Customer Reviews

Gold

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This wonderful compilation puts the spotlight on where it should be, Pete the amazing songwriter, musician and arranger. Freed from their narrative structure, songs like English Boy, Face the Face and Give Blood now sound fresher and more alive than they have ever been before.

The track list doesn't proceed chronologically and it shouldn't. This cements the idea of Townshend the songsmith (as opposed to the guy who feels compelled to write concept albums). The songs now come alive as individual creations, like much of his best work with the Who.

The remastering is clear and remarkably crisp. It has freed the sliding bass in The Sea Refuses No River and it adds new clarity to the French Horn in the back of the delicate finger picking of Sheraton Gibson. The momentum and flow of Slit Skirts is an even greater marvel than it was before. Every song shows how strongly Townshend is grounded in folk, blues, jazz and rock. Like any real artist, he steals from everything and makes it his own.

You will be amazed at how many of these songs you actually know. There is inspiration in every note and every word. Townshend's heart and spirit always cover his for his brain.

Kudos to Hip-O Records and the rest of the Gold series releases. They provide well over 100 minutes of great music for a relatively low cost. CDs are overpriced to begin with, so a bargain like this is welcome relief for the consumer.

Jeannie doesn't wear any slit skirts because she heard one note. It was pure and easy.

As a fan of The Who, I was curious to hear a large sampling of Pete Townsend's solo work and decided to pick this up. (The version I own is called "Anthology," but is exactly the same as this, called "Gold.") It's very interesting to hear the differences between these songs and those that Townsend made with The Who. Not every song hits its mark, and I certainly wouldn't consider every one of these to be a classic, but there are plenty of excellent songs here, and not a single one of them sounds like a Who song (except for those taken from the Lifehouse sessions, which are, of course, essentially Who songs anyway.)

I'd recommend this for anyone who, like me, is more curious than anything else. I was pleasently surprised, especially by "Brilliant Blues" and "Silk Skirts."

I didn't need to purchase this Two CD Collection, as I have all I of these tracks on the original releases by Pete, but...

It's just Great to see 34 Fantastic Pete Townshend Songs right here all together in One Place at a Low Price.

With: "Rough Boys","A Friend Is A Friend","Pure And Easy" and "Let My Love Open The Door"...All the Big and well known Hits are here, and now they are right besides Lesser-Known Gems as: "Heart To Hang Onto","Keep Me Turning", "I Won't Run Anymore" and "Don't Try To Make Me Real".

To say this is THE Collection of The work of Pete Townshend, would be putting it Mildly. It is the place to begin for a New Listener, and for all of us that have been on The Magic Bus since the Year Dot, THIS IS The Collection that puts it all together properly.

This is an Excellent Collection and a nice Bargain...FIVE STARS !!!

The songs in this collection are taken from seven studio albums that P.T. released between 1972 and 1993 (the latter six under Atco/Atlantic Records) including a collaboration with Ronnie Laine of The Faces.

The tracks are randomly sequenced, effectively displaying Townshend's brilliance as both a guitarist and a singer-songwriter. He's great with the synthesizers too. His most popular song is "Let My Love Open The Door", a Top Ten hit off his 1980 album "Empty Glass".

Whether he's solo or playing with The Who, Pete Townshend has emerged as one of rock music's most influential pioneers. If you want just one album from Townshend, this is the one to have. If you weren't a fan of him before, you will be after hearing this.

The Pete Townshend anthology GOLD gets off to a not-so-great start with 1993's "English Boy", but it quickly turns around to reach P.T.'s golden solo era. Unlike the 1996 BEST OF, which didn't feature the album version of "Let My Love Open The Door", this one does. There are a lot of great songs on here, and Townshend's belief that the young Australian tourist jailed in Indonesia since 2005 on drug-smuggling charges was unjustly convicted makes even the not-so-great songs worthwhile, so that this anthology is an essential purchase for both your ears AND your conscience.

It was great to hear Pete Townshend in a compilation playing stuff very different from The Who kind of music.

This man should reside beside himself in The Who, with his own place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Let's see him in for his amazing, simply amazing solo body of work.

Long Live Towser!

It's a damn shame what the record industry has done to itself and the artists' music that built it. Here is yet another fantastic, could have been perfect collection absolutely ruined by bombastic mastering methods. If you own the original LP's or Atlantic-issued CD's of the bulk of this material, hold on to those and make your own compilation. I find it amusing that any attention to detail was paid in assembling this product, as the liner notes state Jon Astley's remastering was done utilizing original mixes. What they don't tell you is that, in an effort to make this music as LOUD as possible, Astley and crew have completely squashed all dynamic range and utterly compressed the life OUT of these tracks, so that the (previously) softer passages are already too loud, making loud passages distorted beyond all measure of good sense. Sample "Exquisitely Bored" for an example of this and be sure to have a vomit bucket nearby, not for the song of course, but because of how bad it sounds here. Truly awful. If you care at all about quality sound, avoid this and pretty much anything mastered in digital beyond 1999. I really wanted to purchase other titles in the "Gold" series, but they have seen their last dime from me.

No, Pete Townshend never wrote a slew of radio-friendly top 40 songs (even with the Who, his music rarely reached the upper end of the charts), but I don't know of any other song-writer in rock who could put together a song like he does. There is always so much going on, musically, in a Pete Townshend song that it always takes several listens to really get the feel of his music. In my opinion, he is the best, most intelligent song-writer in rock history. Yes, he's sometimes a bit pretentious, but he's so good he can afford to be.

"Gold" is a nice compilation that covers Townshend's entire career. Not only that, it contains at least three songs from each of his albums, if I counted right. It includes all of his songs that receive radio play ("Slit Skirts", "Let My Love Open the Door"), and just about all of his songs that deserve radio play ("Keep Me Turning", "A Little is Enough", etc.) as well as two or three songs that only the die-hards will like ("Uniforms", "Parvardigar").

I also like the fact that the songs are not chronological. They are arranged to give a nice back-and-forth overview of Pete's career, and, in my opinion, that only serves to emphasize his incredible talent.

Any Townshend fan will have already bought this album. Any Who fan will find this album well worth the price. And any fan of rock music, even if they are not ecstatic about every single song, will not be disappointed by this compilation.

Certainly a lot to read into these lyrics in light of events of the last two years. Great CD, though. "Secondhand Love" is a dreamscape.