The Private Canon: "Blue, Red, and Grey"

This post is part of a series.
I'm a Who fan, don't get me wrong, but my favorite song on any of their records is maybe the least Who-like number in their catalogue, the wistful retro jaunt "Blue, Red, and Grey." It's arguably more a Townshend solo track than a proper Who song (I've read there was a band version recorded, of which the tapes were lost, and which is honestly hard even to imagine), as it comprises just his exquisite falsetto and ukulele, augmented by a muted horn chart from John Entwistle. The horns float in on the B or bridge section (first one starts at :45 above) in a lovely formation, making some Satie-like major-seventh chords over Townshend's simple chunka-chunk uke chords. Before long this horn-and-uke combo sounds uncannily like a manifestation of the "snow and rain" our narrator later describes loving to "laugh in."

The song's lyrics come off as a kind of willfully perverse statement of hippy-dippy positive thinking, leading up to the corker, "I like every minute of the day." But as with a good protest song, it is the extremity of that central sentiment, coupled with Townshend's guilelessly tender delivery, that gives "Blue, Red, and Grey" its power. We clearly don't need to take the song's boast of unbroken bliss at face value to get the point: that in contrasting his alleged openness to experience at any time with those who pickily fetishize specific times of the day—and noting that some folks, like the "man who works the night shift," don't have the power to make such a frivolous choice—Townshend is doing a kind of Sermon on the Mount exaggeration. When Jesus said that lusting in one's heart was equivalent to adultery or feeling hate to murder, he wasn't raising the bar for mortal sin but in effect lowering it—making us see our shortcomings on a continuum, implicating us all in the world's brokenness. Similarly Townshend isn't insisting on the intrinsic virtue of literally every minute, but his attention-grabbing affirmation certainly makes us question the way we use and value our limited time on this green orb.

He gives himself a bit of an out, admittedly, with the B section's suggestion that this is a love song—that he is able to "like every second, so long as you're on my mind," and that his generalized state of bliss has a specific source. But I tend to think that the countercultural vibe of lyrics like, "The people on the hill, they say I'm lazy / But while they sleep I sing and dance," gesture to a broader vision. (Or maybe these are not mutually exclusive—that being besotted with a specific individual is synecdoche for loving the world.)

In any case, I think it's a perfect butterfly kiss of a song, informed by a holy-fool passion, evoking and one-upping Paul McCartney in both his old-timey songsmith mode and his faux-naif dispensation ("Fool on the Hill," "Mother Nature's Son").

Two more points: The "Blue, Red, and Grey" of the title seems to refer to a chichi cocktail bar, but if so it's not a well-known one, if a quick Internet search is any indication (I can't figure out what Robert Christgau means with his parenthetical that this " means satori," or enlightenment).

Also, though Townshend famously didn't want to include the song on the under-rated The Who by Numbers at all, he hasn't quite disavowed it. He has in fact broken it out on a few occasions in an oddly reharmonized and re-melodized arrangement. Note his annotations in the version below: After the line "I like every minute of the day," he adds, "Such a fuckin' lie," and to the counter-intuitive lyric "I even shun the south of France," he amends, "Used to." We all used to do a lot of things, Pete, but thank God some of us captured them in song.

(Roger Daltrey also breaks this one out and follows the original melody.)