Roger Daltrey thinks The Who’s first single was “derivative” of a classic British band: “A huge influence on Pete”
It is extremely difficult today to find a band that wasn’t influenced by the 1960s in some way, shape, or form. But what is perhaps more impressive is that the bands of the decade, like The Beatles, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, also effectively shaped one another with every release.
London was brimming with talent and it meant that influence and inspiration was keenly shared and adopted into the work of a set of artist who, when they travelled across the Atlantic to try and crack America became succinctly known as the British Invasion.
The British Invasion occurred so quickly and so forcefully in the United States that it became difficult to keep track of the proper timelines. Seemingly overnight, The Beatles had opened an entirely new world of mop tops, guitars, and accents to American audiences. Unless you were paying close attention, it was almost impossible to know the exact differences between The Rolling Stones and Herman’s Hermits.
So when looking back at a discography, you might be forgiven for slightly mistaking the start of such a timeline for a band like The Who. ‘I Can’t Explain’ is sometimes cited as the group’s first release, but it wasn’t technically the first single by The Who – that distinction goes to ‘Zoot Suit’, a mod-influenced single recorded by the band when they still went by the name The High Numbers.
Written by their first manager, ‘Zoot Suit’ wasn’t really The Who as we know them today, so when the song failed to find any kind of meaningful impact on the charts, the band changed their name, sacked their songwriter/manager, and reinstalled Pete Townshend as their main creative voice.
Looking for a strong direction forward that didn’t have to specifically appeal to their mod image, The Who turned to one of their peers in the English rock scene for guidance: The Kinks. Although Townshend had been writing his own tunes by that point, he decided to take a page out of the Davies brothers’ playbook when writing ‘I Can’t Explain’.
“We already knew Pete could write songs, but it never seemed a necessity in those days to have your own stuff because there was this wealth of untapped music that we could get hold of from America,” Roger Daltrey told Q Magazine in 1994. He was right, although the British Invasion felt new and fresh, it rtelied heavily on the blues of the American lands the groups were culturally conquering.
Covers were a part of the gig, but soon enough a whole run of groups began to pen their own tunes, as Daltrey continues: “But then bands like the Kinks started to make it, and they were probably the biggest influence on us – they were certainly a huge influence on Pete, and he wrote ‘I Can’t Explain’, not as a direct copy, but certainly it’s very derivative of Kinks music.”
Featuring choppy guitar riffs with more than a little bit of fuzz to them, it’s not hard to see how The Kinks provided an early bit of inspiration for Townshend’s writing. According to Townshend’s autobiography Who Am I, ‘I Can’t Explain’ was directly inspired by The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, mostly because Townshend was trying to impress Shel Talmy, the producer of ‘You Really Got Me’, who also produced ‘I Can’t Explain’.
In the book, Townshend also claims that the song’s main thesis had more to do with writing the song itself than anything else. Townshend claimed that he was trying to sum up the feeling that came from listening to his favourite artists. The fact that he couldn’t summarise them, ironically, provided the basis for the song that was summarising those same feelings. Because Townshend couldn’t explain how he felt, he wrote ‘I Can’t Explain’.
Check out ‘I Can’t Explain’ down below.
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