The Who had exactly one top 10 hit in America. It wasn’t “My Generation,” which peaked at No. 74 here in the States. “Substitute” and “I’m a Boy” both reached top five in England and ultimately failed to chart in the U.S. “Pictures of Lily,” No. 4 in the UK, peaked at No. 51 here.
The one big success? “I Can See for Miles,” which soared all the way to No. 9 in 1967. All of this to say, you can’t go by the charts alone. Pete Townshend examines the meaning behind “I Can See for Miles” by The Who. (A.songwriter)
I know that you have ’cause there’s magic in my eyes. Pete Townshend wrote those sinister words from a place of jealousy.
He shared the story on his memory “On one of The Who’s many trips away, I began imagining that my fabulous new girlfriend Karen was deceiving me.”
Drummer Keith Moon’s wife had once been followed to her home by singer Rod Stewart, and it made Townshend’s mind race. “It was this kind of paranoid, unhinged thinking that spurred me to write ‘I Can See for Miles,’ one of my best songs from this period,” he said.
“The new swinging Sixties ethos—free love, girls on the pill, and everyone in our new London crowd behaving as though they were suddenly beautiful—played directly into my intense fear of being abandoned by Karen,” Townshend continued. “One day, I returned late after a gig to find a man talking to Karen in her bedroom. There was an air of intimacy between them, and she looked especially pretty and flushed. After I shooed him out, I felt jealous and old-fashioned: Everyone else was sharing their partner with whomever they fancied.
“One night, I listened again to the demo of ‘I Can See for Miles.’ There wasn’t much more I could do to improve on it,” he related. “I was ashamed of the jealousy that had inspired it, but I regarded the song as a secret weapon. When it was recorded properly and released as a Who single, I believed we would flatten all opposition.”
The slow start in record sales surprised Townshend, who wrote, “I Can See for Miles’ wasn’t shooting up the charts as a single, which was a shock to me; I really had expected my masterwork to sweep us to eternal glory.”
“I don’t know if you know the story about Kit Lambert, who was our manager and my songwriting and composing mentor back then,” Townshend told Rolling Stone in 2021. “His godfather was William Walton, the English classical composer. And when he heard “I Can See for Miles,” he wrote Kit a letter thinking that Kit had written the song, of course, because he didn’t think any of us goons could have done anything like that, praising him for the adventurous harmonies.
“Kit graciously shared that letter with me and I went off to tool up on William Walton,” he continued. “I don’t know. Maybe I just got carried away with how clever I thought I was. I was disappointed. It wasn’t just disappointed that we didn’t get a hit. It was that I was worried that I couldn’t do any better.”
“Ace in The Hole”
You took advantage of my trust in you when I was so far away
I saw you holding lots of other guys, and now you’ve got the nerve to say
Townshend was certainly more than a goon when it came to composition. He had penned “I Can See for Miles” in 1966 but held it back as an “ace in the hole,” thinking it would surely define The Who’s legacy. When it failed to be the dominant smash hit, he looked at it as his own failure as a composer.
