The only song Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey wrote for The Who together
We have spent so many years with songwriting partnerships dominating the way we think of rock and roll that it is expected that most bands have a dynamic duo at the centre of production. John Lennon and Paul McCartney got things going, but Jagger and Richards followed, and things seemingly continued from there. The Who were different.
Like a lot of the songwriting partnerships of the day, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have a famously up-and-down relationship, but they never let writing songs contribute to that. No, it seems this duo were happily at each other’s throats without the need for creativity to add a little fuel to that fire.
Despite being bandmates for nearly 60 years together in The Who, the interactions between the guitarist and singer have fluctuated to different extremes over the years. Sometimes they seem like close mates, and other times they seem ready to kill each other. That was nothing new for The Who – there was no other band of their era who made out so well from getting on so poorly.
Especially in the earliest days of the band, Townshend and Daltrey seemed to have a cold war going that occasionally boiled over into flat-out aggression. Townshend was the band’s songwriter and spokesperson, conflicting with Daltrey’s desire to lead the group. Daltrey was the band’s frontman and voice, often getting the attention and focus that Townshend felt should be on him. These attitudes weren’t consistent or pervasive enough for them to split apart, but it was clear that Townshend and Daltrey weren’t close enough to be anything other than bandmates in The Who.
In fact, there was only a single time that Townshend and Daltrey ever collaborated on a song. That was 1965’s ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, The Who’s second-ever single. After a promising start with 1964’s ‘I Can’t Explain’, the band returned to the studio with producer Shel Talmy for a follow-up. Townshend had written ‘I Can’t Explain’ alone and would be solely responsible for the vast majority of The Who’s material (with occasional contributions from John Entwistle), but for ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, Daltrey’s name appeared with Townshend’s in the songwriting credits for the first and only time.
“Roger Daltrey helped a lot with the final arrangement and got half the credit. Something he does today for nothing, bless him,” Townshend recalled in the liner notes for The Who’s 1971 compilation album Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy. “I was lying on my mattress on the floor listening to a Charlie Parker record when I thought up the title. (It’s usually title first with me.) I just felt the guy was so free when he was playing. He was a soul without a body, riding, flying, on music. Listening to the compulsory Dizzy Gillespie solo after one by Bird was always a come-down, however clever Gillespie was. No one could follow Bird.”
“Jimi Hendrix must have been his reincarnation, especially for guitar players. The freedom suggested by the title came restricted by the aggression of our tightly-defined image when I came to write the words,” Townshend continued. “In fact, Daltrey was really a hard nut then, and he changes quite a few words himself to toughen the song up to suit his temperament. It is the most excitingly pig-headed of our songs. It’s blatant, proud and, dare I say it, sassy.”
Daltrey wasn’t done with songwriting, but he and Townshend wouldn’t collaborate again. Instead, Daltrey is the sole writer for a few deep cuts in The Who’s catalogue, including ‘See My Way’ from A Quick On; ‘Here for More’, which became the B side to ‘The Seeker’; and ‘Early Morning Cold Taxi’, an outtake from The Who Sell Out that later appeared on the compilation album Thirty Years of Maximum R&B.
Check out ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ down below.
