“Join Together” - The Who
(Words/music: Pete Townshend, available on Thirty Years of Maximum R&B, MCA 1994)

“Join Together” evokes mixed feelings in me as someone who things about music.  As a song, “Join Together” doesn’t belong among the Who’s best songs yet sits right at the top of their second tier.  The mouth harp and the penny whistle near the end makes it a little goofy, but overall it’s a fine rock single propelled along by Keith Moon’s start/stop drumming.  I’m talking about the ideas that the song presents about the role of music.  “Join Together,” released as a single in 1972, was part of Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse project – a rock opera (that later became the songs on Who’s Next) about a dystopian future where music was the only refuge from a large, internet-like “grid” that all of humanity was connected to (Wikipedia probably explains it a little better).  The song suggests that music, in particular live music, serves as a uniting force.  I wholeheartedly agree with this idea; concerts provide an opportunity to leave behind the stress of our everyday lives and join a bunch of strangers for a night of music we all love.  I’m a fairly friendly guy, but I’m much more likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a concert than I am in the supermarket.  Even if we have similarities in both instances (“oh, you like peanut butter too?”), there seems to be a more immediate and natural connection with strangers with music as a common ground.  Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy has compared live music to religious services in a number of interviews, and undoubtedly he’s talking about the communal aspect of these shows – how a group of people can put everything else aside for an evening to “join together” with everyone else.

So I’m on board with the song’s main idea, but I’m not as quick to buy the first line in the last verse - “It’s the singer not the song / that makes the music move along.”  In the context of Townshend’s Lifehouse, the band is the essential uniting force.  However, taking “Join Together” as a mission statement makes accepting this line a bit tougher for me.  Over the last six months, I’ve been looking at individual songs and tried to figure out what makes them tick (or, at least, why I like them).  Occasionally, I slip into a tangential story, but I try to return back to the song.  Yes, I’ve talked a lot about specific performances or interpretations, and I agree that sometimes a song becomes better with the right performer behind it – it’s hard to doubt that certain people “own” certain songs, whether they wrote them or they’re covering them.  I’d also like to think that the opposite is true – that certain songs (to a degree) transcend performance.  Of course, it’s possible to butcher even the best songs, but some songs don’t need a specific performer’s gift in order to fulfill it’s potential.  Perhaps it’s just the right chords or the right melody sequence.  Maybe it’s the song’s ability to tap into something about our shared human existence.  Regardless, just as there are performers that make certain songs sound better, there are certain songs that transcend their singers.  If the singer makes the music move along, the song is the essential roadmap – and without a set of directions, the singer’s going nowhere.

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