“I’m embarrassed”: The Who song Pete Townshend will always regret
Pete Townshend has certainly earned his stripes as a songwriter. During the early days of The Who, the windmill-swinging guitarist helped to establish the sounds of the swinging sixties, reflecting the mod subculture and the voice of Britain’s post-war youth. As the years went on, however, the songwriter managed to develop this raucous rebellion into something much more profound and expansive on rock operas like Tommy, causing Townshend to slightly resent some of his more mainstream offerings.
The Who never made any guise about their desire to appeal to mainstream audiences. Their roots might have been in youth subculture, but they certainly saw the appeal of the pop charts, too. In fact, the band’s first single, ‘I Can’t Explain’, was written with the express intent to evoke The Kinks’ groundbreaking hit ‘You Really Got Me’, in an effort to attract producer Shel Talmy. Still, Townshend attempted to imbue his mainstream songwriting with a diverse range of influences which were not often found in pop music.
Early single ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, for instance, evoked the blossoming world of pop art experimentalism, and records like The Who Sell Out drew from postmodernism and inventive concept albums of the time. Given that the songwriter once had dreams of being an art school graduate, it should come as no real surprise that he always strived for The Who to be a little more highbrow than the band were often given credit for.
This apparent lack of attention for the band’s more expansive and artistic offerings was frustrating for Townshend. Even when the band were rightly afforded mainstream attention for their daring 1969 rock opera Tommy, which birthed an entirely new landscape of rock operas and stunning concept albums, the songwriter was annoyed with certain songs on the record being viewed as stand-outs.
Tommy’s stand-out track is inarguably ‘Pinball Wizard’. Issued as a single months before the release of the full album and quickly reaching number four in the UK singles chart, the infectious track quickly became one of The Who’s defining moments. Telling the tale of the album’s protagonist and his knack for pinball, the song features some of Townshend’s most iconic lyrics, but he didn’t view the song quite so favourably.
“I knocked it off,” the songwriter once declared, almost dismissing the importance of the song in the history of his band. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is awful, the most clumsy piece of writing I’ve ever done. Oh my God, I’m embarrassed. This sounds like a Music Hall song. I scribbled it out, and all the verses were the same length, and there was no kind of middle eight. It was going to be a complete dud, but I carried on.”
Despite Townshend’s apparent idea to scrap the legendary song, the rest of The Who recognised its genius. “I knocked a demo together and took it to the studio, and everyone loved it. Damon Lyon-Shaw [the engineer on Tommy] said, ‘Pete, that’s a hit.’ Everybody was really excited, and I suddenly thought, ‘Have I written a hit?’ It was just because the only person that we knew would give us a good review [journalist Nik Cohn] was a pinball fanatic.”
Lyon-Shaw was right, of course: the single did become a hit for The Who, and a rather colossal one at that. Townshend has always been a pretty difficult figure to please, so it is no surprise that he would rather be remembered for something a bit more profound than ‘Pinball Wizard’, but for fans of The Who, it remains an absolute triumph of the band’s Tommy period which perfectly encapsulated the appeal of Townshend’s songwriting.
