You’ll find few advocates for The Who’s ‘Call Me Lightning’. In fact, I’ve never read a word in its defence. Released it seems on not much more than a whim, a stop gap exercise between The Who Sell Out and Tommy or between ‘I Can See For Miles’ and ‘Magic Bus’. It touched #40 in the American charts, but was hidden beneath ‘Dogs’ on its first UK release, so doubly damned as that’s another forgotten 45. It was dismissed by Townshend at the time as ‘unrepresentative’ of the band’s current sound.

For me it is precisely its outlier status within The Who’s oeuvre that makes it a small treasure. I like their quirks, the second side of Ready Steady Who EP and things like ‘Waspman’. Their ephemera keeps the canon fresh, stops it from going stale. Anyway, Townshend was wrong. It was perfectly representative of what the band were doing in 1968, at least an aspect of what preoccupied them. It sits well alongside the Eddie Cochran covers, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, ‘Young Man Blues’ and the like. ‘Call Me Lightning’ is part of that return they made in ’68 to teenage pop, a restatement of the ethos of rock ’n’ roll as deadly fun.

For many commentators it remains no more than a throwaway homage to Jan and Dean, but like Townshend they too are wrong. The song’s ‘dum–dum–dum–do-ays’ are more Dion and the Belmonts, New York doo-wop, than California surfing harmonies, equally loved by the band though they might be. The recording has an aggressive masculine spirit that is shared with ‘The Wanderer’ and is not there at all on ‘Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)’ or ‘Dead Man’s Curve’; it trades in a braggadocio wholly avoided by the West Coast duo.

The Who had already borrowed wholesale from Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’ for their Talmy produced, yet at the time, unreleased novelty record ‘Instant Party Mixture’, which is a hoot; a paean to wacky cigarettes. The subject matter undoubtedly as responsible for its nixed release, coupled with ‘Circles’, as was the copyright implications of its pilfered tune.

The song had been in Townshend’s portfolio since at least 1964, the reason for its return, I like to think, was that it now had contemporary currency. In the Autumn of 1967, Nancy Sinatra released ‘Lightning’s Girl’. Lee Hazelwood’s composition would have been a perfect number for the Ronettes or the Shangri-las, which is to say it is as late to the party as the Who’s tune. ‘Lightning’s Girl’ is a warning from a girl to a boy, whose attention is unwanted, to stay away, otherwise he’ll have to answer to her boyfriend – Lightning.

Here comes Lightning down the street
While you just stand there talking
If I were you I'd start to move
And tell my story walking
About a hundred miles an hour!

If you want to know more about this cat called Lightning, well Roger can tell you:

See that girl who's smiling so brightly
Well I reckon she's cool and I reckon rightly
She's good looking and I ain't frightened
I'm gonna show you why they call me Lightning

And his ‘XKE is shining so brightly’, which if you know your Jaguars, as Pete certainly did, then he also has ‘grace . . . space . . . and pace’, which is another good reason to call him Lightning.

Maybe I’ve misheard what this is all about, but to me it sounds like a great pop conversation: ‘Call Me Lightning’ is best taken as an answer record to ‘Lightning’s Girl’. It’s the kind of exchange pop once had around Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ with Rufus Thomas’ howling out ‘Bear Cat’ in return, or ‘Judy’s Turn To Cry’ as Leslie Gore’s answer to her own ‘It’s My Party’, or Neil Sedaka singing ‘Oh Carol’ and Carol King responding with ‘Oh Neil’, or, my favourite, The Satintones telling The Shirelles it’s ‘Tomorrow and Always’ in answer to ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’.

Great pop is always in conversation with itself

Light In The Attic have just released a double album of Nancy’s best. After having only ever heard these recordings on budget label releases, it is a sonic revelation. As always with LITA the packaging is to die for.

April 1968, The Who have added three, count ’em, three Eddie Cochran numbers to the set-list for the Filmore East gigs – ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘My Way’ and ‘C’mon Everybody’. In 1967, between the release of ‘Pictures of Lily’ in April and The Who Sell Out in December they laid down two studio versions of ‘Summertime Blues’, the first as a potential single, the second, alongside ‘My Way’, for possible inclusion on the album. What was it with The Who and Cochran that led one American journalist to report that Townshend carried tapes of the rocker wherever he goes?

The band were not alone in making a down shift in gears back to rock ’n’ roll as a reaction to the swerve taken during the high-days of psychedelia. The Beatles, the Stones and The Move, among others, felt the curve away from the music’s founding roots was too steep and attempted a recalibration, but if The Who were following a general trend then their latching on to Cochran, if not unique, had a depth and reach that exceeded the likes of Blue Cheer.

Nik Cohn thought Cochran played ‘pure rock’, whatever that might be, and he was ‘a composite of a generation . . . a generalised 50s blur’. Greil Marcus considered ‘Summertime Blues’ the ‘grammar book of rock ’n’ roll language’, but you might say the same of Gene Vincent and ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. Or maybe not, Vincent was too much of a greaser, much more of the pool hall punk than Cochran, whose performances and songs spoke more clearly to a suburban teenage dissatisfaction than to an urban disaffection. Cochran wrote teenage anthems, he worked the high school beat and the soda hop, Vincent came from the world of juke joints and honky tonks, he smelt of reefer and whiskey. In Cochran’s world, dad busted up your fun. Vincent was sui generis, without parents: it is unimaginable to think of him sitting down to Sunday dinner with mom and pop. The differences are there in their individual performances in The Girl Can’t Help It. Cochran is projected into the family home via the television set, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps are playing in some downtown rehearsal space uninvited to the party.

You might pull on Vincent’s leather jacket, like countless British rockers did, but you could only mirror back his stance and hang on to the microphone stand in a pose that mimicked him. You couldn’t better Gene Vincent at being Gene Vincent. But Cochran, his stance and pose, The Who could own. They could remake him to fit their purpose, with Townshend incorporating, as Charlie Gillett wrote, the rock ’n’ roller’s ‘chunky, resentful guitar’, while Daltrey and Entwistle could play teenage parts with a knowing wink as a counter to Moon’s arrested development.

a very rare tri-centre promo edtion . . . a homage to the original London release I believe