We Wont Be Fooled Again Meaning
Won't Get Fooled Again is one of the biggest classic rock anthems of all time. Written by Pete Townshend and released by The Who as a single in June 1971, reaching the UK top ten. It was the final track on the incredible Who's Next album, released August 1971.
The track was originally conceived for an entirely different project. Following the success of Tommy, the band's 1969 double concept album that sent The Who into rock's elite division, Townshend started work on a new conceptual project called Lifehouse.
The story was an intriguing one, if a bit abstract. It was designed to show how spiritual enlightenment could be obtained via a combination of band and audience. The concept was imagined as a multi-media exercise, involving a movie and theatrical live performances in addition to the music. Even the music was to be developed in a new way: through interaction with a live audience. The problem was that nobody but Townshend fully understood what it was all about thematically, what it would entail, or how the execution really work work.
Lifehouse is set in the near future in a society in which music is banned and most of the population live indoors in government-controlled experience suits connected through a grid. A rebel, Bobby, broadcasts rock music into the suits, allowing people to remove them and become more enlightened.
Interestingly, the story describes technology that would be developed years later. For example, the grid resembles the internet, and people's experiences within the experience suits basically describe a form of virtual reality.
Bobby finds that there is a universal chord that is so pure that it has the power to restore harmony and enlighten anyone who hears it. Won't Get Fooled Again was written for the end of the opera, when the people are free and looking to overthrow the leadership. Bobby is killed and the universal chord is finally sounded. The main characters disappear, leaving behind the government and army to have at each other.
We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the songI'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Townshend realised that the newly emerging synthesizers would allow him to communicate the ideas he had to a mass audience. He had met the BBC Radiophonic Workshop which gave him ideas for capturing human personality within music. Townshend interviewed several people with general practitioner-style questions, and captured their heartbeat, brainwaves and astrological charts, converting the result into a series of audio pulses.
For the demo of Won't Get Fooled Again, he linked a Lowrey organ into an EMS VCS 3 filter that played back the pulse-coded modulations from his experiments. He subsequently upgraded to an ARP 2500. The synthesizer did not play any sounds directly as it was monophonic; instead it modified the block chords on the organ as an input signal.
These type of arpeggiated synthesizer sounds would be used on two songs on the album: opener Baba O'Riley and closer Won't Get Fooled Again, bookending the album with songs featuring this sound – and quite prominently at that. The nerve of in particular opening the album with a huge, extended synthesizer intro, was a ballsy move. It was also very unique – not just the sonic quality of the sound itself, but the percussive rhythms that the patterns infused into their songs.
It almost certainly was the first time a major rock band had used a synthesizer like this. Others may have wanted to or would have leapt at the chance, but the instrument was simply uncommon before Townshend got his hands on one. Also, very few knew how to work them and they were really difficult to program. Townshend spent countless weeks holed up in the studio getting to the bottom of this instrument and the new opportunity it offered, putting in time, effort, and pure stamina that others simply may not have had.
The demo, recorded at a slower tempo than the version by the Who, was completed by Townshend overdubbing drums, bass, electric guitar, vocals and handclaps. In the Classic Albums documentary for the Who's Next album, Townshend said: "When I did this sound for Won't Get Fooled Again I didn't have the full equipment. It arrived during the making of the demos. By the time I had finished the demos I knew how to work it, but what I did have was a much simpler organ synthesizer. I took the output of the organ and put it through a filter, which is what they call 'sample and hold' – you get these random voltages coming out. I suppose I was just sitting there and playing it for hour after hour, getting into it. The chords I used were very simple – almost kind of naïvely simple, but then again, the end result is extraordinarily harmonically complex."
What many assume to be a loop, is actually a live performance with many subtle variations, making a loop impossible.
Townshend's demo of the song contains a much more straightforward drum and bass pattern than the ones Keith Moon and John Entwistle would add to the song. "When I first started playing the drums I tried to emulate Keith, but in the end I thought, f*ck it. I don't really want to play like that." He knew that the songs would still get the inevitable and inimitable stamp by the other band members, making it into a song by The Who rather than Pete Townshend solo.
At a point well into the song, there is an organ solo with the same arpeggiated rhythm. "That part is something I couldn't have written on paper," said Townshend. "What's interesting there is what happens to the organ. The part has been playing in the background all along, when it suddenly becomes a solo. The part is me playing, and it turns into something beautiful and spontaneous. Something very disciplined. I'm just following it – I did not write it, I follow the music."
That solo spot became a pivotal point in the live shows as well, with incredible laser effects casting a spectacular display over the stage, Roger Daltrey's shadow reappearing in the middle, backed by Keith Moon's incredible percussive work, before the band explode back into it – with THAT scream.
Roger Daltrey's scream towards the end of the solo, right before the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" section, is simply incredible. It is largely considered one of the best recorded screams on any rock song. According to legend, it was such a convincing wail the rest of the band, who were lunching nearby, thought Daltrey was having a brawl with the engineer. Who biographer Dave Marsh described it as "the greatest scream of a career filled with screams".
The lyrics of Won't Be Fooled Again has as interesting a backstory as the music. To fully understand everything that went into the song, we need to look at the commune on Eel Pie Island, right near a place on the River Themes in Richmond, London, where Pete Townshend lived at the time. There was an active commune on the island at the time, situated in what used to be a hotel. "There was like a love affair going on between me an them," Townshend said. "They dug me because I was like a figurehead in a group, and I dug them because I could see what was going on over there. At one point there was an amazing scene where the commune was really working, but then the acid started flowing and I got on the end of some psychotic conversations."
In the documentary The History of The Who, Townshend offered more detail on what happened: "When I wrote Won't Get Fooled Again I was a young man with a family. I have a choice about what I can and cannot do, and what I can and cannot think. The sensibility of the day was that the artist – the rock musician – was the property of the people. It was the musician who should be liberated. This was exacerbated a bit by the fact that I lived right near a place on the River Themes called Eel Pie Island, which had been taken over by a bunch of hippies and Grateful Dead fans, and the Pig Pen… all that bunch came one day and distributed heroin and LSD. They used to come and knock at the door and say, "give us food"! I'd say okay, and I'll give 'em some food. The next day they were back, and said "give us more food"! I said okay again, and of course the next they were back yet again saying "give us more food!" I finally said, "we've run out of food." They went, what? I repeated "we've run out of food." They could not comprehend this. "But… we want more food!" Later they would come by and say "give us a car – we want to liberate your car!" I told a story about them to a friend once, and my wife got so angry cause I'd never told her about it. She hates it when she hears things second hand, and this one was about one of these guys knocking at the door saying "we've come to liberate your baby!" I mean… Jesus F*cking Christ. They were wackos. And that was the climate in which I wrote Won't Get Fooled Again. It caused quite a lot of difficulty for me, but I had to think about it and I had to stand by it."
The Woodstock festival was also an influence on this song. Most songs inspired by Woodstock follow the peace and love narrative, but Townshend had a very different take.
The Who played on day two, going on at the ludicrous hour of 5 in the morning. During their set, the activist Abbie Hoffman came on stage unannounced and commandeered the microphone. Accounts differ on whether Townshend belted him with his guitar, but he certainly did not want to provide a platform for any cause. "I wrote Won't Get Fooled Again as a reaction to all that," he explained to Creem in 1982. "As in, 'Leave me out of it; I don't think you lot would be any better than the other lot!'"
The song has been taken as a call to arms for a number of causes over the years, which is the exact opposite of what its writer had in mind. In The History of The Who documentary, Townshend said, "Strangely enough, it's the kind of song which is adopted for many causes, you know. We have to keep reminding people that this is about our right to stand away from causes. You know, we choose not to be fooled by your rhetoric, by your politicisation, by your spin. We think for ourselves, and we also have the right to opt out. I think what I felt at the time was that I if I had been confronted with people coming to say 'we want the money back,' I would just say that you can't have it and I'm available for hire. If you don't want to hire me, don't hire me. You can't liberate me – I'm not your property."
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
Cause the banners, they are flown in the next war
Townshend described the song as one "that screams defiance at those who feel any cause is better than no cause." He later said that the song was not strictly anti-revolution despite the lyric "We'll be fighting in the streets", but stressed that revolution could be unpredictable, adding, "Don't expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything."
Bassist John Entwistle later said that the song showed Townshend "saying things that really mattered to him, and saying them for the first time."
One of the pivotal lyrics to ever come from a The Who song are found at the end of this song.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
The song has often been taken up in an anthemic sense, but these words more than any other should make it clear that it's actually a cautionary piece. Townshend said: "Won't Get Fooled Again was not a defined statement. It was a plea! It was a plea, because you know – in the Lifehouse story, it said; please don't feel because you've come to the concert, to this place, that you've got an answer. Please don't make me on the stage the new boss. Because I'm just the same as the guy who was up here before. You're in charge."
In looking closer at the Lifehouse story and Won't Get Fooled Again, you realise that it is not describing utopia. It is much closer to dystopia. The current world order does not work and people are paying the price for it. The rock opera depicts leadership as a dangerous idea, which may be some of the reason why it was so hard to pull off. It put forth the idea that actions have consequences. The order of the day back then was that actions and revolutions were supposed to have glorious results – not consequences. Was the world ready for such a message back then? It may have been more convenient to lump it in with the political protest songs of the era. Some no doubt thought that's what the song was about in any case.
Most of the songs that make up the Lifehouse rock opera reflects a striving to try and make more of ourselves – to become more conscious, more aware, more complete as human beings. Won't Get Fooled Again stands out on its own because it carries a strong message of encouraging self-empowerment and thinking for yourself. But, as part of Lifehouse, it was part of an even bigger message.
The Who's first attempt to record the song was at the Record Plant on W 44 Street, New York City, on 16 March 1971. Manager Kit Lambert had recommended the studio to the group, which led to his producer credit, though the de facto work was done by Felix Pappalardi from the band Mountain. This take featured Pappalardi's bandmate, Leslie West, on lead guitar.
Lambert proved to be unable to mix the track, and a fresh attempt at recording was made at the start of April at Mick Jagger's house, Stargroves, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. Glyn Johns was invited to help with production, and he decided to re-use the synthesized organ track from Townshend's original demo, as the re-recording of the part in New York was felt to be inferior to the original.
Keith Moon had to carefully synchronise his drum playing with the synthesizer, while Townshend and Entwistle played electric guitar and bass. Townshend played a 1959 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins hollow body guitar fed through an Edwards volume pedal to a Fender Bandmaster amp, all of which he had been given by Joe Walsh while in New York. This combination became his main electric guitar recording setup for subsequent albums.
The Stargroves recording of the song was intended as a demo recording, but the end result sounded so good that they decided to use it as the final take. Some overdubs, including an acoustic guitar part played by Townshend, were recorded at Olympic Studios at the end of April. The track was mixed at Island Studios by Johns on 28 May.
During this process, Lifehouse as a project was abandoned. You could say it collapsed under its own weight, with Townshend never fully being able to explain the full concept or get others to share his own enthusiasm for the project. He did not have the strength to carry all the ideas through on his own. Producer Glyn Johns felt that most of the songs they had been working on, including Won't Get Fooled Again, were so good that it did not matter. The best of them could simply be released as a single album of standalone songs. This became Who's Next.
Without the concept of Lifehouse to provide an overarching context, the songs now had to stand on their own legs, providing their own inner meaning. Won't Be Fooled Again was meant to provide a climax in the Lifehouse story, but the song would is so powerful in any case that it ends up providing a similar climax to the Who's Next album.
Roger Daltrey felt that having gone through the initial phases of the Lifehouse project had been very beneficial to the album they ended up with. "If we hadn't been given the chance to at least be working for this kind of ethereal project of Pete's – it was going to be a concept, a film and this and that – we would have just gone into the studio with demos and recorded it the way all our other albums were recorded. Whereas, this album is a real organic Who album, and it's got much more of what The Who really were about. It has much more of our stage presence, because we knew the songs so well."
This is a very good point, and every musician delivered brilliantly. A lot of the songs had been explored in rehearsal a live to an extent that they normally didn't for new material. Whether you focus on the vocals, guitar, bass, or drums, the parts are incredibly well developed. They managed to display the usual levels of virtuosity while fitting it in naturally within the song. Nothing sounds overwrought – it just sounds amazing.
The album version runs 8:30. The single was shortened to 3:35 so radio stations would play it. The band was not happy that the song had to be edited, and Daltrey has expressed particular unhappiness about it. He recalled toUncut magazine, "I hated it when they chopped it down. I used to say 'F*ck it, put it out as eight minutes', but there'd always be some excuse about not fitting it on or some technical thing at the pressing plant. After that we started to lose interest in singles because they'd cut them to bits. We thought, 'What's the point? Our music's evolved past the three-minute barrier and if they can't accommodate that we're just gonna have to live on albums.'"
The single was released on 25 June 1971, replacing Behind Blue Eyes which the group felt didn't fit The Who's established musical style. It was released in July in the US. The single reached #9 in the UK charts and #15 in the US. Initial publicity material showed an abandoned cover of Who's Next featuring Moon dressed in drag and brandishing a whip.
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The full-length version of the song appeared as the closing track of Who's Next, released 14 (US)/27 (UK) August. It made it to #4 on the US Billboard charts, going all the way to #1 in the UK – the only Who album to do so. Won't Get Fooled Again drew strong praise from critics, who were impressed that a synthesizer had managed to be integrated so successfully within a rock song.
The song would immediately become a mainstay in The Who's live shows, having been part of every Who concert since its release – usually as the set closer and sometimes extended slightly to allow Townshend to smash his guitar or Moon to kick over his drumkit. The group would perform it live over the synthesizer part being played on a backing tape, which required Moon to wear headphones to hear a click track, allowing him to play in sync.
It was the last track Moon played live in front of a paying audience on 21 October 1976, and the last song he ever played with the Who at Shepperton Studios on 25 May 1978, which was captured on the documentary film The Kids Are Alright.
Several live and alternative versions of the song have been released on CD or DVD. In 2003, a deluxe version of Who's Next was reissued to include the Record Plant recording of the track from March 1971. It also included the earliest known live version from the Young Vic on 26 April 1971.
In its May 26, 2006 issue, the conservativeNational Review magazine published a list of "The 50 greatest conservative rock songs." Won't Get Fooled Again was ranked song number one. Pete Townsend responded on his blog as follows: "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. Don't expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything." Townsend then goes on to explain that the song was simply "Meant to let politicians and revolutionaries alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause."
Roger Daltrey has in later years admitted that the frequent airing of the song may have pushed it over the edge for him. "That's the only song I'm bloody bored shitless with," he toldRolling Stone in 2018. Interestingly, that has not prevented Daltrey from nearly always including the song in his solo concerts – as Entwistle and Townshend always did.
For better or worse, this is the song many will associate The Who with. My Generation was a solid anthem for the 1960s, but they managed to redefine themselves and establish Won't Get Fooled Again as their new anthem for the 1970s onward – and it continues to be timeless.
Source: https://norselandsrock.com/wont-get-fooled-again-the-who/
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