I have been a fan of The Who since I was thirteen years old or roughly the past forty years. Just forty years? I know it’s crazy considering hardcore fans of the band who witnessed their rise to glory have twenty years on me. I was born when Who’s Next came out and I discovered them two years after the release of It’s Hard in 1982.
So what was the first song you heard? Glad you asked because I can remember it like it was yesterday. The song that came across Montreal’s CHOM FM was I Can’t Explain. No, really, that was the song. I heard it and immediately asked my young self, who are these guys?
From that moment on, it was like magic, and they immediately became my band. Every young teenager raging with hormones and steeped in angst needed something to cling to that was cool and unique and, besides, most of the music on the radio at the time sucked, anyway. How cool was it to say your band was The Who. Who?
The idea for this article came about when I was thinking about all the material the band put out in the 60s and I was reflecting on how quite a few of these were really silly songs. When I say silly, I don’t mean awful songs, just songs with silly lyrics and melodies. Here’s a few to give you a general idea before I get into the others. I’m a Boy, Happy Jack and Pictures of Lily.
To me, it’s not so much that the songs are silly, but more to do with why they chose to go this route?
My Generation
Their debut album, My Generation (1965), produced by Shel Talmy, spawned some of their best commercial tracks in the 1960s, including I Can’t Explain; Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere; My Generation; Substitute; A Legal Matter and The Kids Are Alright. They were seriously good songs, but none of them reached number one.
They get close with the song My Generation, landing at number two and with Substitute, landing at number five. I guess it was after A Legal Matter and The Kids Are Alright didn’t get anywhere near the top ten that they must have decided they would try a different approach. Let’s try a silly song.
With the band firing Shel Talmy and manager Kit Lambert taking over the role of producer, it was a plan that nearly paid off, with I’m a Boy, Happy Jack and Pictures of Lily landing at number two, three and four respectively on the UK singles chart between 1966 and 1967.
Outside of the UK, Happy Jack landed at number twenty-four on the US Billboard Top 100 and number one on the Canadian singles charts.
Up until this point, I’ve only talked about the singles and haven’t really got into the meat of the silly songs yet.
A Quick One
Their second release, A Quick One (December 1966), was unique because all the guys in the band were tasked with coming up with songs for the album. Of the ten tracks featured on the album, Townshend only wrote four of them.
Answering the call for melodic silliness, we get John Entwistle’s Boris the Spider as the second song on the album with its haunting chorus.
Creepy, crawly, creepy, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Next we have Keith Moon’s Cobwebs and Strange. An instrumental so steeped in silliness that if it doesn’t put a smile on your face, maybe you need to watch a few funny movies and cheer up. While Pete Towshend’s, Don’t Look Away, doesn’t meet the same strict standards set by Keith and John, the lyrics at the beginning of the chorus do come across as being rather silly.
There’s a stone in my shoe
So I can’t catch you up
My head’s in a lion’s mouth
Wants to eat me up
Pete continues the lion head eating theme in the second verse:
I once heard you say
If I ever was down you would help me
Now my head’s being chewed up
You tried to pretend that you don’t see
This album, of course, ends with the famous track, A Quick One, While He’s Away. It is significant because without Townshend being coached by Kit Lambert to write a multi themed song, a mini-opera, we may never have had Tommy. While it definitely holds its own as a silly song, there’s a dark secret hidden in the words that touch on events in Townshend’s past that he goes into in his biography Who I Am.
If you’ve never seen the live performance of this song in The Rolling Stone’s Rock and Roll Circus documentary, it is a real treat.
Sell Out
The Who Sell Out (December 1967) is chock-full of silly songs and if the album cover didn’t give you the impression that you may be in store for some all around silliness, I’m not sure what you were expecting. With track names like Heinz Baked Beans, Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand and Silas Stingy, you know you’re in for a treat on this one.
Three other tracks with names that don’t immediately make you think they might be, well, silly, turn out to be abundantly so. Odorono is a song about an opera singer with terrible body odor; Tattoo is a song about two kids who get tattoos to prove they’re men and then get flogged by their parents for doing so and Medac is a song about a teenager with a severe acne problem.
While this album has an abundance of silliness, including blending slapstick radio commercials between the songs, still it spawned one of Townshend’s greatest rock songs of the sixties, I Can See For Miles. The song reaches number ten in the UK, four in Canada and nine in the US. That was the highest The Who will ever reach on the US Billboard chart.
Tommy
Last but not least, we have Tommy (May 1969). The first of two rock operas The Who would release in their career, with the second being 1973s Quadrophenia. Falling on the heels of The Who Sell Out, it also has its share of tracks to keep the silly streak going. These include Cousin Kevin; Do You Think It’s Alright?; Fiddle About and Tommy’s Holiday Camp.
When you take the album at face value, it really is an obscure idea of a deaf, dumb, and blind boy becoming the Pinball Wizard. But of course, the album is so much more than that, as Townshend explained in a 1968 interview before the album’s release:
The package I hope is going to be called “Deaf, Dumb and Blind Boy.” It’s a story about a kid that’s born deaf, dumb and blind and what happens to him throughout his life … But what it’s really all about is the fact that … he’s seeing things basically as vibrations which we translate as music. That’s really what we want to do: create this feeling that when you listen to the music you can actually become aware of the boy, and aware of what he is all about, because we are creating him as we play.” — Pete Townshend talking to Jann Wenner, August 1968
(Source: Marsh, Dave (1983). Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who.)
The first silly track on the album, penned by John Entwistle, is Cousin Kevin. The listener is introduced to Tommy’s wicked cousin Kevin, who has some playtime with Tommy to do as he pleases. This includes such sadistic acts as burning him with a cigarette, pushing him down the stairs, trying to drown him in the bath, throwing him outside in the cold or pulling him around by the lock of his hair. Entwistle had this to say about writing the song:
I actually based Cousin Kevin on a boy who lived across the street. Our parents thought we should play together, and he was completely sadistic. Musically, I wanted the piece to sound both sinister and childish, so I came up with a kind of ‘Chopsticks’ theme on the piano to make it sound like a simple children’s song.
In Do You Think It’s Alright, Tommy’s mother is questioning whether she should leave Tommy with his drunk uncle Ernie and in the song that follows, Fiddle About, we get strong hints that uncle Ernie is a pedophile. Unable to write the song himself because of past childhood experiences, Townshend asked Entwistle to step in and write it.
Finally, we have Tommy’s Holiday Camp, written by Keith Moon and sung by Pete. In this song, uncle Ernie has become Tommy’s business partner and welcomes people to Tommy’s holiday camp to learn about his teachings after becoming a guru.
And there you have it. The Who’s silliest songs from the 1960s. There are a couple that creep up in the 70s and 80s, such as Squeeze Box from The Who By Numbers and Little Billy from Odds & Sods. Little Billy was written in 1968, so technically it would belong to the silly songs from the 60s.
There are a few others that sit on the edge of silly but not strong enough to be successful candidates such as Dreaming From The Waist (The Who By Numbers); Now I’m A Farmer, Water (Odds & Sods); How Can You Do It Alone (Face Dances) and Heaven & Hell (Who’s Missing).
I hope you enjoyed this look at The Who’s silliest songs. It’s another face of the band that unless you’re a hardcore fan, you may never have seen. All I know is, as silly as they are, they still bring a smile to my face every time I listen to them all these years later.
What are your favorite silly songs by The Who? Let me know in the comments.