It’s Not Enough

You are locked in with The Zoo, the place that still treats a guitar break like it matters, and the cut coming at you is “It’s Not Enough” by The Who, track eight on Endless Wire, the record that finally ended a twenty-four-year silence between studio albums. Last time these two put a full Who album on the shelf it was 1982 and the title was It’s Hard. John Entwistle was still the thunder under everything. Keith Moon was already gone. By the time Endless Wire arrived, late October 2006 on Polydor, the Ox was gone too, taken in a Las Vegas hotel room in June 2002, and the band was down to the argument that had always been its engine: Pete Townshend writing, Roger Daltrey deciding whether the words were worth a voice like his. The album went to number seven on the Billboard 200 and number nine in Britain, and it went gold over there. Not a comeback built on nostalgia. A comeback built on the nerve to show up unfinished and finish it in public.

“It’s Not Enough” runs four minutes and two seconds, and it is the one song on the record that does not belong to Townshend alone. The music started with Rachel Fuller, his partner, who had written and recorded it with her own band. Townshend heard it, decided it would make a Who track, asked for it, and threw her original lyric out. He wrote a new one. Fuller has said as much, laughing at the idea of Who fans discovering the radio cut from the album was hers on the music side. Townshend, on one of their In the Attic webcasts, admitted he was nervous the faithful would bristle at a co-write, then claimed the finished thing sounded more like The Who than anything else on Endless Wire. Credit on the sleeve reads Townshend and Fuller, published through Eel Pie and BMG. On the record you get Daltrey out front, Townshend on electric and backing vocals, Jolyon Dixon on acoustic, Stuart Ross on bass, Fuller on keyboards, and Peter Huntington on drums. No Moon. No Entwistle. The rhythm section is session men, and the song still swings like a band that learned its trade in Shepherd’s Bush pubs and Marquee clubs.

The lyric comes out of a movie. Townshend was watching Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, known in English as Contempt, with Brigitte Bardot. In the scene he fixated on, Bardot asks her lover if he adores her legs. He nods. Her breasts. He nods. Her arms. He nods, all the way down the inventory of a body. When she is done she tells him it is not enough. Townshend took that line and turned it into a question about why people choose partners they already suspect are not quite right. Bardot and Mépris are named in the song. Film buffs will tell you the scene, shot because producer Carlo Ponti wanted Bardot on screen, does not actually end the way Townshend remembered it. In the picture the writer declares his love and she agrees. The songwriter kept the version that hurt. That is the job.

A version turned up online at ArtistDirect before the album was finished. Polydor floated it as the first single, then the calendar slipped, the way Who calendars always slip. On the third of October 2006 it went up as a digital download. A promotional CD credited a Chris Lord-Alge mix. The British promo carried an extended guitar passage and clocked in at four minutes and eight seconds, a little extra Townshend you will not find on the album. It reached number 37 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks, the first Who single to chart in the United States since “It’s Hard” in 1982. Later it showed up on a reissue of the compilation Then and Now, and Townshend folded it into The Boy Who Heard Music, the rock musical he built out of this same pile of songs. A workshop version of that piece played at Vassar in the summer of 2007. The man has never been able to leave a song sitting still.

Endless Wire was cut, in Townshend’s own sleeve-note word, discontinuously, across his home studio and Eel Pie Oceanic in London, roughly from the autumn of 2002 into the summer of 2006. He produced. Bob Pridden and Billy Nicholls handled Daltrey’s vocals. Half the album is the mini-opera Wire & Glass, issued as a taster earlier that summer. The other half is standalone Townshend songs, with this Fuller collaboration sitting between “God Speaks of Marty Robbins” and “You Stand by Me.” Daltrey has said Entwistle’s death changed the balance. Pete and Roger at opposite ends, John the equator, and without him the weather is different. Townshend has said, years later, that getting songs past Daltrey is the hard part. Daltrey did not love the batch at first. He thought some of them might suit Townshend’s own voice better. He sang them anyway, and he sang them like a man who still believes a microphone is a weapon.

If you came in late, here is the short version of the long war. The Who formed in London in 1964 out of the Detours and the High Numbers: Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle, and Moon. Mod uniforms, feedback as a composition tool, auto-destruction as a publicity stunt that became a philosophy. “I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” “My Generation.” Then the run that rewired rock: The Who Sell Out, Tommy, Who’s Next, Quadrophenia. Townshend writing rock operas while the other three tried to knock the scenery down. Moon died in 1978. Entwistle died in 2002. The name stayed, because the name was never just four men. It was an argument about how loud the truth ought to be. They have sold on the order of a hundred million records. They have been called the greatest rock and roll band in the world so often the phrase is printed under their own logo, with the kicker “no substitute.”

What you hear in “It’s Not Enough” is that argument, late, leaner, still unwilling to settle. A lover’s inventory that comes up short. A co-write that Townshend was half afraid to claim and then could not stop claiming. A single that crawled back onto American rock radio after a quarter century away. Play it loud. That is still the only correct volume.

The Zoo keeps the deep cuts and the back pages spinning, commercial-free and listener-supported, the way album rock was supposed to work. Come by the station at https://thezoorocks.com/. The Who’s own house is at https://www.thewho.com/, with the official pages on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/thewho, Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/officialthewho/, and X at https://x.com/TheWho. For the unofficial archive that has been keeping the history since the nineties, thewho.net is still standing at https://thewho.net/. Maximum rock and roll. No substitute.