Nobody will argue against The Who's placement as one of rock and roll's great bands. Depending on who you ask, their music may not fall into a universal style of rock.
If you ask Pete Townshend, he'll make an argument that The Who invented heavy metal.
Townshend was speaking to the
Toronto Sun and touched on a myriad of topics. One of them was how the band's new album doesn't have the pulsating rock and roll sound like their earlier records.
Townshend said,
“It doesn’t sound like The Who from those early heavy metal years. We sort of invented heavy metal with Live at Leeds. We were copied by so many bands, principally by Led Zeppelin, you know heavy drums, heavy bass, heavy lead guitar and some of those bands, like Jimi Hendrix for example, did it far better than we did. Cream, with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, they came along in ‘67, same year as Jimi Hendrix, and they kind of stole our mantle in a sense. So people who want to hear that old heavy metal sound there are plenty of bands that can provide it. So it’s not really what we can actually do today. Even if we wanted to, it was never high on my list of wishes.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Townshend commented on the state of modern rock and sees it as a genre that will forge on.
“I think there are still loads of young guys with guitars and now we’ve got loads of young women with guitars," Townshend said. "I think rock will continue as a genre but I don’t know quite what it will touch on, what it will be able to draw on.”
