The reason The Who rarely ever soloed
Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon: it’s hard to imagine a more virtuosic four-piece than that. It renders The Who a fantasy band akin to a supergroup. Daltrey had a voice that could stir honey into tea; Townshend’s chops were so singular that Joe Satriani said he could “lift the spirits of the audience like nobody”; Lemmy called Entwistle the “best bass player on the face of the earth”; and the thunderous Keith Moon, well, he dubbed himself the all-time great.
However, this collection of masters produced a strangely reserved sound, focussed firmly on the spiritual feel of the music. They were so efficient at this, that you barely noticed an oddity about their constitution. As Geddy Lee said when appraising their Live at Leeds record: “What an amazing guitar sound on this album! And [Pete] Townshend even plays a few solos, which he usually never does. Was there anybody better at expressing themselves through power chords?”
Indeed, the band rarely did solo. They certainly had the skills to do so, but Keith Moon explained why they rarely fell into the trap: ”Drum solos are fucking boring. Any kind of solo is. It detracts from the group identity,” he told Rolling Stone. The rest of the group concurred with this, avoiding ego and sticking to the task of crafting songs that came with a wallop.
As Geddy Lee inferred, it was ‘sound’ that Townshend was more interested in honing that a slew of superfluous notes. As Townshend said about the song that first made him pick up a guitar, “I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard [Link Wray’s] ‘Rumble’, and yet very excited by the guitar sound.” It’s a track with only a few chords, but laden with attitude, and Townshend opines that if he had never heard the song, then he would ”have never picked up a guitar.”
This inspiring notion of shaking up the daily malaise with sheer sound is something that has always stayed with Townshend. His father was a local musician, but Townshend, respectfully, found that the music he played belonged to a bygone era, and when he came of age, he wanted to exult music to a higher calling: “When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was colour and life was grey. So, music for me has always been more than entertainment.”
This is typified by Tommy. This artistic fulfilment that Tommy gave him was something that he had longed for and made him truly proud of his work. “I felt like the messenger from Mars in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land,” Townshend wrote in his autobiography Who I Am, “who promises that the secret of all existence is simply to learn to wait.”
The epiphany came to Townshend in what he described as being “in a most unlikely place”—and he wasn’t wrong, later referencing a Holiday Inn in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, as the birthplace of Tommy. He describes the scene in vivid detail, recalling the “vibrating bed far too big, a TV with a fuzzy screen, sheets and towels that smelled slightly of something warm, but not quite alive… I heard the voice of God,” he writes. And God didn’t call for a solo.
In fact, being in a band, in the truest sense of the word, didn’t call for a solo. As Keith Richards explained when discussing guitarists like Townshend: “The thing is, you’ve got your Jimi Hendrix, you’ve got your Eric Clapton, and then you’ve got guys who can play with bands. People get carried away with lead guitars […] and feedbacks. And it’s all histrionics, when it comes down to it.”
