Pete Townshend kept I Can See for Miles the way a gambler keeps a marked card. He wrote it in 1966, listened to his own demo, and concluded he was holding the best song he had ever written — a guaranteed number one, too valuable to waste. So he refused to release it. For more than a year the Who put out other singles while the masterpiece sat in reserve, waiting for the moment it would be needed to, in his phrase, “flatten all the opposition.” When the band finally played the ace in the autumn of 1967, it reached number nine in America and number ten in Britain. Townshend responded by announcing that he spat on the British record buyer. It remains the Who’s biggest hit single in the United States. It also, by its composer’s furious standards, failed.
Written on the Back of a Lawsuit
The song began, improbably, as paperwork. In the spring of 1966 the Who were locked in a legal war with their first producer, Shel Talmy, whose contract and injunction had snarled the band’s career; Townshend, by his own account, first wrote the lyric on the back of his affidavit in the case. Its subject was nearer home than any courtroom. The narrator of I Can See for Miles is a watcher: a man who cannot be near the woman he loves and so surveils her from a distance, informing her, with eerie calm over crashing music, that her secret meetings and magic tricks have all been observed. Townshend drew it from the jealousy he felt over his girlfriend Karen Astley — the daughter of television composer Edwin Astley, and the woman he would marry in 1968 — when he saw her, or imagined her, with other men. Jealousy, litigation and spite: the sweetest-sounding threat in rock was assembled out of all three.
The demo he made of it thrilled him so much that it changed his behaviour. He decided the song was his “ace in the hole,” a secret weapon to be kept for the day the Who were in real trouble, when it would surely redeem everything. The caution was understandable. The Who of 1966 were a hit singles act living hand to mouth: Townshend was writing virtually everything, the band’s chart run was strong but crownless — plenty of top five finishes, no number ones — and their finances and management arrangements were as unstable as their amplifiers. A writer in that position does not spend his best idea on an ordinary Tuesday. In the meantime, he wielded it as leverage over the band’s manager-producer Kit Lambert. Townshend later told Jann Wenner that the demo “was just so exciting and so good that for a long time we didn’t dare make a single because it was blackmail. I was more or less blackmailing Kit Lambert into doing better. So we always put it off until Kit was very sure of himself.” Through I’m a Boy, Happy Jack and the rest of 1966, the greatest song in the drawer stayed in the drawer.
Three Studios, Two Continents
When the moment finally came, in the spring of 1967, the recording matched the song’s own sprawl — it was made in pieces, in three cities, across an ocean. One night at CBS Studios in London, Lambert simply turned around and announced, “Let’s do ‘I Can See for Miles.’” The demo went on, the band dug it all over again, and the backing track was laid down in late May 1967: Roger Daltrey’s measured, menacing lead vocal still to come, but John Entwistle’s bass, Keith Moon’s rolling drums and Townshend’s guitar already building that vast, echoing architecture.
The Who’s summer took them to America, touring in the support slot for Herman’s Hermits, and the record travelled with them in a tape box. On 6 and 7 August, vocals and overdubs were recorded at Talentmasters Studios in New York. Daltrey’s contribution deserves its own note: the most extrovert frontman in British rock sings the song in an almost level tone, patient and reasonable, while the band crashes around him — and that restraint is the record’s menace. It is Entwistle’s bass, roaming under Moon’s cymbal wash, that supplies the agitation. Then, on 10 September, Lambert carried the four-track tapes to Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles — Phil Spector’s temple — specifically to mix and master the track through Gold Star’s celebrated echo chamber, the secret ingredient in the record’s sense of distance. The American single even received an overdubbed second bass line. Few British singles of 1967 were made with this much deliberation, in this many places. This one was assembled like a moonshot.
It was destined for The Who Sell Out, the band’s affectionate concept album about pirate station Radio London, complete with fake advertisements and jingles — an album whose only single it would be. The timing gave the joke a melancholy edge: the Marine Offences Act had shut down Britain’s offshore pirate stations in August 1967, weeks before the single appeared, so the album arrived as a memorial to the radio culture that had championed bands like the Who in the first place. Nothing else on the record sounds like the single: the jokes stop, and for four minutes the band simply looms.
Number Nine Was Not Enough
The American single appeared on 18 September 1967, on Decca, with Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand on the reverse; Britain followed on 13 October, on Track Records. Promotion included a mimed performance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that September — the most notorious television appearance of the band’s career, though not because of this song. For the climax of My Generation, Moon had secretly had his bass drum loaded with extra explosive, and kept the size of the charge to himself. The detonation singed Townshend’s hair, left Moon bleeding from a cymbal fragment in his arm, and has been blamed ever since for contributing to the guitarist’s lasting hearing damage. The single it was all supposed to promote played earlier in the same show, perfectly calm by comparison.
The chart returns, by any normal accounting, were a triumph. In the United States the record climbed to number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 — the only top ten single of the Who’s entire career, and still their highest American chart placing. In Britain it reached number ten. But Townshend had not saved the song for number ten. He had promised himself, and anyone who would listen, a number one, and he took the shortfall personally and publicly. “To me it was the ultimate Who record, yet it didn’t sell,” he said. “I spat on the British record buyer.”
The Song That Ended the Singles Band
The disappointment changed the band’s direction more than a triumph might have. Townshend effectively withdrew from the singles contest he had spent three years trying to win, and poured his ambition into albums instead; within eighteen months the Who were at work on Tommy, and the group that had hoarded a perfect pop single became the defining album band of the next decade. Critics, meanwhile, kept returning the verdict the chart had withheld: in his landmark survey The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, Dave Marsh ranked I Can See for Miles among the very finest singles ever recorded. The record is also widely believed to stand behind the Beatles’ Helter Skelter — Paul McCartney said he wrote that song after reading a review describing a record as the loudest, most raucous thing ever committed to tape, and the review in question is usually identified as one written about this very track.
So the ace in the hole did its work in the end — just not the work its author intended. I Can See for Miles did not flatten the opposition on the charts. It flattened something else: the Who’s career as a pop group, clearing the ground for everything that came after. Townshend was right about the song. He was only wrong about what it was for.
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