The band so good it confused Roger Daltrey: “Totally alien”
Once in a blue moon, a group emerges onto the airwaves that are so innovative and otherworldly that they change your entire perspective of what can be achieved within the musical realm. Within the realm of 1960s rock and roll, The Who were that band for legions of young listeners.
From the moment that their masterful debut single ‘I Can’t Explain’ hit the airwaves back in 1965, The Who perfectly represented the voice of Britain’s disenfranchised post-war youth, with their anarchic end-of-set destruction and arsenal of short, sharp mod rock anthems.
Pete Townshend’s songwriting spoke directly to audiences in a way which had never truly been achieved prior, and the band’s development from that rebellious young outfit into the profound maturity of their later rock operas cemented their legacy among the greatest rock outfits of all time.
Despite their otherworldly output, though, The Who’s rock mastery did not arrive from outer space. Instead, the band took hearty inspiration from a wealth of different artistic avenues. The modernist sounds of jazz and soul that the group experienced in the all-nighters of their subculture era certainly had their impact, as did the omnipresence of pirate radio stations like Radio Luxembourg, all blended together with Townshend’s art school sensibilities.
One of the most unlikely influences on the band’s sound, however, was The Beach Boys; a group so profoundly good that they left Roger Daltrey scratching his head. After all, in only a few short years, Brian Wilson’s outfit had gone from surf-themed harmonies over Chuck Berry riffs to the artistic masterpiece of Pet Sounds.
According to Daltrey, who spoke to Rolling Stone in 2022, the modern musical landscape is missing the kind of unexpected spark that the Californian outfit had. “So much of the music in the last ten years, it’s kind of ignored what you can do with just voices,” he declared. “I’m talking about mainstream big-selling stuff. Harmonies – when you listen to The Beach Boys, I mean, their kind of image was totally alien to us.”
“They were these square guys in swimming trunks. It meant nothing to us,” he continued, casting scorn over the early image of the Wilson clan. Ultimately, though, their musical quality couldn’t be denounced in the same way as their swimming trunks, and The Who even performed covers of the group at certain points in their performing career.
Seemingly, though, those covers were down to Keith Moon, who, as Daltrey put it, “lived on another planet. All he wanted to be was the drummer of The Beach Boys, all the time he was the drummer of The Who.”
Even if – as evidenced by the band’s cover of ‘Barbara Ann’ – neither Moon nor Daltrey could quite rival the harmonies of The Beach Boys, that didn’t stop the mod rockers from appreciating the revolutionary, albeit confusing, vocal mastery of Brian Wilson’s outfit.
