‘Naked Eye’: The Who hit that never was
When you get a band known for their jamming, it’s always worth keeping an ear out for the riffs they use in concert. Sometimes, a riff or chord sequence will go so absurdly hard that it can’t just be used for one random jam session in front of a slightly baffled crowd waiting for you to play your big hits; it’s got to be earmarked to be a big hit of its own.
In their prime, there were few bands that could jam with the ferocity of The Who.
For some weird reason, there may be a few of you who need proof of this. Which is kind of fair enough, one shouldn’t just let a band of The Who’s reputation rest on its laurels. There’s never a bad reason to crack out their absolutely peerless run of live albums from the late 1960s and early 1970s when they were, with an absolute bullet, the best live band in the world.
If you give a close listen to the versions of ‘Magic Bus’ and ‘My Generation’ on Live At Leeds and Live at the Isle Of Wight Festival 1970, you’ll find an absolute cornucopia of riffs, hooks and tossed-away little phrases that most bands would kill for. You’ll also find living proof that at his prime, Townshend was every bit the shredder that Page, Clapton and Gilmour were; he just preferred riffing away instead.
One of these riffs, a chiming, descending pattern in F that sees singer Roger Daltrey give it his best Robert Plant howl over the top, might sound a little familiar to true The Who die-hards. This is because the chord sequence never left Pete Townshend’s consciousness, and he spent the next couple of years turning it into ‘Naked Eye’, a song earmarked for a potential single release.
Why didn’t ‘Naked Eye’ by The Who ever see a proper release?
Part of the reason why the song lost its way was because it got caught up in Townshend’s early ’70s white whale, the Lifehouse project. The multimedia spectacular was meant to be the band’s evolution from Tommy to a whole new way of entertainment. The unfortunate truth about the project though was that Townshend got so in his head about it that he never could adequately explain what it actually was to anyone.
Once Townshend finally came to his senses and realised that a gig where the entire audience was hooked up to a computer program that turned their personality into music (or something) was never, ever going to happen, the project downscaled somewhat. While he wouldn’t be able to make the Lifehouse project he saw in his head, what he did have was a collection of absolute bangers. Townshend and The Who would just have to settle for turning them into Who’s Next, one of the best and most successful rock albums ever made. Doesn’t your heart just bleed for them?
However, anyone who’s taken a cursory glance at the track listing for Who’s Next can see that ‘Naked Eye’, despite being a highlight of most concerts they played around that album’s release, didn’t make the cut. It didn’t make the cut for Quadrophenia either, although it would have been a difficult fit for that album’s structured storytelling. In the end, the song was eventually just rattled out in the studio and stuffed onto 1974s album of studio outtakes Odds & Sods.
It’s one hell of a tribute to the sheer quality of The Who’s prime years that a song of that calibre couldn’t make the cut. Yet it sounds as if the song was a microcosm of the Lifehouse project as a whole. A vision that Pete Townshend had that, try as he might, he couldn’t quite bring it to life. In the liner notes of Odds & Sods, he elaborated on what the song could have been.
He said the song “came to be one of our best stage numbers, this was never released because we always hoped we would get a good live version one day. But then we’re such a lousy live group…” Hell of a way to discover that Pete Townshend actually does have a sense of humour, right?
