(Excerpt from The Who.com) by Irish Jack
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 affect 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 15 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 bollocks 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 15 January. Only it didn’t. Nothing happened. I bought every music paper that printed record charts on Friday 22 January 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 at 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!.
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.”
