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"Driving"

Gabriel looks at Glass fan Victoria through what must be some really good spyware, then wacks off his guitar in the studio in a bit of sublimation. The next day Josh demonstrates the new computer program that allows Gabriel, Leila and Josh's pictures and "personal sounds" to run into each other creating a merged image and musical noise. Ray mentions Leila's image, for instance, looking like the cat drawings of Louis Wain:


Meanwhile, in the land of rock stardom, Leila has become the world's sexiest Muslim, with popular pictures of her wearing a white T-shirt with no bra going around the world. Gabriel's childhood abuse picture is also going around the world and he tries to deny he is gay, a denial so poorly worded, it seems to confirm what he is denying. Must have talked to Timothy White...

Townshend Bio

Sorry to be late putting in the synopsis of Pete's latest chapter but I've been at the beach on Christmas vacation and just got back on Monday evening.

For a good beach read, I took Mark Wilkerson's new biography of Pete. Amazing Journey: The Life Of Pete Townshend.

A lot of you have already read it online at Mark's site but this was my first time catching up with it (lazy, I know...) and it was very interesting to go through Pete's entire life to date as an artist without the artificial cutoff dates of Keith's death, the Farewell Tour, etc. The underlining themes in his work become a bit clearer and what he's doing now as a writer and guitarist make more sense. Get the book (here) or read it online but try to read it as all of one piece and you'll be amazed all the elements in Pete's work to which he returns again and again. For those of you following The Boy Who Heard Music check out this 1973 note from Pete about his part of Jimmy's character in Quadrophenia

I'm the good part of the character needless to say - the choir boy who doesn't make good, the sea scout who gets assaulted by the scout master.

By the way, as I'm typing this, I'm listening to the new album by the Japanese Mod band The Collectors Biff Bang Pow

It has Japanese-language versions of Mod classics of the 1960's including "Pictures of Lily." Check it out if you get a chance.

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"The Method"

A lot of plot and theory in this chapter. Gabriel, Leila and Josh's group "The Glass Household" becomes a huge hit under the management of Rastus, Ray's old manager from Psychoderelict. Rastus now runs PlusBond, a multimedia company that is dubbed the "Grid" exactly as in Ray's unfinished rock work from the 1970's. The group's contract puts Leila in control of the Grid's pop-music content and she uses it to begin to make Ray's old "Grid" dream come true.

Meanwhile, Gabriel beats out Josh for Leila's hand but finds it difficult to keep up with her sexually and becomes an alcoholic and a web voyeur. While "Googling" his name, Gabriel discovers the pictures of himself being sexually abused as a child by the Sea Scouts, pictures that have spread all over the world via the Internet.

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"The Glass Household"

It's a year after the premiere of Josh, Leila and Gabriel's musical group at Myrna's birthday party. Hymie has died and now past antagonists Myrna and Trilby are close friends. Meanwhile our threesome's musical group is beginning to take off under the name "The Glass Household," based on Ray's autobiography. Their fans have shortened it to "Glass."

Meanwhile, Josh, Leila and Gabriel's Jules and Jim-type relationship is beginning to start. Hope no one ends up driving a car off a pier!

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"Fragments"

In the best chapter so far, Ray tells the story of the latter years of his band, a band whose history is an alternate-universe version of The Who's, including a reunion concert in 1983 and a Cincinnati-type stampede in which 17 fans died.

A year after the events in the previous chapter (1982) Gabriel, Josh, Leila have become interested in Ray and the rockers that came before them after attending a reunion concert of Ray's band. They watch news footage of the concert crush and discuss the meaning of rock in the universe. Josh compares the rock of Ray's era to the Big Bang that created the universe and says the purpose of the rock music of their generation is to bring all the fragments back together as it all collapses back in on itself.

So far, the chapter I would choose for anthologies.