The Who songs Pete Townshend hates
It often seems the songs fans adore most are those their creators despise most. Apparently, playing and hearing such songs incessantly isn’t conducive to long-lived affection. This was certainly true of Robert Plant’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Thom Yorke’s ‘Creep’ and Kurt Cobain’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. As for the legendary rocker Pete Townshend, he wrote a couple of songs for The Who that he’d rather not hear again.
After a successful run in the mid-1960s as a British Invasion group rivalling The Kinks and The Yardbirds, Townshend re-established The Who as a pioneering art-rock band in the rock opera project Tommy. During a recent interview with Far Out, the guitarist discussed this pivotal moment for The Who.
“The Who were running out of ideas pre-Tommy, the rock opera,” Townshend said. “And that album started off as a mythic tale. It’s loosely inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. But I was also reading lots of Sufi tales and mystical writings by Hazrat Inayat Khan. He wrote a book called The Mysticism Of Sound. A musician but also a spiritual teacher. All of that was flooding through my head.”
Throughout the interview, Townshend spoke passionately of the transformative 1969 album and its semi-conceptual follow-up of 1971, Who’s Next. However, the songwriter once admitted to disliking ‘Pinball Wizard’, the lead single of Tommy and one of The Who’s most adored classics.
Townshend candidly dismissed the song in a quote featured in the liner notes for the 2003 Tommy reissue. “I knocked it off,” he said. “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.”
“I attempted the same mock baroque guitar beginning that’s on ‘I’m a Boy’ and then a bit of vigorous kind of flamenco guitar,” he added. “I was just grabbing at ideas. 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.”
Townshend has also expressed regrets concerning ‘Dreaming From The Waist’, a song from the 1975 album The Who by Numbers. “‘Dreaming From The Waist’ is the song I hate more than anything on Earth,” he once said. “In fact, I think I hate it most because it’s a song which Roger [Daltrey] used to like to play.”
Despite his unequivocal hatred for ‘Dreaming From The Waist’, Townshend managed to pick out another Who song as rock bottom, again because of its connection to Daltrey. “I think actually ‘Sister Disco’ qualifies. Yeah, ‘Sister Disco’, I hate even more than ‘Dreaming From The Waist’ because there is a point in which every time we’ve done it where, Roger comes over to me, stands next to me and makes some kind of soppy smile, which is supposed to communicate some kind of Everly Brothers relationship we have for the audience, which isn’t actually there.”
“It’s supposed to be an act where I’m supposed to collude like, ‘We know each other very well; we look like enemies, but we are friends really,’ kind of look,” he added. “Often that will be the moment where I look him in the face and go, ‘You fucking wanker,’ and he gets angry when I do that.”
The Who songs Pete Townshend hates:
- ‘Pinball Wizard’ – Tommy
- ‘Dreaming From The Waist’ – The Who by Numbers
- ‘Sister Disco’ – Who Are You
