescing indy pop (so much more rhythmically exciting than The Who's take), and so on. At this point, even when Pete is losing it, he makes better tracks on his own than with his old band.

Pete's version of "You Better" outpaced The Who's in my heart years ago.

Townshend's reflexive, self-pitying lyrics here may not plumb the depths of bathos reached on Who Are You (whose outtake "No Road Romance" has got to be one of his most pitiful). But "Daily Records" gives the earlier record a run for its money: They say it's just a stage in life / But I know by now the problem is a stage. And when Townshend is not making his discontent obvious, the hermetic lyrics of "Cache, Cache" and "Did You Steal My Money" still sound like complaining, albeit through a filter of eyebrow-cocking irony. The latter song joins the cod-epic wanking anthem "How Can You Do It Alone?" on the list of Townshend's most obnoxious novelties, right up there with "Squeeze Box." It's embarrassing, the more so for touches of musical grandeur like the martial, pipe-and- drum (synth-and-drum) interval in the break. For a song about masturbation, it's, well, proggy.

Entwistle's two songs here are crusted with cliches, but "The Quiet One," a right snarler, spins the cliches to advantage, snapping at the hands that feed with vengeful irony (Still waters run deep / So be careful I don't drown you). It's a song about Entwistle's own taciturn reputation, suitably nasty, delivered in Entwistle's own harsh rasp. Musically, it slashes away nicely -- a quick burst of big chords and febrile drumming, seesawing among a very few notes while Pete works variations in the simple riff. This gives Pete a chance to let rip, and the record could have used more of that -- the wet blanket of Szymzyk's sound can't smother it. Entwistle's other number, "You," is draggier, a lumbering catalog of misogynistic rock 'n' roll chestnuts. In a word, bad.

Let's be honest: The Who were hell to work with in the studio at this point. Really, they weren't a functional band. Szymzyk, who has criticized the album's sound and called the job the worst of his career, tells stories about singer Roger Daltrey avoiding sessions with the other members of the band. The whole Who were hardly ever present together, as Daltrey's straight-edge careerism and hardheadedness put him at odds with the boozy fecklessness (frankly, alcoholism) that hovered round the rest of the group. Everything was a mess. Townshend was drinking like a sponge and offering Szymzyk and the band songs of either confessional or trivially humorous bent. Entwistle and Szymzyk fought over the bass parts; Entwistle would later complain of Szymzyk's numbing perfectionism and lack of spontaneity, and Szymzyk would complain of Entwistle overplaying. As for Kenny Jones, he was in the unenviable, post-Keith Moon drummer's stool, playing for keeps but in the very definition of a no-win situation. The Who had outlived itself and its members were half-broken. Szymzyk's brand of meticulousness -- comping vocals, insisting on multiple takes, trying to tamp down the craziness -- turned out to be no savior.

It's not all bad, of course. Face Dances is a Who album, so it features one of the smartest songwriters and arrangers in rock. The fact that Townshend was writing synth-pop at this point, rather than anthemic rock, maybe bugged some fans, but Pete was eager to do new things even when he was killing himself by degrees. The arrangements could have shimmered had they not been (by Szymzyk's own admission) compressed to death. "You Better, You Bet" is still a good single. And dig the chiming twelve-string guitars that anchor that song and "Daily Records" (the latter reminding me of the way The Beach Boys open "Sloop John B"). Meanwhile, Entwistle's bass, sometimes galloping, sometimes hopscotching, does great service. The way he works under and around the verse is the one good thing about "How Can You Do It Alone?" Jones, underrated, is a powerhouse, drumming solidly with occasional explosive fills. Granted, Jones would sound better if not recorded like Don Henley -- the big kit and high toms are very 70s, with little snare and no sizzle, and the mix is turgid. Jones, in other words, gets Szymzyked.

Daltrey works as hard as anyone, with a deliberate, at times droll delivery, as when he caresses some of the sleazier lyrics in "Did You Steal My Money" and "How Can You Do It Alone?" (They simply relax and lay back, etc.). He works over these lines theatrically; I bet he thought carefully about how to deliver them, and then sang them the same damn way, over and over. He probably didn't know what to think of the insular "Daily Records" and "Cache, Cache," but he sang them anyway. Daltrey by this period strikes me as a mannered rather than spontaneous singer: he works hard to make Townshend's lyrics scan, comes up with phrasing and asides to fill the empty spaces, and then replays the same seemingly tossed-off bits over and over, on demand. Though in life Daltrey was far from sympathizing with Pete's excesses, he interprets the lyrics here with a professional's patience and a certain lusty hamminess (and a bit of wink-wink-nudge-nudge, know what I mean?). Roger, the sane and settled pro, ends up play-acting through Pete's sybaritic overkill. The results, which are mannerist and funny, will appeal to some listeners and repel others. Daltrey does try.

It's strange to feel grateful for an album that you don't think is very good. I do feel grateful, though I find myself daydreaming about Townshend leaving The Who after Moon's death, or even earlier, and following his muse into other things. Above all, Face Dances feels like a determinedly adult (hell, middle-aged by rock standards) delaying action that thematizes growing up and the inevitability of compromise but also sounds, well, sadly compromised. Kudos to Townshend and the band for not sitting still thematically -- but this one sounds like it's coming well after the fire. Pete's next album, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, is much better.