Episode 136: “My Generation” by the Who

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 136

My Generation

by The Who

In 1991, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book called Generations, The History of America's Future, 1584-2069.

That book was predicated on a simple idea, that there are patterns in American history and that those patterns can be predicted in their rough outline, not in the fine details, but broadly.

Those of you currently watching the TV series Foundation, or familiar with Isaac Asimov's original novels, will have the idea already, because Strauss and Howe claimed to have invented a formula which worked as well as Asimov's fictional Psychohistory.

Their claim was that, broadly speaking, generations could be thought to have a dominant personality type, influenced by the events that took place while they were growing up, which in turn are influenced by the personality types of the older generations.

Because of this, Strauss and Howe claimed, American society had settled into a semi-stable pattern, where events repeat on a roughly 88-year cycle, driven by the behaviours of different personality types at different stages of their lives.

You have four types of generation, which cycle.

The adaptive, idealist, reactive, and civic types.

At any given time, one of these will be the elder statespeople, one will be the middle-aged people in positions of power, one will be the young rising people doing most of the work, and one will be the kids still growing up.

You can predict what will happen, in broad outline, by how each of those generation types will react to challenges.

and what position they will be in when those challenges arise.

The idea is that major events change your personality, and also how you react to future events, and that how, say, Pearl Harbour affected someone will have been different for a kid hearing about the attack on the radio, an adult at the age to be drafted, and an adult who was too old to fight.

The thesis of this book has, rather oddly, entered mainstream thought so completely that its ideas are taken as basic assumptions now by much of the popular discourse, even though on reading it the authors are so vague that pretty much anything can be taken as confirmation of their hypotheses, in much the same way that newspaper horoscopes always seem like they could apply to almost everyone's life.

And sometimes, of course, they're just way off.

For example, they make the prediction that in 2020 there would be a massive crisis that would last several years, which would lead to a massive sense of community, in which America will be implacably resolved to do what needs doing and fix what needs fixing, and in which the main task of those aged 40 to 60 at that point would be to restrain those in leadership positions in the 60 to 80 age group from making irrational, impetuous decisions which might lead to apocalypse.

The crisis would likely end in triumph, but there was also a chance it might end in moral fatigue, vast human tragedy, and a weak and vengeful sense of victory.

I'm sure that none of my listeners can think of any events in 2020 that match this particular pattern.

Despite its lack of rigor, Strauss and Howe's basic idea is now part of most people's intellectual toolkit, even if we don't necessarily think of them as the source for it.

Indeed, even though they only talk about America in their book, their generational concept gets applied willy-nilly to much of the Western world.

And likewise, for the most part we tend to think of the generations, whether American or otherwise, using the names they used.

For the generations who were alive at the time they were writing, they used five main names, three of which we still use.

Those born between 1901 and 1924, they termed the GI generation, though those are now usually termed the greatest generation.

Those born between 1924 and 1942 were the silent generation.

Those born 1943 through 1960 were the Boomers.

And those born between 1982 and 2003, they labelled Millennials.

Those born between 1961 and 1981, they they're labelled 13ers, because they were the unlucky 13th generation to be born in America since the Declaration of Independence.

But that name didn't catch on.

Instead, the name that people use to describe that generation is Generation X, named after a late 70s punk band led by Billy Idol.

Using an OARC

Our men must justify beliefs I say to your generation don't you

think to me

I say to your generation

That band was short-lived but they were in constant dialogue with the pop culture of 10 to 15 years earlier Idol's own childhood as well as that song, Your Generation, which is obviously referring to the song this week's episode is about, they also recorded versions of John Lennon's Gimme Some Truth, of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates Shaking All Over, and an original song called Ready Steady Go about being in love with Kathy McGowan, the presenter of that show.

And even their name was a reference, because Generation X were named after a book published in 1964, about not the generation we call Generation X, but about the baby boomers, and specifically about a series of fights on beaches across the south coast of England between what at that point amounted to two gangs.

These were fights between the old guard, the rockers, people who represented the recent past who wouldn't go away, what Americans would call greasers, people who modelled themselves on Marlon Brando in Revel Without a Cause, and who thought music had peaked with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochrane, and a newer, younger, hipper group of people who represented the new, the modern, the mods.

Talking about my generation,

just because we get around.

Talking about my generation,

talking about my generation.

Hope I die before it gets old.

Talking about my general generation.

Take my generation,

Jim Marshall, if he'd been American, would have been considered one of the greatest generation.

But his upbringing was not typical of that, or of any generation.

When he was five, he was diagnosed as having skeletal tuberculosis, which had made his bones weak and easily broken.

To protect them, he spent the next seven years of his life, from age five until twelve, in hospital in a full body cast.

The only opportunity he got to move during those years was for a few minutes every three months, when the cast would be cut off and reapplied to account for his growth during that time.

Unsurprisingly, once he was finally out of the cast, he discovered he loved moving a lot.

He dropped out of school aged 13.

Most people at the time left school at aged 14 anyway, and since he'd missed all his schooling to that point, it didn't seem worth his while carrying on.

and took on multiple jobs, working 60 hours a week or more.

But the job he made most money at was as an entertainer.

He started out as a tap dancer, taking advantage of his new mobility, but then his song and dance band routine became steadily more song and less dance, as people started to notice his vocal resemblance to Bing Crosby.

He was working six nights a week as a singer, but when World War II broke out, the drummer in the seven-piece band he was working with was drafted.

Marshall wouldn't ever be drafted because of his history of illness.

The other members of the band knew that as a dancer he had a good sense of rhythm, and so they made a suggestion.

If Jim took over the drums, they could split the money six ways rather than seven.

Marshall agreed, but he discovered there was a problem.

The drum kit was always positioned at the back of the stage, behind the PA, and he couldn't hear the other musicians clearly.

This is actually okay for a drummer.

You're keeping time, and the rest of the band are following you, so as long as you can sort of hear them, everyone can stay together.

But a singer needs to be able to hear everything clearly in order to stay on key.

And this was in the days before monitor speakers, so the only option available was just to have a louder PA system,

and since one wasn't available, Marshall just had to build one himself.

And that's how Jim Marshall started building amplifiers.

Marshall eventually gave up playing the drums and retired to run a music shop.

There's a story about Marshall's last gig as a drummer, which isn't in the biography of Marshall I read for this episode, but is told in other places by the son of the bandleader at that gig.

Apparently Marshall had a very fraught relationship with his father, who was, among other things, a semi-professional boxer, and at that gig, Marshall Sr.

turned up and started heckling his son from the audience.

Eventually the younger Marshall jumped off the stage and started hitting his dad, winning the fight.

but he decided he wasn't going to perform in public anymore.

The bandleader for that show was Clifford Townsend, Townsend, a clarinet player and saxophonist whose main gig was as part of the Squadronaires, a band that had originally been formed during World War II by RAF servicemen to entertain other troops.

Townsend, who had been a member of Oswald Mosley's fascist black shirts in the 30s, but later had a change of heart, was a second-generation woodwind player.

His father had been a semi-professional flute player.

As well as working with the Squadronaires, Townsend also put out one record under his own name in nineteen fifty six, a version of Unchained Melody, credited to Cliff Townsend and his singing saxophone.

Cliff's wife often performed with him.

She was a professional singer, who had actually lied about her age in order to join up with the Air Force and sing with the group.

But they had a tempestuous marriage and split up multiple times.

As a result of this, and the travelling lifestyle of musicians, there were periods where their son Peter was sent to live with his grandmother, who was seriously abusive, traumatising the young boy in ways that would affect him for the rest of his life.

When Pete Townsend was growing up, he wasn't particularly influenced by music, in part because it was his dad's job rather than a hobby, and his parents had very few records in the house.

He did, though, take up the harmonica and learn to play the theme tune to Dixon of Dot Green.

His first exposure to rock and roll wasn't through Elvis or Little Richard, but rather through Ray Ellington.

Ellington was a British jazz singer and drummer, heavily influenced by Louis Jordan, who provided regular musical performances on the Goon Show throughout the 50s, and on one episode had performed That Rock and Rollin' Man.

man.

He can play rock and roll like no one can.

The rock of Gibraltar, the rolling tide.

The must be a little of each inside.

That rock and a rollin' man.

Young Pete's assessment of that, as he remembered it later, was, I thought it's some kind of hybrid jazz, swing music with stupid lyrics, but it felt youthful and rebellious, like the goon show itself.

But he got hooked on rock and roll when his father took him and a friend to see a film.

According to Townsend's autobiography, I asked Dad what he thought of the music.

He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was okay.

For me, it was more than just okay.

After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same.

Young Pete would soon go and see Bill Haley live, his first rock and roll gig.

But the older townsend would soon revise his opinion of rock and roll, because it soon marked the end of the kind of music that had allowed him to earn his living.

Though he still managed to get regular work, playing a clarinet was suddenly far less lucrative than it had been.

Pete decided that he wanted to play the saxophone like his dad, but soon he switched first to guitar and then to banjo.

His first guitar was bought for him by his abusive grandmother, and three of the strings snapped almost immediately, so he carried on playing with just three strings for a while.

He got very little encouragement from his parents, and didn't really improve for a couple of years.

But then the Trad Jazz Boom happened, and Townsend teamed up with a friend of his who played the trumpet of French horn.

He had initially bonded with John Entwistle over their shared sense of humour.

Both kids loved Mad Magazine and would make tape recordings together of themselves doing comedy routines inspired by The Goon Show and Hancock's Half Hour.

But Entwhistle was also a very accomplished musician, who could play multiple instruments.

Entwhistle had formed a trad band called The Confederates, and Townsend joined them on banjo and guitar, but they didn't stay together for long.

Both boys, though, would join a variety of other bands, both together and separately.

As the trad boom faded and rock and roll regained its dominance among British youth, there was little little place for Entwistle's trumpet in the music that was popular among teenagers, and at first Entwistle decided to try making his trumpet sound more like a saxophone, using a helmet as a mute to try to get it to sound like the sax on Ramrod by Dwayne Eddy.

Eddie soon became Entwistle's hero.

We've talked about him before a couple of times, briefly, but not in depth.

But Dwayne Eddy had a style that was totally different from most guitar heroes.

Instead of playing mostly on the treble strings of the guitar, playing high twiddly parts, Eddie played low notes on the bass strings of his guitar, giving him the style that he summed up in album titles like The Twang's the Thang and Have Twangy Guitar Will Travel.

After a couple of years of having hits with this sound, produced by Lee Hazelwood and Lester Sill, Eddie also started playing another instrument, the instrument variously known as the six-string bass, the baritone guitar, or the Dan Electro bass, after the company that manufactured the most popular model.

The baritone guitar has six strings, like a normal guitar, but it's tuned lower than a standard guitar, usually a fourth lower, though different players have different preferences.

The Dan Electro became very popular in recording studios in the early 60s, because it helped solve a big problem in recording bass tones.

You can hear more about this in the episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I recommended last week, but basically double basses were very, very difficult to record in the 1950s, and you'd often end up just getting a thudding, muddy sound from them, which is one reason why when you listen to a lot of early rockabilly, the bass is doing nothing very interesting, just playing root notes.

You couldn't easily get much clarity on the instrument at all.

Conversely, with electric basses, with the primitive amps of the time, you didn't get anything like the full sound that you'd get from a double bass.

But you did get a clear sound that would cut through on a cheap radio, in a way that the sound of a double bass wouldn't.

So the solution was obvious.

You have an electric instrument and a double bass play the same part.

Use the double bass for the big dull throbbing sound, but use the electric one to give the sound some shape and cut through.

If you're doing that, you mostly want the trebly part of the electric instrument's tone, so you play it with a pick rather than fingers, and it makes sense to use a Dan Electro rather than a standard bass guitar, as the Dan Electro is more trebly than a normal bass.

This combination of Dan Electro and double bass appears appears to have been invented by Owen Bradley, and you can hear it, for example, on this record by Patsy Klein, with Bob Moore on double bass and Harold Bradley on babitone guitar.

Crazy,

I'm crazy for feeling

so lonely.

I'm crazy.

Crazy for feeling

so lonely.

This sound, known as tic-tac bass, was soon picked up by a lot of producers.

and it became the standard way of getting a bass sound in both Nashville and LA.

It's all over the Beach Boys Best Records, and many of Jack Nitch's arrangements, and many of the other records the Wrecking Fruit played on.

And it's on most of the stuff the Nashville A-team played on, from the late 50s through mid-60s, records by people like Elvis, Roy Orbison, Arthur Alexander, and the Everly brothers.

Lee Hazelwood was one of the first producers to pick up on this sound.

Indeed, Dwayne Eddy has said several times that Hazelwood invented the sound before Owen Bradley did, though I think Bradley did it first, and many of Eddie's records featured that bass sound.

And eventually Eddie started playing a babitome guitar himself as a lead instrument, playing it on records like Because They're Young.

Dwayne Eddy was John Entwistle's idol, and Entwistle learned Eddie's whole repertoire on trumpet, playing the saxophone parts.

But then, realizing that the guitar was always louder than the trumpet in the bands he was in, he realised that if he wanted to be heard, he should probably switch to guitar himself.

And it made sense that a bass would be easier to play than a regular guitar.

If you only have four strings, there's more space between them, so playing is easier.

So he started playing the bass, trying to sound as much like Eddie as he could.

He had no problem picking up the instrument.

He was already a multi-instrumentalist, but he did have a problem actually getting hold of one, as all the electric bass guitars available in the UK at the time were prohibitively expensive.

Eventually he made one himself, with the help of someone in a local music shop, and that served for a time, though he would soon trade up to more professional instruments, eventually amassing the biggest collection of basses in the world.

One day, Entwistle was approached on the street by an acquaintance, Roger Daltrie, who said to him, I hear you play bass.

Entwistle was, at the time, carrying his bass.

Daltry was at this time a guitarist.

Like Entwistle he'd built his own instrument, and he was the leader of a band called Del Angelo and his Detours.

Daltrie wasn't Del Angelo, the lead singer.

That was a man called Colin Dawson, who by all accounts sounded a little like Cliff Richard, but he was the band leader, hired and fired the members, and was in charge of their set lists.

Daltry lured Entwistle away from the band he was in with Townsend by telling him that the detours were getting proper paid gigs, though they weren't getting many at the time.

Unfortunately, one of the group's other guitarists, the member who owned the best amp, died in an accident not long after Entwistle joined the band.

However, the amp was left in the group's possession, and Entwistle used it to lure Pete Townsend into the group by telling him he could use it, and not telling him that he'd be sharing the amp with Daltry.

Townsend would later talk about his audition for the detours.

As he was walking up the street towards Daltry's house, he saw a stunningly beautiful woman walking away from the house crying.

She saw his guitar case and said, Are you going to Rogers?

Yes.

Well, you can tell him it's that bloody guitar or me.

Townsend relayed the message, and Daltry responded, Sodder, come in.

The audition was a formality, with the main questions being whether Townsend could play two parts of the regular repertoire for a working band at the time, Havana Guilah and The Shadows Man of Mystery.

Townsend could play both of those, and so he was in.

The group would mostly play chart hits by groups like the Shadows, but as Trad Jazz hadn't completely died out yet, they would also do breakout sessions playing Trad Jazz, with Townsend on banjo, Entwistle on trumpet, and Daltry on trombone.

From the start, there was a temperamental mismatch between the group's two guitarists.

Daltry was thoroughly working class, culturally conservative, had dropped out of school to go to work at a sheet metal factory, and saw himself as a no-nonsense plain speaking man.

Townsend was from a relatively well-off upper-middle-class family, was for a brief time a member of the Communist Party, and was by this point studying at art school, where he was hugely impressed by a lecture from Gustav Metzke titled, Auto-Destructive Art, Auto-Creative Art, The Struggle for the Machine Arts of the Future, about Metzke's creation of artworks which destroyed themselves.

Townsend was at art school during a period where the whole idea of what an art school was for was in flux, something that's typified by a story Townsend tells about two of his early lectures.

At the first, the lecturer came in and told the class to all draw a straight line.

They all did, and then the lecturer told off anyone who had drawn anything that was anything other than six inches long, perfectly straight, without a ruler, going north-south with a 3B pencil, saying that anything else at all was self-indulgence of the kind that needed to be drummed out of them if they wanted to get work as commercial artists.

Then, in another lecture, a different lecturer came in and asked them all to draw a straight line.

They all drew perfectly straight six-inch north-south lines in 3B pencil, as the first lecturer had taught them.

The new new lecturer started yelling at them, then brought in someone else to yell at them as well, and then cut his hand open with a knife and dragged it across a piece of paper smearing a rough line with his own blood, and screamed, That's a line!

Townsend's sympathies lay very much with the second lecturer.

Another big influence on Townsend at this point was a jazz double bass player, Malcolm Cecil.

Cecil would later go on to become a pioneer in electronic music as half of Tonto's expanding head band, and we'll be looking at his work in more detail in a future episode.

But at this point, he was a fixture on the UK jazz scene.

He'd been a member of Blues Incorporated and had also played with modern jazz players like Dick Morrissey.

But Townsend was particularly impressed with the performance in which Cecil demonstrated unorthodox ways to play the double bass, including playing so hard he broke the strings, and using a saw as a bow, sawing through the strings and damaging the body of the instrument.

But these influences, for the moment, didn't affect the Detours, who were still doing the Cliff and the Shadows routine.

Eventually, Colin Dawson quit the group, and Daltry took over the lead vocal role for the Detours, who settled into a line-up of Daltry, Townsend, Entwistle, and drummer Doug Sandam, who was much older than the rest of the group.

He was born in 1930, while Daltrie and Entwistle were born in 1944, and Townsend in 1945.

For a while, Daltrie continued playing guitar as well as singing, but his hands were often damaged by his work at the sheet metal factory, making guitar painful for him.

Then the group got a support slot with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, who at this point were a four-piece band, with Kidd singing, backed by bass, drums, and Mick Green playing one guitar on which he played both rhythm and lead parts.

Green was at the time considered possibly the best guitarist in Britain, and the sound the Pirates were able to get with only one guitar convinced the detours that they would be okay if Doltri switched to just singing.

So the group changed to what is now known as a power trio format.

Townsend was a huge admirer of Steve Cropper, another guitarist who played both rhythm and lead, and started trying to adopt parts of Cropper's style, playing mostly chords, while Entwistle went for a much more fluid bass style than most, essentially turning the bass into another lead instrument, patterning his playing after Dwayne Eddy's work.

By this time, Townsend was starting to push against Daltry's leadership a little, especially when it came to repertoire.

Townsend had a couple of American friends at art school who had been deported after being caught smoking dope, and had left their records with Townsend for safekeeping.

As a result, Townsend had become a devotee of blues and RB music, especially the jazzier stuff, like Ray Charles, Mose Allison, and Buckety and the MGs.

He also admired guitar-based blues records like those by Howland Wolf or Jimmy Reed.

Townsend kept pushing for this music to be incorporated into the group's sets, but Doltri would push back, insisting as the leader that they should play the chart hits that everyone else played, rather than what he saw as Townsend's art school nonsense.

Townsend insisted and eventually won.

Within a short while the group had become a pure RB group, and Doltri was soon a convert and became the biggest advocate of that style in the band.

But there was a problem with only having one guitar, and that was volume.

In particular, Townsend didn't want to be able to hear hecklers.

There were gangsters in some of the audiences who would shout requests for particular songs, and you had to play them or else, even if they were completely unsuitable for the rest of the audience's tastes.

But if you were playing so loud you couldn't hear the shouting, you had an excuse.

Both Entwhistle and Townsend had started buying amplifiers from Jim Marshall, who had opened up a music shop after quitting drums.

Townsend actually bought his first one from a shop assistant in Marshall's shop, John McLaughlin, who would later himself become a well-known guitarist.

Entwhistle, wanting to be heard over Townsend, had bought a cabinet with four 12-inch speakers in it.

Townsend, wanting to be heard over Entwhistle, had bought two of these cabinets and stacked them, one on top of the other, against Marshall's protestations.

Marshall said that they would vibrate so much that the top one might fall over and injure someone.

Townsend didn't listen, and the Marshall stack was born.

This ultra-amplification also led Townsend to change his guitar style further.

He was increasingly reliant on distortion and feedback, rather than on traditional instrumental skills.

Now, there are basically two kinds of chords that are used in most Western music: there are major chords, which consist of the first, third, and fifth note of the scale, and these are the basic chords that everyone starts with.

So you can strum between G major and F major.

There's also minor chords, where you flatten the third note, which sound a little sadder than major chords.

So playing G minor and F minor?

There are, of course, other kinds of chord.

Basically, any collection of notes counts as a chord, and can work musically in some context.

But major and minor chords are the basic harmonic building blocks of most pop music.

But when you're using a lot of distortion and feedback, you create a lot of extra harmonics, extra notes that your instrument makes along with the ones you're playing.

And for mathematical reasons I won't go into here, because this is already a very long episode, the harmonics generated by playing the first and fifth notes sound fine together, but the harmonics from a third or minor third don't go along with them at all.

The solution to this problem is to play what are known as power chords, which are just the root and fifth notes, with no third at all, and which sound ambiguous as to whether they're major or minor.

Townsend started to build his technique around these chords, playing for the most part on the bottom three strings of his guitar, which sounds like this.

Townsend wasn't the first person to use power chords.

They used on a lot of the Howland Wolf records he liked, and before Townsend would become famous, the Kinks had used them on on You Really Got Me.

But he was one of the first British guitarists to make them a major part of his personal style.

Around this time, the detours were starting to become seriously popular, and Townsend was starting to get exhausted by the constant demand on his time from being in the band and going to art school.

He talked about this with one of his lecturers, who asked how much Tanzan was earning from the band.

When Townsend told him he was making £30 a week, the lecturer was shocked, and said that was more than he was earning.

Townsend should probably just quit art school because it wasn't like he was going to make more money from anything he could learn there.

Around this time, two things changed the group's image.

The first was that they played a support slot for the Rolling Stones in December 1963.

Townsend saw Keith Richards swinging his arm over his head and then bringing it down on the guitar to loosen up his muscles, and he thought that looked fantastic and started copying it.

From very early on, Townsend wanted to have a physical presence on stage stage that would be all about his body, to distract from his face, as he was embarrassed about the size of his nose.

They played a second support slot for the stones a few weeks later, and not wanting to look like he was copying Richards, Townsend didn't do that move, but then he noticed that Richards didn't do it either.

He asked about it after the gig, and Richards didn't know what he was talking about.

Swing me what?

So Townsend took that as a green light to make that move, which became known as the windmill, his own.

The second thing was when in February 1964, a group appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars.

Sometimes, when I'm all alone, wondering what to do,

sometimes I start dreaming dreams, dreaming dreams of you.

And in them all, I fall,

I fall

Johnny Devlin and the Detours had had national media exposure, which meant that Daltry, Townsend, Entwistle and Sandam had to change the name of their group.

They eventually settled on The Who.

It was around this time that the group got their first serious management, a man named Helmut Gordon, who owned a doorknob factory.

Gordon had no management experience, but he did offer the group a regular salary and pay for new equipment for them.

However, when he tried to sign the group to a proper contract, as most of them were still under 21, he needed their parents to counter sign for them.

Townsend's parents, being experienced in the music industry, refused to sign, and so the group continued under Gordon's management without a contract.

Gordon, not having management experience, didn't have any contacts in the music industry, but but his barber did.

Gordon enthused about his group to Jack Marks, the barber, and Marks in turn told some of his other clients about this group he'd been hearing about.

Tony Hatch wasn't interested, as he already had a guitar group with the searchers, but Chris Parmenter at Fontana Records was, and an audition was arranged.

At the audition, among other numbers, they played Bo Diddley's Here Itis.

I want my baby.

How happy we could be.

I sing woo-woo-woo.

I sing woo-woo-woo.

I sing woo-woo-woo-woo.

I sing woo-woo.

Unfortunately for Doug, he didn't play well on that song, and Townsend started berating him.

Doug also knew that Parmenta had reservations about him, because he was so much older than the rest of the band.

He was 34 at the time, while the rest of the group were only just turning 20, and he was also the least keen of the group on the R and B material they were playing.

He'd been warned by Entwistle, his closest friend in the group, that Doltri and Townsend were thinking of dropping him, and so he decided to jump before he was pushed, walking out of the audition.

He agreed to come back for a handful more gigs that were already booked in, but that was the end of his time in the band and of his time in the music industry, though oddly not of his friendship with the group.

Unlike other famous examples of an early member not fitting in and being forced out before a band becomes big, Sandam remained friends with the other members, and Townsend wrote the foreword to his autobiography, calling him a mentor figure.

while Daltrey apparently insisted that Sandam phone him for a chat every Sunday, at the same time every week, until Sandam's death in 2019 at the age of 89.

The group tried a few other drummers, including someone who Jim Marshall had been giving drum lessons to, Mitch Mitchell, before settling on the drummer for another group that played the same circuit, the Beachcombers, who played mostly Shadows material, plus the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean songs that their drummer Keith Moon loved.

Moon and Entwistle soon became a formidable rhythm section.

and despite having been turned down by Fontana, they were clearly going places.

But they needed an image, and one was provided for them by Pete Meaden.

Meaden was another person who got his hair cut by Jack Marks, and he had had a little bit of music business experience, having worked for Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager, for a while, before going on to manage a group called The Moments, whose career highlight was recording a soundalike cover version of You Really Got Me for an American Budget Label.

Yeah,

you really got me now

You got me so I can't sleep at night

Oh yeah,

you really got me now

You got me so I don't know what I'm doing

Oh yeah,

you really got me now

You got me so I can't sleep at night You really got me

You really got me

You really got me

The moments never had any big success, but Meaden's nose for talent was not wrong, as their teenage lead singer, Steve Marriott, later went on to much better things.

Pete Meaden was taken on as Helmut Gordon's assistant, but from this point on the group decided to regard him as their de facto manager, and as more than just a manager.

To Townsend in particular, he was a guru figure, and he shaped the group to appeal to the mods.

Now, we've not talked much about the mods previously, and what little has been said has been a bit contradictory.

That's because the mods were a tiny subculture at this point.

Or, to be more precise, they were three subcultures.

The original mods had come along in the late 1950s, at a time when there was a division among jazz fans between fans of traditional New Orleans jazz, trad, and modern jazz.

The mods were modernists, hence the name, but for the most part they weren't as interested in music as in clothes.

They were a small group of young working class men, almost all gay, who dressed flamboyantly and dandyishly, and who saw themselves, their clothing and their bodies as works of art.

In the late 50s, Britain was going through something of an economic boom, and this was the first time that working-class men could buy nice clothes.

These working-class dandies would have to visit tailors to get specially modified clothes made, but they could just about afford to do so.

The mod image was at first something that belonged to a very, very small clique of people, but then John Stevens opened his first shop.

This was the first era when short runs of factory produced clothing became possible, and Stevens, a stylish young man, opened a shop on Carnaby Street, then a relatively cheap place to open a shop.

He painted the outside yellow, played loud pop music, and attracted a young crowd.

Stevens was selling factory-made clothes that still looked unique, short runs of odd-coloured jeans, three-button jackets, and other men's fashion.

Soon Carnaby Street became the hub for men's fashion in London, thanks largely to Stevens.

At one point, Stevens owned 15 different shops, nine of them on Carnaby Street itself, and Stevens' shops appealed to the kind of people that the Kinks would satirise in their early 1966 hit single, Dedicated Follower of Fashion.

Many of those who visited Stephen's shops were the larger second generation of mods.

I'm going to quote here from George Malley's Revolt into Style, the first book to properly analyse British pop culture of the 50s and 60s, by someone who was there.

As the mod thing spread, it lost its purity.

For the next generation of mods, those who picked up the mod thing around 1963, clothes, while still their central preoccupation, weren't enough.

They needed music, rhythm and blues, transport, scooters, and drugs, pep pills.

What's more, they needed fashion ready-made.

They hadn't the time or the fanaticism to invent their own styles.

And this is where Carnaby Street came in.

Melly goes on to talk about how these new mods were viewed with distaste by the older mods, who left the scene.

The choice of music for these new mods was as much due to geographic proximity as anything else.

Carnaby Street is just round the corner from Wardore Street, and Wardore Street is where the two clubs that between them were the twin poles of the London R and B scenes, the Marquis and the Flamingo, were both located.

So it made sense that the young people frequenting John Stevens' boutiques on Carnaby Street were the same people who made up the audiences, and the bands, at those clubs.

But by 1964, even these second-generation mods were in a minority compared to a new third generation, and here I'm going to quote Melly again.

But the Carnaby Street mods were not the final stage in the history of this particular movement.

The word was taken over finally by a new and more violent sector, the urban working class at the gang forming age, and this became quite sinister.

The gang stage rejected the wilder flights of Carnaby Street in favour of extreme sartorial neatness.

Everything about them was neat, pretty, and creepy.

Dark glasses, nero haircuts, Chelsea boots, polar necked sweaters worn under skinny v-necked pullovers, gleaming scooters, and transistors.

Even their offensive weapons were pretty, tiny hammers and screwdrivers.

En masse they looked like a pack of weasels.

I would urge anyone who's interested in British social history to read Melly's book in full.

It's well worth it.

These third-stage mods soon made up the bulk of the movement, and they were the ones who, in summer 1964, got into the gang fights that were breathlessly reported in all the tabloid newspapers.

Pete Meaden was a mod, and as far as I can tell, he was a leading-edge second-stage mod.

Though as with all these things, who was in what generation of mods is a bit blurry.

Meaden had a whole idea of mod as lifestyle and mod as philosophy, which worked well with the group's RB leanings, and with Townsend's art school-inspired fascination with the aesthetics of pop art.

Meaden got the group a residency at the Railway Hotel, a favourite mod hangout, and he also changed their name.

The Who didn't sound mod enough.

In mod circles at the time there was a hierarchy, with the coolest people, the faces, at the top.

Below them a slightly larger group of people known as numbers, and below them the mass of generic people known as tickets.

Meaden saw himself as the band's Svengali, so he was obviously the face.

So the group had to be numbers, so they became the high numbers.

Meaden got the group a one-off single deal to record two songs he had allegedly written, both of which had Lovicks geared specifically for the mods.

The A-side was Zoot Suit.

I'm the hippiest number in town, and I'll tell you why.

I'm the snappiest dresser right now to my inch white tie.

And to get you wise,

I'll explain to you

a few other things out of business is supposed to do.

I'll wear a suit, suit, jacket with sidebands five inches long.

This had a melody that was stolen wholesale from Misery by the Dynamics.

I don't know, but I think I deserve a misery.

The B-side, meanwhile, was titled I'm the Face.

I'm the face, baby, is that crazy?

I'm the face, baby, is that fake?

I'm the face if you want it.

I'm the face if you want it.

All the others are third-party stickers by me, baby, is that thing.

Which anyone with any interest at all in blues music will recognize immediately as being Got Love If You Want It by Slim Harpo.

Unfortunately for the high numbers, that single didn't have much success.

Mud was a local phenomenon, which never took off outside London and its suburbs, and so the songs didn't have much appeal in the rest of the country.

While within London, mod fashions were moving so quickly that by the time the record came out, all its up-to-the-minute references were desperately outdated.

But while the record didn't have much success, the group were getting a big live following among the mods, and their awareness of rapidly shifting trends in that subculture paid off for them in terms of stagecraft.

To quote Townsend, what the mods taught us was how to lead by following.

I I mean, you'd look at the dance floor and see some blokes stop during the dance of the week, and for some reason feel like doing some silly sort of step.

And you'd notice some of the blokes around him looking out of the corners of their eyes and thinking, Is this the latest?

And on their own, without acknowledging the first fellow, a few of them would start dancing that way, and we'd be watching.

By the time they looked up on the stage again, we'd be doing that dance, and they'd think the original guy had been imitating us, and next week they'd come back and look to us for dancers.

And then Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp came into the railway hotel.

Kit Lambert was the son of Constant Lambert, the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, who the economist John Maynard Keynes described as the most brilliant man he'd ever met.

Constant Lambert was possibly Britain's foremost composer of the pre-war era, and one of the first people from the serious music establishment to recognise the potential of jazz and blues music.

His most famous composition, The Rio Grande, written in 1927 about a fictitious South American river, river, is often compared with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Kit Lambert was thus brought up in an atmosphere of great privilege, both financially and intellectually, with his godfather being the composer Sir William Walton, while his godmother was the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fontaine, with whom his father was having an affair.

As a result of the problems between his parents, Lambert spent much of his childhood living with his grandmother.

After studying history at Oxford and doing his national service, Lambert had spent a few months studying film at the Institut des Audes Etudes Cinématographiques in Paris, where he went because Jean-Luc Godard and Alain René taught there, or at least so he would later say, though there's no evidence I can find that Godard actually taught there.

So either he went there under a mistaken impression, or he lied about it later to make himself sound more interesting.

However, he got bored with his studies after only a few months, and decided that he knew enough to just make a film himself, and he planned his first documentary.

In early 1961, despite having little film experience, he joined two friends from university, Richard Mason and John Hemming, in an attempt to make a documentary film tracing the source of the Irii, a river in South America that was at that point the longest unnavigated river in the world.

Unfortunately, the expedition was as disastrous as it's possible for such an expedition to be.

In May 1961, they landed in the Amazon basin and and headed off on their expedition to find the source of the Irii, with the help of five local porters and three people sent along by the Brazilian government to map the new areas they were to discover.

Unfortunately, by September, not only had they not found the source of the Iri,

they'd actually not managed to find the Irire itself, four and a half months apparently not being a long enough time to find an 810 mile long river.

And then Mason made his way into history in the worst possible way, by becoming the last, to date, British person to be murdered by an uncontacted indigenous tribe, the Panara, who shot him with eight poison arrows and then bludgeoned his skull.

A little over a decade later, the Panara made contact with the wider world, after nearly being wiped out by disease.

They remembered killing Mason, and said that they'd been scared by the swishing noise his genes had made, as they'd never encountered anyone who wore clothes before.

Before they made contact, the Panara were also known as the Creana Cro, a name given them by the Kayapo people, meaning round-cut head, a reference to the way they styled their hair, brushed forward and trimmed over the forehead, in a way that was remarkably similar to some of the mod styles.

Before they made contact, Paul McCartney would, in 1970, record an instrumental, Creana Cro, after being inspired by a documentary called The Tribe That Hides From Man.

McCartney's instrumental includes sound effects, including McCartney firing a bow and arrow, though apparently the bowstring snapped during the recording.

For a while, Lambert was under suspicion for the murder, though the Daily Express, which had sponsored the expedition, persuaded Brazilian police to drop the charges.

While he was in Rio waiting for the legal case to be sorted, Lambert developed what one book on the Who describes as a serious anal infection.

Astonishingly, this experience did not put Lambert off from the film industry, though he wouldn't try to make another film of his own for a couple of years.

Instead, he went to work at Shepperton Studios, where he was an uncredited second AD on many films, including From Russia with Love and The L-Shaped Room.

Another second AD working on many of the same films was Chris Stamp, the brother of the actor Terence Stamp, who was just starting out in his own career.

Stamp and Lambert became close friends despite, or because of, their differences.

Lambert was bisexual and preferred men to women.

Stamp was straight.

Lambert was the godson of a knight and a dame.

Stamp was a working class East End cockney.

Lambert was a film school dropout full of ideas and grand ambitions, but unsure how best to put those ideas into practice.

Stamp was a practical, hands on man.

The two complemented each other perfectly, and became flatmates and collaborators.

After seeing A Hard Day's Night, they decided that they were going to make their own pop film, a documentary, inspired by the French Nouvelle Vargue School of Cinema, which would chart a pop band from playing lowly clubs to being massive pop stars.

Now all they needed was to find a band that were playing lowly clubs but could become massive stars.

And they found that band at the railway hotel, when they saw the high numbers.

Stamp and Lambert started making their film and completed part of it, which can be found on YouTube.

The surviving part of the film is actually very, very well done for people who'd never directed a film before.

And I have no doubt that if they completed the film, to be titled High Numbers, it would be regarded as one of the classic depictions of early 60s London club life, to be classed along with the small world of Sammy Lee and Expresso Bango.

What's even more astonishing though is how modern the group look.

Most footage of guitar bands of this period looks very dated, not just in the fashions, but in everything, the attitude of the performers, their body language, the way they hold their instruments.

The best performances are still thrilling, but you can't tell when they were filmed.

On the other hand, the high numbers look ungainly and awkward, like the lads of no more than twenty that they are, but in a way that was actually shocking to me when I first saw this footage, because they look exactly like every guitar band I played on the same bill as during my own attempts at being in bands between 2000 and about 2005.

If it weren't for the fact that they have such recognisable faces, if you told me this was footage of some band I played on the same bill with at the Star and Garter or Night and Day Cafe in 2003, I'd believe it unquestioningly.

But while Lambert and Stamp started out making a film, they soon pivoted and decided that they could go into management.

Of course, the high numbers did already have management, Pete Meaden and Helmut Gordon.

But after consulting with the Beatles' lawyer, David Jacobs, Lambert and Stamp found out that Gordon's contract with the band was invalid, and so when Gordon got back from a holiday, he found himself usurped.

Meadan was a bit more difficult to get rid of, even though he had less claim on the group than Gordon.

He was officially their publicist, not their manager, and his only deal was with Gordon, even though the group considered him their manager.

While Meaden didn't have a contractual claim, though, he did have one argument in his favour, which is that he had a large friend named Phil the Greek who had a big knife.

When this claim was put to Lambert and Stamp, they agreed that this was a very good point indeed, one that they hadn't considered, and agreed to pay Meaden off with £250.

This would not be the last big expense that Stamp and Lambert would have as the managers of the Who, as the group were now renamed.

Their agreement with the group had the two managers taking 40% of the group's earnings, while the four band members would split the other 60% between themselves, an arrangement which should theoretically have had the managers coming out ahead.

But they also agreed to pay the group's expenses, and that was to prove very costly indeed.

Shortly after they started managing the group, at a gig at the railway hotel, which had low ceilings, Townsend lifted his his guitar up a bit higher than he'd intended, and broke the headstock.

Townsend had a spare guitar with him, so this was okay, and he also remembered Gustav Metzger and his ideas of auto destructive art, and Malcolm Cecil soaring through his bass strings and damaging his bass, and decided that it was better for him to look like he'd meant to do that than to look like an idiot who'd accidentally broken his guitar.

So he repeated the motion, smashing his guitar to bits, before carrying on the show with his spare.

The next week, the crowd were excited, expecting the same thing again, but Townsend hadn't brought a spare guitar with him.

So, as not to disappoint them, Keith Moon destroyed his drum kit instead.

This destruction was annoying to Wentwhistle, who saw musical instruments as something close to sacred, and it also annoyed the group's managers at first, because musical instruments are expensive, but they soon saw the value this brought to the band's shows, and reluctantly agreed to keep buying them new instruments.

So, for the first couple of years, Lambert and Stamp lost money on the group.

They funded this partly through Lambert's savings, partly through Stamp continuing to do film work, and partly from investors in their company, one of whom was Russ Conway, the easy-listening piano player who'd had hits like Sidesaddle.

Conway's connections actually got the group another audition for a record label, Decker, although Conway himself recorded for EMI, but the group were turned down.

The managers were told that they would have been signed, but they didn't have any original material.

So Pete Townsend was given the task of writing some original material.

By this time, Townsend's musical world was expanding far beyond the RB that the group were performing on stage, and he talks in his autobiography about the music he was listening to while he was trying to write his early songs.

There was Green Onions, which he'd been listening to for years in his attempt to emulate Steve Cropper's guitar style, but there was also The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan, and two tracks he names in particular: Devil's Jump by John Lee Hooker.

My baby, she reached, baby, she gone.

Baby, God's done, I sure do love how baby do it boogie.

I'll baby do it a boogie.

I'll baby do it a boogie.

We take you all night long.

And Better Get Hit in Your Soul by Charles Mingus

He was also listening to what he described as a record that changed my life as a composer, a recording of Baroque music that included sections of Purcell's Gordian Not Untied.

Townsend had a notebook in which he listed the records he wanted to obtain, and he reproduces that list in his autobiography.

Marvin Gaye, 123, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder's Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert, Brackets Nina Simone, Charlie Christian, Billy Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Telonius Monk Around Midnight, and Brilliant Corners.

He was also listening to a lot of Stockhausen and Charlie Parker, and to the Evely brothers, who by this point were almost the only artist that all four members of the Who agreed were any good, because Daltrie was now fully committed to the R and B music he'd originally dismissed, and disliked what he thought was the pretentiousness of the music Townsend was listening to, while Keith Moon was primarily a fan of the Beach Boys.

But everyone could agree that the Everlies, with their sensitive interpretations, exquisite harmonies, and bow diddly inflected guitars, were great.

And so the group added several songs from the Everly's 1965 albums Rock and Soul and Beat and Soul to their set, like Man with Money.

Just down the street,

I know a place

when they're asleep.

I'll cover

my face.

I'll break the lock,

open

the door,

I'll slip inside,

I'll rob the store,

then I'll be a friend with lots of

Despite Daltry's objections to diluting the purity of the group's RB sound, Townsend brought all these influences into his songwriting.

The first song he wrote to see release was not actually recorded by The Who, but a song he co-wrote for a minor beat group called The Naturals, who released it as a B-side.

Then I met you and I realized

It was you, it was you who set my heart up beating

I never knew, never knew Love would come without me

But shortly after this, the group got their first big break thanks to Lambert's personal assistant Anya Butler.

Butler was friends with Shell Talmy's wife, and got Talmi to listen to the group.

Townsend in particular was eager to work with Talmy, as he was a big fan of the Kinks, who were just becoming big, and who Talmie produced.

Talmy signed the group to a production deal, and then signed a deal to license their records to Decca in America, which Lambert and Stamp didn't realise wasn't the same label as British Decker.

Decca in turn sub-licensed the group's recordings to their British subsidiary Brunswick, which meant that the group got a minuscule royalty for sales in Britain, as their recordings were being sold through three corporate layers all taking their cut.

This didn't matter to them at first though, and they went into the studio excited to cut their first record as The Who.

As was typical at the time, Talmi brought in a few session players to help out.

Clem Katini turned out not to be needed, and left quickly, but Jimmy Page stuck around.

Not to play on the A side, which Townsend said was so simple even I could play it, but the B side, a version of the old blue standard bald-headed woman, which Talmy had copyrighted in his own name and had already had the kinks record.

It'll make me mean, yeah, Lord make me mean.

I don't want no bald head of woman.

It'll make me

Apparently the only reason that Paige played on that is that Paige wouldn't let Townsend use his fuzzbox.

As well as Paige and Catini, Talmi also brought in some backing vocalists.

These were the Ivy League, a writing and production collective consisting at this point of John Carter and Ken Lewis, both of whom had previously been in a a band with Paige, and Perry Ford.

The Ivy League were huge hitmakers in the mid-60s, though most people don't recognise their name.

Carter and Lewis had just written Can You Hear My Heartbeat for Herman's Hermits.

highway?

Baby, baby, can't you hear my heartbeat when you move up closer to me?

I get a feeling that's who we

can you hear with the pounding of my heartbeat to show the one I love.

And along with a couple of other singers who joined the group, the Ivy League would go on to sing backing vocals on hits by Sandy Shaw, Tom Jones, and others.

Together and separately, the members of the Ivy League were also responsible for writing, producing and singing on Let's Go to San Francisco by the Flowerpot Men, Winchester Cathedral by the new vaudeville band, Beach Baby by First Class and more,

as well as their big hit under their own name, Tossing and Turning.

I think of all the things that we do,

and all the reasons why I love you.

Tossing and turning,

I'm tossing and turning

all night.

Though my favorite of their tracks is their Baroque pop masterpiece, My World Fell Down.

I heard a bluebird sing,

but not today.

Cause it's winter time

and the leaves are brown

since you went away.

My world fell down.

My world

fell down.

As you can tell, the Ivy League were masters of the Beach Boys sound that Moon, and to a lesser extent Townsend, loved.

That backing vocal sound was combined with a hard driving riff inspired by the Kink's early hits like You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night, and with lyrics that explored inarticulacy, a major theme of Townsend's lyrics.

I can't explain made the top ten, thanks thanks in part to a publicity stunt that Lambert came up with.

The group had been booked onto Ready Steady Go, and the floor manager of the show mentioned to Lambert that they were having difficulty getting an audience for that week's show.

They were short about 150 people, and they needed young, energetic dancers.

Lambert suggested that the best place to find young energetic dancers was at the Marquee on a Tuesday night, which just happened to be the night of the Who's regular residency at the club.

Come the day of filming, the Ready Steady Go audience was full of the Who's most hardcore fans, all of whom had been told by Lambert to throw scarves at the band when they started playing.

It was one of the most memorable performances on the show.

But even though the record was a big hit, Daltry was unhappy.

The man who'd started out as a guitarist in a Shadows cover band, and who'd strenuously objected to the group's inclusion of RB material, now had the zeal of a convert.

He didn't want to be doing this soft commercial pop, or Townsend's art school nonsense.

He wanted to be an R and B singer, playing hard music for working class men like him.

Two decisions were taken to mollify the lead singer.

The first was that when they went into the studio to record their first album, it was all soul and RB, apart from one original.

The album was going to consist of three James Brown covers, three Motown covers, Bo Diddley's I'm a Man, and a cover of Paul Revere and the Raiders' Louie Louie sequel Louie Come Home, retitled Lou B.

All of this was material that Daltry was very comfortable with.

Also, Daltry was given some input into the second single, which would be the only song credited to Daltry and Townsend, and Daltry's only songwriting contribution to a Who A side.

Townsend had come up with the title Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere while listening to Charlie Parker, and had written the song based on that title, but Daltry was allowed to rewrite the lyrics and make suggestions as to the arrangement.

That record also made the top ten.

But Daltry would soon become even more disillusioned.

The album they'd recorded was shelved, though some tracks were later used for what became the My Generation album, and Kit Lambert told a melody maker, The Who are having serious doubts about the state of R and B.

Now the LP material will consist of hard pop.

They've finished with Smokestack Lightning.

That wasn't the only thing they were finished with.

Townsend and Moon were tired of their band's leader, and and also just didn't think he was a particularly good singer, and weren't shy about saying so, even to the press.

Entwistle, a natural peacemaker, didn't feel as strongly, but there was a definite split forming in the band.

Things came to a head on a European tour.

Daltrie was sick of this pot nonsense, he was sick of the arty ideas of Townsend, and he was also sick of the other members' drug use.

Daltry didn't indulge himself, but the other band members had been using drugs long before they became successful, and they were all using uppers, which offended Daltry greatly.

He flushed Keith Moon's pill stash down the toilet, and screamed at his bandmates that they were a bunch of junkies, then physically attacked Moon.

All three of the other band members agreed.

Daltry was out of the band.

They were going to continue as a trio.

But after a couple of days, Daltrie was back in the group.

This was mostly because Daltrie had come crawling back to them, apologising.

He was in a very bad place at the time, having left his wife and kid, and was actually living in the back of the group's tour van.

But it was also because Lambert and Stamp persuaded the group they needed Doltrie, at least for the moment, because he'd sung lead on their latest single, and that single was starting to rise up the charts.

My generation had had a long and torturous journey from conception to realization.

Musically, it had originally been inspired by Mose Allison's Young Man's Blues.

I said, A young man

ain't nothing in this world these days

in the old days

when a young man was a strong man, Townsend had taken that musical mood and tied it to a lyric that was inspired by a trilogy of TV plays, The Generations, by the socialist playwright David Mercer, whose plays were mostly about family disagreements that involved politics and class, as in the first of those plays, where two upwardly mobile young brothers of very different political views go back to visit their working-class family when their mother is on her deathbed, and are confronted by the differences they have with each other and with the uneducated father who sacrificed to give them a better life than he had.

Thank you very much.

I know my place.

See you all at morning.

Andy, Beatty, she's a good woman.

Dad, will you just tell me why?

Why this?

Why?

Why we've got a lot of misery in this state when Mother lying dead yourself.

She's a tall older, didn't it, Lady?

She'd have understood, would you, mother?

Doesn't you think we've been blind, deaf, and dumb this last fifteen year without feeling?

Doesn't you think we noticed no?

Doesn't I think that could walk in here one time I send for thee and carry on same way as I always say,

Townsend's original demo for the song was very much in the style of Mose Allison, as the excerpt of it that's been made available on various deluxe reissues of the album shows.

But Lambert had not been hugely impressed by that demo.

Stamp had suggested that Townsend try a heavier guitar riff, which he did, and then Lambert had added the further suggestion that the music would be improved by a few key changes.

Townsend was at first unsure about this, because he already thought he was a bit too influenced by the kinks, and he regarded Ray Davis as, in his words, the master of modulation.

But eventually he agreed, and decided that the key changes did improve the song.

Stamp made one final suggestion after hearing the next demo version of the song.

A while earlier, the Who had been one of the many British groups, like the Yardbirds and the Animals, who had backed Sonnyboy Williamson 2 on his UK tour.

Williamson had occasionally done a little bit of a stutter in some of his performances, and Daltrie had picked up on that and started doing it.

Townsend had in turn imitated Daltrie's mannerism a couple of times on the demo, and Stamp thought that was something that could be accentuated.

Townsend agreed and reworked the song, inspired by John Lee Hooker's stuttering blues.

Well, man, the woman got some pretty high than lame.

The stuttering made all the difference, and it worked on three levels.

It reinforced the themes of inarticulacy that run throughout the Who's early work.

Their first single, after all, had been called I Can't Explain, and Townsend talks movingly in his autobiography about talking to teenage fans who felt that I Can't Explain had said for them the things they couldn't say themselves, and how they even found it difficult to say that themselves.

Here is a character who is trying to be a spokesman for his generation, but he is literally unable to force the words out.

It was also a shout-out to the mod audience, more subtle than the obvious references on things like I'm the face.

The mod drug of choice was speed, and one common effect of amphetamine use is that users tend to stutter when on high doses.

Amphetamines raise dopamine levels in the brain to such an extent that the basal ganglia thalamocortical motor circuits of the brain are thrown off, leading to a similar inability to control the muscles used in speech as one gets in Parkinson's disease for similar underlying reasons, even as the sped up thought processes caused by amphetamines make it seem that much more urgent to get the words out.

By having the protagonist of the song stutter, Townsend was telling the group's mod listeners, this character is on the same drugs as you, without doing anything so crude as just flat out saying that.

And finally, the stutter also allowed Tanzan to hint at things he wouldn't be allowed to say on the radio.

Every teenage listener knew what Why Don't You All F

was leading up to, and could dig what he was saying, even if the eventual words that came out were more broadcastable.

I'm trying to

There were two other aspects of the record that were unlike anything else that was on the pop charts at the time.

The first was the bass solo, which was not, as some have claimed, the first bass solo on record.

Even leaving aside jazz and only looking at hit singles, Grady Martin had played a Dan Electro Fuzz solo a full five years earlier on Marty Robbins' top five US chart hit, Don't Worry.

But it was one of the most prominent bass solos on a rock single, and one of the first times that the bass had really seemed like a lead instrument on a rock and roll record.

Entwhistle's solo was meant to be recorded on a Dan Electro, but there was a problem.

Dan Electros had thinner strings than a normal bass, and Entwhistle was a very heavy-handed player.

Often one can use the same bass strings for years without breaking a string, but the combination of the thinner strings and Entwhistle's playing meant that he broke strings when playing the solo.

The problem was that because the Dan Electro didn't use the same strings as other instruments, because it wasn't normal for people to break bass strings very often, and because it was an extremely rare instrument in the UK at the time, you couldn't buy those strings separately.

The only way you could get new strings for a Dan Electro was to buy a whole new instrument.

After the third time Entwistle broke a Dan Electro string, and now owning three Dan Electros he couldn't play because of broken strings, he decided to play it on a Fender jazz bass instead, and that's what's used on the finished record.

And after all these innovations, the band saved the most astonishing thing for last, ending the song in a cacophony of feedback and drums, which was the kind of thing that several acts have been doing live, but which had not made it to a pop single at this point.

The record became the group's biggest hit at that point, reaching number two on the UK charts, kept off the top by the Carnival is Over by The Seekers, though it only made number 75 in the US.

And as Daltry was the lead singer on the record, it was decided that they'd better let him stay in the group.

But the dynamic of the band had changed forever.

The band that had been led by Roger Daltrey were now, for better or worse, Pete Townsend's band.

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Thank you very much for listening.