One Hit No More, No. 32: Thunderclap Newman, Pete Townshend's Other Wild Vision

This will make sense by the end. Promise.

The Hit
If you weren’t fully sentient in 1969, or didn’t log enough time on a particular kind of “oldies/classic rock” radio programming, it’s likelier than not that you first heard Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” while watching something – e.g., Almost Famous, Kingpin, or an episode of My Name Is Earl. If I had to guess, I’d say you liked it. Some number of you probably asked the person next to you, “hey, who is that”?

The band was Thunderclap Newman. Yes, Thunderclap Newman.

It’s a pretty song, sounds a little like the Summer of Love, maybe with a bit of a hangover; the tinny (frankly pinched) quality in the vocals pairs with the twanging treble to create a bright sunny melody, so it sounds very late 60s West Coast. The bass and a spidery guitar sound creates a counter-melody that grounds that higher register, and there’s just a lot of fun orchestration going on. It’s just a nice song to listen to. Makes you feel like hugging strangers. Seriously.

The Rest of the Story
“I don’t quite know if that’s a fair description of it but I can tell you, for me, it was a bit sort of traumatic, except for having been a civil servant, and being used to dealing with the public.”

That’s what the actual Thunderclap Newman, aka, Andy Newman, had to say about backing into fame by way of a very famous fan-boy crush. The fan-boy in question: The Who’s Pete Townshend, who had seen Newman play a lunch-time show at Ealing Art School while he was studying graphic design. Newman wasn’t even scheduled to play, but, a mutual friend of Townshend and Newman’s named Rick Seaman suggested the latter to fill in. Unbeknownst to Newman (and for, like, literal years), Townshend left that lunch-time show he’d stumbled into the presence of overlooked genius. Newman had put out some recordings – importantly, recordings he made through multi-track recordings on single-track devices – and Townshend played one of them, Ice & Essence, something like into the ground. (This also files under “unbeknownst to Newman,” because he thought they sounded terrible.) He roped Newman into a couple projects over the years; Thunderclap Newman wound up being the last and largest of them. It’s worth pausing a second to talk about what Newman did at that lunch-time show (quote from Richard Barnes, Maximum R&B):

The Who, Half-Assing, and the Perils of Full-Assing It: Yet Another Pivot

For my money, that's the one you're after...

It’s fitting to talk about the demise of one maniacally-ambitious project in a post that will end by talking about the demise of several other projects, if the latter were only too ambitious for one man attempting to maximize the internet in order to make the voices in his head calm down. I’ll close with that.

Reviving the Bins Project with a chapter on the band who bundled their greatest hits onto the first cassette I ever bought felt fitting, centering, even a little poetic. When my mom took me to…Kmart(?) and offered to buy a cassette for me (which I don’t even remember asking for), I don’t recall seeing anything else but The Who’s Greatest Hits, the one with a Union Jack jacket on the cover. I have zero recollection of how 11-year-old me came to decide that a cassette by The Who was the one I just had to have. I do, however, remember my oldest sister asking me to record a live radio broadcast of a concert of theirs that she went to see in Indianapolis – one after The Who’s infamous concert in Cincinnati where 11 people got trampled to death. (So called, “festival seating” caused that, by the way, and not the band, but they still got banned from Cincinnati, because that’s how America’s municipalities roll, I guess.)

I started the predecessor site to this one, A Project of Self Indulgence, as a review/farewell to my record collection, which I figured I’d stop listening to once I got lost in the infinite wilds of streaming services like Spotify. It became clearer and clearer, as I worked through my catalog, that I knew very little about the music. Worse, I knew far, far less (far, far, far less) about the artists who made it all. And I think that’s why I cracked up and deleted it.

I bring up all the above because that pattern started with how I consumed The Who. Greatest hits albums were all I ever listened to – whether the greatest hits album named above, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, or The Kids Are Alright, which, as it happens is a soundtrack to a documentary – so I’d never actually sat through an actual album by The Who, i.e., an original product put out for first-time consumption, and not something re-hashed. Well, Tommy excepted. I knew that album very well, even remember the look of the cover from lifting out of the stack of my sister’s records to play it just one more time.