J.R. Taylor looks at a surprisingly conservative-sounding Pete Townshend, circa 1980, and observes:

We got The Who’s Who Are You in 1978, and 1980’s Empty Glass was a great solo effort. All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes made for a fine follow-up in 1982. Let’s include 1977’s brilliant Rough Mix—where Townshend collaborated with Ronnie Lane—as part of the era. The Who released the underrated Face Dances in 1981, and then It’s Hard in 1982…and that last one had Townshend showing that he could stand to recharge his batteries.

Indeed it was--I really worshiped Townshend during that period, both with The Who (whom I saw at Philadelphia's old JFK stadium in 1982 during their first of what would eventually feel like semi-annual farewell tours) and on his own.

There's one more album of Townshend from that period that Taylor leaves off his list, and that's Townshend's Scoop, the first of an ongoing collection of his demos. Scoop was part of a very strong DIY ethic that was bubbling up in music during that period, both from the "anybody can play!" ethos of punk and new wave, and from the release of the affordable four-track cassette recorders. Townshend would eventually use these himself, along with much more sophisticated hardware. Four-track cassette recorders allowed a budding musician to "write" his own songs onto cassette by recording a drum machine (another early 1980s innovation) onto track one, bass onto track two, rhythm guitar onto track three and vocals and a lead instrument on track four. The tools available today are infinitely more sophisticated, but things had to start some place.

There's a music store poster from around 1983 promoting Scoop that I had framed to hang above my assorted tools of destruction a while back to remind me where I came from. Because virtually everything creative that I've done since flows in some way from that period, beginning with learning music and how to record it, and then figuring out that if I could be creative there, I could explore other media as well. And I suspect I'm not the only one blogging who had similar insights around that time.