The Who’s debut single I Can’t Explain was released in the UK 60 years ago!
The record was released in Britain on 15 January 1965 on Brunswick, the subsidiary of the American Decca label, who initially released the song in the US the previous month, on 19 December 1964.
The song rose to number 8 in the UK charts after getting some great TV exposure when The Who performed it on the popular evening pop show Ready, Steady, Go! on 29 January. It stayed in the charts for 13 weeks. An impressive start to their career!
I Can’t Explain was recorded on 4 November 1964 at Pye studio in London. It was produced and arranged by American record producer Shel Talmy, who had recently worked on The Kinks hit songs You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night.
The single’s B-side was Bald Headed Woman, a traditional blues song, which had been arranged by Shel Talmy for The Who and also The Kinks, who released it on their debut album Kinks in 1964. Jimmy Page was brought in as a session guitarist for The Who, and played lead fuzz guitar on Bald Headed Woman.
The Who’s managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp signed a contract with Shel Talmy, who was able to get the band a record deal. Talmy went on to produce their second single Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere (May 1965), followed by The Who’s debut album My Generation (December 1965). The two singles did not appear on the My Generation album, and were not released on an LP until they showed up on Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy in 1971, a compilation album of The Who’s early hits and singles.
While I Can’t Explain was the debut single by The Who, the band did release a previous single in July 1964 when they were called the High Numbers, which was Zoot Suit/I’m the Face, a couple of mod themed songs that were written by their manager Peter Meaden.
I Can’t Explain was the first song that Pete Townshend wrote for The Who, and just his second ever composition. He had previously written a song called It Was You in late 1963, that was recorded by a Merseybeat-style group called The Naturals.
When The Who were auditioning for recording deals in 1964, the labels wanted bands that wrote their own songs. Kit and Chris encouraged Pete to write some new material for the band to record in order to get them a contract, since he had some success with his first song.
Pete Townshend wrote in his autobiography Who I Am: “This was the most critical challenge I had ever faced. I isolated myself in the kitchen of the flat in Ealing where I kept my tape machine, listening to a few records over and over again: Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’; Charlie Mingus’s ‘Better Get It in Your Soul’; John Lee Hooker’s ‘Devils Jump’; and [Booker T and the MG’s] ‘Green Onions’. I tried to divine what it was I was actually feeling as a result of this musical immersion. One notion kept coming into my head: I can’t explain. I can’t explain. This would be the title of my second song, and I was already doing something I would often do in the future: writing songs about music. At the time I was still using a clunky old domestic tape recorder to record my songs, which I used to put down a simple demo. Kit and Chris met with the producer of The Kinks’ recent chart hits, Shel Talmy, who had his own label deal with Decca in the USA. He agreed to hear us. I ran back to my tape machine and listened to The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ – not that I really needed to, it was on the radio all the time. I tightened up ‘I Can’t Explain’ and changed the lyrics so they were about love, not music. I tried to make it sound as much like The Kinks as I could so that Shel would like it. We played Shel Talmy the revised ‘I Can’t Explain’ and he booked us a session at Pye studios to record it. Shel Talmy got a good sound, tight and commercial, and although there was no guitar feedback I was willing to compromise to get a hit.”
Shel Talmy discussed his work a few years ago on his Facebook page BLUEPRINT OF ‘I CAN’T EXPLAIN’ BY THE WHO: “The first time I heard ‘Can’t Explain’ was when someone from their organization played it for me over the phone. What I heard was only about a minute long. Despite that, I really liked it and set a date to hear it in a Who rehearsal and see what we could make of it. What I heard confirmed that that tinny one minute demo over the phone was a terrific song and it needed to be finessed into an arrangement for public release. We worked on it and I got it stretched out to a 2 minute and 4 second length, a little short, but acceptable for the singles of the time. When the band played through it, I envisaged that backing vocals would add a lot and so for the session, I booked the popular vocal trio the Ivy League, to sing the parts. To be fair, the band were annoyed and resented others doing the backings and subsequently worked on their own voices and never needed session singers to do backups again. The recording date was November 4, 1964, and as I was now very familiar with the Pye studio where I’d been recording The Kinks, stayed with it for this debut Who session. I’d already concluded how good I thought Pete Townshend’s guitar playing was, but this was a first session and wanted to insure everything went smoothly, so booked Jimmy Page to be there in case he might be needed. He wasn’t, as Pete was brilliant! It was obvious during the audition and confirmed during rehearsals that 18-year-old Keith Moon was an extraordinary drummer and one of the best I’d ever heard. I recorded him with my usual 12 mic setup. I placed mics on both Pete’s amp and his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar and combined the sound. For John Entwistle’s bass, I mic’d his amp and also did a “direct inject” connection to the console and mixed the two sources together. As for Roger Daltrey’s vocal, he was in the sound booth singing into a U67 mic that was set in the omni position, meaning the entire mic was live and I could get the full range of Roger’s voice on tape. We got it done in 10 takes. I decided to run the 3-track tape machine at 30 ips (inches per second), faster than the standard 15 ips speed, so as to enable the capture of all the nuances and dynamics of the performance afforded by this procedure. All those decisions paid dividends and exceeded my expectations!”
The production quality of I Can’t Explain is first rate, and the punchy combination of Pete Townshend and John Entwistle's loud up-front guitars and Keith Moon's driving drums, along with Pete’s wonderful lyrics which were beautifully belted out by Roger Daltrey, had an explosive impact on their fans. The mods really connected with the sentiment about being unable to express their feelings.
Pete told Spin in 1995: “After the Who put out ‘I Can’t Explain’, we did a show at the Goldhawk. Irish Jack, who led the mod delegation, said, ‘This song is great.’ I thought they meant they liked the song, so I said, ‘Good, thanks.’ And they said, ‘No, we really like the song.’ It was kind of like, ‘I love you. No, you don’t understand, I really love you.’ So I said, ‘What are you trying to say?’ And Jack said, ‘That’s it! I Can’t Explain is about how we can’t explain what we want to say. And that’s what you’ve done.’ I was really charged by that, both charged with the duty to write for them, but also charged up by it. I thought, fucking hell, this is great. Through a little teenybopper pop song – you know, I’m in love with you but I can’t explain – I hit on something far deeper.”
I Can’t Explain has such a timeless quality, and continues to be a fan favorite. It has been a staple in The Who’s concerts throughout their career. It was the opening number during their Who Hits 50 tour and is the perfect song to kick start a show!
Many thanks to Irish Jack for sending us his personal story about The Who’s I Can’t Explain! Be sure to check it out below!
We're back in the charts....
by Irish Jack
IN EARLY January 1965, Mike Shaw the scooter riding production manager of the Who played me a rough demo of the song 'I Can't Explain', this was in the main drawing room of the posh residence 84 Eaton Place in Belgravia - the most expensive street in London. I thought the song was quite Kinky....that is until I got to the line : 'I know what it means but....' Roger Daltrey pauses on 'but' and there follows a suspension and then Christ Almighty ! the making of the record comes next....six rifle shots from Keith Moon's drum sticks take the whole thing out of any perceived similarity to the Kinks because no, this is not the Kinks, this is the Who. I simply fell in love with the song and every time I'd hear it on the radio or play it on my wonderful mono box record player I'd wait for 'I know what it means but...' Then the rifle shots and the magical chorus 'I can't explain'.
I come from a family of sign writers and because of that I have always felt or sensed an absurd affinity with special words or letters. Excalibur always had an effect of perfection on me in the way I always felt drawn to the appearance of that word. So imagine my deeply repressed creative feelings when I first read the song title 'I Can't Explain'. A bomb went off in my head when I studied the word 'explain' and the 'x' played havoc with my mind's eye. Yes, this was hip, this was subversive. On the 15th January 1965 with Georgie Fame's 'Yeh Yeh' toppling the Beatles' 'I Feel Fine' at number 1; I was working for George Wimpey construction in Hammersmith Grove as a filing clerk and living with my uncle and aunt at 194 Flora Gardens a five minute walk away. Our telephone was Riverside 7999.
Kit Lambert handed me my free copy of 'I Can't Explain' up at number 84 Eaton Place, he was so proud of it. Some of the lesser informed pirate radios were making a bollix of the song's title by amateurishly inserting unwanted gaps between the words as in 'I---Can't----Explain'. Pete Townshend had never intended it as some kind of dragged out title, he wrote it as street talk like when you would say in automatic conversation about something you didn't know : 'I dunno, I can't explain !' Also because the record was on the American Decca's British subsidiary label Brunswick people thought the Who were an American group. I looked at the record in my hands with a measure of pride and immediately noticed that Decca had typically misspelled Pete's name leaving out the 'h'.
-So, the party got into full swing on 15th January. Only it didn't. Nothing happened. I bought every music paper that printed record charts on Friday January 22nd but there was no sign of the Who. I bought posh Sunday papers for reviews. Still nothing. A week later 'I Can't Explain' was listed at number 47 in the Top 50. Then two weeks later and now we're in February! the record peaked at number 25 and my heart was crushed a week later when this brilliant fucking piece of music died and dropped out of the charts. I had a Cork friend who had moved to west London, John McSweeney, or Max as everyone knew him. He lived in Brook Green and worked at Cadby Hall food producers. Unlike most of the Irish diaspora Max rightfully regarded himself too hip to go to the meat market of Irish dance halls preferring to spend hours listening to blues on a juke box in the 2i's coffee bar in Soho and Alexis Korner at the Marquee. I would invariably bump into him every Friday just after work at the old Hammersmith & City tube station on the Broadway. There was always a news vendor standing with his wares at the station entrance. Whether or not he read the crestfallen look on my face I'll never know but about a week after the band had appeared on Ready Steady Go he saw me and called out "What about the Who eh?' I looked a him and mumbled something about maybe the next record release will do better. He had a funny look on his face .."What? You don't know?" "Know what Max?" I replied, I wasn't in the mood for jokes. "They're back in the charts, Jack. 'I Can't Explain' is at number 8 !" I thought I was hearing things, "WHAT?", I replied, visibly astonished. I walked down King Street toward home feeling like a mighty weight had been lifted from my shoulders and as well as that, as if a member of my family had just become a pop star. The virtual miracle delivered was, of course, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp's invitation to Vicki Wickham the head of Ready Steady Go the Friday night teenage tv pop show, to be their special guest at the Who's Tuesday night residency at the Marquee and see for herself what exactly the group were about. Wickham was stunned by their 40-minute Marquee performance and immediately booked the Who for Ready Steady Go.
Anybody reading this who most likely has seen director Matt O' Casey's film documentary Quadrophenia - Can You See The Real Me, round about 17 minutes in will have seen me enter the door of the Shepherd's Bush Club (where the Goldhawk Friday and Saturday nights happened), the camera follows me to the old dressing room door where I pause and say..."On Friday March 12th the Who had played 'I Can't Explain' three times and the crowd was going mad and I thought 'God almighty, what's going on? Because 'I Can't Explain' is probably my all-time favourite song. I elected myself as some kind of delegate and I knocked on this very door----I knock on the door for the camera----with me that night would've been besides myself the three other members of The Shepherd's Bush Miming Who : Martin Gaish (Roger); his brother Lee (Keith); Peter Campbell (John) and of course the tom-boy mod Jeanette who went everywhere with us. We walked into the dressing room, I said to Townshend "there's something I want to tell you.." And I said, "look, that song is exactly what we're trying to say. You've said it for us, 'I Can't Explain' because this was what mods were about, they couldn't explain None of us could explain, we didn't have the articulation." So, in words, Pete Townshend became the song laureate for the mods of Shepherd's Bush, Hammersmith, Acton and Ealing..
In his autobiography 'Who I Am' Pete Townshend has described this incident you have just read about as being memorable : "Without my art-school training I doubt that this moment would have touched me the way it did. But it changed my life. I had been set up at college, especially in my last days doing graphics, to look for a patron, to obtain a brief, to find someone to pay for my artistic excesses and experiments. My new patrons stood before me."
Irish Jack's original single!