Song 183: “Pinball Wizard” by the Who, part 1: Always Playing Clean

A history of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hickey. Song 183, Pinball Wizard by The Who. Part 1, Always Playing Clean. Before we begin, this episode contains some mention of child abuse, drug use and physical violence. One of the things that people often get wrong is how memory works. Thanks partly to our own intuitions, and partly to the work of Sigmund Freud, who of course attempted to get the study of the human mind onto something like a modern scientific basis, but whose work when compared to current psychology and neurology is roughly equivalent to pitting Aristotle's conception of physics against the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider, we think and act as if our memories are accurate records of what's happened to us. that when we remember things, it's as if we're looking over a video recording of the events that happened. We now know, though, that this isn't how memory works. You don't store a recording of what happened and leave it there untouched until you come to think of it again, while that very quickly, after a memory is formed, it starts to degrade. You lose details. But if you think of it again, you fill in the missing details as if you're remembering them. Then, next time you remember the event, you remember those filled-in details, as if they're part of the original memory. Every time you think of something, it reinforces both the original memory and whatever new details you've added in subsequent rememberings. So important, memorable, or traumatic events that you think about constantly get reinforced, and the original details stay stronger. But if you're trying to remember something that happened decades ago that you haven't thought about in the interim, you'll get almost nothing right. But it'll sometimes still feel like you're remembering every detail as if it were happening right then. This is, of course, why in so many of the stories I tell in this podcast, people give radically different versions of events from each other, none of which match documentary evidence. They're not lying, usually. They're just telling everyone else the story that they've told themselves. Because that's all memories are, really, stories we tell ourselves. And if we don't get reminded of them frequently, they drift from reality. And it's been a good couple of years since I told you all the start of the story of The Who. So, to prevent you going too far from reality in your memories of the story, I should probably remind you of that. The Who started out as a band called Del Angelo and the Detours, a band that performed covers of pop hits by people like Cliff Richard, led by guitarist Roger Daltrey, who recruited guitarist Pete Townsend and bass player John Entwistle. When Del Angelo, whose real name was Colin Dawson, quit, Daltrey became the lead singer, and after seeing Jenny Kidd and the Pirates perform they realised that they could perform with only one guitar so Daltrey gave up playing guitar. Townsend started playing Steve Cropper style parts that were mostly rhythm but incorporating lead licks while Entwistle developed a more melodic bass style inspired by Dwayne Eddy's guitar style. After recruiting drummer Keith Moon and under the influence of early co-manager Pete Meaden the group became favourites of the mod movement in London playing hard-edged R&B music rather than the pop music they've been playing. They changed the name first to The Who and then to The High Numbers and released their first single, a rewrite of the blues standard Got Love If You Want It with lyrics by Meaden about the mod scene. That went nowhere, and they were dropped by their label. The group were one of the most exciting on the live scene, but they were mismatched as people. Entwistle and Moon were the only members who were actually friends, and they, especially Moon, wanted to play surf music rather than R&B. Daltrey had started out as someone who wasn't very keen on the R&B music they were now playing, wanting to keep playing pop. But by this point, he had become an R&B purist, and wanted the set to be full of James Brown songs. Townsend, on the other hand, who had been the band member keenest of all on going into R&B, was by now wanting to experiment with sound on stage, using feedback to make his guitar sound unique. He also started doing things like smashing his guitar on stage, which was inspired by the autodestructive art of Gustav Metzger. Daltrey thought this was arty nonsense. He had been expelled from school for fighting and had gone on to work in a sheet metal factory, while Townsend was an art student. Daltrey also disapproved of the group's increased drug use. They were all heavy amphetamine users, but Daltrey didn't even particularly drink to excess. Despite the fact that they disliked each other, the group was special when they worked together, and they were united by knowing they created something better than the sum of its parts. The group was soon discovered by two aspiring filmmakers, Chris Stamp, the brother of the film star Terence Stamp, and Kit Lambert, the son of the famous composer Constant Lambert. The two had a plan to make a documentary film about a pop group, as it went from playing small clubs to huge stardom, and decided that the high numbers were the band to star in that film. They bought out the group's management contract, renamed them back to The Who, and soon got them signed to a deal with the independent record producer Shell Talmy. Talmy was, at the time, best known for producing The Kinks, and so Pete Townsend, the only member of the band with any interest in songwriting at that point, wrote a song that was deliberately in the style of The Kinks' early hits, though also adding in the Beach Boys harmonies Keith Moon loved, courtesy of vocal group The Ivy League. The group had a couple of fairly big hits, but came very close to splitting up after a European tour where Daltrey, sick of Keith Moon's behaviour, flushed Moon's stash of amphetamines down the toilet. The other three had never liked Daltrey much anyway. He had put the band together and considered himself the leader. But as far as they and the group's managers were concerned, he was the weakest link in the group. Entwistle and Moon were one of the best rhythm sections around. Townsend was the inventive ideas man. But Daltrey wasn't a great singer at the time. He would regularly beat up Entwistle and Moon. They could do without him. The group sacked Daltrey and decided to carry on as a trio. But then they decided that they should give him one more chance. So Dolce was back in the band on a final warning while they went out and promoted what became their biggest hit to date My Generation People try to put us down Talking about my generation Just because we get around Talking about my generation Things they do look awful Talking about my generation I'm about to die before I get old That's where we left the story last time, and that's probably the single most important event in the history of The Who, because it established forever what the dynamic of the group was going to be. Up to this point, it was Daltrey's band. But after the band meeting where he was allowed back in the group, the whole dynamic changed, and that's because Daltrey agreed to swallow his ego. As he said later, I sat down and thought, well, the biggest thing in my life is the group. And I literally changed. Anything they ever did from then on never bothered me. I let them play their Beach Boys. It went down okay, but it didn't last five minutes. As we'll see, that's not entirely true. Daltrey would continue to have very vocal disagreements with his bandmates for the entire rest of the band's career. But from this point on, Daltrey did agree that the group was bigger than any one man, and that whatever the group as a whole, including their marriage as Lambert and Stamp, decided, would go. The first thing to do, after they released My Generation, and it went to number two on the charts, was to release an album. They had already made one attempt at recording an album, but that had been the album Daltrey wanted to make, heavy on James Brown and Motown covers. That wasn't what the rest of the band wanted to be doing, and so most of it was scrapped. Though because the band was now a democracy, they did keep three songs, a quarter of the album, from those sessions. But other than two James Brown songs and one Bo Diddley one, this was very different from the music the group had been making live until very recently. The other nine songs are originals, all written by Townsend apart from one instrumental, the Ox, credited to all the band members except Daltrey plus session keyboard player Nicky Hopkins, and which shows the influence of the surf music that the rhythm section wanted to play, particularly in this case instrumental surf bands like the Safaris. There's more than a little wipeout in the Ox. The influence of the Beach Boys Moon's favourite group is also very audible on what he would later call his favourite ever Who song The Kids Are Alright. The climbing melody in the bridge is pure Brian Wilson and at least in the studio the Who could pull off a reasonable approximation of the Beach Boys block harmonies. But I know sometimes I must get out in the line Better leave or be I'm with the kids are alright There are other musical influences in there as well. The song uses quite a few suspended chords. For those who don't know, where a normal trad chord is the first, third and fifth notes of the scale, A suspended chord replaces the third with the second, or the fourth. Now, these chords are often used in folk rock and singer-songwriter music, because you can shift between them and the standard triad, just by moving one finger, to create interesting harmonic effects with minimal effort. So, for example, the Needles and Pins riff is played by strumming through A, A-sus-2, and A-sus-4, just moving one finger. And the use in The Kids Are Alright sounds like that. The combination of Townsend's Rickenbacker, the block harmonies, and the suspended chords sounds like it could be something the searchers or the birds of a similar band would do. And indeed, Townsend later used essentially that riff for his song So Sad About Us. But Townsend actually had a different intention behind his use of suspended chords, and one that shows how his mind was working and how the band's dynamic was changing. Lambert and Stamp, while much closer to each other than Daltrey and Townsend were, had a similar dynamic. Stamp was a working-class pragmatist who cared about the nuts and bolts, and while Lambert was upper-class while Townsend was lower-middle, they were both interested more than anything else in art, theorising about artistic ideas, and moving into genuinely new territory. While Lambert was not a musician himself, he had been brought up by one of the most celebrated musicians of the era, and he had far more knowledge of art music than Townsend did. He had been lending Townsend records to help educate him in more sophisticated music, and Townsend has said that his use of suspended chords was in conscious imitation of the Chaconne from Purcell's The Gordian Knot Untied. And lyrically, the track is fascinating too. Townsend's lyrics at this point are often very confused, and he's talked himself about how he would write what he thought were fairly conventional love songs, and then later look back and realise that they were saying something very different than what he had intended. Indeed, one thing we'll see with Townsend a lot over the course of these episodes is that Townsend was, at his peak, someone who was able to almost split into multiple people when working on a track. He talks a lot about how he would write songs as a writer, not thinking of the band at all, but thinking of pure songs. But then as soon as he walked into the room with the other members of The Who, he became just an equal member of the band, with no more say about the arrangement of performance than the other three. This is probably not strictly true, because a lot of his demos show sketches of arrangements that are very similar to the final record, but it's what he told himself and others. When performing with the band, he would look on the song as the work of someone else altogether. Pete the writer, not Pete the band member. And then he would become Pete the critic. In interviews, he would look back at his work and analyse it using the theoretical structures he'd learned as an art student, and while he was a fan and admirer of his own group, he would be relatively dispassionate about the work when talking about it. As a result, we have the odd situation where most of Townsend's work has been publicly over-analysed by its composer, even as he says himself that that analysis is not necessarily any more correct than anyone else's. But from the very start of Townsend's career as a writer, a lot of themes show up which recur in almost everything he's written. The very first song Townsend wrote for The Who was called I Can't Explain, and inarticulacy comes up again and again. Other themes that show up in The Kids Are Alright, and in much of his later work, come from the way The Who worked. Townsend has talked a lot about how the reason the group became so popular as a live act is that they took their cues from the audience. They didn't see themselves as performing for the audience, but as collaborating with them in a shared experience, being led by the audience rather than leading them. And so, over and over again in Townsend's work, you get themes of the power of a collective rather than an individual. My generation, the kids are all right. And also, the Who had a far more male audience than most bands of the period, and there's a strong theme of homosociality, male bonding, a he-man-no-girls-allowed club, in a lot of their material. Interestingly, Given that at the time the Who were explicitly trying to emulate the Beach Boys, this, like the inarticulacy, is another parallel to their music. Compare the lyrics to The Kids Are Alright with those to I Get Around, and it's almost as if Townsend has disassembled the Beach Boys song and put it back together again. Which, funnily enough, is what an obscure band called The Rockin' Vickers did to The Kids Are Alright, turning it into It's Alright, though giving Townsend full songwriting credit. It's alright for you to go with my girl I don't mind where you go with my girl I don't mind her walking with her I don't mind her talking with her Just as long as she gives her love to me That track is mostly notable because the Rocking Vickers' guitarist, Ian Kilmister, later became better known as Lemmy of Motorhead. The Rocking Vickers track was produced by Glyn Johns, the engineer on the sessions for the My Generation album, but in at least one book I've consulted for this episode, the credit is instead given to Shell Talmy. And this brings up the fraught question of who actually did produce the album. On paper, the answer is simple. Shell Talmy is the credited producer. And the record certainly sounds like a lot of other records that Talmy produced. But exactly how involved he was became a bone of contention in court when the group decided they didn't want him to produce their next single. The main reason for this was not actually Talmy's production input, but rather the contract the group were under. They had signed a production deal with Talmy as an independent producer, who was then licensing the records to Brunswick in the UK and Decker in the US. Initially, this meant that the group were on a ludicrously low royalty rate, only 2.5% split between the four members and Lambert and Stamp. They wanted to break the contract so that they could make a deal that would actually pay them a reasonable amount of money for their hit records. But the claim made by the band in the court was that Talmy had little or no involvement in making the record, which was cut very quickly with the bulk of it done in a single session. According to the band members, before the session, they had rehearsed intensely with Kit Lambert, who had made suggestions as to song structure and arrangement, and essentially pre-produced the record, which fits in with the way Lambert would continue to be involved with the band's records. And then in the studio, Glyn Johns had done all the production work, while Talmy had done nothing. Johns, who of course became an immensely successful producer himself later, always denied this, and said that Talmy was very involved, and there is definitely a sound that many of Talmy's records have. He's not a producer whose style jumps out instantly, but there are commonalities among the records he produced. Indeed, the other complaint that the Who repeatedly made about Talmy, along with him not doing anything, is that he tried to take control too much, that he saw them as something to be moulded to his vision, as could be seen by him bringing in minger session musicians for the first single. I think the way to square all these different claims is to note that the job of a record producer is not a clearly defined one, and meant different things to different people. There were producers like Phil Spector, who would act as auteurs and subordinate everything to their vision while leaving the detail work to lackeys. Like Joe Meek, who was interested in what sounds he could get out of recording equipment and saw the artist as an excuse to play with knobs and make funny sounds. Like George Martin, who would help tighten up song structures and write orchestral arrangements. Or like Tom Wilson, who would largely just make sure that the artist had the resources they needed to make the record they wanted. Tell me seems, in large part, to have been a Wilson type, albeit one who seems occasionally to have wanted to be a spectre. But if everyone's claims are taken as more or less accurate, Talmy, Lambert, Townsend and Johns all did work on that first Who album that could be considered production work. There was another reason as well that the group wanted to break their contract with Talmy. Decker in the US was completely ignoring their records, and they were barely scraping the bottom reaches of the Hot 100. The group had initially announced that they were going to issue a song they'd recorded with Talmy, Circles as their next single. Instead, they put out a new song, Substitute, for a new record label, Reaction, that had been formed by Robert Stigwood, who was at that point their booking agent. You think we look pretty good together You think my shoes are made of leather But I'm a substitute for another guy I look pretty tall, but my heels are high The simple things you see are all complicated Look pretty young, but I'm just back to date again Substitute was produced by the group rather than Tell Me. Soon Kit Lambert would take over production, but he wasn't sure enough in the studio yet, and became one of Entwistle's favourite Who tracks, because of the prominence of his bass. Keith Moon, on the other hand, was on so many pills during the session that he had no memory of recording the track, and later accused the other band members of having replaced him with a session drummer. The song had a number of different inspirations. Townsend was someone who used demos to refine his songs, making them an integral part of the writing process, and you can hear from his demo of Substitute that early on he was trying to parody the Rolling Stones. You think my shoes call me to bed love I'm a substitute for another guy I look pretty tall but my heels are high The simple things just here are all complicated I look pretty young but I'm just about to fade in the air There were two more major influences on the track. The one that Townsend brings up more often is Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. The line, Although she may be cute, she's just a substitute, because you're the permanent one, had apparently made the word substitute a bit of a buzzword in mod circles at the time. However, he also had inspiration from another record. He says in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview, The stock downbeat riff used in the verses I pinched from a record played to me in Blind Date, a feature in Melody Maker. It was by a group who later wrote to thank me for saying nice things about their record in the feature That record is Where Is My Girl? by Rob Storm and the Whispers an obscure group who managed to have quite a long career despite never having a hit. They continued releasing records first as the Rob Storm group and then as the Orange Bicycle through to the early 70s Where is my girl? Hey, where is my girl? Hey, where is my girl? The B-side to Substitute was originally a track titled Instant Party, but which was actually a re-recorded version of Circles, almost identical to the version they recorded with Talmy. Talmy sued them, claiming that he had had significant input into the arrangement and structure of circles, and that therefore they were infringing on his copyright. Townsend wanted to use his demos to show otherwise in the court case, though they eventually came to a settlement after discovering the judge was so uninformed about pop music that he actually thought the case was to do with the World Health Organization, rather than a pop group. But while they were waiting for that case to go to court, the single was pulled and quickly reissued with the B-side replaced by an instrumental titled Waltz for a Pig, performed by the Graham Bond organisation under the name The Who Orchestra. Substitute quickly made the top five in the UK, but it once again did nothing in the US, despite being released to Atlantic Records rather than US Decker. This is despite it having a separate US edit, cutting out one verse altogether, and also rewriting one line of what was left. The label thought that the line, I look all white but my dad was black, would get the record banned from the radio in the southern states. And so the lyric was changed to I try going forward but my feet go back. We see you next time Meanwhile as an attempt at a spoiler Talmy released a rival Who single through Decca As a point of choice, he put the version of Circles he produced on the B-side, and on the A-side, the appropriately named Illegal Matter, a song sung by Talzen from the first album. The single went to number 32 on the charts, but no higher, thanks largely to the fact that The Who refused to promote it, and many people who would have wanted it had already bought the album. Deckard put out another two singles from the album after that, with diminishing returns. At this point, the group were getting more and more despondent. Their hit records weren't making them any money because of the pitiful royalty rate they were on with Talmy. But the problem was that they weren't making any money from touring, either. In theory, they should have been. they were getting £300 per show in early 1966, which is roughly equivalent to £5,000 a night in today's money. The problem was, every night as part of the show, Townshead would smash his guitar and Moon would destroy his drumheads. The guitars could sometimes be pieced together, but not always, and new drumheads every night were expensive. Also, Keith Moon was starting the habit which would become more pronounced over coming years of trashing hotel rooms out of boredom, which not only cost the group yet more money but also made booking shows more difficult as they would get barred from hotels. On top of that the group had to keep up their image as mod style icons and so were spending a fortune on looking like the young millionaires that they weren't. There were hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt and the more they worked the more money they lost. Meanwhile there was fundamentally a three-way split in the band. Moon and Entwistle were friends and wanted to play surf music. Daltrey didn't like any of the other members and wanted to make some money, which he thought that their antics were preventing him from doing. Townsend wasn't sure what he wanted. He had a lot of conceptual ideas, but he also wanted to keep the peace with his bandmates. And he was giving serious consideration to quitting The Who and joining Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, a Liverpool band who at the time were tipped as the next big thing. They never had a hit, but are remembered because their bass player, Klaus Forman, was a friend of the Beatles who drew the cover art for Revolver, and later went on to replace Jack Bruce in Manfred Mann before becoming one of the most successful session bass players of the late 60s and 70s. Daltrey, meanwhile, didn't turn up for several shows in early May 1966 with various excuses being put out but the main reason really being that at this point nobody wanted to be in The Who anymore and they were all looking for excuses not to show up. Townsend and Entwistle covered his vocals at those shows and at one in the Black Country a young Robert Plant came up to Townsend afterwards and offered his services as vocalist. In the end, it was Keith Moon who ended up getting sacked from The Who, and it was because he wanted to be a beach boy. When Bruce Johnston came over to the UK to promote Pet Sounds on May 16, 1966, The Who were already in a bad state. This was right after the gigs that Daltrey had missed, and there was open talk of them splitting. Indeed, that very same day, Keith Moon made the bid for independence we talked about in the Days and Confused episode. If you haven't listened to that, or don't remember it, there was an attempt made to form a supergroup of the best players in London. Jeff Beck was on lead guitar, Jimmy Page was on rhythm, Nicky Hopkins was on piano, and because everyone had heard that the Who's rhythm section was unhappy with the other members, they were invited to play on the record. Moon showed up, in disguise, because he wasn't sure he actually did want to quit the group. But Entwistle didn't, and so John Paul Jones replaced him on bass on the one track recorded by this line-up, Beck's Bolero. Thank you. Moon commented that the band would go down like a Led Zeppelin. But after recording that session, Moon went to hang out with Bruce Johnston. Now Moon was a surf popper obsessive, in a way few people in the UK were at the time. Before 1966, the Beach Boys had only had one top ten hit over here with I Get Around. Barbara Ann had given them a second in February 1966, and Johnston came over just as Sloop John B. was hitting the top five, because Andrew Oldham was starting to push the group's music in the UK. But before that, they'd hit the lower reaches of the top 30 a handful of times, but were virtual unknowns over here. Their UK career basically started in 1966, even as their US career more or less finished then. But Moon was a fan, and not only of the Beach Boys, but of Jan and Dean, who were even less successful over here. Only two hit singles, the highest, Heart and Soul, hitting number 24. and of the rip chords, the studio group Johnston had sung in with Terry Melcher, who'd had a big hit in the States with Hey Little Cobra. For Keith Moon, this was the obscure American music he liked and obsessed about, in the same way that Muddy Waters or Elmore James were for Brian Jones. He wanted, more than anything, to be a beach boy. So even though when he was played pet sounds, he was actually not very impressed, it was a departure from the surf sound he loved. He was in awe of Johnston and wanted desperately to impress him. He agreed to help Johnston meet up with the Beatles later in the week, and Moon and Johnston, along with Johnston's friend Kim Fowley, who was at that time living in London and who was Johnston's guide to the music scene in Britain, also met up with Moon's friend Tony Rivers. Rivers would later become a successful session singer and vocal arranger, but he was one of the few people in the UK who was as big a fan of harmony surf pop as Moon, and at the time he was the lead singer of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, who made unsuccessful singles in the same style and whose live act was full of Beach Boys and Jan and Dean covers. Shortåtés Surf City, here we come You know it's not very cherry It's a rolly, but a goody Surf City, here we come It ain't got a backseat or a river, no But it still gets me where I wanna go Well, I'm going to Surf City I'm just do the one You know we're going to Surf City He invited Moon, Johnston and Fowley to the gig he was playing that night not expecting them to turn up but not only did they show up Johnston and Moon joined the group on stage and played with them for hours Johnston having difficulty because while he played bass on stage it wasn't really his instrument but Moon having a whale of a time finally getting to be, sort of, a beach boy for a day Moon desperately wanted to impress his new friend so the next day he and Entrysell took Johnston to a live broadcast of Ready Steady Go and then to the after party and stayed there while the Who were meant to be performing a gig in Newbury about 50 miles away They turned up to the gig two hours late, only to find that Daltrey and Townsend had started without them, with the rhythm section of the support band in their place. They got up on stage and joined their bandmates, who were understandably annoyed at them. So annoyed that at the end of the set, both Daltrey and Townsend, who was not normally a violent man, were beating up Moon with their mic-stand and guitar. He sustained a black eye and needed three stitches. A journalist was present, and Moon and Entwistle told him they were quitting the group and going to start their own band, and then drove back to London and told Kit Lambert and Robert Stigwood the same thing. Entwistle changed his mind the next day, but for the next five days the Who played with a succession of fill-in drummers before they managed to persuade Moon to return to the band. The group's first return to the studio after Moon's temporary departure was to record two songs for what was Pete Townsend's first attempt at writing an extended narrative in mock music form. That narrative, quads, seems to have been both a science fiction story and a way for Townsend to work out some of his gender issues. While Townsend uses he-him pronouns, he has described himself in ways that sound like what we would now call non-binary. For example, saying in a Newsweek interview in the 90s, I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman and I won't be classified as just a man. He has also variously described his sexuality, which is not the same thing as gender, but in the 60s the two were more tied together in general understanding than they are now, as bisexual and pansexual. And he has also made a lot of comments about his own appearance, which sound very much to me like dysphoria. He has repeatedly talked about how he hates his own face, and how one of the reasons he developed such a physical style of playing the guitar and moving on stage is so that people will watch his body and not his face. He's also talked about how when he was living with his abusive grandmother as a small child, he had an imaginary twin sister, who suffered every privation I suffered. I am not the person to analyse this in any more detail than to note that it's a thing about Townsend that he has talked about on many occasions, that he is clearly trying to work to understand about himself, and that he has made conflicting statements about. As a cishet man myself, I have never had to do much thinking about my own gender and sexuality. I've thought about it, as most people have but came to the conclusion that in my own case it's simply not very interesting and so I don't have the visceral understanding of these experiences the way that many queer people do but it has to be noted because this questioning of gender and sexuality often mixed up with broader questions of identity is one of the themes that Townsend comes back to again and again in his work and he did it first with quads which seems to have been a musical narrative he started writing but never finished about the far future of 1999. In this future society, people can order genetically engineered children and can specify their gender. But there's a mix-up, and when one family orders female quadruplets, they get three girls and one boy, who they decide to raise as a girl anyway. There are three songs that are known to have been written for the project that saw release. One, Join My Gang, was given to a performer then using the stage name Oscar, but later to find fame as Paul Nicholas. and released as an unsuccessful single on Reaction Records. Maybe when I feel my hands, I'd sweat you to take it But I don't want you to hold it, I'm only shaking Just cause you're a girl don't mean that we can't get along They say it won't work, but I can't prove them all You can't join my game, that would shake the world You can't join my game Even though you're a friend According to Townsend, you know who used to rave about that song? David Bowie. He actually heard it in the publishing office. He used to work in an office that had a lot of my stuff then, and it seemed plausible that Bowie would have known the record given that Bowie wrote and sang backing vocals and Oscar's follow-up. The other two Quadstracks that we know of were the ones recorded at this session, which was the first one that Kit Lambert is credited as producing. One, Disguises, was saved for the lead track of an EP towards the end of the year. That simultaneously makes sense. It was not a commercial enough track to have had a hope of hitting the top 40, but also is something of a shame, as it is far heavier and more psychedelic than anything the group had done previously, and honestly sounds like a slightly less successful attempt at some of the things the Beatles were doing at the same time with Revolver, which got released first. so by the time the Who's record came out it sounded like a pale imitation I think they're all good here Don't see you in the crowd anymore I'll kiss you but I'm feeling sure You're wearing the sky The other track became the group's biggest British hit single ever. The Who have never had a number one hit on the charts that are now considered official, the ones that the BBC references. But at the time there were multiple competing charts and I'm a Boy, a song which lays out the story of quads from the point of view of the child assigned to the wrong gender and which is now treated by many people as something of a trans anthem went to number one on all of them except the record retailer one the BBC used where it only went to number two. The other girl was called Jean Marie Another little girl was called Felicity Another little girl was Sally Joy He thought it was me In other boys My name is Bill And I'm a head case They practice making a long night Roger Daltrey didn't like or understand I'm a boy at the time. He says in his autobiography I was alright with the line My name is Bill and I'm a head case But the rest of it A boy struggling to find his identity Was hard. Up until this point The band had been moulded around what I did. Pete wrote it but I sang it. I wasn't in charge, but on stage I could do what I wanted. Dave fitted around me, and so did the songs. It wasn't like that anymore. My confidence had been knocked. All I remember was that I listened more to Pete's voice on the demo tapes and how he was singing it. I tried to get his voice into my voice. I tried to sing it like a vulnerable kid. When I listen to I'm a Boy Now, I think it kind of works, but I didn't think it did at the time, not at all. But this actually ended up being the remarkable thing about Daltrey and Townsend's collaboration. Daltrey, at least at the time, simply did not understand Townsend's lyrics or his thought processes. The two men were very different in every conceivable way, and still are to this day. Their interests, their political views, their taste in music, their level of introspection, their religious views, all were and are almost diametrically opposed. But Daltrey had realised something during the time that the Who had been constantly on the verge of splitting. He realised that he needed to be in the Who. At the time he was regarded by everyone as the most expendable member of the band. Townsend was clearly an innovative guitarist and a writer unlike anyone else on the scene, while Moon and Entwistle were regarded by many as the best rhythm section in the UK. Daltrey, though, was not even thought of as a particularly good singer. He wasn't bad, but nor was he anything special. He knew that if the group did split up he would never find another group of musicians like that. and he resolved to make himself unsackable. He made two big choices. Firstly, he became immensely loyal to the Who as a group. He would often dislike the other individual members, or Lambert and Stamp, who in many ways were considered as much a part of the group as the musicians. And that dislike would often come out in warring interviews over the years, where Townsend and Daltrey in particular would insult each other constantly. But he was loyal to the group as a collective, and would never waver from that loyalty. the other choice he made was to consciously become a mouthpiece for Townsend's lyrics at this point, as he says in his autobiography the vibrations didn't feel good once we moved deeper into Pete's brain but as he goes on to say I already knew my job was to be a portal for Pete's words realising that, accepting it, embracing it was what these years were all about between my generation and Tommy it was all about finding that vulnerability it wasn't easy And this was something that was necessary for Townsend. One of his other major lyrical themes is inarticulacy and the inability to find a voice. Daltrey became the voice he didn't have himself. The B-side of I'm a Boy, which also had production credited to Lambert, was a relic of the abortive plan for Moon and Entwistle to go off and form their own surf band. In the City was a track written by the two of them, their only songwriting collaboration as a duo, which they'd recorded by themselves without telling Townsend and Daltrey about it, an attempt at pastiching John Dean records. After the group had healed its wounds, Townsend overdubbed some guitar, but Daltrey is not on the track at all. I'm alone into the city Where the girls are pretty You can't go wrong Take your time No need to hurry Don't have to worry Don't you want it all But you can step in the seat You can stay in the seat Do anything you want to do Before the single was released, though, they still needed to finalise the details of how they were going to get out of their contract with Talmy. They'd been recording for reaction, but they needed to do something to get rid of their very real legal responsibilities to tell me. A plan was hatched, the details of which I've never been able to properly follow. It's told slightly differently by every participant. But what seems to have happened is that Lambert and Stamp played multiple sets of opponents off against each other. At the time, they were the third biggest managers on the London scene, after Brian Epstein and Andrew Oldham. They were working closely at the time with Robert Stigwood, who was also at that point building his own alliance with Epstein, and who was running reaction. Lambert and Stamp basically saw their future as aligning themselves more closely with Epstein's stable of artists, and working with the same booking agents and so on as them. But Andrew Oldham wanted to manage The Who, and Oldham was now working with Alan Klein, who was busy getting control over every British pop group's American career. The Who didn't have an American career yet, but Klein could see that they were going to. Klein was best known as a representative, so he offered to represent Shell Talmy's interest in the negotiations. And he did, but he also represented his own. He did arrange a deal which was agreeable to both parties, and which turned out to be very much the Talmy's advantage. But what he really cared about was negotiating a role for himself in the Who's management. So Lambert and Stamp went along with this and signed agreements that freed the Who from having to work with Talmy, but gave Klein the right to manage the group, so long as suitable terms could be negotiated over the next two weeks. And then they just didn't negotiate those suitable terms, and Klein was left with nothing. Tell Me, however, did rather well. The group's new recording contract, when it was signed, would get them a 10% royalty rate, rather than the 3% they were on before. But for everything they recorded in the next five years, they would get half of that, with the other half going to Tell Me to compensate him. So for what turned out to be the Who's commercial and artistic peak, the Who got a 5% royalty rate for making records, and Shell Talmy got 5% for not making them. This wouldn't have been too bad under normal circumstances. The prevailing wisdom in the 1960s was that bands didn't make money from selling records anyway, you made the money from touring. And The Who, in general, saw live performances far more important than recordings anyway. They thought that the art in what they did came in collaboration with an audience, not working by themselves in a studio. This is one reason why, even after the contractual issues were sorted out, the group would release albums only infrequently. They just saw recording as the secondary medium, not the primary one. But without realising it, the group's actions could very easily have sabotaged their hopes of making real touring money too. There were essentially two circuits that pop groups could play in the US. There was the established one where you'd go on package tours like Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars, sharing a bus with 30 other acts and playing three ten-minute sets a day for minimal money, and which only people who already had some chart hits would be booked on. And then there was a new circuit just starting to open up, venues like the Grandy Ballroom in Detroit and the Fillmore. And all those venues turned to one man for their bookings, Frank Barcelona. The unfortunate thing was that at some point during negotiations, when Lambert, Stamp and Townsend flew out to New York to talk with Klein, Barcelona interacted with them in some way. Barcelona had a flat rule that he would not do business at all with anyone doing business with Klein, who he did not trust, and so when he was approached by Lambert and Stamp to try to book The Who, he turned them down flat. The group were now free to work properly on their second album, though before that there were a few other things to do in the studio. First, Townsend wrote and produced So Sad About Us for the Merseys, the band formerly known as the Mersey Beats, though Lambert got the production credit. So sad about us So sad about us for the album a couple of months later. They also had a 16-minute appearance on Ready Steady Go, which promoted a simultaneously released five-song EP of the songs they performed, titled Ready Steady Who. That EP, which was their only EP of tracks that weren't already released on other formats, featured two recent originals, Disguisers from the Abandoned Quads project and the version of Circles that had been released and quickly withdrawn on the substitute single on Side 1. Side two, on the other hand, was where Keith Moon got to live his Southern California surf pop fantasies for three songs. The Batman theme was obviously a popular song at the time, and other bands whose popularity overlapped with The Who's, like The Kinks, would sometimes perform it live. But The Who's version is clearly inspired by Jan and Dean's version of it on the Jan and Dean Meet Batman album. So much so that on the label they accidentally credited Jan Berry, Don Altfeld, and Frank Weider, the writers of a different Jan and Dean song titled Batman. Max Thanack Max Max ig 안녕 version of Jan and Dean's Bucket Tea with Moon on falsetto vocals. This was released as a single in parts of Europe, and went to number one in Sweden, convincing Moon, despite all available oral evidence, that he was in fact a great falsetto singer and should be allowed to sing backing vocals regularly on the Who's records. And the EP ended with Barbara Ann. Ready Steady Who went to number one on the EP charts, making it their first number one on any of the UK charts now considered official, and one of only two they had altogether. They've never had a number one single on the official UK charts, and only one album, Who's Next, in 1971. Much like the EP, the album the group were working on was very unrepresentative of the work the group had been known for, and for the most part of the direction they were travelling in Partly this was because it was the only Who album to mostly feature original songs not written by Pete Townsend As part of a way to deal with the group not receiving any record royalties while the dispute with Talmy was ongoing, Lambert and Stamp had made a deal with the music publisher Essex Music to give the band members advances of a few thousand pounds, conditional on them all writing a couple of songs for the next Who album. This was a bit of a problem, because the reason Townsend was the group's songwriter was that he was the only one remotely interested in writing songs at the time. Daltrey only managed to come up with one song, a rather poor track that was meant to be an imitation of Buddy Holly, though you can't tell that from listening to it, and which would be his only solo songwriting contribution ever to a Who album. Moon, with some uncredited lyrical help from Entwistle, came up with a rather interesting baroque pop number, I Need You, including a spoken section with someone impersonating John Lennon, which is sadly spoiled by Moon's insistence that he's singing it himself in his falsetto, and he is also the credited writer on the instrumental track Cobwebs and Strange, which is actually just a re-recording of a TV theme tune from a few years earlier, originally by Tony Crombie. But Entwistle, unlike Daltry or Moon, had actually had a fair bit of formal musical training. As well as playing the bass, he could also play several brass instruments, and any brass parts you hear on Who Records are usually him. And he brought in two songs, one of which, Boris the Spider, would go on to become one of the Who's most beloved songs and a regular in their live shows for decades to come. Hanging by your little friend But even leaving aside the contributions of the other members, Townsend's songs on the album point to the way that this was a transitional period in which he didn't know what he wanted to do or who he wanted to be. At the time, Townsend was being torn in two different directions. He was very interested in doing big conceptual projects, like the Quads project he'd started unabandoned, and he was being pushed in that direction by Kit Lambert, who was enthusiastic about the possibilities for pop music to expand into some of the classical forms Lambert's father had worked in, and who had a collaborative relationship with Townsend, in which Lambert would bounce Townsend's ideas back taken two steps further, and Townsend would then make them even more ambitious again. But he was also committed to the simple three-minute pop single, and against what he saw as the trend towards pretension and over-intellectualisation. As he would explain a few months later, coining a term that would later be used to describe a whole genre, power-pop is what we play, what the small faces used to play, and the kind of pop the beach boys used to play in the days of fun-fun-fun, which I preferred. There were too many groups involved in the same kind of scene as the move, where every word has to mean something. The beach boys are playing on this kind of ethereal level, where the public is expected to come to them and be taught. I believe pop music should be like the TV, something you should turn on or off and shouldn't disturb the mind. Eventually, these people are going to go too far and leave the rest of the world behind. It's very hard to like strawberry fields for simply what it is. Some artists are becoming musically unapproachable. He would later revise his opinion of the artists he was talking about there, and their artistic ambitions, saying in his autobiography, For me, Sgt. Pepper and the Beach Boys' pet sounds redefined music in the 20th century. Atmosphere, essence, shadow and romance were combined in ways that could be discovered again and again. But for now, he wanted to be making unambitious, meaningless fun pop music like So Sad About Us on the album. Except, of course, that the closing track, which gave the album its title, is precisely the kind of over-ambitious record he would be dismissing a few months later. A Quick One While He's Away is a nine-minute track planned as a mini-opera, after Townsend and Kit Lambert had been talking about the possibilities of pop music, and both at this point were adamantly talking about the music the Who made as pop, not rock, though within a couple of years Townsend would become one of the most vocal advocates for rock as a lifestyle and almost a religion, taking over some of the cultural space that art music had previously had, and using some of the more complex formal structures of that kind of music. Lambert was interviewed in the mid-sixties, saying that he hadn't heard a good new symphony or opera in about eighteen months, and that that proved that kind of music needed to be replaced. Townsend was at first hesitant to do this. He talked about how it was a law of nature that pop songs had to be two and a half minutes long. But then he realised that he could do it by stringing together several pieces of music into one longer piece, and that that might be interesting. More to the point, whether he wanted to or not, they needed to fill up most of one side of an album, and because of the Essex music deal they could only have one more Townsend song, so he had to do something about nine minutes long. And not only that, they needed it quickly, in order to get the album out for the Christmas market. The word quick was stressed enough that Townsend took it as the watchword for the piece, using the phrase a quick one, meaning brief, illicit sexual coupling, as the hook to hang it on. Townsend now sees a lot of the lyrics in the song as being about his own feelings as a child, abandoned by his parents to live with his abusive grandmother while they temporarily split and his mother had an affair, saying that because he wrote it so quickly, a lot of his feelings about that abuse bubbled up from his subconscious, though he didn't realise that until later. We'll be talking more about Townsend's experiences of abuse, the complex issues around his memory of them, and his trauma, and how they affect his work, in the next part of this story, where those connections become a lot more explicit. But for now, I'll just say that Townsend's later interpretation of demeaning is just that. His interpretation. As I've said before, Townsend prides himself on his ability to step back and criticise and analyse his own work, the same way he can with that of other writers, as if he is looking at someone else's work, and he has said that he considers himself a great rock critic. In this case, while the subtext he points out is a valid interpretation, and certainly explains why he finds the song moving himself, it's not one that anyone else is likely to have come to in analysing the track itself, which is closer to a farce than anything else. The song consists of six sections. It starts with an a cappella fragment setting up the premise. It then goes into a section titled Crying Town, about the sadness of the unnamed woman awaiting her lover's return. This one once again shows Townsend playing with suspended chords, as he was so fond of doing at this time. The sequence goes D, D suspended fourth, D5, a power chord where just the root and dominant of the chord are played, D suspended fourth, playing it so that the top note of the arpeggiated riff moves up and down like a scale, like this. As I said earlier, that kind of riff was a staple of acts like The Searchers, and Townsend seems to have noticed that resemblance and leaned into it by having a falsetto part that resembles some of their work. Compare the falsetto in the Crying Town section. So that in Sweets for My Suite by The Searchers. So brightly, too much the slightest in your eye. Darling, I would chase that bright sun nightly and try to steal it from the sky. And I would bring sweets for my sweet, sugar for my honey. Your first big kiss thrilled me so. Sweets for my sweet, sugar for my honey. I'll never ever... Then there's a section titled We Have a Remedy, in which various men suggest that maybe they could solve the woman's problems if she knows what they mean and they think she does. More jangly folk rock suspended chords here here switching between major chords and their suspended seconds. We then get into a bit which sees the piece turn to broad farce. In the Iver the Engine Driver section, the unnamed woman is seduced by a train driver named Iver, and anyone in Britain listening at the time would have recognised that as a nod to the children's cartoon Iver the Engine. This part is sung by Entwistle, and in live performances would often be sung in a comedy-rustic accent, and is clearly played as comedy. But it's also the one part of the piece where Townsend's later interpretation of it subconsciously being about child abuse rings true, as Ivor refers to the woman as Little Girl, and in live performances the group would go further and say Little Girl Guide, and offers her a suite before taking her home. You'll sort it out, sort it out, back at my place maybe. You'll come right, you ain't no fool lying either. So why not be nice to an old engine driver? Better be nice to an old engine driver. The man then arrives home, riding a horse and so given an appropriately cowboy bass line from Entwistle. We'll soon be home, we'll soon be home. We'll soon, we'll soon, soon, soon be home. We'll soon be home. Then, after some truly dodgy harmonies singing Dang, Dang, Dang, Dang, the final, longest, and most successful climactic section of the song. You Are Forgiven has the man coming home happy to see the woman, her confessing her infidelity, and him forgiving her. The start of the section is built around major chords, but with the occasional suspended fourth to give harmonic tension as things aren't yet quite resolved, mirroring lyrics like Do my eyes deceive me? and Like a dream to be with you again. There's still an element of unreality here. But there's also the humour that we saw in the earlier sections. The group wanted to add strings, but they were working on such a low budget that they couldn't afford string players, and so they'd just sing cello, cello, cello instead. when I can hear the way from all the time it's like a dream to be with you or so they always told that story but there's an interesting addendum to that which I'll come to shortly and then once the man forgives the woman the chords turn to the simple three major chords that make up all the most rudimentary rock and roll things are now simple and good and so so are the chords though in the recorded version there's also a little bit of polyphonic harmony at the end, in the style of some of the Baroque composers Townsend had been listening to, after being introduced to their work by Lambert. This part would become the most powerful part of the song in live performance. Townsend describes it in his autobiography, saying, Then suddenly everyone is forgiven, not once but a thousand times, over and over, as though there's not enough forgiveness in a single line. When I sang this part live on stage, I would often become furious, thrashing at my guitar until I could thrash no more, frantically forgiving my mother, her lover, my grandmother, her lovers, and most of all myself. To coincide with the release of a quick one, the group also released the non-album single Happy Jack, a character study inspired by Alan and Rigby, and apparently based on someone Townsend had observed on holiday as a child, about a homeless man living on a beach on the Isle of Man, who the local children mock and bully, but who doesn't get bothered by it. The track became the group's third top five hit of 1966. That, I saw you, at the end, is aimed at Moon. Apparently, when they toured Sweden a few weeks before the session, they had included Bucket Tea in the set list because it was going to be their next single there, and enough of the girls had screamed at Moon's falsetto that he was now convinced he was actually a good singer. He kept trying to join in the backing vocals on the track, and the other three had to throw him out of the studio so they could do it without him. But he kept trying to creep back in and disrupt the session and Townsend was joking about how he'd caught him. Now here comes that addendum I mentioned earlier. Happy Jack was recorded during the same batch of sessions as the quick one while he's away. And there's an earlier attempt at the track where they perform it acoustically. And Townsend plays the cello, having purchased one. Happy Jack wasn't old, but he was a man. He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man The kids all would sing, he would take their own knees So they rode on his head with their furry arms Quite where they claimed they couldn't afford a cello player when they had someone in the band who could at least play competently enough to play the simple part they were singing on a quick one, I don't know. Happy Jack and a quick one would be the group's last releases on Reaction Records. For a long time, Lambert and Stamp had been planning to set up their own label to put out records by The Who and other artists, but they sped up their plans after seeing Jimi Hendrix perform live and realising he was currently unsigned. They signed him up, though they didn't have the label, Track Records, together in time to put out Hay Joe, which had to be licensed to a different label. But his second, Purple Haze, became the first record on the new label. The Blades are in my brain Lazy things that don't seem the same Acting funny, but I don't know why Excuse me while I kiss the sky And as their managers had their own label now, the Who became track artists. They were supposedly all told that they would get shares in the company, though that never ended up happening. And they were all at least meant to be A&R people for the label, in charge of different areas of music based on their own tastes. Townsend was meant to find jazz and experimental musicians, Moon was meant to find surfact, entwistle classical music, and Daltrey's soul and R&B. Of all of them, Townsend was the one who seemed to take this most seriously, and he did bring in some acts to the label. But the Who were more concerned about their own career. There were a lot of plans in the air. After being inspired by the Monkees, the group decided that they were going to make their own TV series, and maybe get the Monkees and Bob Dylan and others to guest in it. Brian Epstein's film company, Suba Films, was going to make the pilot. But then, according to Daltrey, they found out that the Monkees' TV series lost money. which I think is incorrect, and abandoned the idea. Townsend and Moon apparently also started working on a science fiction film script for a film vehicle for the band. Most of this, of course, was because the group was still in a bad financial way. But the solution to that came from a frankly bizarre set of bad decisions that ended up being good ones. As I said earlier, Frank Barcelona had not wanted to sign the Who to his booking agency in the US. They'd never had a hit there, and they seemed to him to be associated with Alan Klein, who he wanted nothing to do with. But Stamp and Lambert had talked to Barcelona's business partner, who dealt with stuff other than signing the act, and had got him to sign them to the agency without Barcelona's knowledge. Barcelona was stuck with a group he wanted nothing to do with, and assumed were utterly useless. He told his partner that he'd signed them, he should book them. Barcelona washed his hands of the whole business. But while he had them, he might as well use them as a bargaining chip. Murray the K was putting on a package show at the RKO Radio Theatre, with various hit acts like Wilson Pickett and the Blues Magoos, performing five shows a day starting first thing in the morning for nine days. Murray needed a headliner, and he wanted Mitch Ryder, who had just had the biggest hit of his career with Sock It To Me Baby, recorded with his band The Detroit Wheels. I'm running in the beehive, running a bunch. Every time you kiss me, hit me like a bunch. Ready, ready, ready, ready, ready, oh, yes, I want you to do what you've got. Stock it to me, baby, baby. Stock it to me, baby, baby. You gotta stock it to me, baby. Stock it to me, baby. Stock it to me, baby. But Ryder, who was represented by Barcelona, wanted nothing to do with these shows. The idea of doing five 20-minute shows a day every day starting at 10am sounded like hell. But Murray was the most important pop DJ in the New York area, and you didn't just say no to him. So they came up with a whole list of ridiculous stipulations, everything from a huge fee to repainting the dressing room. Murray agreed to them all. He really wanted Mitch Ryder. So okay, they had an ace up their sleeve. Barcelona would voice the worst act he had on Murray. He would say that Ryder was a huge fan of this English band called The Who, and he'd only do the show if they were playing. Yeah, they'd had no hits in the US, but they were really big in the UK, and they'd never do it for less than $7,500. A ludicrous amount for the time. Even though normally a band who'd never had a hit in the US would have been happy to play these shows for nothing for the great exposure they'd give. They'd also want to be given billing somewhere near the top, above some bigger acts. To Barcelona's amazement, Murray agreed even to this. He said he knew Robert Stigwood who'd be organising the contracts for the group, and he was sure he could negotiate something with him. As soon as Barcelona got off the phone with Murray, he called Stigwood and said, Look, whatever you do, don't accept less than $7,500 for the Who. This is important. A few days later, Murray sent through the contract he'd agreed with Stigwood to Barcelona. It was for $5,000. Now Ryder was going to have to play the show. Barcelona was despondent. Not only had he let down a major client, he'd also lumbered the show with a terrible band. But then he went to the dress rehearsal and was astonished by The Who's stage presence. This band was going to be huge, clearly. Murray the K was also impressed and started playing The Who's latest single, Happy Jack, on his radio show to promote the shows. Other DJs picked up on it and it became the group's first Top 40 hit in the US. The ruffles on his back to life, life, life, life, life. They couldn't stop Jack and water-stopping. And they couldn't prevent Jack from being happy. Murray was still furious at Barcelona, though, and confronted him angrily about that other crap group he'd been stuck with. Barcelona had no idea what he was talking about. The cream, he was told. What had happened is that Stigwood had played a similar trick to the one that Barcelona had done. He'd told Murray that he could have the Who, but only if he took the cream as well. They would charge $7,500, but that would be $5,000 for the Who and $2,500 for the cream. And that's how Murray the K got conned into losing money on a package show that became an historic turning point in the transition from pop to rock. The Who were the big hit of the show. They'd finally got a US hit single, and now the most important booking agent in the US suddenly thought they were a priority. They were going to break the US at last. But first they had to go back to the UK. They had a new single to record, and a tour to do. The single, Pictures of Lily, was another example of the formula they'd hit on with I'm a Boy, type power pop with a nod to West Coast surf music. In this case, John Entwistle's French horn part was a knowing nod to Jack Nitschie's instrumental The Lonely Surfer. While the lyrics were once again about adolescent interests that did not normally get talked about in pop songs of that era. In this case, masturbation. Pictures of Lily was inspired by a picture Townsend's girlfriend had of an old theatrical star. Townsend said at the time that it was Lily and Bayliss, but in his autobiography he mentions Lily Langtree, and Langtree fits the subject of the song much better. She was known as one of the great beauties of her time, and died in the same year as the Lily and the Song, while Bayliss was not the kind of conventionally attractive woman who gets made into pin-ups. The song describes the life of a young man, given photos of Lily by his father, which stop him feeling so lonely and having bad nights. Pictures of Lily Made my life so wonderful Pictures of Lily Help me sleep at night At least they do until he asks his father how he can meet Lily and is told that she died in 1929. It's quite a remarkable song and record and it went to number four in the UK though it didn't do well in the US being banned by many radio stations thanks to its subject matter. Between recording and releasing the single, their first on track, they toured West Germany. The support band was the group that Simon Napier had taken on after splitting from the Yardbirds He regarded John children as the worst band he ever seen but decided that was a good reason to sign them After a few flop singles on another label that group had just got signed to track and had also changed their line-up, replacing their guitarist with a 19-year-old who Kit Lambert suggested to Napier Bell after meeting him at Napier Bell's flat. Mark Bolan, the new guitarist, wrote and sang backing vocals on what was going to be their first single on track, Desdemona. Let the motor get you on now Lift up your skirt and fly Just because the loops are tracks They need some kick in the roof It seemed natural to have Tracks' latest group support their biggest group on tour. It turned out to be a bad idea. Napier Bell wanted to use the tour to make the group's name, and that meant upstaging The Who. And given that The Who were best known for onstage destruction, that meant that John's children would have to be even more destructive, and Napier Bell coached them in exactly how to do that. The group's lead singer, Andy Ellison, would start the show by running screaming through the crowd, throwing handfuls of feathers everywhere, which would stay in the air for the whole show often affecting Daltrey's singing. Ellison would then demonstrate to the crowd how to methodically destroy the seats in the venue and encourage them to do the same. For the finale Ellison and the bass player would strip to the waist and have a fist fight while Boland would whip them both with an iron chain. After a few shows they ended up inciting an actual riot before the Who made it to the stage and promptly got booted off the tour. Soon after Boland quit the band after an argument with Napier Bell over the production on their next single, and a couple of flop singles later, John's children split up. After the tour ended, the group were back in the studio again working on new projects. One that was proposed was an instrumental EP. That was possibly inspired by Manfred Mann having released one a few months earlier, produced by The Who's old producer, Shel Talmy. But where Manfred Mann had recorded jazz-rock instrumental versions of recent pop hits, The Who were recording tracks like a rock version of Hall of the Mountain King, showing the classical influences they were starting to incorporate. Though oddly, from the same sessions, it was a commercial for Coca-Cola that would point more in the direction it would be going in for their next album. The instrumental EP never got released, and at this time there seems to have been a slight lack of focus in the band, partly because Townsend seems to have been pursuing a lot of outside projects. He gave a song, Magic Bus, to a band called The Pudding, who released it as an unsuccessful single. You'll be an inspector, have no fear. Let's ride the magic bus. I don't wish to cause no fuss. Let's ride the magic bus. Can I buy your magic bus, mister? Let's ride the magic bus. And he was also trying to sign artists to track. When he was in New York, he'd seen Tiny Tim performing and made overtures to him to sign to the label without success. and he'd also tried to get the Bonzo Dog Doodah band for the label but had just missed the opportunities they'd signed somewhere else. He did, though, bring The Crazy World of Arthur Brown to track and co-produced their first single with Lambert. The Devil's Trip on Me, Dave The Devil's Trip on Me, oh man The Devil's Trip on Me, Dave The Devil's Trip on Me There were also attempts at recording songs by Moon and Daltrey at this point, neither of which got released for decades, and the group made a start on recording their next album, only for that to be swiftly curtailed by Moon being hospitalised with a hernia. While he was ill, Chris Townsend, the drummer for John's Children, sat in for him, and on Townsend's last show, the roadies put flash powder under his stool, blowing it up at the end of my generation and sending him flying. When Townsend went to hit Townsend, Townsend just said, Remember Germany? Germany might have been on the group's mind when they flew to the US for their first major shows there. Barcelona had booked them into a handful of venues before their appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival. They went down well in Detroit, but were shocked when they got to the film war to find that the new American Underground had very different expectations for live performances than the British audiences they were used to. The Who normally did a 45 minute set but Bill Graham explained to them that they needed to do two hour long sets and not repeat any songs because it would be the same audience for both sets. Chris Stamp was dispatched to find a record player and copies of as many of The Who's records as he could get so they could quickly relearn the songs they didn't normally play in the hour or two before the show. They got through though, and Townsend later said, Now I understand why every group comes away saying that's the best gig we've ever played. The PA system is fantastic. The whole place is very well built for sound and acoustics. It's a rock group's paradise, and the audience want to listen and take in all you've got to offer. I don't want to sound pretentious, but the vibrations are something else. He also said of Bill Graham and the Fillmore's audience, It's a great pity that Britain doesn't take pop as seriously as these American guys do, and praised Graham's attention to detail when it came to the equipment. That said, while the group were impressed with the venues and the audiences, they were generally less impressed with the bands who were favoured on the American scene. Daltrey said at the time, The Mothers are in venture than Moby Grape are marvellous, but the rest are a lot of rubbish. It's time somebody told the truth about the American scene. Really, most of the groups don't know where it's at. Their material is good. They have this environment which seems great for writing songs, but groups themselves are nothing on stage. The next show after the film war was Monterey, and there was a problem with the billing. The Who's track label mate, Jimi Hendrix, with whom Townsend had a complicated relationship of mutual admiration and resentment, was also playing the same day, and the group had heard that he was planning to destroy his guitar on stage. As far as they were concerned, that was their act, and if they went on stage right after someone else had just done their act, they'd look stupid. It was John's children all over again. Eventually, it was agreed that Hendricks would go on after the Who, with the Grateful Dead acting as a buffer between them. The group weren't happy with their set. They hadn't been able to bring their Marshall stacks with them to the US, and were using rented box equipment which didn't sound right to them. But as far as the crowd were concerned, they were astonishing. Monterrey made four acts into stars among the new hippie movement. Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and The Who. The group would spend much of the next few months in the US, but they flew back to the UK to start work on their next album, and on that flight something happened to Pete Townsend which affected him profoundly. Both he and Moon had been given tablets of the hallucinogen STP by Owsley, the Grateful Dead's dealer, and Moon decided to take his on the transatlantic flight to stave off the boredom. Townsend took his, too, so his friend wouldn't be the only one, and he didn't realise how much stronger STP was than the LSD he would occasionally take. He had a bad trip so bad that he renounced psychedelics altogether from that point on. But during the trip he felt so bad that, in his description, I was so disgusted with what I was and what I was thinking and my body and the way I felt that I actually left my body. I was looking down at myself in the seat, and in the end I realised I must go back otherwise I was going to die. Thinking back on it afterwards, he came to the conclusion that he had had a genuine out-of-body experience, and that this was proof that the soul exists independently of the body. From this point on, he became far more interested in spiritual matters, and in understanding what it meant to be an embodied soul, an interest that would profoundly affect the rest of his work. The next record the Who would make, though, was the first Who single not to be written by Townsend, and their first, other than the cash-in singles released by their old label after the dispute with Talmy, not to make the top five since My Generation, though in this case they didn't really intend it to. When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were imprisoned on drug charges, The Who announced that in solidarity they would record and release Stone's songs, and only Stone's songs, until the two were released, as a way of keeping their music in the public eye. The group, Minus Entwistle, who was on his honeymoon but was cabled on the QE2 and gave his blessing, went into the studio and cut versions of Under My Thumb and The Last Time for immediate release. You never listen to my life. You don't try very hard to be a test. Because what you know should come easy. Well, this could be the last time. This could be the last time. Maybe the last time. I don't know. Oh, girl. However, by the time the single came out, Jagger and Richards had already been released and so no effort was made to promote it and it didn't make the top 40. The group then returned to the US where they were middle of the bill on a tour headlined by Herman's Hermits and with on the bottom of the bill, the Blues Magoos a psychedelic garage band who had recently had their one hit with We Ain't Got Nothing Yet. The Blues Magoos would inadvertently have a big effect on Townsend as well. Ralph Scala, the group singer, and Ron Gilbert, the bass player, were both interested in the teachings of George Adamski, a New Age guru and flying saucer cultist, who claimed he had been taken to Venus by Orthon, a tanned, blonde-haired alien who looked human except that, in Adamski's words, his trousers were not like mine. There, Adamski was told about the Space Brothers who lived past the age of a thousand in a utopia from which they occasionally sent representatives down to earth, who were people like Jesus Christ and other founders of great religious movements. Adamski had proper physical evidence of this, mind you. He had taken a photo of the spaceship that Orthon had travelled in. Only the rankest cynics would point out that the spaceship looked exactly like the top of a seer's gas lantern, or that most of Orthon's teachings sounded like they'd been cut and pasted from Theosophy, with the word Tibetan replaced by Venusian. Townsend became seriously interested in Adamski's work for a short time, and it would later indirectly lead to his most famous works. Several more things happened on the Hermit's tour that would, in different ways, affect the Who in the future. The first was Keith Moon's twenty-first birthday party, which became one of the most important parts of their legend. The party descended into a food fight in general rampage, with Moon having his trousers pulled off, revealing he was not wearing underwear, at which point he ran off naked from the waist down to get away from the police who were there to protect Herman's Hermits from fans, and who didn't approve of indecent exposure. Moon tripped over and broke two of his teeth and had to go to the dentist to get caps put on. While he was gone, the police shut down the party and the guests, mostly very intoxicated, rampaged throughout the hotel doing thousands of dollars worth of damage. Amazingly, most of the damage done to the hotel in the most legendary Keith Moon story actually came not from Moon, but from Herman's Hermits and the members of their entourage. Keith Moon would later exaggerate the story a great deal, and claim that he had done most of the damage. After all, how could a party for Moon the loon have ended with him going off to the dentist while Herman's Hermits smashed stuff up? And he would cap the story by claiming he had driven a Rolls Royce into the hotel swimming pool. Also, on the group's appearance on the Smothers Brothers TV show, Moon decided to bribe the stagehands to put far more explosives in his drums than he normally used for the climactic explosion at the end of My Generation. The explosion was so powerful it knocked the band members several feet, and Townsend has later claimed that this explosion caused the hearing damage he's suffered from for decades. There was one more event on the tour, though, that became the seed of something bigger. A lot of the tour involved travelling on a chartered prop plane, which wasn't the most reliable means of transport, and they had to make an emergency landing, which was apparently extra stressful as some of the people on the plane were on acid. This experience inspired Townsend to write a song, Glow Girl about the thoughts going through a young woman's head as she dies in a plane crash. But Townsend was starting to think about reincarnation and the transmigration of souls and so the song ends with the woman's spirit being reborn. It's a girl Mrs. Walker It's a girl It's a girl Mrs. Walker Glowgull wouldn't get released until the mid-70s, but that section would be used much sooner. The group continued work on their new album while they were on tour, and the resulting record, The Who Sell Out, is one that for a time had a rather poor reputation, as it was the last album they recorded in the style of their mid-60s pop records before their American success changed them, and it was also their lowest charting album in the UK. But over the decades it has been re-evaluated, and is now often considered the band's best album. The album, like many of The Who's best, was the product of retrofitting a concept onto material that had already been created. When they got back from the US tour, Chris Stamp presented Townsend with a proposed running order for the new album that would be coming out at the end of the year. made up of the tracks the group had been cutting over the previous months. But Townsend was unhappy with it. It didn't cohere, he didn't like all of the songs, and there was nothing to differentiate it from their previous album. In the year of Sgt. Pepe you couldn't just put out an album of good songs, no matter how good. But then, in discussion with the management, Townsend had a brainwave. Townsend had been a fan of the pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline and Radio London that had been criminalised in August that year. The group had also been recording a lot of commercials, for everything from Coca-Cola to the US Air Force. Why not create an album that played like Radio London, songs going into commercials which the group would also record? They might even be able to get some of the products they were doing commercials for to give them some money. That bit didn't happen. Nobody was interested in paying for commercials on an album, but the eventual album contained snippets of the Radio London jingle, which later attracted legal action from the people who created the jingle, plus songs written by the band about such subjects as Heinz Baked Beans. Odorono deodorant and Medak acne cream And the album cover was made up of four fake magazine commercials for real products sung about on the record, with each band member endorsing a different one. Townsend was photographed using a huge stick of deodorant, Moon using Medak acne cream, Entwistle in a Tarzan suit endorsing the Charles Atlas course, and Daltry in a bathtub full of Heinz baked beans. Looking past the commercials, the rest of the album contained some of the best songs the Who would ever record. But it's also easy to see why Townsend was worried that there was nothing to differentiate it from the group's previous album. The songs are largely dealing with themes that are already familiar from Townsend's writing. Tattoo, for example, sees someone berated by his parents because only women wear long hair getting a tattoo because tattoos make you a man, but getting abused by his father anyway, and ends with both the protagonist and his wife having the manly tattoos. Mary Ann with the shaky hand might be thought of as a spiritual successor to Pictures of Lily. The shaky hand What they've done to a man The shaky hand Mary is so pretty The pretty is still alive Guys come from every city Just to shake the shaky hand Silas Stingy is an entwistle comedy character study in a similar vein to Townsend's Happy Jack. Our Love Was is another Beach Boys pastiche, a falsetto love song, and Can't Reach You could easily have been a hit single and is very much in the vein of the first couple of Who singles. For the most part, the album is that kind of thing, a refinement of what the group had previously been doing rather than a reinvention. And it's all the better for that. There are a couple of tracks that show that Townsend was getting more ambitious as a writer, too. Sunrise is a song that he had originally written years earlier to impress his mother, who had been resolute the unimpressed. But he rewrote it for the Who Sell Out after reading the jazz guitar tuition books written by Mickey Baker of Mickey and Sylvia, and came up with some of the most harmonically ambitious music of his career in the middle section. And Rael is another attempt at a mini-opera. The piece apparently started out as much longer more coherent, but by the time it was recorded, with Al Cooper on organ, it was cut down to six minutes, and nobody seems to know what the lyrics are about, except that in its original form it was something to do with Chinese communists, hence the red chins in the lyrics for Red Chinese, overpopulation, and Israel, where Townsend had recently gone on holiday, and which was in the news at the time because of the Six-Day War, as we discussed when talking about All Along the Watchtower. There also seems to be some allusion to the story of Theseus in the passages about the colour of a ship's sails. Towns then planned it as a full opera, and it was written as a vehicle for his friend Arthur Brown, who he had recently got signed to track, before he cut it down to a few minutes as a Who album track. Two of the musical themes in Rael would end up getting reused in his next attempt at a pop opera, one that had come from Glowgirl. And one note of instrumental passage. The one single from the album, I Can See For Miles, had actually been written a year or so earlier. Townsend wrote the original draft of the lyrics on the back of an affidavit from the Talmy court case, but he'd held it back as the group's secret weapon. The song was inspired by his own paranoid feelings of jealousy about his then-girlfriend, later wife, who he was convinced for a while was having an affair, and by the more pathological jealousy that Keith Moon felt about his own wife, Kim, who he was convinced was more interested in Rod Stewart than in him. Stewart had actually been interested in her until he found out how seriously Moon took the relationship, at which point he'd backed off. Townsend poured all these feelings into what he was convinced was the ultimate single, the one that would finally take the Who to number one. And Miles and Miles and Miles and Miles and Miles and Miles and Miles and Miles. But I Can See For Miles became their least successful proper single in the UK since Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, only reaching number 10. Their previous five proper singles had all made the top five, and only staying in the charts for four weeks. It became their biggest hit single ever in the US, making number nine, their first and only US top ten hit. but that wasn't enough to stop Townsend being utterly despondent. He had made what he considered the ultimate Who single, and it had been, by their standards, a flop. He was never going to have a number one single. If he couldn't do it with I Can See For Miles, he just couldn't do it. The best pop single he could come up with wasn't good enough. He was going to have to do something else. And we'll find out more about that in Part 2. A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. With every episode, and sometimes between episodes, Patreon backers will get a short bonus podcast. This episode is on Father and Son by Cat Stevens. Visit patreon.com slash andrewhickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. two books based on the first 100 episodes of the podcast are now available with a third coming soon search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs in your favourite online bookstore this podcast is written and narrated by me Andrew Hickey and produced by me and Tiltarizer no generative AI has been or ever will be used in the writing research or recording of this podcast visit 500songs.com that's 500, the numbers not the letters, songs.com to read transcripts and minor notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you like this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening. and