The one song that The Who’s Pete Townshend declared to be “perfect”
The Who guitarist Pete Townshend once said, “Rock ‘n’ roll may not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” Beyond the pithiness of the line, there is untold depth. With 17 words, Townsend distilled a cultural movement down to a single sentence. It’s a scything succinctness that typifies Townshend’s contribution to the music world. His work with The Who was often short, sharp and brutally honest. With this one line, he manages to create a well of intrigue.
After all, rock ‘n’ roll came to the fore as a way to push through exultant liberation despite the problems subsuming the blues originators. Townshend himself has continued that same spirit. You simply can’t listen to ‘Baba O’Riley’ and have a single care knocking around the old cranium. The powerful intro alone is enough to rattle the rocks in your brain so defiantly as to produce a beat your hips simply cannot ignore for too long.
When it comes to the heroes who have made him dance, Townshend is mostly reticent. After all, it’s not very rock ‘n’ roll to brown-nose. Iconoclastic criticism, on the other hand, is his forte. “When you actually hear the backing tracks of The Beatles without their voices, they’re flippin’ lousy,” he once said. As for Led Zeppelin, he opined: “I don’t like a single thing that they have done, I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them.” Townshend has rarely been one to mince his words in favour of keeping the peace.
However, this makes his praise all the more notable, especially when he declares a song as a perfect work of art. “I love Brian [Wilson],” Townshend once said of The Beach Boys’ leader. “There’s not many people I would say that about. I think he’s a truly, truly, truly great genius. I love him so much it’s just terrible – I find it hard to live with. ‘God Only Knows’ is simple and elegant and was stunning when it first appeared; it still sounds perfect.”
It was a song that changed the face of music forever; The Who were no different from any other musicians when it came to the pandora’s box moment that the track represented. Speaking of the song’s influence with Guitar Player, Townshend commented: “You know, if we think about ’66 as being the year that we got Pet Sounds from the Beach Boys, that was a quantum leap for them, from being kind of a surf band very much in the tradition of Jan and Dean, which was very lighthearted, very much about the beach, very much the California story. It was, ‘Push away our blues!'”
That cloud-shifting music was magnificent, but beyond that, The Beach Boys were now heralding a keyless complexity to pop music with mindbending innovation that essentially made it Baroque. The California band were able to create something The Who guitarist found almost impossible to grab on to. “Brian Wilson had a harmonic sensibility that was sort of off the map. ‘God Only Knows’ is a masterpiece,” Townshend continued.
Adding: “And I suppose to some extent with ‘I Can See for Miles’, the challenge was not to try to equal Brian Wilson’s harmonic sensibility but certainly to say, “Well, that’s a new standard. Instead of just doing three-part harmony, let’s do five-part harmony and see what happens.”
Townshend didn’t just recognise the beauty of the record, but he also seized upon its importance. “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band,” explained Townshend reflecting on the moments that helped him find his musical sense of self. “He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy,” he told Apple Music.
Continuing: “Music even today is about much more than that. It has a function which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us, so the purpose and the duty of somebody who makes music is very different to the way it used to be. […] And I think I was the first to articulate that and try to explain it.” And this revelation was partly brought into bloom by a ray of wonder from Mr Wilson. Thankfully, it is still blossoming now.