How the Sex Pistols and a load of booze inspired one of The Who’s biggest hits
After the Sex Pistols burst onto the scene, music changed course. It wasn’t just prog rock this wave of leather-clad antiheroes had in their crosshairs, but the established rock order at large. This meant that pretty much as soon after 1976’s Never Mind the Bollocks hit number one, people were quietly discarding their record collections under cover of night, hoping not to be caught in the ownership of titles by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. However, one group from this era survived the purge: The Who.
While The Who are essentially the only classic rock artist to have survived the punk purge bar Jimi Hendrix, there are a few clear reasons why, and these also account for how the late American star also managed to retain his status throughout this period of cultural recentering.
The Who were the first punk group. How? Well, if we put aside The Kinks’s accidental foray into distortion on ‘You Really Got Me’ for one second, you can clearly see that the ‘Substitute’ band helped lay some of the spiritual foundations for punk. This can be found in their defiant songs about the plight of their generation fighting to change the world, the heavy, distorted guitar playing of Pete Townshend, and their clangorous, explosive live shows.
Even Ron Asheton of The Stooges, the definitive proto-punk band that every first-wave outfit were openly deferential to, told Buzz Osborne their main inspiration was The Who – you won’t get much more punk than that.
While The Who certainly contributed a lot to the development of punk, the genre also gave back to The Who in an incredible way, a strange twist of fate given Townshend’s complex thoughts on the genre. According to him, it happened one night in 1977. In the liner notes of a reissue of 1978’s Who Are You, the last record with drummer Keith Moon before his death later that year, The Who guitarist revealed that the classic title track, one of their biggest hits in North America, was inspired by a drunken night out with Sex Pistols members, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Paul Cook.
Townshend recalled that he had met up with the pair of punk heroes after an arduous “13-hour encounter” with the notorious former manager of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Allen Klein, who he aptly described as “the awesome rock leech godfather”. Before the meeting, Townshend had discovered that the unscrupulous Klein had purchased a stake in The Who’s publishing without telling them and, naturally, was angry that someone he thought he trusted had taken such an underhand move.
After leaving that exhausting meeting, Townshend met up with the pair of young guns and got blotto at London’s Speakeasy club. He was so inebriated that after stumbling into the darkness of Soho, he was awoken in a doorway with a policeman standing over him, just like the track says.
“Steve and Paul became real ‘mates’ of mine in the English sense,” Townshend recalled in the liner notes. “We socialized a few times. Got drunk (well, I did), and I have to say to their credit, for a couple of figurehead anarchists, they seemed sincerely concerned about my decaying condition at the time.”
Luckily, when Townshend took the autobiographical and furious lyrics to The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, he put his own spin on it, lifting it to new heights. As the vocalist felt threatened by punk at the time, wanting to show them who’s boss, his own wrath made a perfect foil for Townshend on a song the guitarist said is “more about the demands of new friendship than blood-letting challenge”.
