Join Together

Pete Townshend pulled it out of the wreckage of Lifehouse. Lifehouse was the rock opera and multimedia stage experiment he abandoned in 1971 after it nearly broke him, and this song was one of the pieces left over. Roger Daltrey remembered it landing on the band with almost no warning, though a longer demo surfaced decades later on the Lifehouse Chronicles box set, suggesting the idea had been sitting in Townshend’s notebooks well before that one urgent night. The Who cut it on May 22, 1972, at Olympic Studios in London.

The hook came from an ARP synthesizer Townshend had been teaching himself to use at home, the same instrument he would lean on again for “Who Are You?” He layered it against a Lowrey Berkshire TBO-1 organ, the same model already heard on “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Two harmonicas filled out the bridge, a chord harmonica and a bass harmonica, the latter played by John Entwistle. None of it sounded like the band that had built its name on Townshend’s guitar.

Daltrey was not won over right away. He liked the finished single well enough, but he distrusted where the synthesizer was taking the band, worried that Townshend’s sequencing experiments were piddly one-note noises a guitar could have handled just as well.

Released June 16, 1972, on Track Records in the UK and Decca in the US, “Join Together” reached number 9 on the UK chart and number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its B-side was a live, unedited recording of Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It” from a December 1971 show in San Francisco. The song stayed in the band’s live sets for decades, folded into a blues jam off “My Generation” through the mid-1970s and revived for the 2011 Concert for Killing Cancer alongside Debbie Harry and Jeff Beck.