Iron Man

Stereo Review
October 1989

LARGELY overlooked in the controversy surrounding the Who's tour this year--are they over the hill? going through the motions? doing it for the money?--is the release of a new Pete Townshend album, which would normally be something of an event.  It's not hard to figure out why. 
 
It is, you see, a concept album, and that's not exactly the most fashionable undertaking in a pop era defined by Debbie Gibson (whose Electric Youth is to Townshend's My Generation what typing is to writing).  Still, Townshend's "The Iron Man" is a fascinating piece that's instantly recognizable as the work of its creator. 
 
If not as ambitious as Tommy or Quadrophenia (it is, on some level, a children's record), it more than compensates with consistency, unpretentiousness, and musical invention. Townshend has billed "The Iron Man," based on a story by poet Ted Hughes, as a musical, rather than something highfalutin like a rock opera, and the description is both apt and a challenge. 
 
The contemporary musical, after all, is moribund, what with Andrew Lloyd Webber and other folks still recycling Puccini and Jerome Kern more than thirty years after rock-and-roll changed the world's listening habits.  What Townshend has attempted is a genuine piece of music theater in an idiom that has some relation to what actual people actually listen to for pleasure. On that level, it seems to me, he's succeeded splendidly. 
 
The songs in "The Iron Man" are clearly rock-and-roll, but it's a grown-up rock-and-roll very much in the style of the late Who, all rippling keyboards and power chords.  As far as I could tell from reading the story synopsis--it's partly an ecological fable, partly a meditation on the redemptive power of love--the songs move the narrative along as smartly as anything in West Side Story. 
 
Whether Townshend's creation is stageworthy remains to be seen, but on this record songs like New Life, Dig (guest starring the Who, all of them, sounding better than ever), and Over the Top (featuring blues great John Lee Hooker, an early Townshend influence) are genuinely thrilling. Of course, given Broadway's dismal commercial realities, it's doubtful whether we'll ever find out if an essentially sweet little show like "The Iron Man" can shake the stage musical out of its doldrums. 
 
To be honest, I'm not sure Townshend should even try to mount the thing.  The album, after all, has advantages that no stage musical will ever have--brilliant sound production (by Townshend), phenomenal band work, and honest-to-God vernacular singing (particular kudos here to Roger Daltrey and the missing-far-too-long Nina Simone).  Moreover, "The Iron Man" is still, in part, a work in progress.  It doesn't yet have that One Big Tune, and the remake of Arthur Brown's psychedelically silly Fire is a miscalculation. 
 
Nevertheless, you've got to give Townshend credit just for trying something this risky. In your living room, under the headphones, you can visualize "The Iron Man" for yourself, just as we've always done with the best rock-and-roll.  For me, for now, that's more than enough.