“I’m not going to be your tool”: The song Pete Townshend used to insult his audience
Every great rock band knows about that signature push and pull between them and the audience. It’s nice to create musical innovations in the studio, but the minute that someone steps out onstage to play, some ex-factor takes over and results in this communal spiritual exercise when everyone joins in unison singing a song. Although Pete Townshend loved the idea of bringing the band and audience closer with The Who, he admitted that one particular song was meant to spit in the crowd’s face from the minute it started.
Then again, Townshend was never known to take the easy route whenever going through the pop machine. He understood how that machine worked most of the time, and even if he didn’t go along with the program, he still knew how to write phenomenal pop singles, like the chorus of ‘So Sad About Us’ or the acoustic jewel ‘Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand’.
On Tommy, though, Townshend made a point of leaving that style of song behind. ‘My Generation’ was certainly powerful, but it wasn’t pushing music forward like Townshend’s rock opera, taking the basic building blocks of rock and roll and pairing it with horns, orchestrations and a sweeping story about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who can hardly communicate outside of the music shouting his thoughts into the world.
This was still the mainstream, though, and when someone makes something that groundbreaking, everyone is looking at them to do the same thing over again. Townshend may have been ready to move onto the next phase of storytelling, but when working on the Lifehouse opera, things began to fall apart too quickly, with most of the tunes from Who’s Next being patched together from the basic outline of his intended second opera.
If this was what he had in the pipeline, though, it sounded like we missed out on one of the greatest rock operas that the world had ever seen. There were still pieces that sounded complete, like ‘Baba O’Riley’, but even the non-epic songs on the record like ‘Love Ain’t For Keeping’ and ‘Going Mobile’ are perfect vignettes that helped flesh out the world Townshend was envisioning.
While everything built to the battle cry in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, Townshend said that the whole point was to go against what the audience had thought of him, saying, “I wrote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ which was essentially saying to the audience: ‘Just **** off. I’m not going to be your tool.’ It led to the question, If you’re going to say ‘**** off’ to revolutionary thinking, then what it is that you are going to do? That is a process that I’m still involved in.”
It’s not exactly subtle in its swift middle finger, either. Everyone was looking for Townshend to take over the world and become the next leading voice, but listening to the end of the song, he knew that nothing was ever going to change, stating that the new boss would be the same as the old boss until the end of time.
In making a song that was intended to be a put-down, though, Townshend created an anthem that entered a rare league of songs that subverted the revolution it supposedly started. Compared to other rock and roll heavyweights that came both before and after him, this was as close as Townshend ever came to matching what Bob Dylan had done when making something as blunt as ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
