The Who Album-By-Album (& Single-By-Single) Thread

See Me, Feel Me

http://www.*****/images/SMFM-UK.jpg http://www.*****/images/SMFM-USA-A.jpg

UK: October 9, 1970 - Track 2094 004
US: September 26, 1970 - Decca 732729

A1: See Me, Feel Me (3:34) *****
(Pete Townshend)
A2: Overture (3:50) ***
(Pete Townshend)
[UK lists "Overture" as "Overture To Tommy", and US lists "Overture" as "Overture From Tommy"]​

On July 17th, Pete appeared in the BBC 2-programme The Timeless Moment, where Geoffrey Moorhouse talked to people about insights into reality glimpsed through drugs, madness or mysticism. The interview was filmed in late '69 at the London centre for the Meher Baba Association, which is Pete's old fifth floot flat at 87 Wardour Street, Soho. Pete, Mike and Katie McInnerney, as well as leader Don Stevens and several other devotees, described the experiences that in turn led them to Baba.

In August, Pete and Keth did a session with Ronnie Lane (Faces), Mike Heron (The Incredible String Band) and John Cale (The Velvet Underground) at Sound Techniques Studio in Chelsea. They recorded the song "Warm Heart Pastry" under the name Tommy and the Bijoux. John Cale's viola was overdubbed later. The session was produced by Joe Boyd.

The same month, Pete began a monthly Melody Maker column entitled The Pete Townshend Page. The column, which often displayed Pete’s self-deprecating sense of humour and his refreshing humility, also became a veritable bulletin board of ideas which were whirling around inside his brain.

In the first instalment, printed in the August 22nd Melody Maker, a holidaying Pete explained: "I'm beginning my first page of this bulky journal in particularly strange surroundings. On holiday I am, far away from the sounds of London's traffic and Keith Moon, on an island in the Blackwater Estuary called Osea. The most exciting thing about Osea Island is probably the causeway that you have to drive over to reach it. It's over a mile long and is just about revealed for a few hours each low tide for the milkman and postman to make a mad dash across, make their rounds and get back again. As you drive over, the sea splashes over the front of the car and you feel a bit like a sea captain at the bridge as starfish and crabs come hurtling through the windows. I'm hoping that the messenger who comes all the way from Melody Maker to collect this trivia doesn't throttle me when he realises he'll have to spend twelve hours looking at a ten acre caravan site before he can get back home again..."

On August 29th, The Who played the second Isle Of Wight Festival, which promised to be the biggest musical event in history. Over 500 000 people came to see the massive line-up that included The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, Donovan, Ten Years After, Pentangle, Sly & The Family Stone, Joan Baez, Miles Davis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Richie Havens, Family, Chicago, Procol Harum, Free, Taste, Supertramp, Kris Kristofferson, Melanie, John Sebastian, Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull, Leonard Cohen and The Doors, with Hawkwind and The Pink Fairies playing in the camping area!

The Who headlined the third night over The Doors. Pete had bought a motor home for the occasion; a Dodge called Maxine the Motor Home. Pete: "Maxine comes from the US of A, and is what we British would call a motor caravan. I bought the thing to ride in at the Isle of Wight. You know, ask in the other groups for tea and cakes."

The festival was plagued with financial and security problems. Several concerts were interrupted and/or stopped, and the presence of French, Algerian, Dutch and German anarchist-activists, White Panthers, Young Liberals and Hell's Angels (they actually teamed up - quite an alliance, huh?) was felt through acts of violence against - not people, but the walls surrounding the festival area. They demanded a free festival, and eventually (realising that they weren't gonna make a profit anyway) the arrangers actually decided to make the festival free. The press made it look like a war already before The Who arrived, which angered Pete. Pete: "The press had ruined a lot of people's potential happy weekend by exaggerating reports of water shortage and security trouble. I read the papers too and got nervous, and we didn't take the baby. When I got there I realised what a fool I was. This wasn't a battle, or an invasion. It wasn't a gathering of anarchists, nor even really a running gamut of tired Rock Artists in the usual festival tradition. It was a weekend on an island for a lot of young HUMAN BEINGS. The fact that the young people of today do things together in large numbers without the organisation of a field-marshal is regarded suspiciously by all these days."

Pete also met a person he probably had hoped never to see again, namely Michael Wadleigh (director and innovator of the Woodstock-film), who Pete had kicked off the stage at Woodstock. Pete: "It was greatly embarrassing for me to hear him announce that the cameraman's bum I had kicked off the stage during our show at Woodstock had belonged to him. Bearing in mind that we have some great work done for us in the Who sequence in the film, I figure he cannot be a man that holds a grudge. Lesson for Abbie."

The band took the stage at about 2 a.m. on Sunday morning in front of the largest crowd they had ever played to, and played for over two hours. The concert had some incredible peaks, with a particularly inspired "Young Man Blues", and a visually great "See Me, Feel Me" (where 25 000 watts of blue spotlights bathed the crowd), but the band couldn't hold the intensity all the way to the end. Keith broke one of his bassdrum-skins during "My Generation", and "Magic Bus" anticlimactically fizzled out. Pete: "We didn't play quite right. We had trouble with the ending. We ended once, and it was perfect. Then for some reason, Roger carried on singing. Well, the group can't walk off, so we had to go on. I'd thrown me guitar up and bounced it on the ground, and of course it was grossly out of tune. It took me five minutes to get it in tune, five minutes to get me head together, because me adrenaline had gone down, five minutes to get enough energy to get Moon to end... You very much have to play the end of an act right. It's probably far more important for The Who than the rest of it put together."

The Who's set was recorded on the 8-track CBS Mobile, and filmed in colour with three by Murray Lerner, as part of an intended feature film. Music and interviews taped at the festival by Johnny Moran were included in a special Isle Of Wight-edition of Radio 1's Scene And Heard, broadcast on August 31st.

The band followed the Isle Of Wight show with several dates in mid-September, travelling through Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, prior to returning to Britain for a two month, 23-date tour, the highlights of which Pete reported on The Pete Townshend Page. Pete: "Our show at Purley Orchid Ballroom (October 8th) was quite an experience. I came closer to complete physical exhaustion than I ever have before at a performance and yet we are playing a slightly shorter show on this tour. The last time we played there was so long ago I can't remember, and as we walked through the audience to the stage, surrounded by bouncers, I heard elderly mods asking for 'I Can’t Explain' and 'Substitute' with such zest that I began to believe they were new releases."

Track was running out of stuff to release, but when "Overture From Tommy" covered by Assembled Multitude became a surprise hit Stateside back in July, they decided to put out "See Me, Feel Me" a single, to boost extra sales.

While "See Me, Feel Me" certainly is one of the group's best ever songs, and an excellent choice for a single, one would think that US-fans would feel a bit ripped off by this, as it already was out on 45 as the B-side to "I'm Free" (as part of the full length "We're Not Gonna Take It"), but the single sold well, and reached #12 in the charts. It also sported a nice "royal" picture sleeve and label (note that while I stated in the "Pinball Wizard"-post that PW had the first US picture sleeve, that honour belongs to the US Decca "Happy Jack").

 

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