Retro Video Unit (2/12/16)

It's well past time to restart this feature; I keep thinking about it, and then I either forget again, or my time gets consumed by other things, as it tends to these days. This song has been in my head for a couple of weeks, but it was only two or three days ago that I remembered that there was a video for it.

Back in 1980 I was not an ardent fan of The Who, but I certainly knew their music and liked it. I was absorbing a lot of music at the time, both older (1960s and '70s bands I was familiarizing myself with) and current (early new wave). When Pete Townshend released the solo album Empty Glass, it got a fair amount of airplay on WBCN (which was my main outlet for new music at the time), plus I had a high school friend who was an ardent Who fan, so naturally he jumped on Empty Glass.

In that pre-MTV era, some performers were making early music videos, sometimes at the urging of their record companies. Townshend's video for "Rough Boys" showed up on late-night TV. I was also quite enamored of the Fender Telecaster (the less-flashy sibling of the Stratocaster) at the time, so seeing him play one in the video got my attention.