THE WHO
“SUMMERTIME BLUES”

EDDIE COCHRAN COVER

SONG

“SUMMERTIME BLUES”
[B/W “HEAVEN AND HELL”] (1970)

WRITTEN BY

EDDIE COCHRAN, JERRY CAPEHART

FIRST RECORDED BY

EDDIE COCHRAN (1958)

The Who’s mod look took on more color as the hippie era approached, 1966.

Roger Daltrey remembers when he first heard Eddie Cochran’s 1958 hit “Summertime Blues.” “I was in school the year it came out,” he says today. “It was him, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers—they were the people that we idolized. I was a year older than [my bandmates], so I was probably influenced by those people more. But where Buddy Holly’s songs were male–female, Eddie’s were more male derivative, which later was reflected in the Who’s audience. We were much more of a blokes’ band than a girls’ band. We weren’t very good at love songs.”

Still a teenager himself when he cowrote “Summertime Blues” with his manager Jerry Capehart, Cochran expressed a quintessentially high school dilemma in his lyrics: the singer has to work to afford summer vacation, but he can’t enjoy that vacation because he’s so busy working. Daltrey was only fourteen years old himself when Cochran’s song came out, so he could relate to Cochran’s frustration.

As Daltrey entered his twenties and left his years of summer vacations behind, he held on to “Summertime Blues” as the perfect distillation of school-age angst. As he began to develop his new band—first called the Detours, then, when they discovered another group with that name, renamed the Who—he suggested they cover the song.

His three bandmates did not take much convincing. Pete Townshend had learned to play the guitar in part from listening to Eddie Cochran records, and drummer Keith Moon had in fact already been playing “Summertime Blues” in his previous band, the Beachcombers. Cochran may have had only one big hit (he died in a car crash a few years after it, only twenty-one years old), but that hit became a rock-and-roll-band staple. Like “Gloria” or “Louie Louie,” it required only a few chords and a lot of attitude, perfect for budding rock-and-roll musicians.

The Who, though, did not play the same kind of straight cover that was in every bar-band’s repertoire. They made the song angrier, casting aside the original instrumental parts for a more wild and slashing arrangement. “We just did it onstage one day,” Daltrey says. “The way Eddie did it, it wasn’t very easy to cover it. So I said to Pete, just play it as power chords, and he did.”

Where Cochran’s delivery was bouncy and light-footed to match the silly lyrics, the Who’s version took on an aggression and a power—not to mention a volume—absent in the original. Early live videos show Townshend slashing furiously at his guitar while Moon seems to pursue a record for drums-hit-per-second. This wasn’t the performance where they would famously smash all their instruments onstage, but it might as well have been.

“The Who was music to fight to,” Daltrey says of their aggressive arrangement. “We’d taken the song from being in kind of a swing rhythm on the off-beat to a rock rhythm on the one. You leave the holes and that makes it more punchy.”

Despite the volume, they did bring in a little of their Everly Brothers influence on the chorus line “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues,” pausing the assault for a moment for a quick three-part harmony. For the song’s punch lines—like the congressman saying, “I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote”—they turned vocals over to comically low-voiced bassist John Entwistle. Though loud and powerful, the song still didn’t take itself too seriously.

Eddie Cochran playing at Wembley in 1960, when Roger Daltrey was still playing with the Detours.

“Summertime Blues” quickly became a crowd favorite when they played it in concert, even though they hadn’t recorded it. It wasn’t the only Eddie Cochran cover the Who played—they had also worked up versions of “C’mon Everybody” and “My Way”—but it stayed in the band’s set list much longer. When asked if the fans’ enthusiastic response kept “Summertime Blues” in the band’s set, Daltrey bristles.

“I didn’t really give a fuck whether they liked it or not,” he replies. “We always used to play music that we liked. You should never, ever ask the fans what they think of anything. If they didn’t throw bottles, they must have thought it was all right.”

Since their fans didn’t throw bottles, the next obvious step was for the Who to record “Summertime Blues” in the studio. Which they did in the late 1960s—but no one quite remembers what for. Some sources say the song was recorded for their commercialism-lampooning concept album The Who Sell Out, complete with fake radio-jingle intro, or even a covers record that never happened. Their longtime engineer Bob Pridden thinks maybe they planned to make it a stand-alone single. Daltrey doesn’t remember recording a studio version at all (“We used to do loads of silly little things in the studio and they’d get forgotten”).

This studio version was eventually released on a 1998 rarities collection. Whatever it was recorded for, it’s clear why it was not used. In the recording, the band goes through the motions, but the song presents nowhere near the energy or excitement it did live. Removed from the fervor they worked themselves into in front of screaming fans, the band could muster only a halfhearted cover, not a classic.

From their earliest tours, the Who had earned a reputation among people who had seen them as one of the best—maybe the best—live rock-and-roll band of their day. The San Francisco Examiner reviewed a show this way: “[Concertgoers] had just heard the finest two-hour concert of their lives. They knew it. The Who knew it. . . . Exaggeration? I can’t exaggerate perfection.” And that was just a typical night.

But as one can hear on the recorded “Summertime Blues,” capturing that live power in a studio setting was nearly impossible. So they rarely tried, instead either recording ambitious “rock operas” like Tommy or tight pop singles. They were like two different bands in the studio and onstage—and the latter was a whole lot louder.

“It was very difficult to capture the dynamics of the Who in the studio,” engineer Pridden says, “because onstage the dynamics were just unbelievable. It was just like fire. To bring that into a studio is very difficult.”

Though Daltrey doesn’t remember recording “Summertime Blues” specifically, he agrees that they rarely captured their high-voltage live sound on records. “We were always a very different band onstage than we were on record,” he says. “Our records were almost in some ways a demo for what it would become onstage. The only album we ever kind of knew what we were doing before we recorded it was Who’s Next. All the rest we were learning in the studio. When we got the songs onstage, they became more and more developed and became totally different in a lot of ways. A lot more power, that’s for sure.”

If you can’t bring the live show into the studio, why not bring the studio to the live show? Live albums had grown increasingly prominent in the rock world by the late 1960s, from the Rolling Stones’ Got Live If You Want It! to Cream’s Wheels of Fire. This offered a way to capture the power of “Summertime Blues.” In those early days, though, live albums were hit-or-miss—mostly miss. Many, like the Rolling Stones’ album, sounded like they’d been recorded inside a tin can. Others weren’t really live at all, but rather recorded in a studio somewhere, with canned applause added after the fact.

The Who featuring the aerodynamic Pete Townshend, 1973.

Despite the audio obstacles, in 1969 the Who decided a live album needed to be the next stage in their career. Their fame had just hit new heights with the phenomenal success of Tommy, and they weren’t sure what to do next. “I’m sure the Beatles were faced with it after . . . Sgt. Pepper’s,” Townshend said in a Rolling Stone interview at the time. “It would be very, very difficult to follow up Tommy, and I don’t want to do it, and I don’t think people really want it anyway.”

Live at Leeds is generally considered one of, if not the, greatest rock concert albums of all time.

So this proposed live album would serve two purposes: it would finally find a way to showcase the Who’s power as a true rock-and-roll band (rather than just an arty group that made faux operas), and it would buy Townshend some time to figure out what was next. “It was filler between Tommy and something else that Pete was working on that became Who’s Next,” Daltrey says. “We wanted to get it out there to remind people that we are a rock-and-roll band, and we’re still alive.”

To ensure that this live album contained their absolute best performance, the band recorded every show on their 1969 U.S. tour. This seemed like a smart idea until it came time to listen to all those tapes. “Suddenly someone realizes there are 240 hours of tape to be listened to,” Townshend said in that Rolling Stone interview. “You know, now who’s going to do this? So I said, well, fuck that, I’m not gonna sit through and listen, you’d get brainwashed, let’s face it! So we just fucking scrapped the lot.”

The tapes weren’t just scrapped. To eliminate the risk of unauthorized bootlegs circulating (another quickly growing trend in the late 1960s), Townshend instructed Pridden to burn the recordings. He scorched the lot in his back garden while Pete looked on. “We put them all into an oil drum, bent over, and put a match to them,” Pridden says.

With all their live recordings smoldering in a heap of melted plastic, the band and Pridden came up with a Plan B for their live album: they would schedule two more shows, record those, and just use whichever of the two sounded better. They booked college gigs in Leeds and Hull—“university audiences were always crazy,” Pridden says, “and more into the music than most other places”—and brought along their recording equipment.

Mobile recording trucks—a full studio on four wheels—abound now but did not exist back then. So Pridden and his crew had to set up all their recording gear in the university’s kitchen to tape the band playing in the dining hall two floors up.

Luckily, the crew had a lot of practice. Despite the earlier live tapes’ fiery end, all that work around the U.S. paid off in one way. “It helped that we had experimented by recording all the other shows,” Pridden says. “We had a lot of rehearsals for the real thing.” Even then, accidents did happen—the bass on the second show in Hull did not get properly recorded, so Leeds won as the concert to release by default.

Leeds was an extraordinary show, even by the Who’s standards. Taking place on Valentine’s Day 1970, the concert featured the band at their most wild and frenetic. They did a long Tommy medley and a few well-honed covers, including “Summertime Blues.” Shortly after, Townshend called it “one of the best and most enjoyable gigs we’ve ever done.” And despite being confined to a cafeteria kitchen two floors below, Pridden was able to capture that excitement in his recording.

“We were trying to capture the rawness, not trying to smooth it out,” Pridden says. “Live albums then weren’t very good.” He says too many so-called live albums weren’t entirely live, but rather basic live recordings that the musicians then added to in the studio. “If you’re going to start adding more instruments to things, you might as well not bother. We wanted to put the Who up there among the top two or three live bands in England, if not the world.”

The Leeds tape showed everything the band was in concert: ragged, loud, sweaty, passionate. It abandoned any whiff of pretention or high-mindedness and showcased the band stripped back to their core. Whereas in the Tommy era, the Who occasionally seemed more like Pete Townshend and Associates—he wrote almost all the songs, and came up with the entire opera concept—the Leeds tape showed the band as an unstoppable foursome. “Summertime Blues” served as the pinnacle, letting each band member shine. Roger hollers the lyrics, Pete windmills furiously, John delivers the laugh lines, and Keith pounds away at his most manic.

Though he’s since changed his tune, at the time the perfectionist Townshend wasn’t thrilled about just how raw the recording was. “People wouldn’t rave about us so much if they could just hear that tape,” he said before it was released. “There’s all kinds of bits where sticks are obviously in the air when they’re supposed to be on the drums and arms are spinning when they’re supposed to be playing solos. They did a terrible job on the recording. They fucked it up incredibly. They got crackles all the way through, horrible crackles. But I’m just going to put it out anyway.”

They did put it out, on May 16, 1970, and quickly Townshend was proven wrong. People heard the tape and raved about the band more than ever. Though it was meant mostly as a stopgap, Live at Leeds became another hit for the band. The New York Times called it “the best live rock album ever made” in its review.

Though the band played thirty-three songs in that Leeds university dining hall, the final album was cut down to just six. “We’ve just gone for the hard stuff,” Townshend said by way of explanation. They avoided most of the Tommy opera songs in favor of the huge, powerful live tracks, the band’s ultimate room-shakers. Three of those six tracks were covers: Johnny Kidd’s 1960 hit “Shakin’ All Over”; an unlikely interpretation of Mose Allison’s jazz song “Young Man Blues”; and, of course, their live favorite “Summertime Blues” were finally put on a record for people to hear in the comfort of their own living rooms.

“I was glad people could buy a record that reflected what we were onstage,” Daltrey says. “I always felt that how the band sounded live was never on the record. There wasn’t a studio big enough to capture our sound. When we put the live one out, there it was in its full glory, bum notes and all, and I love it. It’s how we are. We are much rawer. The sound of the Who live was more primitive than it really ever was in the studio.”

The label released “Summertime Blues” as the album’s first and only single, and it hit the Top 40 in both the UK and the U.S., becoming one of their biggest hits to date stateside. It also holds the distinction of being the Who’s only hit not written by Pete Townshend. Which, ironically, is why the Who doesn’t play their most famous live song in concert today.

“We don’t play ‘Summertime Blues’ anymore because it’s not a Who song; it’s an Eddie Cochran song,” Daltrey says. “Pete doesn’t really want to play our covers, I don’t know why. I’ve given up asking him.”