60 years on: The most “perfect” song Pete Townshend has ever heard
The Who guitarist Pete Townshend once said, “Rock ‘n’ roll may not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” Beyond the pithiness of the line, there is untold depth.
With 17 words, Townsend distilled a cultural movement down to a single sentence. It’s a scything succinctness that typifies Townshend’s contribution to the music world. His work with The Who was often short, sharp and brutally honest. With this one line, he manages to create a bottomless well of intrigue.
After all, rock ‘n’ roll came to the fore as a way to push through exultant liberation despite the problems subsuming the blues originators. Townshend himself has continued that same spirit. You simply can’t listen to ‘Baba O’Riley’ and have a single care knocking around the old cranium. The powerful intro alone is enough to jetwash the moss of worry in your brain. By the time of the chorus, you will, indeed, be twisting all over your old problems.
When it comes to the heroes who have made him dance, Townshend is mostly reticent. After all, it’s not very rock ‘n’ roll to brown-nose. Iconoclastic criticism, on the other hand, is his forte. “When you actually hear the backing tracks of The Beatles without their voices, they’re flippin’ lousy,” he once said.
As for Led Zeppelin, he opined. “I don’t like a single thing that they have done, I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them.” And he once even bemoaned, “I hate performing and The Who and touring”, so nobody is safe. Townshend has rarely been one to mince his words in favour of keeping the peace.
A perfect song
However, this makes his praise all the more notable, especially when he declares a song as a perfect work of art. “I love Brian [Wilson],” Townshend once said of The Beach Boys’ leader. “There’s not many people I would say that about. I think he’s a truly, truly, truly great genius.”
George Martin, the so-called Fifth Beatle, even went a step further than that, calling Wilson the “only” genius of pop, leaving four Liverpudlian buddies a little miffed. “I love him so much it’s just terrible,” Townshend continued in a similar tone. “I find it hard to live with. ‘God Only Knows’ is simple and elegant and was stunning when it first appeared; it still sounds perfect.”
It was a song that changed the face of music forever; The Who were no different from any other musicians when it came to the pandora’s box moment that the track represented. Speaking of the song’s influence with Guitar Player, Townshend commented: “You know, if we think about ’66 as being the year that we got Pet Sounds from the Beach Boys, that was a quantum leap for them.”
He went on to say that the harmonising Californians went “from being kind of a surf band very much in the tradition of Jan and Dean, which was very lighthearted, very much about the beach, very much the California story. It was, ‘Push away our blues!'”
That cloud-shifting music was magnificent, but beyond that, The Beach Boys were now heralding a keyless complexity to pop music with mindbending innovation that essentially made it Baroque. The California band were able to create something The Who guitarist found almost impossible to grab on to. “Brian Wilson had a harmonic sensibility that was sort of off the map. ‘God Only Knows’ is a masterpiece,” Townshend continued.
Adding: “And I suppose to some extent with ‘I Can See for Miles’, the challenge was not to try to equal Brian Wilson’s harmonic sensibility but certainly to say, “Well, that’s a new standard. Instead of just doing three-part harmony, let’s do five-part harmony and see what happens.”
Townshend didn’t just recognise the beauty of the record, but he also seized upon its importance. “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band,” explained Townshend, reflecting on the moments that helped him find his musical sense of self.
“He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy,” he told Apple Music. But with pop culture arising at the same time as presidential assassinations and huge political movements, the counterculture generation had to do something with a bit more potent purpose.
As Townshend continued, “Music even today is about much more than that. It has a function which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us, so the purpose and the duty of somebody who makes music is very different to the way it used to be.”
He concludes, with no small degree of pride, “And I think I was the first to articulate that and try to explain it.” And this revelation was partly brought into bloom by a ray of wonder from Mr Wilson. Thankfully, it is still blossoming now.
