“It was an orgasm”: the 1973 song that captured everything great about The Who
Career-defining songs typically arrive, by very definition, once in an artist’s existence, but The Who are something of an exception to that rule. Such was the nature of the band’s constantly evolving output that they seemed to land upon a new defining track with the release of every new LP.
Pete Townshend’s first defining moment as a songwriter came rather early on, with the release of The Who’s third single, ‘My Generation’, which gave the rebellious post-war youth of 1960s Britain a fittingly anarchic, amphetamine-fueled anthem. Given the vast success of that single, you could potentially forgive Townshend for following it with an endless deluge of singles following in those same footsteps. However, he simply used that early success as fuel for his ever-developing artistic vision for the band.
Most of The Who’s early contemporaries had either imploded, broken up, or fallen into the depths of obscurity by the time that 1970 rolled around, but Townshend had already ushered the band into the bold new era of rock opera, cementing their position on the upper echelon of British rock for another decade.
While those operatic efforts didn’t contain the same spontaneous energy as the band’s earlier records, they did contain some of Townshend’s greatest songwriting moments. In fact, 1973’s Quadrophenia is arguably the guitarist’s magnum opus; a semi-autobiographic epic that, even today, remains one of the greatest coming-of-age tales in the history of rock music.
More than his songwriting alone, though, that extensive LP encapsulated everything that was great about The Who as a band.
After all, and as has been exemplified by the band’s later efforts, the magic of The Who was not contained entirely within Townshend’s songwriting alone. Each of the band members conjured up some of their all-time greatest performances on Quadrophenia, from John Entwistle’s bassline brilliance right down to the snarling vocals of Keith Moon on ‘Bell Boy’. No song, however, captured the band’s superiority quite like ‘Love, Reign o’er Me’.
Once described by Roger Daltrey in a New York Times interview as “an orgasm”, ‘Love, Reign o’er Me’ marks the grand finale of Quadrophenia, and it does an excellent job at encapsulating the spirit of the entire record in its sub-six-minute runtime. Although it was Townshend who got the writing credit for the song, each band member contributed something invaluable to the track.
“He didn’t write those high notes, I did,” as Daltrey recalled, crediting himself for one of the greatest vocal performances of his career. “That last high note, the scream, it’s not on the demo. Pete sang it as a gentle love song. I sang it as passionate.”
In that sense, nothing captures the passion, songwriting power, and sheer rock and roll brilliance of The Who’s illustrious career quite like ‘Love, Reign o’er Me’, even if the single wasn’t the band’s best-selling – in fact, it didn’t even chart in the UK.
