The Motown hit that changed Pete Townshend with one word
Regardless of which part of the music world you find yourself most closely aligned with, it’s hard to deny the importance and influence of the Motown label, with its artists having ultimately helped reshape the pop music landscape from the 1960s onwards.
You can easily point to the significance of artists like Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, and how many pop acts have tried to emulate the brilliance of their approach to songwriting in the years since they were the dominant forces at the top of the charts. This is something that is still prevalent even in today’s landscape, only further highlighting the impact that Motown has had, and how their hit-writing factory is perhaps one of the greatest ever produced.
But it’s far from just the pop world who were enamoured with their work, and there are plenty of acts from beyond that they passed their influence onto, extending their grip on contemporary music and the direction it was shifting towards far beyond where most would have imagined.
You’ve only got to look at how certain rock acts began implementing some of the more elaborate production styles that were used on Motown records, and how lavish arrangements were becoming the norm in contexts outside of what most would consider to be pop music.
Things were becoming more elaborate in all strands of the music world, and it’s thanks to what Motown were producing in the 1960s. They’d arguably asserted dominance over all other forms of music by the end of the decade, with a total of 79 songs from the label hitting the top 10 in the US between 1960 and 1969; a far greater number than most other labels can dream of producing.
One noted fan of their exploits was Pete Townshend, although this shouldn’t come as a surprise considering how The Who’s association with the Mod rock scene was heavily intertwined with soul music coming out of the US. Consequently, it also shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of their most famous early hits was heavily inspired by a Motown classic.
However, the manner in which they were provided with said inspiration is perhaps a little more unusual, with Townshend revealing that it was simply down to the choice of a single word that he was driven to pen his own hit.
In 1987, Townshend released Another Scoop, a career-spanning compendium of demos from both his solo career and from The Who, and in the liner notes for the record, he expressed his love for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ ‘The Tracks of My Tears’. “Smokey Robinson sang the word ‘substitute’ so perfectly in ‘The Tracks of My Tears’, my favourite song at the time, that I decided to celebrate the word itself with a song of its own,” he said, referring to The Who’s 1966 single, ‘Substitute’.
The mere pronunciation of a word and the way it fits in with the surrounding lyrics might seem like a very simple reason to have fallen in love with a song, but if Robinson had substituted another word, would it have stuck out to Townshend as much? Sometimes it’s the smallest decisions that turn a good song into a classic, and in the case of this Motown gem, inspire further classic songs to be written.
