Won’t Get Fooled Again –
The Who
MM’s going for another
family Desert Island Discs this Christmas, which I think is a wonderful idea.
For loads of reasons. Apart from anything else, your all-time favourite eight
songs or pieces say more about you, in my opinion, than many other more
conventional yardsticks. I’m going to get at least eight more catch-up blog
posts out of it, too.
First in my 2014 eight is a
song, and a political philosophy, wrapped up in eight and a half minutes of
rock n roll heaven. A good test of whether you’re actually still alive, rather
than in some ‘Matrix’-like government and corporation generated human battery
state is to listen to this, with the volume set somewhere between ‘ouch’ and
excruciating agony, with Entwhistle’s bass, when it first comes in, actually
rearranging your internal organs…and if, by this point:
Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Meet the new boss,
Same as the old boss…
You’re not pointing
accusing fingers at imaginary faceless suits, then Matrix it is.
But that’s pretty well
impossible, I think.
Do you believe in rock and roll?
Can music save your mortal soul?
Don McClean – American Pie
Give Won’t Get Fooled Again a chance, and you’ll be answering: "Yes, Don,
I do, and yes, I do believe it can."
This is from Pete Townshend’s
Diaries:
I am just a song-writer. The actions I carry out are
my own, and are usually private until some digger-after-dirt questions my
methods. What I write is interpreted, first of all by Roger Daltrey. Won't Get
Fooled Again - then - was a song that pleaded '….leave me alone with my family
to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….'. But when Roger
Daltrey screamed as though his heart was being torn out in the closing moments
of the song, it became something more to so many people. And I must live with
that. In the film Summer of Sam the song is used
to portray white-boy 'street' idiocy; a kind of fascist absurdity, men swinging
their arms over air-guitars and smashing up furniture. Spike Lee told my
manager that '…he deeply understood Who music….'. What he understood was what
he himself - like so many others - had made it. He saw an outrage and
frustration, even a judgement or empty indictment in the song that wasn't there.
What is there is a prayer.
What there is, is just a
song. Just a song. But I guess I’m just a bloke who sees the world as just an
absurd, obscure, unimportant little rock, taken too seriously too often by too
many who need to put that ‘just’ in front of their personal neuroses and
obsessions.
This is a 1978 version.
Keith Moon in ridiculous cans at a ludicrously oversize (fashionable at the
time) kit. Listen to just how busy Entwhistle is on that bass. Townshend and
Daltry are at their peak here. Huge trousers, Doc Martens, windmilling arms, mic
swinging, larger than life. Maximum R ’n’ B, the loudest band in the world. Oh
and look out for the Townshend knee-slide when it all comes back in at Daltry’s
scream, years before it’s been adopted as the Premiership footballers’ celebration of choice.
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