Shindig! #163 – The Who
This month marks 60 years since ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ upset the airwaves with its squalls of feedback and atomic drums. Its defiant, almost nihilistic lyrics gave further voice to a jumbled youth that had swallowed ‘I Can’t Explain’ like the Dexedrine pills that kept them going at weekend all-nighters. It’s one of the most futuristic blasts of pop music to make the Top 10 during a year bursting with sonic innovation.
HUW THOMAS charts how THE WHO became ambassadors for the anonymous, and how both the fans and the media elevated a “group with built-in hate” into pop’s elite.
“It’s the most excitingly pig-headed of our songs. Blatant, proud and, dare I say it, sassy”
Searching for a credible follow-up, The Who turned to no-nonsense rhythm & blues. After all, sermons from the good books Stateside, Sue and London still made up the lion’s share of their live repertoire. R&B was just about the only thing they could all agree upon. Returning to the studio with Talmy, the band cut a single made up of two red-hot Holland-Dozier-Holland compositions, Eddie Holland’s ‘Leaving Here’ (covered by The Birds at roughly the same time) and Marvin Gaye’s ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’. Daltrey is particularly gruff on these tracks (both eventually released on the 1998 CD edition of Odds & Sods) and the band sound unbridled, with Moon’s zippy drumming stealing the spotlight. Talmy’s hand is near invisible. Before these tracks could escape acetate purgatory, however, Townshend changed his mind again. He had a new song, an original, one surely destined to become a classic; that’s right – ‘You Don’t Have To Jerk’. Little is clear about this unreleased and perhaps unrecorded Who composition. All we know is that its writer touted it as the next single to Melody Maker’s Nick Jones in March. Obsessed with Bobby Bland and James Brown, Townshend wanted to have “the group all digging the jerk”. We may never know what John Entwistle digging the jerk would have looked like.
The next Who single was ultimately ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, a scrawled statement of autonomy knocked together by Townshend and Daltrey in a rare collaboration, the night before it was recorded. Townshend had been inspired by hearing a Charlie Parker solo. “I just scribbled those three words on a piece of paper because I thought that was how he sounded, so free and liberated,” he revealed to the BBC in ’83. ‘Anyway’ was released two days after Townshend turned 20 and it was a final, definitive teenage statement with its rallying cry of “I can do anything!” Daltrey provided the street-smart lines about how “nothing gets in my way / not even locked doors”. “It’s the most excitingly pig-headed of our songs,” Townshend enthused to Rolling Stone in ’71. “It’s blatant, proud and, dare I say it, sassy.”
Townshend had been emboldened by the reaction to ‘I Can’t Explain’. That song was about a failure to communicate – in Townshend’s words, it concerned “a pathetic little boy who can’t explain to the most beautiful girl in class he loves her” – but its lyrics had struck a chord with scores of young men. “It happened at The Goldhawk Club,” Townshend raved to Simon Witter in ’94. “This deputation came back and said, ‘You wrote that song, didn’t you? You’ve got to write some more like that… because we can’t write… and if we could write, we’d have nothing to communicate.’ I felt like I grew in a moment. I thought, ‘Christ! All I have to do is look at them every night I’m on the stage, figure out what it is they are going through and write a song about it!” With ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, Lambert and Stamp’s feedback loop reached a lopsided endpoint. The Who had dressed like mods before but now Townshend’s writing completely refracted the lives of those who listened to it – their dreams, their feelings, their fears and their inarticulacy.
Lambert and Stamp had a name for this. Their charges had made “the first pop-art single”, a trojan horse chartbuster with a standard call-and-response structure buckling underneath a cacophony of morse code guitar feedback. Its range was such that The Who were asked to play the song both on an edition of Ready Steady Go! and at a musique concrète concert in Paris. (They didn’t accept the latter invitation.) The feedback troubled Decca’s American arm, however. They sent a telegram to Talmy complaining that they’d been sent a defected record “riddled with distortion”. “The beginning of the disc is like fly paper – designed to trap the unwary and hold them there while the ‘damage’ is done,” Lambert snarled to Record Mirror. “A great thing about pop-art is that it won’t stand analysis. You can’t explain it, it just works. Another thing about pop-art is that the statements it makes are very, very simple. One record, one idea.”
‘Anyway’ was, in fact, one idea in a sea of false starts. It was recorded at IBC Studios during the three days in April ’65 that The Who set aside to make an album. These sessions produced 12 tracks, most of them R&B cover versions – with their touring schedule at a brutal peak, the band hadn’t had the time to write new material. There was ‘Anytime You Want Me’, a waltz time ballad familiar to Daltrey as a Garnet Mimms B-side, ‘(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave’, the Martha & The Vandellas classic made powerpop via gender switch, ‘Please, Please Please’, a James Brown number with a convincingly tortured Daltrey vocal, and ‘I’m A Man’, Shel Talmy’s favourite since he first auditioned the band. ‘Louie Louie’ spin-off ‘Lubie (Come Back Home)’ was probably the least inspired of these recordings. Almost four minutes long, it retains little of the vim that made the original by Paul Revere & The Raiders take so appealing. What’s more, the number had already been covered better by struggling mod group Davie Jones & King Bees on the B-side to ‘Liza Jane’, the first of nine consecutive flops for their Brixton-born lead singer.
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