Fact #116945
When:
Short story:
Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who is released as a single in the USA.Full article:
The Story Of Won’t Get Fooled Again by Johnny Black (Article first appeared in Blender magazine)
As the ’70s opened, the breakup of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones’ Altamont nightmare and the student deaths at Kent State conspired to kick socially conscious rock off the youth agenda. The Osmonds, Bread and Tony Orlando And Dawn ruled the charts. And the Who, following their climactic 1969 Woodstock appearance and the ambitious rock opera Tommy, seemed trapped by success. Won’t Get Fooled Again pulled them out of the doldrums.
Pete Townshend conceived the song when a hippie commune near his Eel Pie Island home in southwest London adopted him as its spiritual leader. “At one point there was an amazing scene where the commune was really working,” he says, “but then the acid started flowing and I got into some psychotic conversations. I just thought, ‘Oh, fuck it.’ ”
Townshend’s despondent final line, “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss,” railed against the corrupting influence of power and bemoaned the inevitability that the revolutionaries of one generation become the reactionaries of the next. The song was powered by riffs combining Rolling Stones-style chord changes with the Who’s trademark power slams, but the song’s real innovation was Townshend’s pioneering use of synthesizers.
Townshend had been at work on a science-fiction rock-concept work, Lifehouse, which, he says, “explored the Sufic notion that all life and all nature is based on harmony or disharmony of a very physical variety.” He collected information from test individuals—heartbeat, brain rhythms, astrological data—tabulated the information on charts and converted the numbers into synth patterns. The resulting patterns became the opening of Won’t Get Fooled Again. Glyn Johns, who produced the final version of the song, says, “Pete came up with synthesizer basics for the tracks, which were just unbelievable. Nobody had done it that way before.”
In March 1971, Townshend nearly jumped out a Manhattan window when he overheard his drug-addled manager, Kit Lambert, scheming to bury the Lifehouse project because it clashed with plans for a movie of Tommy. In this atmosphere of cheery bonhomie, the Who, with Lambert in the producer’s chair, assembled that month at the Record Plant in New York to tape the track as part of the sessions for Lifehouse, a double LP that eventually emerged in truncated form as Who’s Next.
The house engineer, Jack Adams, was an RAndB fanatic who hated rock. “Jack lived on a houseboat,” recalls his assistant, Jack Douglas. “So he tells me to go into the other room and call him on the phone and say his houseboat is on fire. So I’m 12 feet away, and I can hear him screaming, telling Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend that his boat’s on fire. He tells them I’m the other engineer, not the assistant, and that I’ll be doing the sessions. Until then, I had done only some jingles and one record session with Patti LaBelle, during which I had set the Datamix console on fire. So I was a little nervous.”
After the sessions floundered, Townshend retreated to Britain, where he made a second attempt in April at Mick Jagger’s Victorian mansion, Stargroves. Johns, who had worked with the Who in the early days, replaced the frazzled Lambert.
“The time this was recorded was when we were happiest,” says bassist John Entwistle. “We used (Jagger’s) hall as the studio floor and used the Stones’ mobile outside. There were further overdubs at Olympic Studios. It’s always been one of my favourite Who songs, mainly because I got to mess around in the middle while the synthesizer’s playing.”
Performing the song live, drummer Keith Moon could hear the low volume of the taped synthesizer sections only through headphones. “About halfway through the tour,” he told Crawdaddy magazine, “the big problem was not being able to hear the tape. So we’ve got John and Pete blasting away and this tape, which is important because they take their thing off of me. I get mine off the tape so if I don’t get that, we all go and lose it.”
Moon explained the system more fully in an April 1976 interview with International Musician, saying, “I get synthesizer and I get straight chords. The tape is played out on stage as well, so I get the same as comes out on stage. The chords are mainly for Pete, so he knows where he is. It is very difficult to explain in words because it’s a complex matrix. The machine itself is mathematical. There’s no lead-in, so all I do basically is keep in my head the phrase where I come in. It doesn’t make sense to come in where I do on the cans, but overall, it does … hopefully. The synthesizer dictates the tempo all the way through. Every number I use the cans on, it’s metronomic, totally.”
Bizarrely, Moon’s headphones caught fire during a late July show at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, New York. (“That’s what I call pyrotechnics,” he quipped.) Only a stagehand with a bucket of water saved the night.
Won’t Get Fooled Again appears on Who’s Next, the Who’s first number 1 album in the U.K., proving there was life after Tommy. Although the drastically edited single peaked at a humble number 15, Won’t Get Fooled Again is now a radio staple, its broad appeal illustrated by its use in a recent Nissan spot and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s request to use it on the stump.
Only a curmudgeon could fault such an enduring classic—and, indeed, Townshend does, declaring it “irresponsible” and politically irrelevant. “I greatly regret that it’s one of the most powerful songs I’ve ever written,” he says.
Tweet this Fact
As the ’70s opened, the breakup of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones’ Altamont nightmare and the student deaths at Kent State conspired to kick socially conscious rock off the youth agenda. The Osmonds, Bread and Tony Orlando And Dawn ruled the charts. And the Who, following their climactic 1969 Woodstock appearance and the ambitious rock opera Tommy, seemed trapped by success. Won’t Get Fooled Again pulled them out of the doldrums.
Pete Townshend conceived the song when a hippie commune near his Eel Pie Island home in southwest London adopted him as its spiritual leader. “At one point there was an amazing scene where the commune was really working,” he says, “but then the acid started flowing and I got into some psychotic conversations. I just thought, ‘Oh, fuck it.’ ”
Townshend’s despondent final line, “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss,” railed against the corrupting influence of power and bemoaned the inevitability that the revolutionaries of one generation become the reactionaries of the next. The song was powered by riffs combining Rolling Stones-style chord changes with the Who’s trademark power slams, but the song’s real innovation was Townshend’s pioneering use of synthesizers.
Townshend had been at work on a science-fiction rock-concept work, Lifehouse, which, he says, “explored the Sufic notion that all life and all nature is based on harmony or disharmony of a very physical variety.” He collected information from test individuals—heartbeat, brain rhythms, astrological data—tabulated the information on charts and converted the numbers into synth patterns. The resulting patterns became the opening of Won’t Get Fooled Again. Glyn Johns, who produced the final version of the song, says, “Pete came up with synthesizer basics for the tracks, which were just unbelievable. Nobody had done it that way before.”
In March 1971, Townshend nearly jumped out a Manhattan window when he overheard his drug-addled manager, Kit Lambert, scheming to bury the Lifehouse project because it clashed with plans for a movie of Tommy. In this atmosphere of cheery bonhomie, the Who, with Lambert in the producer’s chair, assembled that month at the Record Plant in New York to tape the track as part of the sessions for Lifehouse, a double LP that eventually emerged in truncated form as Who’s Next.
The house engineer, Jack Adams, was an RAndB fanatic who hated rock. “Jack lived on a houseboat,” recalls his assistant, Jack Douglas. “So he tells me to go into the other room and call him on the phone and say his houseboat is on fire. So I’m 12 feet away, and I can hear him screaming, telling Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend that his boat’s on fire. He tells them I’m the other engineer, not the assistant, and that I’ll be doing the sessions. Until then, I had done only some jingles and one record session with Patti LaBelle, during which I had set the Datamix console on fire. So I was a little nervous.”
After the sessions floundered, Townshend retreated to Britain, where he made a second attempt in April at Mick Jagger’s Victorian mansion, Stargroves. Johns, who had worked with the Who in the early days, replaced the frazzled Lambert.
“The time this was recorded was when we were happiest,” says bassist John Entwistle. “We used (Jagger’s) hall as the studio floor and used the Stones’ mobile outside. There were further overdubs at Olympic Studios. It’s always been one of my favourite Who songs, mainly because I got to mess around in the middle while the synthesizer’s playing.”
Performing the song live, drummer Keith Moon could hear the low volume of the taped synthesizer sections only through headphones. “About halfway through the tour,” he told Crawdaddy magazine, “the big problem was not being able to hear the tape. So we’ve got John and Pete blasting away and this tape, which is important because they take their thing off of me. I get mine off the tape so if I don’t get that, we all go and lose it.”
Moon explained the system more fully in an April 1976 interview with International Musician, saying, “I get synthesizer and I get straight chords. The tape is played out on stage as well, so I get the same as comes out on stage. The chords are mainly for Pete, so he knows where he is. It is very difficult to explain in words because it’s a complex matrix. The machine itself is mathematical. There’s no lead-in, so all I do basically is keep in my head the phrase where I come in. It doesn’t make sense to come in where I do on the cans, but overall, it does … hopefully. The synthesizer dictates the tempo all the way through. Every number I use the cans on, it’s metronomic, totally.”
Bizarrely, Moon’s headphones caught fire during a late July show at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, New York. (“That’s what I call pyrotechnics,” he quipped.) Only a stagehand with a bucket of water saved the night.
Won’t Get Fooled Again appears on Who’s Next, the Who’s first number 1 album in the U.K., proving there was life after Tommy. Although the drastically edited single peaked at a humble number 15, Won’t Get Fooled Again is now a radio staple, its broad appeal illustrated by its use in a recent Nissan spot and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s request to use it on the stump.
Only a curmudgeon could fault such an enduring classic—and, indeed, Townshend does, declaring it “irresponsible” and politically irrelevant. “I greatly regret that it’s one of the most powerful songs I’ve ever written,” he says.