All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes is the fourth solo studio album by English rock musician Pete Townshend, released on 14 June 1982 by Atco Records. Chris Thomas produced the album (who had also produced Townshend's previous studio album, Empty Glass) and it was recorded by Bill Price at three separate recording studios in London, England, which were Eel Pie, AIR and Wessex. The album peaked at No. 32 on the UK Albums Chart, and at No. 26 on the US Billboard 200. All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes contains some compositions that were salvaged from later albums by his band the Who, and was released just under three months before their tenth studio album It's Hard.

Recording and production

Along with the 11 songs on the album, other songs were also recorded, including "Body Language" (subsequently released in 1983 on the compilation album 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 Who between 1979 and 1981, usually as a coda to their cover version of "Dancing in the Street"), and which was released as the B-side of "Uniforms". One further song "Vivienne" was listed on the cover of some early LP copies but not released at the time. This, along with "Man Watching" and "Dance It Away", were released as bonus tracks on the 2006 reissue.

Album title

Townshend explained the album title as referring to the "average American hero – somebody like a Clint Eastwood or a John Wayne. Somebody with eyes like slits..." On the Listening Time promotional LP, Townshend said he should have won a "Stupid Title of the Year" award.

Video release

A companion video was also released, featuring concept videos set to the musical backings of "Prelude", "Face Dances, Pt. 2", "Communication", "Uniforms", "Stardom in Acton", "Exquisitely Bored", and a re-recorded version of "Slit Skirts", with a harmonica performance on the last song, not used on the studio cut. Chalkie Davis, the director (with Carol Starr) of the video, said: "It was 1 pm on a Tuesday in 1982 when the phone rang, 'Hi Chalkie, it's Pete (Townshend), there is this thing starting in America, it's called MTV and they want a 30-minute film of me, if you can get to Bill Curbishley's office by 2:30 pm with a script I reckon I can get you the job.' We got the job, we started filming the following Monday and shot for six days, we had two full days and four afternoons with Pete." This has been out of print for years, though Pete Townshend put the videos up on his website in 2000, which were then subsequently uploaded to other sites on the Internet.

Critical reception

All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes was panned by most music critics upon its release. In a contemporary review for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau found it "pretentious at an unprecedented level of difficulty" and said that Townshend twisted "such long words into such unlikely rhymes and images and marshal arrangements of such intricate meaninglessness." Stereo Review called it an "ambitious failure" and felt that Townshend tends to indulge in his ideas on rock music and life on his songs. In a positive review for Rolling Stone, Jon Pareles called the album "a mess of contradictions", but an exceptional listen because of Townshend's arrangements, which "surge and subside as gracefully as anything in rock; they're neither static nor jolting." In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it the type of album that "taunts cynics and critics, being nearly impenetrable in its content even if the production and the music itself aren't all that inaccessible." Stylus Magazine's Justin Cober-Lake said that the album "might at times be convoluted or over-thought," but "remains affecting and compelling" because of Townshend's sincere lyrics. Rob Hughes of Classic Rock included "The Sea Refuses No River" in a list of the top 10 most underrated Townshend songs.

Track listing

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes liner notes. Musicians Technical Artwork

Charts