The Who song that sold Roger Daltrey on the synthesiser
The introduction of synthesisers into rock music was controversial from the very start. When Robert Moog perfected his own brand of synthesiser during the mid-1960s, it was almost immediately adopted by everyone from The Beatles to The Monkees. New sonic possibilities had arrived, but the turn towards electronic sounds began a battle with the guitar as the dominant instrument of the genre. No band could exist without a synth, but the extent to which synths should be played would become contentious.
Pete Townshend was an early adopter of the synthesiser and its sonic capabilities. As he built a home studio, Townshend experimented with the new instrument and devoted himself to figuring out its complex operation. As he recorded demos, songs would naturally come from the experiments, and soon Townshend was bringing in synth-heavy material for The Who.
Those synthesiser sounds are now legendary. The opening blast of ‘Baba O’Riley’, the buzzy backing of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, and nearly every song the band recorded from Who’s Next featured the instrument. The band’s guitar player championed the transition away from the guitar, but it wasn’t universally accepted, at least not at first. For Roger Daltrey, it took one of the band’s early synth-heavy singles for him to reckon with the instrument entirely.
“I remember when Pete came up with ‘Join Together’. He literally wrote it the night before we recorded it,” Daltrey recalled. “I quite like it as a single, it’s got a good energy to it. But at the time I was still very doubtful about bringing in the synthesizer. I felt that, with a lot of songs, we’d end up spending so much time creating these piddly one-note noises that it would’ve been better just doing it on guitar. I mean, I’m a guitar man. I love the guitar; to me it’s the perfect rock instrument. I don’t think Pete did much with those sequencing things that he couldn’t have done on his guitar anyway”.
‘Join Together’ came to fruition after the band recorded sequencer-heavy tracks like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ so it seems strange for Daltrey to take a moral stance after the band had successfully integrated the instrument into their sound. Nevertheless, as the 1980s approached, The Who became more and more indebted to the sound of the synthesiser, taking up prominent space in the arrangements for classic songs like ‘Who Are You’, ‘You Better You Bet’, and ‘Eminence Front’.
Check out ‘Join Together’ down below.
