Nuggets

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The biggest blog moment of the week for me was seeing Pete Townshend show up as a commenter on Tom Watson’s blog. When your idols become your readers, well that’s just super cool.

The reason for that action was the revival of Pete’s Blog, Boy Who Heard Music.

That resulted in a Pete Townshend obession week. I’ve listened to basically nothing else this week. But not The Who, who I do love, but Pete’s records; Empty Glass, All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, and White City.

That required some work, because as much as Pete gets blogging, photos, and video, he doesn’t get online music distribution.

These three records are not available on Rhapsody (damn), iTunes, or anywhere on the web (other than allofmp3.com which didn’t even have all of them). But given all the talk about allofmp3.com being a pirated music site, I decided not to do that. I own all three of these records, but they are at my house in Long Island.  So, I decided to go to Virgin Records (yes Jackson the itch was bad enough to get me into a record store!).

But Virgin didn’t have them either. What does it take to satisfy a music fan who wants to hear some of his favorite music? C’mon Pete, get your music online!

Anyway, I went back to allofmp3.com got what I could get there, and then did what any crazed and unsatisfied music fan must do. File sharing baby.

And so I have been listening to these three great records all week. It’s a hard choice to pick one out of the three.  Empty Glass is closer to his late Who work (Who By Numbers in particular). Chinese Eyes is a deeply emotional record.  And White City is influenced heavily by the 80s rock sound but it does have my favorite Pete Townshend solo song on it called Hiding Out.

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Forced to choose, I am making Chinese Eyes my Nuggets pick this week. Face Dances (along with its Prelude), Slit Skirts, and his excellent cover of North Country Girl are all fantastic. The rest of the record is just a notch below. Really great stuff.

I honestly think you should do what I did.  Get all three records and put them in heavy rotation for a week. You can’t come away from that without realizing what an incredible songwriter Pete Townshend is, even in his post Who period.

#My Music