Roger Daltrey’s favourite ballad of all time: ‘This song really melts me’
Trapped somewhere beneath Roger Daltrey‘s hardboiled surface is a soft and sweet centre. He may well have been the macho man who lent ‘My Generation’ its gritty boldness, but the frontman also embodied The Who’s secret softer side. Perhaps this is what has always made him so captivating—he’s the proverbial Graham Greene character with a depth that remains forever shrouded.
However, he found a perfect foil in Pete Townshend on this front—a spiritual soul who wrote songs that at once exemplified the new-found vehement liberation of counterculture rock ‘n’ roll but also yearned towards a greater sense of depth and discovery. Townshend was bullied at school, and rock ‘n’ roll offered a way out—this glowing sense of vital escape rang out in The Who.
While Daltrey had a happy childhood, as a working-class lad who struggled with school, it was also pretty perilous, and he admits, ”life could have gone very wrong indeed”. Likewise, Townshend felt like an outcast, and John Entwistle and Keith Moon didn’t have it easy either. So, they set about coming together and forming a gang of sorts. From there, they simply tried to grab life by the horns, though the horns they were grabbing were largely a mystery.
That notion of doing something with feeling, purpose and escape was distilled into one Who classic that Daltrey ranks among their greatest ever songs. In 1965, as the band were finding their feet, they released the visceral ‘I Can’t Explain’. It proved to be a quintessential ’60s anthem, and it was the perfect way to announce The Who as the latest revolutionaries on the block, their cause palpable but yet to be defined by a manifesto.
In an odd, paradoxical way, it elucidated the strange mystery of life—there is a great deal of poetry and power in making it clear that something escape our understanding. Few songs have done that better than Harry Nilsson’s classic ballad, ‘Without You’. Hanging over his finality is a sense of strangeness regarding how the singer even arrived at this point. It’s emotive to an nth, from a rather unemotional man—so much so, in fact, that Nilsson was embarrassed by the track.
That sentiment is added to by the fact that Daltrey recalls Nilsson as “a very funny man“. But suddenly, the jokey musician was pleading like a classical expressionist painting in his heartfelt ballad, and Daltrey adored that duplicity. It does make the song seem more natural. Hell, it’s even on the same album as the right irreverent ‘Coconut’, how’s that for a snapshot of the veering whims of life?
Citing the song among his favourites of all time on BBC Radio 2, Daltey continued: “There is something about this song that really melts me. Harry was one of the best songwriters out there, the production on this record is extraordinary, such a great sound.”
However, that didn’t stop Nilsson from blushing over his gut-punching Badfingers cover. As producer Richard Perry told Mojo, ”I had to force him to take a shot with the rhythm section. Even while we were doing it, he’d be saying to the musicians, ‘This song’s awful.’” Alas, perhaps, is that self-effacing uncertainty that makes the weeping ballad one of the greatest of all time—a rarity in a genre beset by platitudes and inflated confidence.
