‘Join Together’: The Who single Pete Townshend wrote “the night before we recorded it”
Pete Townshend was afforded a rare amount of freedom while writing and recording songs for The Who. After spending the 1960s creating energetic and destructive rock music as quickly and efficiently as possible, Tommy allowed Townshend to have the full scope and respect of a true composer. Not long after the album’s release, Townshend put the finishing touches on his cutting-edge home studio, which included tape reels, mixing boards, and even synthesisers.
Townshend’s home demos have since become the stuff of legend. His first drafts of songs like ‘Baba O’Reilly’ and ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ sound massive compared to most acoustic home demos. The early cuts are notable not just for their remarkable sound quality but also for Townshend’s musicianship, with the demos often featuring Townshend himself fleshing out the early ideas for bass, drum, and vocal parts to his songs.
But Townshend didn’t always refine songs before bringing them to the rest of The Who. When something good came to him, Townshend often bypassed the demo process and brought his songs directly to the band, which is exactly what happened with The Who’s 1972 single ‘Join Together’. Recorded in a single day – May 22nd, 1972 – ‘Join Together’ was truly a flash of inspiration.
“I remember when Pete came up with ‘Join Together’,” Roger Daltrey recalled about the song’s conception and recording in the book The Who by Numbers: The Story of the Who Through Their Music. “He literally wrote it the night before we recorded it.”
Daltrey was fond of the song, even as it became the first step in Townshend’s increasing reliance on synths. “I quite like it as a single, it’s got a good energy to it. But at the time I was still very doubtful about bringing in the synthesizer,” Daltrey added. “I felt that, with a lot of songs, we’d end up spending so much time creating these piddly one-note noises that it would’ve been better just doing it on guitar. I mean, I’m a guitar man. I love the guitar; to me it’s the perfect rock instrument. I don’t think Pete did much with those sequencing things that he couldn’t have done on his guitar anyway.”
Different recollections actually put the conception of ‘Join Together’ much earlier. Some point to the song being a key component of Lifehouse, Townshend’s rock opera that eventually fell apart and became 1971’s Who’s Next. In fact, a seven-minute demo version that Townshend created was later featured on his 2000 box set Lifehouse Chronicles, proving that ‘Join Together’ actually had a much longer gestation period than Daltrey initially thought.
Check out ‘Join Together’ down below.
