Pete Townshend - Psychoderelict - actually kind of good?

Wow I'm a little shocked at how many people haven't come around on this one. Maybe I just don't find the concept bad because I haven't been following Pete since 1970 or so? But while I can see how the whole plot and setup could be very corny, I found it unique and the narrative at least pretty interesting. Free ride, to the house of life....

I got the 2LP they put out last year as a(n early) xmas gift just a couple days ago and what struck me is how much more energy there is to this, makes The Iron Man feel very flat by comparison, I like the sort of upbeat style of it. Haven't given more than six listens so not sure if the dialog will wear thin, but there's always Music Only and the music is nothing short of great. To me there's really not a bad track on it, and I even find the dialog jabbering to be entertaining at times. I guess I'm weird? I also don't mind at all Pete being intensely navel gazey. Has he addressed the Lifehouse thing and his personal history on other albums? I own all of his other solo LPs... speaking of, while probably not as good as Empty Glass and maybe just a bit behind Chinese Eyes too, Psychoderelict I find to be a lot more conceptually ambitious and energetic than White City as well, which is good because I quite liked White City. Helps the concept is less obtuse.

Really though, there's not a solo Pete I can't get down with, suppose I'm too in love with the man's writing. Top tier lyricist.

 

I always liked it. Far better than "Iron Man" The live DVD is pretty good. I have taken to watching it on his birthday. I have a live version from his Web site too.

 

I had heard it was really bad and enjoyed it when I first heard it. The dialog kind of got old after awhile but it’s still entertain8ng. Hardly Pete’s best but far from his worst. My two Pete solo albums remain Empty Glass and White City.

 

I'm a lifelong Who fan and I bought this when it was first released in 1993. I was completely put off by the dialogue, it was going to grow tiresome during regular listens and it bled into the other songs. One time through and I stored it away for years, until I found the music only version. THAT was a revelation! It wasn't up there with Empty Glass, Chinese Eyes, and White City, but it was still full of really good songs that had gotten lost in that b.s. dialogue. I agree that the theme, an aging rock star trying to cope with getting older, had been played out. It was a commercial flop, as was the tour, and the failure of the project drove Pete to hit the bottle again.

 

I think "kind of good" is a pretty accurate critique of this album.

 

Music only version is the only way I listen to this on cd.

I saw the live show with dialogue in 1993 and it was dreadful.

However, the hour plus encore with just PT solo went along way to make up for that spectacle. The acoustic guitar smash was the highlight-

 

From the Pete fan interview in 2011 :
Did you enjoy making Psychoderelict and touring the U.S. promoting it?
I loved every minute of it. The final show (at Jones Beach in NY) was probably the best rock show I've ever done outside The Who.

 

I enjoyed it the first time I heard it and liked the live one even more. To me it's like Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. I don't listen to either regularly but every few years I'll listen to the whole thing. I still enjoy them both

 

Found the "Music Only" CD-ersion in a dollar-bin once (or for less than $6 anyway). Not something I listen to all that much, but it's not half-bad every now and then.

Not sure if I've ever heard the one with the spoken dialogue, but I pretty much LOATH any/all albums with spoken-word interludes, so I never even considered getting that version.

 

Yes, the music-only version is the ONLY way to listen to this album. And, it IS pretty good.

 

Get the DVD. The music makes much more sense as part if the presentation. Everybody, who I showed it to when it came out, liked it. This included mostly people who wouldn't have been on board with the new album, alone.

 

I saw the show live at the BAM in ‘93 and, like any musical play, it was much, much more entertaining in a live setting.

 

I’m in the failed experiment camp but love English Boy. I wish he would wake up and make some new music.

 

Pete's like 73 now? I wish he would do more too but he owes nobody anything now, lol. Dude made excellent tunes for the better part of fifty years?

 

I remember watching the live version on VH1 back in the day. I quite enjoyed the concert.

 

It's not even a question of owning anybody anything. It's reality. The creative spark only lasts so long.

Rock acts have little incentive to to enter for studio time, even if there's an adequate supply of material. Case in point, read the reactions here anytime to Psychoderelict and Endless Wire.

Want to know what the biggest problem is with rock now? It's not aging of the musicians. It's behavior of a large segment of the fans.

 

Didn’t Pete start drinking again because he got caught up in the New York scene when Tommy was kicking ass on Broadway?

 

I recall Townshend writing about a recent drunken time with Joe Walsh in the liner notes of the MFSL gold cd circa 1992.

 

Forgot to mention that Townshend was drinking heavily at the Jones Beach show. He was slugging down beer after beer and tossing the empties haphazardly about the stage.

 

I think he might have been drinking brandy the night I met him after the first Tower Theater show. I 4get how I know that though, he might have mentioned it to us, or maybe it came out somehow, I can't recall. It was a really nice meet/greet which I crashed (very long story). He was super nice to everybody btw. I'm still pissed that the person who took a photo of me & Pete never got back to me. Guess it is just sitting unwanted in their photo album or something. Whereas I would have framed it & hung it on the wall of my music den. I'll have to settle for my signed ticket and the pen he gave me at the end of the night (long story again)...no guitar to go with the pen unfortunately...

 

He called out a specific gig on the tour in Chicago, when he drank so much that he couldn't remember doing the show. He was pretty crushed that the album and tour wasn't a smashing success, while Peter Gabriel's album and tour from the same summer was a hit and the gigs were selling out arenas. I think, but don't hold me to this, he called it out in his book, but I could be wrong. Maybe he didn't start continuously drinking again in Summer 1993, but it was the catalyst.

 

In it's original form it's a fascinating failure - a prime example of Pete not having the rest of the band around anymore to reign in his lofty ambitions a little. I bought it soon after release and I remember being disappointed that there seemed to be a decent album buried under a lot of unnecessary dialogue. This may seem harsh, but I think anyone from the UK who is used to regularly hearing mediocre radio plays on the BBC doesn't really need to listen to the original version of Psychoderelict more than once.

The story itself is fine enough and it wouldn't have been at all out of place in Pete's "Horse's Neck" prose collection, but as part of a recording designed to be listened to more than once it just doesn't stand up. Dialogue that reads well enough on paper sometimes doesn't translate to performance convincingly despite everyone's best efforts and intentions, and that's the case here. The play intrudes far too much on the music, and the music is the element that most fans will have bought the recording for. They realised this was the problem in the end of course and so we now also have the superior music-only version to choose instead. My main interest in it remains the integrated and 'enhanced' Lifehouse demos (the finest of them being the one including recognisable elements of Who Are You) but the new songs also suddenly come alive once they're unhindered by the dialogue.

Every artist is entitled to fail now and again, but the criticism of Psychoderelict at the time was unnecessarily vicious, I remember - a lot of hot young gunslingers in the UK press in particular seemed to have something to prove by trashing it and Townshend and I'm sure he was wounded by it - no human being wouldn't have been - possibly mortally, in terms of future releases. I remember US critics being slightly more kind, but I was certainly hard-pressed to find a completely positive review at the time.

Having said all that...

As a stage show, however, Psychoderelict works just fine and if you do want to see it at it's best as a realised concept, the live DVD of the original tour is the way for you to go.

So in terms of Pete's 'proper' solo canon, I put Psychoderelict behind EG, Chinese Eyes and White City (Give Blood swings it), but ahead of Iron Man (too many guest stars and not enough good material on that one I'm afraid).


PS trivia: Jan Ravens who played the female lead is reasonably well-known as an impressionist/comedian over here in the UK these days.

 

To me, "Empty Glass" is a rocknroll masterpiece in the same way that Keith Richards' solo debut "Talk Is Cheap" is, an album of great songs and musicianship (nothing wrong by the way with Pete's earlier solo work but the debut was an acoustic affair and the '77 record was a duet album). Empty Glass, Cowboys and White City are all great albums in my book, each album maybe slightly less impressive than the preceding one but all are superior albums and each has a different flavor. Enough to certify PT as a rock great on his own without The Who. Things fell off after that though I enjoyed most of Iron Man at the time (never listen to it now) and Psychoderelict was a let down though the music only version helped certainly. Still I'm sad that nothing new has emerged from Pete on the music front save Endless Wire (which has some fine moments) and the two new tracks on his latest compilation. I don't know what happened but it's a loss in the rock world.

 

The Who are releasing a new album this year of new material.

 

Well, let’s wait and see if it actually happens, but yes, that is their plan.