What is it all about? What is the purpose of our existence? Why are we here? People have pondered these questions throughout history. Songwriters have wrestled with this concept for ages as well. Pete Townshend of The Who struggled with it in several songs. Ultimately, he discovers it’s more about the journey than the destination. Let’s take a look at the story behind “The Seeker” by The Who.
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I’ve looked under chairs
I’ve looked under tables
I’ve tried to find the key
To fifty million fables
They call me The Seeker
I’ve been searching low and high
I won’t get to get what I’m after
Till the day I die
Origin
The song was released as a standalone single—meaning it wasn’t on an album—in 1970. It was just after Tommy, another project delving into trying to answer big questions. Townshend told Rolling Stone magazine shortly after “The Seeker” was released: “I wrote it when I was drunk in Florida. We were in the middle of an American tour … getting completely stoned every night, and me being the only person that could stand up, playing, and we were just standing amid the sand spurs one day. I was just covered in sand spurs, I kept on falling, and they stick in your skin, and you can’t get them out, screaming with pain and singing this song, and it just came out.”
I asked Bobby Dylan
I asked The Beatles
I asked Timothy Leary
But he couldn’t help me either
They call me The Seeker
I’ve been searching low and high
I won’t get to get what I’m after
Till the day I die
A Country Song
The song’s loose, jaunty, country feel makes it a predecessor of songs like “Squeeze Box” and “Going Mobile.” The band needed to break free of being poster boys for the mod movement. “It’s a bit like back-to-the-womb Who, not particularly very good, but it’s a nice side,” Townshend continued. “It’s good because it’s probably the only kind of thing we could do after something like Tommy, something which talks a little bit about spiritual ethics, blah blah blah, but at the same time is recapturing the basic gist of the thing.”
People tend to hate me
‘Cause I never smile
As I ransack their homes
They want to shake my hand
Focusing on nowhere
Investigating miles
I’m a seeker
I’m a really desperate man
Is the Song Autobiographical?
When asked if the character in “The Seeker” was him, Townshend answered, “It started off as being very much me and then stopped being very much me. It’s very personal, but then the whole thing is that, as soon as you discover that songs are personal, you reject them. It’s what happened with ‘I Can See for Miles.’ I wrote it as a personal song at first, and as soon as I sussed out that that was what was going on, I completely pushed it away.”
I won’t get to get what I’m after
Till the day I die
I learned how to raise my voice in anger
Yeah, but look at my face, ain’t this a smile?
I’m happy when life’s good
And when it’s bad I cry
I’ve got values, but I don’t know how or why
Desperation
Townshend realized the finality of it all: “Quite loosely, ‘The Seeker’ was just a thing about what I call divine desperation, or just desperation. And what it does to people. It just kind of covers a whole area where the guy’s being fantastically tough and ruthlessly nasty, and he’s being incredibly selfish, and he’s hurting people, wrecking people’s homes, abusing his heroes, he’s accusing everyone of doing nothing for him and yet at the same time, he’s making a fairly valid statement, he’s getting nowhere, he’s doing nothing and the only thing he really can’t be sure of is his death, and that at least dead, he’s going to get what he wants. He thinks!”
I’m looking for me
You’re looking for you
We’re looking in at other
And we don’t know what to do
Till the Day I Die
Townshend wrote in his 2012 memoir, Who I Am: “I was writing songs purely for fun—we were all trying to have fun together, too, as a band. Maybe that’s why it didn’t occur to me just how much the words of ‘The Seeker’—a song about a man I could see in my mind’s eye as I wrote it—reflected the impasse I was facing.”
They call me The Seeker
I’ve been searching low and high
I won’t get to get what I’m after
Till the day I die
Other Band Members
The opinion of the song was not universally positive. Singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle both expressed their displeasure. Daltrey told Uncut magazine, “I was never ever fond of ‘The Seeker.’ To sing that song, to me, was like trying to push an elephant up the stairs. I found it cumbersome, the first song we’d ever done where I thought, ‘Nah, this is pretentious.”
Added Entwistle, “I never liked that song. I hated playing it on stage.” Townshend later praised both of them for playing it every night with total conviction.
I won’t get to get what I’m after
Till the day I die
Very Little Was Said, But It Was Enough
The song doesn’t answer any of the big questions but gives the listener some things to think about as they go on their journey. Townshend did ask his contemporaries. He mentions Dylan, The Beatles, and Timothy Leary in the lyrics. He wrote in Who I Am, “A smiling, elegant Leonard Bernstein had held me by the shoulders, looked into my eyes, and asked me if I understood the importance of what I’d achieved. That same week, Bob Dylan came to watch us. He’d said very little, but he was there, which said enough.”
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Photo by P. Floyd/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
