Substitute and its Vicissitudes

“You think we look pretty good together,” Roger Daltrey suggests, gazing straight into the camera, with poker-faced sincerity. As the first line of a song, we in the audience are given no clue as to what he is referring to. All we know is, Yes, indeed! You four young men in your mod threads certainly do look pretty good as an ensemble, and you sound pretty good too.

The performance is a very early rendition of The Who's seminal hit pop song from '60s swinging London. Stumble across the three-minute version on You Tube1 and you will encounter a stark proposition about what it is to be a substitute. By contrast, The Who's familiar rock concert versions, with Pete Townshend's windmilling arms and Roger Daltrey's curly blond locks, lack the seriousness of this early rendition. A decade later, the song was so well-known that its words no longer needed to make an argument-they had been turned into a stadium chant. The rhythmical repetition of binary oppositions that constitute the climax of the song amounted to nothing more intricate to the packed crowds in Leeds or in Kilburn2 than the nostalgic comfort of a mass sing-along. Here, in the earlier performance, they amount to an identity crisis.

In the earlier version, Townshend's carefully crafted, self-aware, defiantly ironic lyrics were sung by Daltrey-and played by Keith Moon and John Entwistle-for clarity of communication rather than for anthemic display. It was recorded for black-and-white television in an undecorated, claustrophobic studio, with a tight, steady camera angle, no live audience, no dance steps, no hip movement, no flicks of the curls-almost statuesque.

The rendition gives full voice to the song's multiple, overlapping scenarios of substitution: of the fake for the real, of appearance for reality, of the ersatz for the genuine, of inadequacy for mastery, of the modern for the established, of deception for authenticity, of the child for the parent, of signifiers for identity. It is absolutely appropriate tha