| Notes and Quotes: "I Can't Explain" |
 |
| Entwhistle: Townshend wrote "I Can’t Explain" as an answer to "You
Really Got Me." (Marsh,
144) |
| Townshend: ...[is] kind of a lift off the feeling the Kinks had in "You
Really got Me." (Marsh,
144) |
| Moon:
...[the Kinks were] one of the major influences on us. There’s a lot of
the Kinks’ style in the Who . . . the chords. We used to nick a lot of
things from bands around, and when Pete wrote ["I Can’t Explain"],
there was a lot of Ray Davies in there. (Marsh, 144) |
| Talmy:
Kit Lambert was around and I did tell him I didn't want him around the
studio. What I did and what I do as a producer is work with the band on
the songs and the arrangements. I don't just record anything that comes
in and say, "Oh, yeh that's great." That would be nonsense. No producer
I know, who would call himself a producer, would do it that way. What's
the point; you may as well be an assistant janitor for all the input you'd
have. It was considered good to be fast in the studio, because if you
weren't you were thought of as a shitty band, a totally different attitude
to what it is now. (Oldham 2003: 267) |
| Townshend:
What Shel brought to those early Who recordings was a method, which was
brilliant because when Kit took over our productions, our records sounded
like shit for a long time. All of them nicely recorded but none of them
had the fire that Shel managed to capture. With Shel, we could go and
take our live act into the studio, but when we started to work with Kit
we found we couldn't, because Kit needed to control things that Shel didn't.
But we enjoyed it more with Kit because he would involve us in the recording
process. (Oldham 2003: 262) |
| Townshend: Shel did absolutely nothing. Actually that's not ture; on
'I Can't Explain' he actually did a lot, but nothing that we approved
of. Kit was preproducing the songs at the Marquee from rehearsals and
delivering them to Shel who literally just sat there while Glyn Johns
recorded them. Shel then applied his post-production technique and his
sound machine to it, which was brilliant. Shel was a bit of a collector
and he stumbled into something quite rich at the time: both the Who and
the Kinks had something sepecial about them. With 'I Can't Explain' he
brought in a session guitar player, a session drummer and the fucking
Ivy League to sing girly backing vocals. I don't think I ever had one
conversation with Shel about what I was doing. (Oldham
2003: 261) |
|
| This, their first
hit release, remained one of the numbers with which they would open their
shows from these heady mid-sixties days until the 1980s. All of the parts
come together: the choppy guitar chords on the electric 12-string, the
crackling and slightly rushed drumming, the languid and slightly dragging
bass, the partially sung/partially screamed lead vocal, and the high-pitched
background vocals. Also noteworthy is the compression and limiting that Talmy applies to the recording to create such sharp contrasts. |
| The chord progression
of "Can't Explain" is an inversion of the classic "La Bamba" I-IV-V-IV
sequence: I-bVII-IV-I [V-IV-I-V]. Davies's "You Really Got
Me" features an even less harmonically probablebIII-IV-bIII-IV
beginning. The connection to which the above quotes refer is probably
the major second distance between two major chords. This is a blues conceit
(notably, Chicago blues), but has an entirely new context in these recordings. |
|
| Schedule |
5 March, 2014
|