For Pete's sake!

Play it: Pete Townshend - Scooped (Best of demo series)
Play it: Pete Townshend - Gold (chronologically reshuffled)

The greatest rock band of all-time will release their first album in nearly 25 years this coming Halloween (Endless Wire.) In anticipation of that event, yesterday saw the reissue of a significant amount of Pete Townshend's back catalogue of solo material (on Universal imprint Hip-O Records.




Of particular interest is the collection of demos called Scoop (along w/ Another Scoop, and Scoop 3) which show Townshend's recordings of the songs prior to bringing to The Who. There's a collection called Scooped which compiles the best/more interesting cuts from the three Scoop releases, which serves as a good big toe dip for the series. Since it's not in Rhapsody, I've taken the liberty of reassembling it for you here. Some of the more revealing tracks are the ones that Daltry would end up singing ("Can You See the Real Me" and "Magic Bus,") with Townshend pulling off a pretty good impression of his singer (or is it the other way around?) Others still sound better in arrangment then The Who would do them later, specifically the song "Eminence Front" which is a beautiful moody piano-based piece in this earlier version. There's also plenty of material that never made it to proper release, which is where the gold is to most Townshend worshippers.

Speaking of gold, he best of the proper solo reissues are already well covered in the Hip-O records comp Gold, but that album has a maddening track order which has no rhyme or reason to it. So I've re-ordered in chronological order here. Although, I can't imagine not mentioning/recommending listening to Empty Glass all over again... it's still damn good.

tags: playlist, music, pete townshend, the who, classic rock, rhapsody