“I was very proud”: Roger Daltrey on The Who song that captures the essence of rock ‘n’ roll
It was Pete Townshend who once said, “Rock ‘n’ roll may not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” It’s a pithy little quote that outdoes itself. With 17 words he distilled the history of a cultural movement down to a single sentence. The original pioneers propagated the art form as a way to push through exultant liberation despite the problems surrounding them. This 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.
Daltrey told Uncut Magazine that it is as close to a masterpiece as they got. “Well, it’s that thing – ‘I got a feeling inside, I can’t explain’ – it’s rock’n’roll,“ he says. “The more we try to explain it, the more we crawl up our own arses and disappear! I was very proud of that record. That was us, y’know – it was an original song by Pete and it captured that energy and that testosterone that we had in those days. It still does.”
The Who’s charismatic leader continued: “When we turned up to record it there was this other guitarist in the studio – Jimmy Page. And he’d brought in three backing vocalists, which was another shock.“ However, that alone is defining in that it proves the blase nature of the era where talent was everywhere and ideas were free-flowing.
“He must have discussed it with our management, but not with us, so we were thrown at first, thinking, ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ But it was his way of recording,” Daltrey recalls. With youth on their side, the track flew right off the bat. “We were in that studio for no more than two hours. A-side, B-side, played the thing four times and that was it,“ he says.
Adding: “Obviously, if we’d had to do our own backing vocals that would’ve meant overdubs and more studio time, so that was how Shel worked. Pete could’ve played the lead but in a way it was a privilege having Jimmy Page on one of our records… he ain’t a bad guitarist, y’know?” He was also part of the milieu figuring out the future, and it helped that such collaboration helped to bring it to fruition.
Inspired by the blues, these youngsters were now figuring out how to go about their own exultation, and ‘I Can’t Explain’ perfectly surmises that sense of youngsters finding liberation on the wing.
