As a fundamentally religious artist, Pete Townshend fashions his music from sermons and confessions. (p. 71)

What makes Townshend singular is his insistence on not separating his most transcendent spiritual convictions from gut- and gutter-level rock & roll. It's been suggested (by Townshend, even) that rock itself is a religion, but that's not quite right. Let's say instead that rock is a spiritual medium as much as a musical one…. For Pete Townshend then, playing rock & roll well becomes an act of grace, while playing rock & roll badly is a brutal test of faith.

Townshend has been in a near-continuous state of spiritual crisis since Tommy, and you'd think that his feelings of self-pity and remorse (which have dominated later Who LPs) would have been intensified by the deaths of Keith Moon and "the kids" in Cincinnati. But he seems to have been strengthened rather than weakened by such overt...