The 1965 Motown song Pete Townshend called “the greatest record”
There was no way Pete Townshend was only going to be defined by rock and roll for the rest of his life.
He had made some of the greatest rock operas that the world had ever heard, but when you look at his personal record collection, a lot of his best moments came from what he was hearing out of genres like jazz and more avant-garde approaches to recording. And while there were many great moments throughout his time with The Who, he felt that R&B wasn’t too far behind when talking about his all-time favourite records.
Because while The Who were the epitome of the ideal Mod rock and roll outfit, they did have more than a few soul chops in their repertoire as well. A lot of people forget that their debut album features songs that were originally written by James Brown, and while Roger Daltrey wasn’t necessarily the perfect choice to be a soul crooner by any stretch, he did a serviceable job reinventing those songs for a new generation.
But if Townshend was making rock and roll stars dream bigger than ever, R&B wasn’t far behind when looking at the titans of the genre. The Jackson 5 still made the kind of chipper pop music that made everyone want to sing, but as the 1970s started, people like Stevie Wonder were redefining what soul music could mean. His run of albums was unparalleled in its time, but even when Wonder first started making more ambitious music, he was already being outshined by Marin Gaye.
Compared to every other musician at Motown, Gaye was truly on another planet in terms of his vocal ability. Anyone would have killed to have delivered the same performance that he gave on ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, but it was ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’ that made Gaye turn his head when he first heard Gaye’s music. The tune was great, but it was the sonics behind the record that struck Townshend.
Other soul artists could do a lot with only a little bit of harmony, but Townshend was awestruck when he met Gaye during the recording of the album Face Dances, saying, “We did a test session in March. It was there that I met Marvin Gaye, who took over Studio 2 for a few weeks. I think ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, one of his first hits, is one of the greatest recordings ever made, certainly one of the finest from Tamla.”
That’s high praise coming from someone responsible for works like Quadrophenia, but ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’ didn’t have to be over the top to catch his ear. The backing track is a lot more punchy than anything else coming out of Motown, and you look at where Townshend’s taste for soul music came from, a lot of his favourite records were normally the ones that had a little bit more grit behind them.
Even when branching outside of Hitsville, ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and the MGs is still one of the finest songs that he ever heard, and you can hear Townshend trying to make the same kind of impact whenever he made a record. Not a lotus happening on many of the early Who songs, but when they did start throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the mix, Townshend wasn’t looking for an album that sounded expensive by any stretch.
He wanted people to hear the passion behind everything he was playing, and that came from someone pushing themselves as hard as they could for their art whenever they had the chance. It wasn’t going to be easy for him to make classics every time he played, but the amount of emotional weight that Gaye put into every single note was at least something that he could set his sights on.
