Going Mobile

There is a stretch of blacktop in rock and roll that does not belong to the interstate signs or the truck stops. It belongs to The Who, and it runs straight through “Going Mobile,” the road song that sits on side two of Who’s Next like a window rolled down and a map nobody intends to follow. Pete Townshend wrote it, sang it, and played the guitar that sounds as if it is driving through water. Roger Daltrey sat this one out. John Entwistle locked the low end. Keith Moon kept the wheels from ever quite touching the ground. Three minutes and change of air-conditioned gypsy, and the album that salvaged a wrecked science-fiction opera still feels like the greatest rock record of 1971 because of tracks exactly like this one.

Who’s Next landed in August 1971 on Track in Britain and Decca in the States, the record The Who made after Lifehouse collapsed. Townshend had been building a multimedia story about a future in which music could free people from a locked-down world, and the plot asked what happens when the authorities tell you that you cannot travel anymore. Pollution, control, the lust for a little color on the horizon: that was the frame. The film never got made. The double album never got finished. What survived, cut with Glyn Johns and issued as a single LP, was Baba O’Riley, Bargain, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Behind Blue Eyes, and this lighter, meaner little highway hymn. Townshend later told Uncut that he had bought a big American V8 camper and used it to get to the Isle of Wight festival, and that the joke wrote itself. He did not care about pollution. He was an air-conditioned gypsy. That was his solution. Watch the police and the taxman miss him. He was mobile.

The track was cut at Olympic Studios in London in May 1971, a power-trio date with no lead singer in the room. Townshend takes the vocal, plays acoustic and electric guitar, and stacks a VCS 3 synthesizer over the arrangement. On the solo he ran the guitar through an envelope follower on the ARP, the circuit that turns a note into that fuzzy wah-wah he has described as sounding underwater. Entwistle’s bass does not decorate the song so much as steer it. Moon plays with the loose, joyful violence he brought to everything that was not a ballad, fills that feel like lane changes. It is the other Who’s Next song that does not belong to Daltrey. Entwistle sang “My Wife.” Townshend sang this. In Europe, “Going Mobile” turned up as the flip side of the “Behind Blue Eyes” single in November 1971. It was never the single. It did not need to be. Album-rock radio found it the way drivers find a good exit: by ear.

The lyric is half boast and half getaway. He is going home, and home is a moving target. Out in the woods, or in the city, or in the places the hippies have not ruined yet. Keep me moving. The Lifehouse version of the idea was darker: people ordered to stay put, and a hunger for the road that the system could not legislate away. On the finished record the darkness is worn lightly. Townshend’s vocal is conversational, almost grinning, the sound of a man who has already decided the argument. The band answers with the kind of swing The Who rarely get credit for, because the history books prefer the smashed guitars and the rock operas. This is the same four musicians, minus one microphone, playing like a bar band that happens to own synthesizers.

The Who had already earned the right to a song this free. Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon came out of Shepherd’s Bush and the West London mod scene, first as The Detours, then briefly as The High Numbers, then as The Who. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp took the managerial reins. “I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” and “My Generation” made them the loudest argument in British pop. The Who Sell Out winked at pirate radio and advertising. Tommy, in 1969, turned a deaf, dumb and blind boy into a phenomenon and gave Daltrey the role that fixed his voice in the culture. Live at Leeds, recorded in 1970, proved the stage version of the band could level a room without a net. By the time they reached Who’s Next they were fighting Townshend’s grand design, their own exhaustion, and the simple problem of how to follow a masterpiece. The answer was to play better. Moon was still the ungovernable engine. Entwistle, the Ox, was still the bassist other bassists studied in private. Daltrey had become a frontman who could sing a quiet song and a war cry in the same set. Townshend was the writer who heard whole worlds in feedback and then had the nerve to write them down.

Lifehouse nearly broke him. He has said the failure of the project pushed him to the edge. Daltrey has said the band was never nearer to splitting. Out of that mess came the cleanest, hardest studio album they ever made. “Going Mobile” is the breather that is not a breather. It sits between “Getting in Tune” and “Behind Blue Eyes,” a country-road shrug before the confession and the finale. The synthesizer is there, as it is all over Who’s Next, but it never smothers the wood and wire. You can hear the camper in it. You can hear the joke about the V8 and the fumes. You can hear a man who had spent a year trying to invent the future deciding, for three and a half minutes, to just drive.

The years after did what years do. Moon died in 1978. Entwistle died in 2002. Townshend and Daltrey kept the name on the road, with changing lineups and the old songs still able to fill a field. Quadrophenia, Who Are You, the farewell tours that were not quite farewells: the catalogue kept arguing with itself. “Going Mobile” never became the statue in the town square. It stayed the song you put on when the lane opens up and the radio is doing its job. No video treatment required. No speech from the stage required. Just Townshend counting himself lucky, Entwistle pinning the corners, Moon refusing to play anything the same way twice, and a lyric that still works if you have ever wanted the police and the taxman to miss you for a while that has no clock on it.

That is the record, and that is the band: four London toughs who turned volume, humor and ambition into a language album radio still speaks. If you want the rest of the story told the way freeform rock radio tells it, commercial-free and deep in the cuts, the place is THE ZOO. The official home of the band is thewho.com. Their Facebook page is here, Instagram is @officialthewho, and X is @TheWho. A long-running fan archive worth the detour is thewho.net. Keep it moving. The song already knows the way.