We met Pol’s latest T7 early last summer, a bike he went on to use for the short film, A Thousand Ways To Live and raced in the Red Bull Romaniacs Hard Enduro, coming in 18th in a field of nearly 200 riders. “Most of the scenes were not possible to repeat because of the risk,” says one of The Seeker 2’s creatives, Javi Echevarría. Capturing these feats on film also has its challenges too. It’s always breathtaking to watch Pol make any bike dance, even more so, when it’s ballet with a 400-plus pound adventure bike. There’s slaloming through dense forests at diaper-wearing speeds, gap jumping of roads and never-ending wheelies as Pol races through accidental playgrounds that include mine shafts, derelict houses and an abandoned factory. The rest of the 17:48 minutes of the short film is a visual feast featuring 28-year-old Pol doing unthinkable things on his adventure bike as he searches for his friend. He calls Pol but the phone dies before he can explain where he is.
The film opens with Pol’s friend Gerard, embodied by another friend of the rider’s, actor and comedian Ahikar Azcona (Money Heist), alone on a desolate beach and hopelessly stuck, with his own T7 sunk in deep sand. “Authentic and generous, he marked all our lives, so we are dedicating this project to him,” says Pol of The Seeker 2. Gerard did not make it to see the next sunrise.
Until one day when Pol says they unknowingly said their last goodbyes. Pol’s father gave him work, hoping that a sense of purpose would help him fight his demons, and Gerard subsequently became one of Pol’s best, and most trusted friends. It may have slipped between the cracks a bit in contrast to other classics by The Who, but you’ll never hear a tougher ode to desperation in your life.It’s about a friend of the champion rider, Gerard, who had endured a very difficult life and, like so many, turned to drug use to cope. If you haven’t checked out “The Seeker” in a while, be prepared to be impressed all over again by its power and profundity. Yet the façade cracks a bit when Daltrey sings, “I’m a seeker/I’m a really desperate man.” When the narrator tries to make a connection, his efforts are thwarted by the fact that those he meets seem to be having the same problems: “I’m looking for me/You’re looking for you/We’re looking in at each other/And we don’t know what to do.” As a result, the narrator takes out his frustration on all those around him, trying to feel something by inflicting pain on others.
The narrator’s admission that Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Timothy Leary have all failed to help him seems to be a sly admission that nobody has all the answers, not even profound songwriters like Townshend. When he sings, “I won’t get to get what I’m after ‘til the day I die,” there’s not an ounce of hesitation or fear as he barrels toward that certain fate.
on two feet as he bellows above the relentless rhythm section of John Entwistle and Keth Moon. Roger Daltrey sounds like the toughest S.O.B. One of the ingenious things about the song is how Townshend married those downbeat themes to a typically bruising Who rock arrangement. It just kind of covers a whole area where the guy’s being fantastically tough and ruthlessly nasty and he’s being incredibly selfish and he’s hurting people, wrecking people’s homes, abusing his heroes, he’s accusing everyone of doing nothing for him and yet at the same time he’s making a fairly valid statement, he’s getting nowhere, he’s doing nothing and the only thing he really can’t be sure of is his death, and that at least dead, he’s going to get what he wants. At the time of the song’s release, he talked about it with Rolling Stone: “Quite loosely, “The Seeker” was just a thing about what I call Divine Desperation, or just Desperation. If you read between the lines of “The Seeker,” you can hear Townshend trying to square that success with his constant restlessness. As a matter of fact, it was the first thing that Pete Townshend wrote for the band following Tommy, a project which gained him endless accolades as one of the preeminent rock songwriters. “The Seeker” feels like one of those songs, in part because it was a non-album single recorded and released in 1970 between the twin triumphs of Tommy and Who’s Next. When you’ve got a catalog as vast and impressive as that of The Who, some noteworthy songs can get lost in the shuffle.