During The Who’s 50th-anniversary tour of North America this year, at one point in the band’s set, Pete Townshend noted something unusual, recalls Mark Fried, president/CEO of Spirit Music Group.
“He was telling us that fans of all ages started to applaud at the start of ‘Eminence Front,’ which they’d never done before,” he says.
The music publisher has represented Townshend’s songs since 2012 and had licensed “Eminence Front” for use in an advertising campaign for GMC.
“He was certain it was because of the ad placement,” says Fried, “and he liked that.” The distinctive opening riff of the song (without vocals) is the musical bed for three GMC spots for its line of high-end trucks.
“As fans, we’re sensitive to charges of overexposure of classic Who songs,” adds Fried. But “Eminence Front,” from the band’s 1982 album It’s Hard, is not one of Townshend’s better-known songs (it reached No. 68 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1983).
But Fried thinks Townshend’s previous publishers didn’t dip deep enough into the veteran rocker’s repertoire.
“We have pushed the catalog beyond the two or three CSI theme songs that had gotten most of the [TV exposure] before we came onboard,” he says of the crime series’ use of the Who hits “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Who Are You.”
Spirit also found that the Who co-founder rarely had been asked if he would like to work with new collaborators. So the company connected him with a music supervisor for FX’s The Americans to co-write a new song, “It Must Be Done,” which debuted on the show in 2014.
Other Spirit moves for Townshend: a remix of “Love, Reign O’er Me” from the 1973 album Quadrophenia for Netflix’s Narcos series, and placement of “My Generation” — arguably his best-known hit — on the soundtrack to the animated film Minions, sure to expose a new generation to that Who classic.