
All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes is the third official solo album by English rock musician and songwriter Pete Townshend. It was produced by Chris Thomas and recorded by Bill Price at Eel Pie, A.I.R. and Wessex studios in London. It contains compositions salvaged from later albums by The Who, although being clearly[original research?] similar to all Townshend solo efforts (just like the late Who albums).
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Townshend explained the meaning of the strange album title at length in an interview with Rolling Stone:
Basically, it's about the fact that you can't hide what you're really like. I just had this image of the average American hero - somebody like a Clint Eastwood or a John Wayne. Somebody with eyes like slits, who was basically capable of anything - you know, any kind of murderous act or whatever to get what was required - to get, let's say, his people to safety. And yet, to those people he's saving, he's a great hero, a knight in shining armor - forget the fact that he cut off fifty people's heads to get them home safely. Then I thought about the Russians and the Chinese and the Arab communities and the South Americans; you've got these different ethnic groups, and each has this central image of every other political or national faction as being, in some way, the evil ones. And I've taken this a little bit further - because I spent so much of my time in society, high society, last year - to comment on stardom and power and drug use and decadence, and how there's a strange parallel, in a way, between the misuse of power and responsibility by inept politicians and the misuse of power and responsibility by people who are heroes. If you're really a good person, you can't hide it by acting bad; and if you're a bad person, you can't hide it by acting good. Also - more to the point, really - that there's no outward, identifiable evil, you know? People spend most of their time looking for evil and identifying evil outside themselves. But the potential for evil is inside you. —Pete Townshend, Rolling Stone interview, 1982[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Best_Cowboys_Have_Chinese_Eyes
Slit Skirts
I was just thirty-four years old and I was still wandering in a haze
I was wondering why everyone I met seemed like they were
Lost in a maze
I don't know why I thought I should have some kind of
Divine right to the blues
It's sympathy not tears people need when they're the
Front page sad news.
The incense burned away and the stench began to rise
And lovers now estranged avoided catching each others' eyes
And girls who lost their children cursed the men who fit the coil
And men not fit for marriage took their refuge in the oil
No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned
From all this you'd imagine that there must be something learned
Slit skirts, Jeanie never wears those slit skirts
I don't ever wear no ripped shirts
Can't pretend that growing older never hurts.
Knee pants, Jeanie never wears no knee pants
Have to be so drunk to try a new dance
So afraid of every new romance
Slit skirts, slit skirt
Jeanie isn't wearing those slit skirts, slit skirt
She wouldn't dare in those slit skirts, slit skirt
Wouldn't be seen dead in no slit skirt
Slit skirts, slit skirt
Jeanie isn't wearing those slit skirts, slit skirt
She wouldn't dare in those slit skirts, slit skirt
Wouldn't be seen dead in no slit skirt
Romance, romance, why aren't we thinking up romance?
Why can't we drink it up true heart romance
Just need a brief new romance
Let me tell you some more about myself, you know I'm sitting at home just now.
The big events of the day are passed and the late TV shows have come around.
I'm number one in the home team, but I still feel unfulfilled.
A silent voice in her broken heart complaining that I'm unskilled.
And I know that when she thinks of me, she thinks of me as him,
But, unlike me, she don't work off her frustration in the gym.
Recriminations fester and the past can never change
A woman's expectations run from both ends of the range
Once she walked with untamed lovers' face between her legs
Now he's cooled and stifled and it's she who has to beg
Slit skirts, Jeanie never wears those slit skirts
And I don't ever wear no ripped shirts
Can't pretend that growing older never hurts
Knee pants, Jeanie never wears no knee pants
We have to be so drunk to try a new dance
So afraid of every new romance
Slit skirts, slit skirt
Jeanie isn't wearing those slit skirts, slit skirt
She wouldn't dare in those slit skirts, slit skirt
Wouldn't be seen dead in no slit skirt
Slit skirts, slit skirt
Jeanie isn't wearing those slit skirts, slit skirt
She wouldn't dare in those slit skirts, slit skirt
Wouldn't be seen dead in no slit skirt
Romance, romance, why aren't we thinking up romance?
Why can't we drink it up true heart romance
Just need a brief new romance
--song written by Pete Townshend
This guy is Rock-n-Roll...! Okay so maybe that's hyperbole, but...
Just in the nick of time a question from the audience: 'What's he mean by "men not fit for marriage took their refuge in the oil" '?
Maybe like...Hash oil...? Other suggested meanings turn lubricious & masturbatory...
Anyway...love fades & hearts bruise. And how cynical & damaged do you have to be to eschew the revivifying effects of romance?
Pete Townshend - Slit Skirts (All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, 1982)
Pete Townshend: vocals, guitars and keyboards
Virginia Astley: Piano
Tony Butler: Bass
Peter Hope-Evans: Harmonica
Mark Brzezicki, Simon Phillips: drums
Jody Linscott: Percussion
Chris Stainton: Additional keyboards
Poli Palmer: Tuned percussion
John Lewis: Fairlight CMI synthesizer programmes