All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes
| All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Pete Townshend | ||||
| Released | 14 June 1982 | |||
| Recorded | 1981 - 1982 | |||
| Studio |
Eel Pie Studios, A.I.R. Studios, and Wessex Sound Studios, London |
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| Genre | ||||
| Length | 41:14 | |||
| Label | Atco (United States) | |||
| Producer | Chris Thomas | |||
| Pete Townshend chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music |  |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Village Voice | D+ |
All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes is the third official solo album by English rock musician and songwriter Pete Townshend, guitarist for The Who.
It was produced by Chris Thomas (who also produced Empty Glass) and was recorded by Bill Price at Eel Pie, A.I.R. and Wessex studios in London, England.
The album contains some compositions salvaged from later albums by The Who.
Along with the 11 songs on the album, further songs were also recorded, including "Body Language" (subsequently released in 1983 on Scoop), a track called "Man Watching" (released as the B-side of "Face Dances, Pt. 2"), and "Dance It Away" (which was also performed in various forms live by the band between 1979 and 1981, usually as a coda to "Dancing in the Street"), and which was released as the B-side of "Uniforms". One further song was listed on the initial LP release; called "Vivienne", this, along with "Man Watching" and "Dance It Away", were released as bonus tracks on the 2006 reissue.
Pete 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.
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Wikipedia