Methods to observe Tommy? In album phrases, we all know that The Who’s subsequent launch was the traditional live performance recording Stay At Leeds, after which, after the ill-starred Lifehouse periods, 1971’s revered Who’s Subsequent. However simply after the taping of that Leeds College gig, and earlier than its launch as an LP, Pete Townshend’s subsequent artistic expression was a non-album single whose title mirrored his more and more determined seek for non secular fulfilment.
That track was “The Seeker,” launched as a U.Okay. single on March 20, 1970 and on April 25 within the U.S. Recorded within the January at IBC Studios in London, it was prompted by a real-life expertise that Townshend and his then-wife Karen had had on a vacationer stroll round San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1967.
There, they’d a detailed encounter with a wild-eyed Vietnam Struggle veteran who, as Townshend recalled in his Who I Am autobiography, grabbed Karen’s arm and wouldn’t launch it, “gazing at her like he’d found his Holy Mother.” Within the lyrics of “The Seeker,” the narrator calls himself “a really desperate man,” trying to find solutions and asking in useless for assist from Dylan, The Beatles, and Timothy Leary.
It was solely looking back that Townshend acknowledged how the track foretold, as he put it, “the desperate, chaotic and increasingly fragmentary nature of my life over the next 20 years.” As Roger Daltrey sang within the hook, “I won’t get to get what I’m after ’til the day I die.”
The band’s efficiency on “The Seeker” was augmented by ever-in-demand session A-lister Nicky Hopkins on piano. Money Field wrote: “This side shows the Who still operating with blistering instrumental thrust, but turning to lyrics more meaningful than before. AM and FM food for thought and play.”
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In a 2012 article in American Songwriter, Jim Beviglia wrote: “One of the ingenious things about the song is how Townshend married those downbeat themes to a typically bruising Who rock arrangement. Roger Daltrey sounds like the toughest S.O.B. on two feet as he bellows above the relentless rhythm section of John Entwistle and Keith Moon.”
That includes a uncommon solo composition by Daltrey, “Here For Now,” on the B-side, the one reached No.19 within the U.Okay., the place it was The Who’s tenth Prime 20 hit there. Billboard’s assessment stated of “The Seeker”: “Driving rock item from the pen of Peter Townsend [sic] has all the ingredients to put the group back up the Hot 100 in short order.”
The brand new launch peaked at No.44 on that chart, additionally reaching the Prime 20 in a number of European international locations, and went on to be included on the November 1971 compilation Meaty Beaty Massive and Bouncy. By June, The Who have been scaling the U.Okay. Prime 3 with Stay At Leeds and performing Tommy at New York’s Metropolitan Opera Home.
Purchase or stream “The Seeker” on the Who Hits 50! compilation.
