New Book from Whoville

Michiko Kakutani reviews new Pete Townshend memoir in NYT tomorrow.  She calls it "an earnest, tortured, searching book — by turns eloquent and long-winded, revealing and oddly elliptical....

"Mr. Townshend’s self-portrait is raw and unsparing. He tells us about being abused as a child and lasting feelings of shame, anger and anxiety. He tells us about his drug use and struggles with alcohol. And he tells us about being arrested on suspicion of possessing images taken from a child-pornography Web site." More:

Of Mick Jagger, Mr. Townshend has this bizarrely personal statement to make: He “is the only man I’ve ever seriously wanted” to have sex with, and appeared to be “clearly very well endowed.” 

As Mr. Townshend sees it, the Who’s ascendance would eventually be undermined by the rise of punk rock in the late ’70s. Though Who songs like “My Generation” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” became “anthems for a particular time,” Mr. Townshend writes, by 1981 “a gulf had opened up between the Who and the new younger generation.