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

Song 183, "Pimble" was it by the who, part one, 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 common psychology and neurology is roughly equivalent to putting Aristotle's conception of physics against the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider. We think in act as if our memories are accurate records of what's happened to us.

“But 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, rather 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, which

was if they're part of the original memory. Every time you think of something, a reinforced is both the original memory and whatever new details you've added in subsequent remembering. 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.”

Because it'll sometimes still feel like you're remembering every detail as if it were happening right then. This is of course why and so many of the stories are telling 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 Dell Angelo in the details, a band that performed

“covers of puppets by people like Cliff Fitchard, led by guitarist Roger Daltre, who recruited”

guitarist Pete Townsend and bass player John Antwistle. When Dell Angelo, whose real name was Colin Dawson, quit, Daltre became the lead singer, and after seeing Johnny Kid and the Pirates perform, they realized that they could perform with only one guitar. So Daltre gave up playing guitar.

Townsend started playing Steve Cropa's style parts were mostly rhythm, but in co-op vating lead-licks, while Antwistle developed a more melodic bass style, inspired by Dwayne at his guitar style. After recruiting drummer Keith Moon, and under the influence of early comb age at Pete Meadon, the group became favourites of the mod movements in London, playing hard-edged arm

and beam music rather than the pop music that they've been playing.

They changed their 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 wanted, with a living span Meadon about the mod scene. That went nowhere, and they were dropped by their label. The group were one of the most exciting underlive scene, but they were mismatched as people. Antwistle and Moon were the only members who were actually friends, and they, especially

Moon, wanted to play surface music rather than R&B. Daltre had started out as someone who wasn't very keen on the R&B music they were now playing, wanted to keep playing pop. But by this point, he had become an R&B purevist, and wanted the set to be full of James Brown songs.

On the other hand, who had been the band member keen as to go 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 auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzker.

Daltre thought this was art in nonsense. He had been expelled from school for fighting, and had gone to work in a sheet metal factory, while Townsend was an art student.

There were all heavy ampphetamine users, but Daltre didn't even particularly drink to access.

“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 Tevin 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 hood, and soon got them signed to a deal with the independent record producer Shell Tellmey. Tellmey 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 delivered in the style of the kinks early heads, though also adding”

in the Beach Boys harmonies Keith Moonloft, courtesy of vocal group The Ivy League. The group had a couple of fairly big heads, but came very close to splitting up after a European tour where Daltrey, sick of Keith Moon's behaviour, flushed Moon's stash of emphetamines down the toilet.

The other three had never liked Daltrey much anyway.

He put the band together and considered himself the leader, but as far as they and the group's marriages were concerned, he was the weakest link in the group. Antwislem Moon were one of the best for them sections around. Townsend was the inventive idea's man, but Daltrey wasn't a great singer at the time. He would regularly beat up Antwislem Moon.

They could do without him. The group sat Daltrey and decided to carry on as a trio, but then they decided that they should give him one more chance. So Daltrey was back in the band on a final warning, while they went out and promoted what became their biggest hit to date, my generation.

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, they 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 anyone man, and then whatever the group was a whole, including their mileage as Lambert and Stump, 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 of 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 bow didly 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 towns and apart from one instrumental, the arcs, credited to all the band members except Daltrey plus Session Keyboard player Nikki

Hupkins, 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 surf armies. There's more than a little wipeout in the arcs. The influence of the Beach Boys, Moon's favourite group, is also very audible on what

The climbing melody in the bridge is pure Brian Wilson, and at least in the studio

“the hook could pull off a reasonable approximation of the Beach Boys block harmonies.”

The other musical influences in there as well. The song uses quite a few suspended chords.

For those who don't know, where a normal track chord is the first third and fifth notes of the scale.

My suspended chord replaces the third with the second, or the fourth. Now these chords are often used in folk rock and sing a 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, A62 and A64,

this moving one finger. And the use in the kids of all right sounds like that.

“The combination of towns and rickenbacker, the block harmonies, and the suspended chords”

sounds like it could be something the searches of the birds of a similar band would do.

And indeed, towns and later used essentially that riff for his songs so sad about us. But towns and 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 Daltre and Townsend were, had a similar dynamic.

Stamp was a working-class pragmatist who cared about the notes and bolts, and while Lambert was up a class while Townsend was lower middle. There were both interested more than anything else in art, theorising about artistic ideas, and moving into genuine 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 towns and 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 Shacan from per cells, the Guardian, not untied. And, rhythmically, the track is fascinating too.

Townsend's lyrics at this point were from very confused, and he's taught himself about how to write what he thought were fairly conventional love songs, and then later look back and realise that there was 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. I'm performing with the band who would look on the song as the work of someone else altogether. Pete the writer, not Pete the band member, and then he would be compete 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 a admirer of his own group, he would be relatively dispassionate about the work when talking about it. As a result, we have the art situation where most of Townsend's work has been publicly over-analyzed by its composer. Given 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 recurring almost everything is written.

The very first song Townsend wrote for the who was called "I Can't Explain" and in

articulacy comes up again and again.

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 of all right, and also the who had a far more male audience and most bands of the period, and there's a strong theme of homosexuality, male bonding, a he man no girls allowed club, in a lot of their material. Interestingly, given the tap the time the who were explicitly trying to emulate the beach boys, this, like the inarticularcy, is another power of all to their music.

Compare the lyrics to the kids of all right 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, finally enough, is what an obscure band called The Rock and Vickers did to the kids”

of all right, turning it into "It's all right", though giving Townsend full songwriting for it. That track is mostly notable because The Rock and Vickers' guitarist, in Kill Mr, later became better known as "Lemi of Motorhead". The Rock and Vickers track was produced by Glenn Johns, the engineer on the sessions for

the My Generation album, but in at least one book of consulted for this episode, the credit is instead given to Shell Townley, and this brings up the third question of who actually did produce the album.

On paper, the answer is simple, Shell Townley is the credit of producer, and the record certainly

sounds like a lot of other records at Townley 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 Townley's production input, but rather the contract the group we wanted to.

They had signed a production deal with Townley as an independent producer, who was then licensing the records to Vunswick and the UK and Deca in the US. Initially, this meant that the group ran a ludicrously low royalty rate, only 2.5% split between the four members and Lumberton Stamp. They wanted to break the contract so that they could make a deal that would actually

pay them, and reasonable amount of money for their hit records. But the claim made by the band in the court was that Townley 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 Lumberton, who had made suggestions as to song structure and arrangement, and essentially pre-produced

the record. Which fits in with the way Lumberton continued to be involved with the band's records, and then in the studio, Glyn Johnson done all the production work while Townley had done nothing.

Lumberton's, who of course became an immensely successful producer himself later, always denied

this, and said that Townley was very involved, and there is definitely a sound that many of Townley'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 Townley, along with him not doing

anything, is that he tries 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 ringer session musicians for the first single.

“I think the way to square all these different claims is to note that the job of record”

producer is not a clearly defined one, and meant different things to different people. There were producers like Phil Spectre, who had act as authors, and subordinates everything to their vision while leaving the detail where it's a lackeys. Like Joe Meek, who was interested in what sounds he could get out of recording equipment, and saw the artists as an excuse to play with nobs and make funny sounds.

Like George Martin, who had helped tighten up songs for which is a mitochondrial arrangement. All like Tom Wilson, who had largely just made sure that the artists had the resources they needed to make the record they wanted. Tommy seems in large parts who 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 moral as accurate, Tommy, Lambert, Townsend, and

John's, 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 Tommy. Deca in the U.S. was completely ignoring their records, and they were barely scraping the bottom reaches of the heart 100.

with Tommy, circles, as their next single.

boredom.

“Instead, they put out a new song "Substitute" through a new record label "Reaction".”

There's been a phone by Robert Stigwood, who is at that point in their booking agent. Substitute was produced by the group rather than Tommy. Soon Kit Lambert would take over production, but he wasn't sure enough in the studio yet, and became one of Enthusals' favorite who tracks, because of the prominence of his base.

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", the "Turlion" was trying to parody the Rolling Stones. There were two more major influences on the track. The one that Townsend rings up more often is tracks of my tears by smoking up and sitting

in the miracles. The line, although she may be cute, she's just a substitute, because you are 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 on the Whispers, an obscured 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 homage bicycle through to the early 70s. 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. Let 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 re-issued with the "B" side replaced by an instrumental titled "Waltz for a Pig", performed by the Graham Bond Organization under the name "The Who Orchestra". tombstone.

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”

re-writing one line of what was left. The label thought that a line "I look all white but my dad was black" would get the record banned from the radio in the southern states. Still though it was changed too, I tried going forward but my feet go back. Meanwhile, as an attempt at a spoiler, tell me released a rival who single threw Decker.

As a point of choice, he put the version of circles he produced on the B-side and on the

A-side they appropriately named a legal matter, no songs sung by towns and 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.

“Decker put out another two singles from the album after that, with diminishing returns.”

At this point, the group were getting more and more despondent. The hit records weren't making them any money because of the pitiful royalty rate they were one with Talmey. 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 on it in today's money. The problem was, every night as part of the show Townsend would smash Skittar and Moon would destroy his drum heads.

The guitars could sometimes be pleased together, but not always.

“A new drum heads every night were expensive.”

Also Keith Moon was starting the habit which would become more pronounced overcoming 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 images mod style icons, and so were spending a fortune and unlooking 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 Antosil were friends and wanted to play surf music. Dolphry 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. Downs and wasn't sure what he wanted. He had a lot of conceptual ideas, but he also wanted to keep the piece with his bandmates, and he was giving serious consideration to quitting the ho, in joining Paddy Klaus and Gibson. I'll live a poor band who at the time were tipped as the next big thing.

They never had a hit, but remembered because their base player, Klaus Forman, was a friend

of the Beatles who drew the cover up for a revolver, and later went on to replace Jack Bruce in Manford Man before becoming one of the most successful session base players of the late 60s and 70s. Dolphry 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 Ho anymore, and they were all looking for excuses not to show up. Townsend and Emberysal covered his vocals at those shows, and at one in the black country a young robot 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 Ho, and it was because he wanted to be a beach boy.

When Bruce Johnson came over to the UK to promote pet sounds, on May 16th 1966, the who were well-ready in a bad state. This was right after the gigs at Dolphry 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.

There was an attempt made to form a super group of the best players in London.

“Jeff Beck was on the guitar, Jimmy Page was on with them, Nikki Hopkins was on piano, and”

because everyone had heard that the whos 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 end whistle didn't, and so John Paul Jones replaced him on bass on the one track recorded by this line-up.

Thanks for that, I'll see you next time. Famously, after that session, 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 10 hit over here, without a get around.

Barbara Ann had given the second in February 1966, and Johnston came over just as Snoop

“John B was hitting the top 5, because Andrew Alden 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 what virtual unknowns over here. Their UK career basically started in 1966, even as their U.S. 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 cords, the studio group Johnston had sung it with Terry Meltzer, who had a big hit in the States with a little cobra. For Keith Moon, this was the obscure American music he liked and obsessed about, in the

same way that muddy waters are well more James were for Brian Jones.

“He wanted more than anything to be a Beach Boy.”

So even though when he was played Pet Sound, 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 in 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. Throughout the time he was the lead singer of Tony Rivers in the castaways, who made

unsuccessful singles in the same style, and whose live act was full of Beach Boys and Jan Dean covers. He might have known Johnston and Fowley to the gig he was playing that night, not expecting him 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. For the next day he and Enkrasal 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 new pre of up 50 miles away.

They turned up to the gig two hours late, only to find the Daltry and Townsendard started without them, with the rhythm section of the support band in their place. They got up on stage and joined their bandmates, who understandably annoyed at them. So annoyed that at the end of the set, both Daltry and Townsend, who was not normally a violent man, were beating up Moon with their magstand and guitar.

He sustained a black eye and needed three stitches. A journalist was present, and Moon and Enkrasal told him they were quitting the group and going to start their own band, and then drove back to London until Kitland but in Robert Stigwood the same thing. Enkrasal changed his mind the next day, but for the next five days the who played with

his accession 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 peeped Townsend's first attempt of writing an extended narrative

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 info nouns, he has described himself in ways that sound like what we would now call non-binary. For example saying in a news weekend of you 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 is also very seriously described as 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 bi-sexual and pansexual, and he has also made a lot of comments about his own appearance, which I'm very much to me like this far here. He has repeatedly talked about how he hates his own face, and how why are the reasons

“he develops such a physical style of playing the guitar and moving on stage, is 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 detailed and to note that it's the thing about Townsend that he has talked about on many occasions.

But he is clearly trying to work to understand about himself, and that he has made conflicting statements about.

As a cis-het 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 visible 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 the word a question 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 on one boy, who they decide to raise as a girl anyway.

The three songs that are known to have been written for the project that saw a release, one, joined my gang, was given to a performer then using the stage name Oscar, but later to find famous Paul Nicholas, and released as an unsuccessful single on reaction records. - The according to Townsend, you know who used to wave 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 in sang backing vocals and Oscars follow-up. The other two quads tracks 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 any peat 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. But by the time the hooves record came out, it sounded like a pale imitation. The other track became the group's biggest British hit single, ever.

The hooves never had a number one hit on the charts that 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 and all of them, except the record retailer won the BBC used, where

it, a boy struggling to find his identity, was hard.

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. They fitted around me and so did the songs. It wasn't like that anymore, my confidence had been knocked.

All I remember was the Thialis and Mortar 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 listened 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 Daltrean 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, or "werving" to our almost diametrically opposed. But Daltrey had realized something during the time that the who had been constantly on the verge of splitting. He realized 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 on like anyone else on the scene.

“While Moon and Enthusal were regarded by many as the best of them section in the UK.”

Unfortunately 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 a lumberton stamp, who in many ways were considered as much a part of the group as the musicians.

And that this like would often come out and warving interviews over the years, where Townsend and Daltry 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, realizing that, accepting it, embracing it, was what these years were all about. Between my generation and tummy, 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 in articulacy, and the inability to find a voice. Daltry became the voice he didn't have himself. The be-side of Amar Boy, which also had production credited to Lambert, was a value to pick up the abortive plan for Moon and Entwistler to go off and form their own surf band.

In the city was a track written by the two of them, they were only songwriting collaborations a duo, which they'd recorded by themselves without tying towns in the daltry about it, an attempt at pastishing John Dean Records. After the group had healed its wounds, towns and overdubes from guitar, but daltry is not on the track at all.

Before the single was released though, they still needed to finalize the details of how they were going to get out of their contract with Talmey. They'd been recording for reaction, but they needed to do something to get rid of their very real legal responsibilities of Talmey.

A plan was hatched, the details of which I've never been able to properly follow.

It's told slightly differently by every participant. For what seems to have happened is that Lambert and Stam played multiple sets of opponents off against each other. At the time, there were the third biggest mages on the London scene, after Brian Epstein and Andrew Aldham.

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 Stam 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 Aldham wanted to manage the who.

pop groups 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 Talmey'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 Talmey's advantage. But what he really cared about was negotiating of all for himself in the who's management. The Lambert and Stampern to along with this, and signed agreements that freed the who from having to work with Talmey, but gave Klein the right to manage the group, so longer 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 groups knew 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 5 years, they would get half of that, with

the other half going to Talmey 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 Talmey got 5% for not making them. This wouldn't have been too bad on the 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 a live performance as far more important than recordings anyway.”

They thought that they are to 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 in frequently. They just saw recording as the secondary medium, not the primary one.

But without realizing it, the group's actions could very easily have sabotaged their hopes of making real towing money too. So it was essentially two circuits that pop groups could play in the OS. 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 3/10 minutes set to 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 Grande Bowl room in Detroit and the film more.

“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 Stampen 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 tours for the Merzi's, the band formerly known as the Merzi Beats, the Lambert got the production credit. The Who would record their own version for the album a couple of months later. They also had a 16-minute appearance on Merzi's steady-go, which promoted a simultaneously

released five-songy P. of the songs they performed, titled "Very Study Who." That EP, which was their only EP of tracks that weren't already released on other formats, featured two recent originals. Disguises, from the abandoned Quads Project, and the version of circles that have been released in quickly withdrawn on the substitute single, on side one.

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' popularity overlapped with the Who's, like the Kings, would sometimes perform it live. 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, accidentally credited Jan Berry, Donald Feld and Frank Weader, the writers of a different Jan and Dean's song titled "Batman." Next up was a cover version of Jan and Dean's Book It T with Moon on false set of vocals.

Moon despite all available hour-level evidence that he was in fact a great false set

“of singer, and should be allowed to sing back in vocals regularly on the Who's Records.”

So, this is a cover version of Jan and Dean's Book It T. The Batman theme is a popular song. And the EP ended with Barbara Ann. Ready steady who went to number one on the EP chart, making it their first number one on any of the UK charts now considered official, and one of only two they had all together.

They've never had a number one single on the official UK chart, and only one album,

who's next in 1971. Much like the EP, the album look we're 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.

“Part did 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 Tommy 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 the mole writing a couple of songs to the next Who album. This was a bit of a problem, because the reason Townsend was the group songwriter was that he was the only one remotely interested in writing songs at the time. Daltry only managed to come up with one song, a rather poor track that was meant to be an imitation of body holly, though you can't tell that from listening to it, and which would

“be as only solo songwriting contribution ever to a Who album. Moon, with someone credited”

Liverpool help from Antwissel, 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 seeing it himself in his falsetto. And he has 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 Crumbi. But Antwissel, unlike Galtry or Moon, had actually had a fair bit of formal musical training. As well as playing the bass, he could

also play several bass instruments, and any brass parts you hear on who records usually him. And he brought in two songs, one of which, Baroque's 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. But even leaving aside the contributions of the other members, Townsend 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 dimensions. He was very interested in doing big conceptual projects, like the Quad's Project he'd started on abandoned, 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 fathered work then, 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 was the trend towards potential and open intellectualisation. I'd see what explained a few months later, coining a term that would later be used to describe a whole jumber. 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'd 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

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 revises a opinion of the artists he was talking about there, and their artistic ambitions. Saying in his autobiography, for me, Sergeant Pepper and the Beach Boy's 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 on ambitious meaningless fun pop music, like so sad about us on the album.

Except, of course, 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-opfer, after towns and in kitland but have been talking

“about the possibilities of pop music, and both at this point were adamantly talking about”

the music that who made us pop not rock. There was in a couple of years towns and would become one of the most vocal advocates for a vodka's lifestyle and almost a religion. Taking over some of the cultural space that art music at previous he had, and using sort of the more complex formal structures of that kind of music. Lambert was interviewed in the mid-60s saying that he hadn't heard a good new symphony opera in about 18 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 love of

nature that pop songs had to be two and a half minutes long, but then he realized 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 towns and sung, so he had to do something about nine minutes long. I 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 "drief 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 drummer the 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 realize that until later. We'll be talking more about Townsend's experiences of abuse, the complex issues have earned 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 the meaning is just that. His interpretation. As I've said before, Townsend tried 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 a song moving himself. It's not one that anyone else is likely to have come to analyse in the track itself, which is closer to a faster than anything else. The song consists of six sections, it starts with an accapella fragment setting up the premise.

It then goes into a section titled "Crying Town" about the sadness of the unnamed woman awaiting her love as return. This one once again shows Townsend playing with suspended chords, as he was so fond of doing it this time. The sequence goes D, D suspended forth, D5, a power chord, where just the root and dominant of the chord are played. D suspended forth. 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 surges, and Townsend seems to have noticed that resemblance and leaned into it by having a falsetto part of the resemblance of their work.

.

“To that in-sweeds for my sweet by the surges.”

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 folkfox suspended chords here. Here's switching between major chords and this is Bended Seconds. We then get into a bit, which sees the piece turned to blurred fast.

“In the "I" for the engine driver section, the unnamed woman is seduced by a trained driver named”

Iva. And anyone in written listening at the time would have recognized that as a nod to the

children's cartoon "I" for the engine. This part is sung by end whistle, 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 towns and Slater interpretation of its subconsciously being about child abuse rings true, as Iva refers to the woman as "little girl", and in life performances

“the group would go further and say "little girl guide", and offers her a sweet before taking her home.”

The man then arrives home riding a horse and so given an appropriately cowboy bassline from Mantris Old. Then, after some truly dodgy harmonies singing "Dang-Dang-Dang-Dang-Dang-Dang" the final, longest and most successful climactic section of the song. You are forgiven as 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. Memoring 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 humor 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 "Chalo-Chalo-Chalo" instead.

Also, they always told that story, but there's an interesting

addendum to that which will come too shortly. And then, once the man forgives the woman, the chords tend to the simple three major chords that make up all the most rudimentary rock and mole. Things are now simple and good, and so are the chords. Though in the recorded version there's

towns and a bit listening to, after being introduced to their work by Lambert. [Music]

“This part would become the most powerful part of the song in life performance.”

Townsend describes it in his autobiography, saying, "Then suddenly everyone is forgiven, no 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. Finally, for giving 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 a non-album single "Happy Jack". A character study inspired by a bail in a rugby, and apparently based on someone towns ended observed on holiday as a child.

“About a homeless man living on a beach on the aisle 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 moving. 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 layer. And enough of the girls had screamed at Moon's falsetto that he was now convinced it 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 towns and was joking about how he'd caught him.”

Now here comes that at the end of my mention earlier. Happy Jack was recorded during the same batch of sessions as a quick one while he's away, and there's an earlier attempt at the track where they perform it acoustically. And towns and plays the cello having purchased one. Why are 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 that was singing on a

quick one? I don't know. Happy Jack and a quick one would be the group's last releases on the action records. For a long time, Lumberton's stamp had been playing to set up their own label to put out records by the who and other artists. But they sped up their plans after seeing Jimmy 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 a Jo,

which had to be licensed to a different label. But his second purple haze became the first record on the new label. And as their managers had their own label now, the who became track artists. There were supposed that they all told that they would get shares in the company,

though that never ended up happening. And there 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, end whistle classical music, and adultery soul in R&B. Of all of them, Townsend was the one who seemed to take this most seriously, and he did bring in so much 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 monkeys, the group decided that they were going to make their own TV series,

Planetstein's film company, Super Films, was going to make the pilot. But then, according to

“Daltry, they found out that the monkeys' 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-is-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 Stampon Lambert had talked to Barcelona's business partner, who dealt with stuff other than signing the act, and it got him to sign them to the agency without Barcelona's knowledge. Barcelona was stuck with the 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 and wash his hands of the whole business.

But while he had them, he might as well use them as a bargaining chip. Movie Decay was putting on a package show at the RKO Radio Theater, with various hit acts like Wilson Pickett and the Blues Maguos, performing five shows a day starting first thing in the morning for nine days. Movie needed a headliner, and he wanted Mitch Ryder, who had just had the biggest hit of his career with socket to me, baby. Recorded with his band The Detroit wheels.

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 10 a.m. some of the like

“hell. But Movie was the most important pop-ty of Jay and the New York area, and he didn't just say”

no to him. So they came up with a whole list of ridiculous stipulations, everything from a huge feed to be painted in the dressing room. Movie agreed to the mall. He really wanted Mitch Ryder. So okay, they had a nice oblast leave. Barcelona would place the worst act he had on the way. 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. Here 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.

Alluding for some amount for the time. Even though normally a band would never had to 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 buildings somewhere near the top, above some bigger acts. To Barcelona's amazement, Movie 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 Moray, 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, Moray sent through the contract he 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 did 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. Moray the K was also impressed and started playing the who's later single, Happy Jack, and his radio show to promote the shows. All the DJs picked up on it, and it became the group's first top 40 hits in the U.S.

[Music] Moray was still furious at Barcelona though, and confronted him angrily about that or the crap group he 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 told Moray 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 Moray the K got condoned to 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 U.S. hit single, and now the most important booking agents in the U.S. suddenly

back to the U.K. They had a new single to record, and I thought to do. The single, pictures of Lily,

“was another example of the formula that hit on with I'm a boy. Type power pop with a nod to Westco's”

surf music. In this case, Jalan Twissel's French horn part. Was a knowing nod to Jack Niches instrumental for Lonely Surfer. While the lyrics were once again about had a listen to 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 Girlfriend had of an old theatrical star. Townsend said at the

time that it was Lily and Bayless, 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 Bayless was not the kind of”

conventionally attractive woman who gets made into pin-ups. The song described the life of a young man given photos of Lily by his father, which stopped him feeling so lonely and having bad nights. A list 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 4 in the UK, though it didn't do well in the US, being banned by many radio stations thanks to a subject matter.

Between recording and releasing the single, they're first on track. They told West Germany.

The support band was the group that Sam and Napier Bell had taken on after splitting from the

“yard birds. He'd regarded John's children as the worst bandied 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 kept Lambert suggested to Napier Bell, after meeting him at Napier Bell's flat.

Mark Bowlin, the new guitarist, wrote and sang backing vocals on what was going to be their first

single on track, Desdemona. It seemed natural to have tracks latest groups 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 on-stage 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 Dollar's singing. Ellison would then demonstrate to the crowd how to methodically destroy the seats in the venue, and encouraged them to do the same. For the finale, Ellison and the bass player would

strip to the waist and have a fist fight, while Bowlin 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 Bowlin 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 project.

One that was proposed was an instrumental EP. That was possibly inspired by a Manfred Mann having released one a few months earlier, produced by the who's old producer Shell Tellmey. But where Manfred Mann had recorded jazz rock instrumental versions of recent pop hits,

showing the classical influences they were starting to incorporate.

“So, oddly from the same sessions, it was a commercial for Coca-Cola that would point more”

in the direction that would be going in for their next album.

The instrumental EP never got released, and at this time,

the 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 Boss to a band called The Putting, who released it as an unsuccessful single. And he was also trying to sign artists to track. When he was in New York, he'd seen tiny timber farming and made overchores to him to sign for a label without success.

And he'd also tried to get the bonso.do.band for the label, but had just missed the opportunity as it signed somewhere else. He did, though,

bring the crazy world of Arthur Brown to track, and co-produced their first single with Lumberton.

[Music] There were also attempts of recording songs by Moon and Daltre 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 hospitalized 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 Vodee's pop-flash-powered wondrous 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 O.S. 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 was a fan that the New American Underground had very different expectations for life performances than the British audience as 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 set,

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 be learned the songs that didn't normally play in the hour or two before the show. They got through, though, and Townsend later said, "Now I understand why a 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 for tension, but the vibrations are something else. He also said of Bill Graham and the film was audience. It's a great pity that Britain doesn't take poppers' services 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, there were generally less

“impressed with the bands who were favored on the American scene. Don't we set it at the time?”

The mother's room ventured and won't be grape or 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 was Monterey, and there was a problem with the billing. The host track label made Jimmy Hendrix,

with whom Townsend had a complicated relationship of mutual admiration and resentment. It was also playing the same day, and the group had heard that he was playing to destroy his guitar

someone else had just done their act, they'd look stupid. It was John's children all over again.

“Eventually, it was agreed that Hendrix 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 martial stacks with them to the U.S., and were using mentid vox equipment which didn't sound right to them. But as far as the crowd were concerned, they were astonishing. Monterey made four vacts into stars on one of the new hippie movement.

Otis Redding, Janice Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and the who. The group would spend much of the next few

months in the U.S., but they flew back to the UK to start work on the next album. And on that

“flight, something happened to Pete Townsend which affected him profoundly. Both he and Moon have been”

given tablets of the hallucinogen STP by Osley, the grateful dead stealer, and Moon decided to take his on the transatlantic flight to stay off the board. 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 would announce 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 in 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

“automatically as 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 of interested in spiritual matters and in understanding what it meant to be an embodied soul. An interestable profound the effect

the rest of his work. The next record to who would make though was the first who single not

to be written by Townsend, and their first, although in the cash in singles released by the old label after the dispute with Townsend, not to make the top 5 since my generation, though in this case it didn't really intend it to. When Mick Jaggerman Keith Richards were imprisoned on drug charges, the who announced that in solidarity they would record released stone songs, and only stone songs until the two were released, as a way of keeping them music in the public eye. The group,

minor cent whistle who was on his honeymoon was cabled on the QE2 and gave his blessing. Went into this studio and cut versions of under my thumb and the last time for immediate release. However, by the time the single came out Jaggerman Richard 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 toy headline by Herman's Hermit and with, on the bottom

of the bill, the Blues Maguos, a psychedelic garage band who had recently had their one hit with we ain't got nothing yet. The Blues Maguos were inadvertently had a big effect on towns and as well. Ralph Scarler, the group singer, among Gilbert, the bass player, were both interested in the teachings of Georgia Damskig, a new age guru when playing sorsical test, who claimed he had been taken to

Venus by authorum, a tanned blonde hered alien, who looked human, except that in a Damskis words, his trousers were not like mine. There were Damskis was told about the space for those 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

looked exactly like the top of a sea as gas lantern, while the most of authorums teaching sounded like they had been caught and pasted from the occipy, 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 Hermits Tour that

would, in different ways, affect the who in the future. The first was Keith Moons 21st birthday party,

“which became one of the most important parts of their legend. The party descended into a food fight”

in general vampage, with Moons 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 are there to protect Hermits from fans, and who didn't approve of Indies and exposure. Moons ripped over and broke to her 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,

vampaged throughout the hotel doing thousands of dollars worth of damage. Amazingly, most of the damage stood to the hotel in the most legendary Keith Moons story, actually came not from Moons, but from Hermits and the members of their ontoage. Keith Moons would later exaggerate the story a great deal, and claimed that he had done most of the damage. After all, how could a party

“for Moons alone have ended with him going off to the dentist while Hermits Hermits smashed the”

up? And he would cap the story by claiming he had driven a role's voice into the hotel swimming pool. Also, on the group's appearance on the smothers for this TV show, Moons decided to bribe the stage hands 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 towns and is later claimed that this explosion caused the hearing damage he suffered from for decades. There was one more event on the tour though, the became the seed of something bigger. A lot of the tour involved travelling on a chartered top 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 unassid. This experience

“inspired towns enter out of Song, Glow Girl, about the thoughts going through a young woman's”

head as she dies in a plane crash. But towns and were starting to think about reincarnation and

the transmigration of souls, and so the song ends with the woman spirit being reborn.

Glow Girl wouldn't get released until the mid 70s, but that section would be used much sooner. The group continued work on a new album while they were on tour, and the resulting record, the Who Sal Out, is one that for the 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 chatting album in the UK. But over the decades it has been

be 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 it had already been created. When I got back from the US tour, Chris Stamp presented Townsend with a proposed running order for the new album that we'd 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 Sergeant Papi 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 drain wave. Townsend had been a fan of the pirate radio stations like radio, Caroline, and Radio London that had been criminalized 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. There might even be able to get some of the products that we're 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 contains 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-Begd Beans.

The album covers 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 the Odewon, moon using Medak Ackney Cream, end with Selena Taz and suit endorsing the Charles Atlus course, and Daltry and a bathtub full of hands-baked beans. Looking past the commercials, the rest of the album contains some of the best songs that 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 have already familiar

from Townsend's writing. Tatoo, for example, sees someone berated by his parents because

“only women were long hair, getting a tattoo because tattoos make you a man. But getting abuse”

by his father anyway, and ends with both a protagonist and his wife having them only tattoos. Murphy and with the shaky hand might be thought of as a spiritual successor to pictures of Lily. "Just a shaker shaker."

Silas Stingy is an Empressal 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 read 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 re-invention. 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 bezel-out the unimpressed. But he re-wrote it for the who sell out after reading the Jessica Tartuation 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. I'm Ryan L is another attempted to mini-upper. The piece apparently started out as much longer and more coherent. But by the time it was recorded without coupe for an 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 and 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 watch tower. There also seems to be some allusion to the story of Thesis in the passages about the colour of a ship sails. Townsend planned that as a full-upper and it was written as a vehicle for his friend Arthur Brown,

who 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 my album were ended up getting reused in his next attempt as a pop-up one that had come from Glowgirl. And one lot of instrumental passage.

Townsend wrote the original draft of the lyrics on the back of an effort David from the

“Tommy court case, but he'd held it back as the group Seekfoot weapon. The song was inspired by”

his own paranoid feelings of jealousy about his then-girlfriend later wife, who was convinced for hours 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 what's due at the end of 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.”

♪ I know that you have 'cause there's magic in my hand. I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. But I can see for miles, became the least successful pop-up single in the UK since anyway anyhow anywhere, only reaching number 10. The previous five pop-up 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 9, their first and only US top 10 hit, but that wasn't enough to

“stop towns and being utterly despondent. He had made what he considered the ultimate who single,”

when 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-singly 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 two. 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 Kat Stevens.

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Search Andrew Hikki 500 songs in your favorite online bookstore. This podcast is written and narrated by me Andrew Hikki and produced by me and Totalizer. No generative AI has been or ever will be used in the writing, research or recording of this podcast. Visit 500 songs.com. That's 500, the numbers not the letters. Songs.com. To read transcripts and line notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs accepted here.

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