Recorded live on September 24, 2004 at the Festhalle Frankfurt, Germany from Rush's R30: 30th Anniversary Tour. This is from the Blu-ray version of R30, containing the complete concert, which was released on December 8, 2009 in the US, and in late 2013 in Europe. This is a live cover version of the song "The Seeker" by The Who.
"The Seeker" was The Who's first single released after their very successful rock opera Tommy. The song summed up Pete Townshend's dilemma at the time: how to handle the success that came from Tommy and stay true to the spiritual journey he had been following during the year he wrote and produced the rock opera. Townshend was a devotee of the teachings of Meher Baba, a Persian-Indian mystic whose 1966 treatise/pamphlet God in a Pill? famously lambasted drug use as a means of consciousness expansion. Similarly, Townshend was an opponent of drug abuse throughout this period.
When you’ve got a catalog as vast and impressive as that of The Who, some noteworthy songs can get lost in the shuffle. “The Seeker” feels like one of those songs, in part because it was a non-album single recorded and released in 1970 between the twin triumphs of Tommy and Who’s Next. As a matter of fact, it was the first thing that Pete Townshend wrote for the band following Tommy, a project which gained him endless accolades as one of the preeminent rock songwriters. If you read between the lines of “The Seeker,” you can hear Townshend trying to square that success with his constant restlessness. At the time of the song’s release, he talked about it with Rolling Stone: “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!”
One of the ingenious things about the song is how Townshend married those downbeat themes to a typically bruising Who rock arrangement. Roger Daltrey sounds like the toughest S.O.B. on two feet as he bellows above the relentless rhythm section of John Entwistle and Keith Moon. When he sings, “I won’t get to get what I’m after ‘til the day I die,” there’s not an ounce of hesitation or fear as he barrels toward that certain fate.
The narrator’s admission that Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Timothy Leary have all failed to help him seems to be a sly admission that nobody has all the answers, not even profound songwriters like Townshend. As a result, the narrator takes out his frustration on all those around him, trying to feel something by inflicting pain on others.
Yet the façade cracks a bit when Daltrey sings, “I’m a seeker/I’m a really desperate man.” When the narrator tries to make a connection, his efforts are thwarted by the fact that those he meets seem to be having the same problems: “I’m looking for me/You’re looking for you/We’re looking in at each other/And we don’t know what to do.”
Pete Townshend wrote part of the song in a "mosquito-ridden swamp in Florida, at three in the morning, drunk out of my brain." The swamp was covered in cockleburs that attached themselves to his hair and clothes, and stumbling along filled with frustration and pain he came up with "I'm looking for me, you're looking for you, we're looking at each other and we don't know what to do." Later on he denounced the song as not being one of his favorites, and said that "It sounded great in the mosquito-ridden swamp I made it up in. But that's where the trouble always starts, in the swamp."
Roger Daltrey was not a fan of the song. He admitted to 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.'"
Unusually, the band self-produced the track, as producer Kit Lambert was laid up with a broken jaw. But the sound mix roared, and it became the first single the Who released after the triumph of Tommy. "The Seeker" was an under-performer on the pop charts, but it remained a potent statement. Townshend played it acoustic at Meher Baba gatherings, and the Who's live performances of the song were overpowering – "an elephant," said Townshend, that "finally stampeded itself to death on stages around England."
* The song is used in the opening credits of The Terence Stamp film The Limey. It also features in American Beauty. Both films were released in 1999.
* Rush originally released a studio version of the song on their 2004 EP titled "Feedback."
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