With the rock opera "Tommy" (1969), Pete Townshend transformed the Who from a raucous live act into long-form storytellers for the ages. The songwriter had big plans up his sleeve when it came to the LP's follow-up effort, a dystopian epic to be entitled "Lifehouse," which told the story of a world beset by rampant pollution and the precipitous loss of personal freedom. For the record, Townshend ambitiously staged a series of concerts at London's Young Vic to bring his vision to fruition but grew frustrated when the band's audiences didn't connect with the new material.
For Townshend, the band's inability to make "Lifehouse" a reality proved to be a terrible blow, leaving him in the throes of a nervous breakdown and nearly leading to the Who's dissolution. He was emotionally and intellectually invested in the project, which emerged from his belief in popular music's power to effect change. The narrative at the heart of "Lifehouse" was a masterwork of future-thinking, with explicit references to an Internet-like "grid" that would dominate a consumerist world seemingly bent on environmental destruction and creating its own impending doom. In the story, civilization's only hope involves the shared creation of a single musical note that would establish unity in the face of so much interpersonal loss and destruction.
