Pete Townshend (who he?) - Ch. 19-20

So Jimpy was the guy who inspired the first half of "Real Good-Looking Boy." Wonder who Jimpy was and if he comes up later in some part of the Pete/Who story?

Talking about Pete's childhood friends brings up a point from this era that I've always wondered about: were Pete and John childhood "friends"? John makes his entrance in Ch. 20 with the extremely understated

We called the group ‘The Confederates’. In the spring of 1958 when we began I was still only twelve years old. They were all teenagers at thirteen. I had already met John Entwistle and greatly enjoyed his sense of humour.

Did you have "working" friends when you were 12 or 13? Pete seems to have had them. Although they will be together so much over the next few years (John is present when Pete trashes his first amp in his bedroom), I don't get the sense that they would ever have hung out together just to have fun. It's nothing like the Lennon/McCartney teen dynamic. Wonder why that is? I hope Pete goes into that relationship more.

Also John's afterschool band "The Confederates" was so dubbed because the main Acton afterschool band was "The Union."

I thought I read in one of his old interviews that Pete claimed to have marched in the CND protest march. Perhaps this story is meant to correct that. Anti-nuclear proliferation will come up later of course in the justification for "My Generation"'s infamous line "Hope I die before I get old" (Pete thought he'd die in a fireball anyway), the CHINESE EYES and IT'S HARD albums and the current Pete obsession with terrorists getting the bomb.

While on the subject, DO DO DO get the new DVD of Peter Watkins' 1965 masterpiece THE WAR GAME. Made for the BBC, the film recreates in horrifying, stunning detail a nuclear attack on the English city of Kent. It will immediately put you back into that mindframe of the 1960's when annihilation seemed just around the corner.