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The song Roger Daltrey thinks The Who shouldn’t have recorded
The Who was formed by Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, John Entwistle and Pete Townshend in London, England back in 1964 and during the past six decades the band released 12 studio albums and more than 50 singles. It’s a lot of songs and obviously, even the band members might not like them all.
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The vocalist Roger Daltrey, for example, thinks there is a track that the group shouldn’t have recorded.
The song Roger Daltrey thinks The Who shouldn’t have recorded
The Who is one of the best-selling bands of all time, with an estimated amount of more than 100 million records sold worldwide and still is one of the most influential ones from the past decades. In an interview with Uncut in 2015, Roger Daltrey talked about some of the songs the group released. He revealed that he thinks the track “Dogs”, shouldn’t have been recorded. The song was released as a single in 1968 and was compared to The Small Faces‘ “Lazy Sunday”.
“Dogs’? Oh… [buries face in hands]… shit! That’s just bizarre. Actually, I’ll tell you what it is, it’s just Pete’s tribute to Ronnie Lane. He was such a lovely geezer, Ronnie, they were great guys, The Faces, all of them. But I think it’d have been better if Pete had just given the song to Ronnie in the first place. As a Who record, it was all a bit frivolous for me,” Roger Daltrey said.
Besides the four classic Who members, that track also had Chris Morphet playing the harmonica and singing the backing vocals. He was a friend of Townshend and was the one who inspired the lyrics for the song. Morphet was fascinated by greyhound racing, so it inspired Pete to write that track. Two dogs are mentioned in the lyrics: Camira Flash and Yellow Printer, who raced at the 1968 English Greyhound Derby.
The track was not successful
The song reached number 25 on the United Kingdom Singles Chart, lower than most of their singles at the time. The B-side was the song “Call Me Lightning”
According to Setlist FM statistics that song was not even played live by the band. The song always had mixed reviews, with many people like Roger Daltrey, who never liked the song, but there were also some critics who called it underrated.
In 1969, one year after “Dogs” was released, The Who released the hit “Pinball Wizard” as a single. The b-side was a track called “Dogs (Part Two)”, but it has no connection with the first song. It was an instrumental track credited to the drummer Keith Moon.
Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are the only members of the band who were part of all their releases. The original drummer Keith Moon tragically passed away in 1978 at the age of 32 and the bassist John Entwistle died in 2002 at the age of 57.
