“I wrote it for my mother”: The Who song Keith Moon didn’t want to release
The Who were never going to be limited to just one genre of music. As much as they may have loved to play loud, aggressive songs to anyone they could, there was only so far you could take that before people started wondering if that was the only thing you knew how to do. Pete Townshend knew that their stuff needed to be much more musical, but Keith Moon wasn’t as sold on the song ‘Sunrise’ when he first heard it.
Then again, it’s obvious why Moon wouldn’t like something like ‘Sunrise’… for one thing, it hardly has any drums on it. Given the band had been known for making pieces like ‘My Generation’, hearing this gentle Townshend song probably felt like audio Nyquil when fans first heard it back in 1967.
Also, any track that drops below a certain tempo should really have been off-limits for Moon. Throughout his time in the group, Moon was a glorified cartoon character trapped in a human body, doing everything he could to ensure he caused as much mayhem as possible while the tape rolled.
While that served their first albums fine, Townshend was starting to branch out when he made albums like The Who Sell Out. Although the band would go on to make amazing rock operas, this is by far the weirdest album that they ever made, putting the kind of anthemic rock songs like ‘I Can See For Miles’ right next to tunes that would have easily fit on a madcap comedy radio show like ‘Odorono’ and ‘Tattoo’.
Even though Moon went along with many of the pieces from the record, Townshend remembered him not liking what he heard on this song, telling Rolling Stone, “Keith didn’t want that on the record. In a way, that’s a bit of a giveaway to the fact that, at the time I was studying a bit of this jazz thing. I wrote it for my mother to show her that I could write real music.”
If Moon was afraid that the band were straying too far away from rock and roll, though, he was in for a rude awakening for the rest of their career. Given how many complex Townshend was using at the time, this feels like a test run for the kind of atmospheric songs that would come on Tommy and Quadrophenia while also giving a glimpse into the guitarist’s solo career.
Moon eventually found a way to work around the acoustic problem. Throughout songs like ‘Going Mobile’ and ‘Tommy Can You Hear Me’, Moon began to understand that you can’t bash away on the drums forever, either serving a better role as the straight man to Townshend’s strumming or laying down the sticks altogether.
There are tons of great tunes The Who spit out with every band member contributing, but when you hear a piece like this, it feels like you’re right there in the room as Townshend is playing the track. They may have pioneered the sounds of arena rock and brought their classic tunes to stadium levels, but few have made their songs sound as vulnerable as Townshend could.
