If I haven't said it before, I'll say it again: for my money, the Who are the greatest rock band of all time. Sure, there's the Rolling Stones (I was late to the party on that one, their post-1978 work for the most part has been more miss than hit but I acknowledge the greatness of that period between "Paint It, Black" and "Start Me Up"), and a little band out of Liverpool that happen to be my favorite recording group of all time. But in terms of melting your face with music, I can't think of anything better than the windmill theatcrics of Pete Townshend, the unbridled glory and fury of Keith Moon behind the drum kit, the deceptively restrained bass lines of John Entwistle, and the ear-piercing soul of Roger Daltrey. A better band there never was when they were at their peak (roughly 1966 to 1978, when Moon took one trip too many and ended up gone before his time).
I was a convert to the Who when I was in high school, I got into their Mod period from the early Sixties pretty heavily. I liked the smart fashions they wore (their 1965 look is less ridiculous than the way a lot of bands dress now), and I desperately wanted a Union Jack jacket like Townshend wore in many of the publicity photos of the band from that era. I was hesitant to embrace the later "stadium rock" incarnation of the band, the era that provided countless opening-credits songs to various offshoots of CSI, but you can only resist the awesomeness that is Who's Next for so long. But it was on that album that I encountered the one Who song I will never embrace to my bosom, no matter how much time passes. And I have no idea why that is.
I think I've talked here before about songs I love from bands I hate or dislike; "Behind Blue Eyes" is the song I hate from a band that I love. I'm not sure why it is, necessarily. It could be the "Stairway to Heaven" factor, where a song is celebrated for the explosiveness at its end but also contains a lengthy build-up section that goes on and on (kinda like foreplay...ooh, Freudian territory there) and just leaves me unsatisfied. Perhaps it's the identification with a villain as the narrator of the song (the tune came from the abandoned Lifehouse rock opera, a follow-up to Tommy that was ten times as ambitious and therefore unlikely to be realized), but I have read books and listened to songs and watched movies where the main guy, the guy we are supposed to root for, is a bad egg. Alex in Clockwork Orange comes to mind, and I love the moral ambiguity of the movie (resolved too easily in the book, in my opinion, by the onset of maturity) in which the hero's evil acts are somehow less so compared to the machinations of the state. So really, it can't be that. Why do I hate it so?
The answer might simply be that I do, the same way that "A Quick One (While He's Away)," the live version that the Who did at the Stones' "Rock and Roll Circus" and which later turned up on The Kids Are Alright is my all-time favorite Who song. Sometimes you can over-intellectualize why you respond to something or someone the way that you do. Sometimes it's just a matter of catching it at the right time; perhaps if I'd been more receptive of the themes in The Godfather (or hadn't seen the last movie in the trilogy first, thanks to that one year we had HBO legit), I'd be able to call it my favorite movie of all time (it isn't; the answer seems to change year to year but overall the original Star Wars trilogy could probably claim that title in my heart of hearts). But The Godfather to me is a great film, just not one of my favorites.
"Behind Blue Eyes" is the story of the villain of Lifehouse, how he's been pushed to his dastardly deeds because people perceive him as evil, and he has to live up to it. In that sense, he's more in line with Pinky Brown from Brighton Rock, a killer who's reluctant to do so because the wages of sin weigh him down. In the movies where the bad guys know they're bad guys, you always come away rooting for their downfall. But in the movies where the bad guy is a Hans Gruber from the original Die Hard (his greed more than anything defines him as evil, but other than being a killer he's quite charming and you almost want to root for him to get away at least), it's harder to seperate yourself from the moral abyss. In Star Wars, of course, Anakin Skywalker was simply trying to protect the woman he loved from his nightmarish vision of her death in childbirth; you could argue that the evil he does was rooted in a noble cause. Bad guys like that fascinate us not because they're evil, but because they don't know they're doing evil, not until the last minute. Sometimes an actor likes to ham it up as the bad guy (God love him, Anthony Hopkins literally sunk his teeth into the Hannibal Lector role), but the bad guys that remain in the mind long after, the ones that are truly troubling, are the ones you feel a little sympathy for after it's all said and done. Maybe that's why "Blue Eyes" draws my ire: I can see why the bad guy is the bad guy, even if I deplore his actions.
Real life, of course, is more complicated; you have bad guys for sure (Hitler springs to mind, hard to find anyone who ever mistook him for a wounded soul. He was just evil, greedy and morally evil), but sometimes the good guys aren't so squeaky-clean. If you follow sports at all, you know this for a fact. Lance Armstrong is simply the most recent in a long list of sports stars who sold a counterfeit image of "wholesomeness" that was so far removed from who they really are. Maybe that's why I hate "Blue Eyes," because it doesn't make it easy to hate the villain, because when you hear it in his own words, you begin to understand. That's what the bad guy wants, of course; that's how he can ultimately win. The old line from Donald Sutherland about the Devil in Paradise Lost applies here and in other narratives of violence and death: the most interesting character is the bad guy.
Chuck Klosterman has written a whole book on the subject of bad guys, I'm gonna buy it eventually (probably the weekend, after I get paid), and I'm guessing he goes into way more detail about the nature of villainy in his book than I can get to in one blog entry. But I thought I could lend my voice to the discussion, via the song I hate the most from the band I love above all others save the Beatles. Because sympathy for the Devil is easy to avoid when you're younger and more naive about how the world really works.
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