Apologies for the lateness of this entry - I am currently in Rome on a work trip with less downtime than I expected!
The Who’s Magnum opus, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, has had quite the afterlife since it was released as a single in June 1971, hitting the UK top ten and the closing track on the band’s most revered album, Who’s Next.
The song was even mangled and misquoted by George W. Bush in a 2002 speech on invading Iraq and the illusory search for weapons of mass destruction. Bush Jr. said of the hiding of these non-existent weapons;
There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, fool me once, shame on you – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.
This snippet is used in Micheal Moore’s 2004 polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 as yet another example of Bush Jr’s way with words - we assume that what he wanted to say was “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” but instead we got this mangling of possibly The Who’s most famous song1.
I also associated it with Community Garden Radio’s Shaun Keaveny’s cart wall on his old BBC 6 Music show on Fridays. Roger Daltrey’s prehistoric scream dissolving into Stefan Dennis’s ‘Don’t It Make You Feel Good’ was always a great start to the first day of the weekend.
It is also an excellent way to finish an album of what I would say is the template for stadium rock - when you see bands 50 or 60 years younger than The Who play at Glastonbury at the end of the month, those playing rock songs, with wave-your-hands or sing-your-heart-out punch can be traced back to Who’s Next. It is a song that can rightly be described as an epic, clocking in at over 8 minutes and utilising a synthesiser, an ARP 250, in a prominent way that many rock songs that went before it had stepped back from. Only the album’s opener, ‘Baba O’Riley’, could be considered to be doing that same job of popularising the usage of that type of electronics in pop/rock music.
So what’s it all about? 2 By late 1970, Pete Townshend was working on his Lifehouse project and this song, about the folly of revolutions, was due to be the last song on that project. The project was abandoned, and their follow-up to Tommy ended up being less rock opera and more stadium rock template we received with Who’s Next.
The lyrics deal with a cycle of revolutions and counter-revolutions, probably also the unexpected change in government in the UK in 1970 from Labour to Conservative. That telling quote I’ve put in the subject matter - that the new boss is the same as the old boss- is the song’s crux in one line. I’d also use the du Pan line that one can think of in a similar context “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
Many interesting lyrical snippets should be viewed in the context of the time. We’ve witnessed bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones be more consciously political with their lyrics by the end of the sixties and even more so in John Lennon’s solo career as the seventies began. Those snippets include the remark that “the shotgun sings the song”, which some consider a Burkean conservative argument that revolutions always lead to chaotic fragmentation and the new leaders emerge as those with their hands on the most firepower. We also have Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book mentioning that power in politics is out of the gun’s barrel, which ties the song back to The Beatles’ ‘Revolution.’
I also like the suggestion that the heads of the revolution and subsequent ones may be similar in their outlooks and are offering the narcissism of small differences to drive wedge issues (Sound familiar?). There are great swathes of the population who remain unaffected either way and sit on the sidelines.
How can we be sure that the song is advocating an anti-revolution stance? Well, here’s Townshend in 2006 in his online diary;
It is not precisely a song that decries revolution – it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets – but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict.
So maybe we can view it as an endorsement with a caveat? Digging a little more, we get to the friction in the song. Roger Daltrey believed it was a song that was outraged, upset and desperate for change - hence the vocal performance -. In contrast, Townsend felt it was people having that choice between either focusing on conserving or improving their personal lives or giving time to focus on political campaigning.
In an online diary in 2006, Pete Townshend explains this… his original intent was a plea:
Won’t Get Fooled Again – then – was a song that pleaded ‘….leave me alone with my family to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….’
The song has been played in nearly every gig the band played in 1971 and was the last Who song Keith Moon performed with the group. But the star of the show is Daltrey; every time I hear that primal, urgent scream - I feel like I am listening to the sound, not of the shotgun calling the song but the singer calling shotgun and wrestling the song back for the revolutionaries who want to storm the castle as the song’s writer windmill’s defiance at those that think that opposing something, anything is more important than having no cause at all.
Given the very prominent use in over 200 episodes of CSI: Miami and assorted Lieutenant Horatio memes, I’m calling it more famous than ‘My Generation’ or ‘Baba O’Riley’.
Alfie?
It’s always interesting to think about what’s popular and what’s good. I would pick Baba any day but many would know this track. If you ask my kids, they know a lot off the Tommy record.