Track #25 - “Let My Love Open the Door” by Pete Townshend (1980)

From the album Empty Glass

Music and lyrics by Pete Townshend

Performed by:

Pete Townshend – lead vocals, guitar, synthesizer

John Bundrick – keyboards

Tony Butler – bass

Simon Philips - drums

US Billboard Hot 100 - #9

US Year-End Billboard Hot 100 - #59

I have only the key to your heart

I can stop you from falling apart

Try today you’ll find this way

Come on and give me a chance to say

Let my love open the door

It’s all I’m living for

Release yourself from misery

There’s only one thing gonna set you free

That’s my love

That’s my love

 On May 10, 2010, the New York Times published an obituary for one Bob Mercer, who had died a few days before, at the age of 65. The exact headline was, “Bob Mercer, Executive who signed the Sex Pistols, Dies at 65.” My guess is that unless you follow the business side of popular music you probably have never heard of Bob Mercer. In addition to the Sex Pistols, the UK born Mercer was responsible for signing Queen, Kate Bush, Olivia Newton-John, and was also associated with rock icons Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd, and even helped Jimmy Buffett start his own record label. I will assume you have heard most of those names before. But Bob Mercer was also the person behind bringing a pop culture cornerstone to the US from the UK, a musical brand name so ubiquitous that if you owned a CD player in the 90s and 2000s and loved popular music, I can say with some degree of certainty that there was one of the brand’s CDs in your collection. I’m talking about the NOW That’s What I Call Music series, which Mercer was tasked with starting up in the US in 1998. The NOW series began in the UK in 1983, with the first release containing 30 hit singles by various popular UK artists of the day. Other releases followed, sometimes up to 3 per year, their presence on the UK album charts so dominant, that a new chart was created to accommodate compilation-only releases. To date, there have been 114 official UK releases, including spinoffs, (NOW Dance, NOW Christmas), special editions (Reggae, Disney, Eurovision, to name just a few), and multiple re-issues of popular releases. In 1998, Mercer was hired by the execs at NOW to bring the series to the US, as part of a joint venture between several record labels. Mercer was an expert at television marketing and used his record label connections to quickly make the NOW series a huge commercial success in the US. To date the series has sold about 77 million copies in the US. I have purchased several of the CDs in the past, including the 1st NOW That’s What I Call Christmas edition in the US, released in 2001. If you still own a CD player and want a current snapshot of popular music and what might be a future hit, the NOW series is perfect. There are even some editions available on vinyl. Before digital music, the NOW CDs were essentially curated playlists. Nowadays, I suppose you could get the track listing off the latest NOW edition and just make a playlist on Apple Music or Spotify. But if you’re still in the market for CDs, you can find them in Best Buy, Target or Amazon. The NOW series had its precursors – some of us can remember those late night Time-Life commercials that hawked CD collections containing, among others, classic disco, 70s soul, country, and one of the most popular, Sounds of the 80s Collection. You have no idea how many times I almost dialed that number to buy the first CD for $9.99, with future CDs coming in at $16.99, no obligation, cancel anytime…operators are standing by!! Most of these collections though almost never offered opportunities for discovery, especially if you were uber-familiar with the genre of music in a particular collection. The NOW series did offer what they deemed “future hits” on their CDs, so there was a chance for some “What is this?” moments. Time-Life CDs were more about the past and having all that music from a particular era or genre in one place. But no discussion of music compilations would be complete without talking about the one that started it all, K-Tel Records. K-Tel was started in 1966 by Philip Kives, a Canadian demo salesman who basically invented the infomercial, and the practice of selling consumer goods live in real-time on TV. In 1966, Kives bought the distribution rights for a country music compilation, 25 Country Hits, and was able to sell all 180,000 copies that were pressed. Kives quickly realized there was a market for these albums and set out to purchase the rights to individual tracks to press future albums. The plan was a huge success; other titles followed, including 25 Polka Greats in 1970, which unbelievably sold 1.5 million units (I’m not kidding, look it up.) At $4.99 or $5.99 per album, it was a better deal than purchasing individual single 7” records, and you didn’t have to buy an entire album if you only liked one song by a particular artist: very similar to the NOW series. And the TV commercials ran all the time, each one playing snippets of the tracks included on the album, and letting potential buyers know there was a new K-Tel record available at their local K-Mart. I remember these commercials vividly. They ran while I was watching Batman or Gilligan’s Island reruns, and I can recall seeing them during Saturday morning cartoons sandwiched between the sugar cereal ads. These albums were also in my house growing up; the K-Tel disco compilations were extremely popular in the late 70s. Some of the K-Tel collections my mom had lying around: Disco Mania, High Energy, Disco Nights, and Hot Nights & City Lights. (Wouldn’t you have loved to be in those marketing meetings when they came up with these titles?) K-Tel moved a lot of records in the disco era because while the songs were good, and some are classics now, there were a lot of one-hit wonders back then. Why buy an entire album that contained just one hit and nine filler songs when you can get multiple hits for less money? That is the exact philosophy I used to get my hands on one particular song in 1981, but I ended up finding another song that would have much more of an impact. From there, the music of one of biggest rock acts would follow…but this all starts with a quirky new wave hit from one of the most experimental and unique bands to come out of the 80s. This all starts with “Whip It” by Devo.

Everyone in my fifth-grade class in 1981 loved “Whip It”. I guess to ten-year-old ears, it was probably the weirdness of it all that made it so appealing; the distorted synth loop, and the electronic drums made it unique even back then. But it was those lyrics we used to sing on the school bus and that made us giggle that sealed it: When a problem comes along, You must whip it…Before the cream sets out too long, you must whip it. To a ten-year old, that’s pretty hilarious. I would not see the video for “Whip It” for several months; don’t forget, this is before MTV was even on the air. More on the “Whip It” video later. But hearing the song on the radio was enough to make me want to own it so I could sing those quirky lyrics whenever I wanted. So, in the spring of 1981, I decided that I needed to find and buy the song “Whip It”; the problem would be getting my hands on it. If you remember I had already swindled my mom into buying me the Queen tape back in the fall, so I had a feeling she might be on to me. Besides, I now had my own allowance and could probably afford a record or tape, but did I want to spend it on an entire Devo album when I really didn’t know much about Devo? I would soon find a solution to my dilemma by accident while I was at the Sun-Vet Mall in Holbrook with my mom, specifically while I was looking in Record World. I was about to cave and just buy the 45 record for “Whip It” when I noticed the display of K-Tel records and tapes. I picked one of the albums up and looked at the title: Full Tilt. There was a little tagline above it, which read, “Today’s top sounds moving…”. I know, ridiculously cheesy, but this is how K-Tel moved millions of records back then. I turned the cover over to look at the song titles, and there it was, Track 3: “Whip It”. I had to look at it twice; I couldn’t believe it, the Holy Grail, staring at me, along with 13 other songs, some of which I actually recognized. There was a Blondie song, “The Tide Is High” which I knew, and “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar, a song I used to hear on the radio all the time. At $5.99, this would be a decent investment, plus now I’d have “Whip It”. I found my mom in the store and told her I would be making a purchase. She took the record and turned it over in her hands, asked me if I had my allowance money on me, and accompanied me to the counter to make sure I received the correct change. Before long, I had the record in a slim white paper bag, and I was on my way home. Later that day, I put Full Tilt on my beige plastic record player, and let it play, listening to the Blondie song, and then a track called “Let My Love Open the Door”, by Pete Townshend. I had no idea who that was, but the song wasn’t bad. It was catchy, but more important, it was short, which meant “Whip It” would be playing soon. Finally, that new wave song with the quirky lyrics played, and I thought I had never been so happy. I even picked up the needle arm to play the song again, something my dad told me never to do since it could scratch the record or damage the needle itself. But I didn’t care; I had to hear “Whip It” again. I did listen to the rest of the record, even playing “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” twice. This continued for a few weeks. I would play the first three tracks, including “Whip It", and maybe skip a few, and always end with “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”. But after several listens, I started to wonder more and more about the second track, the song by the guy I had never heard of. It was exceptionally upbeat, with its great synthesizer intro, and lyrics that even at 10 years old, I could tell were sincere. And the voice sounded older, mature, and convincing. Who was Pete Townshend anyway? It would be months before I found out that Pete Townshend was a member of one of the most influential rock bands of all time and had been responsible for writing some of most iconic songs ever recorded. But for now, I had found a Pete Townshend song that I would learn decades later he didn’t consider one of his best, and that his manager hated. But in the fall of 1981, thanks to MTV, I finally figured it out: Pete Townshend was the driving force behind legendary rock band the Who.

I would not consider myself a huge fan of the Who, rather there are Who songs I love, and I understand how important they are in the canon of early rock and roll. When I think of the Who, I also tend to lump them in with other bands that came out of that era, namely Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and that’s probably unfair. The Who are pioneers of the power chord and of using shear volume in their shows, influencing later bands like Guns N Roses and the Clash. Pete Townshend’s guitar and songwriting styles also had an influence on the Beatles, with Paul McCartney and John Lennon citing Townshend as an inspiration behind their early compositions. Before he was 30, Pete Townshend had written the monumental rock opera Tommy, in 1969, and another concept album, the acclaimed Quadrophenia, in 1973. In 1971, the Who released Who’s Next, featuring three of the greatest rock songs ever recorded, all written by Townshend: “Baba O’Riley”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, and “Behind Blue Eyes”. When I was 11 though, I obviously knew none of this and only vaguely heard of the Who. I had not heard any of their most iconic music back then, and had a fleeting awareness of Tommy, but I could have bumped into Pete Townshend on the street and not had any idea who he was. In late 1981 though, that would all change. I may have mentioned that when MTV first launched, they didn’t have a deep catalog of music videos. They tended to play the same videos over and over, so when I first started watching MTV one of the bands that had many of those early videos was the Who, specifically a song called “You Better You Bet” from their 1981 album, Face Dances.  I must have seen that video several times a week, but while a pretty good song, from a decent album, “You Better You Bet” will not be on Pete Townshend’s tombstone. And since I didn’t even know they were responsible for all those iconic songs, if I heard them on radio station WBAB, which played the Who all the time, I never made the connection. Finally in late 1981, I heard a very familiar synthesizer riff as I was listening to MTV one day. I would sometimes play MTV in the background while I was doing my homework, and today I was knee deep in either math problems or some other after school torture when I stopped and looked up at the television. Was this the song from the K-Tel record? It was!! I totally recognized it, the upbeat tempo and the harmonies, and the mature voice singing those sincere lyrics. Then I looked at the TV closer; that guy looked very familiar. Was the guy doing the singing also the guitar player from “You Better You Bet”? It was!! I waited until the end of the video, but I already knew what I was going to see: “Let My Love Open the Door”, by Pete Townshend. So, there it was. Pete Townshend was the guitarist in the Who. “Let My Love Open the Door” was obviously his solo work so he did the singing, and that’s why I never made the connection. I decided a few days later to flip through my dad’s record collection and see if he had any Who records hiding in there. I had never heard any Who records on his stereo growing up, so my guess was that he didn’t have any, but it was worth a shot. After what seemed like going through 100 titles, I saw it…Tommy, the towering double album by the Who just sitting there. I can’t believe it had been here the whole time; it had survived our move from Brooklyn to Long Island only a year before, so he must have some kind of attachment to it. Yet I never knew him to play it, ever. So, that night when he got home from work, I showed him the record, and said, “Dad, you’ve had Tommy this whole time and you never play it…why?” I’ll never forget his reply: “Tommy? Ehhh, it’s two albums, it takes too long to listen to.” I stared at the album jacket, and wondered why someone wouldn’t want to listen to music for hours and hours; to me that was the best thing to do, ever. I asked him if I could borrow it, and he said I could, “Just be careful with it.” So, I listened to it. Was it long? Yes, it was two albums, and over an hour long and I didn’t understand most of it, but I could tell it was special, even back then. And what really blew my eleven-year-old mind was that this was the same person who wrote that little upbeat song that I first heard on a K-Tel compilation. It was the complete opposite to the dark story that is Tommy. Nevertheless, I finally realized that many of those great songs I was hearing on classic rock radio were the Who. I had essentially figured it all out backwards, hearing a solo song from Pete Townshend, not knowing who he was, and then discovering he was part of one of the greatest bands of all time, and then discovering Tommy, and the rest of the Who’s music. I also remember thinking that aside from that impromptu purchase of The Game by Queen, I had not owned a real album since Captain Fantastic, way back when I was five years old. I was getting a lot of my music from the radio and my parents’ record collection, and I thought that maybe it was time to figure out what I really liked when it came to music. Graduating past compilation albums and listening to more than just the hits would make me more of a serious music fan, which I wanted to be at some point. Someday I wanted to have an awesome record collection like my parents; it wasn’t going to happen if I kept buying K-Tel records.  After MTV premiered in August of 1981, they played “Let My Love Open the Door” almost as much as the Who videos. Since then, “Let My Love Open the Door” has appeared in countless movies, TV shows, and is still in heavy rotation on US radio. It remains one of my favorite songs ever. And while I’m not the biggest Who fan, Townshend’s solo effort led me right to their music; some of their tracks you can just turn up and feel those power chords, screeching vocals and maniacal drums threatening to crush your speakers. But if forced to choose, I might pick the song that Townshend himself called “just a ditty.” I suppose after you’ve written Tommy, "My Generation”, and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” you can brush off some of your other songs as “ditties.”

 Here’s the video for “Let My Love Open the Door.” It’s not the greatest quality but it still captures that little positive song I found by accident. Enjoy! 😊

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Next time…does it feel like you just put away your holiday decorations? Well break ‘em out again because we’ve got one more holiday song to talk about! This time the past meets the future when two icons team up to perform a Christmas standard.

P.S.

 You may be asking whatever happened to my fascination with that Devo track, “Whip It”. Well, I finally saw the video for “Whip It” on MTV, probably sometime in late 1981 and the video perfectly complements the song, though I wonder if that video should have been banned during daytime viewing hours. It wasn’t explicit, like Duran Duran’s “Girls On Film”, but there were some weird suggestive images. Aside from the band themselves being total nerds (black shorts and turtlenecks, and basically wearing flowerpots on their heads), there’s a random cast of characters in that video, including cowboys and cowgirls drinking beers, an old woman whipping a bowl of cream, a cross-eyed Asian girl attempting to shoot a beer can, and Devo singer Mark Mothersbaugh using an actual whip to snap the clothes off a terrified woman who seems like a hostage of sorts. Like I said, weird. Devo has said that they were “satirizing both the cowboy mythos and right-wing racist values”, and that it was a commentary on the election of then President Ronald Reagan, a former actor. Writer David Chiu of PopMatters has said of “Whip It”, that “If there was a Hall of Fame for early 80s New Wave music, Devo’s ‘Whip It’ would be shoo-in for induction,” and he also acknowledged that the video “was a staple of MTV during the then-fledgling channel’s early years,” and I 100% agree with that entire sentiment. Devo lead vocalist and songwriter Mark Mothersbaugh is now a successful composer for TV and film, having scored several Wes Anderson movies, The Lego Movie, and Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok. “Whip It” still holds a special place for me, and reminds me of those early days of growing up on Long Island. Here’s the video so you can check out the weirdness for yourself; don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Unlike Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones, or the Beatles, the other iconic bands that come from that time, when I think of the Who, I think of four distinct personalities coming together to form a band, rather than simply a cohesive band. To this day, I’m not sure why that is. To me, the Who has always been the genius and poetry of Pete Townshend, the bravado and roar of frontman Roger Daltrey, the quiet and steady innovation of bassist John Entwistle, and the too-big-for-this world personality and brilliance of drummer Keith Moon, and not one unit. Even when I hear the Who, I immediately hear the distinctive parts first, rather than the whole. But still, it’s all brilliant, and those songs still stand up today. After Moon’s death in September of 1978, he was replaced by Kenny Jones and the Who carried on. Bassist John Entwistle died in 2002 while the band was on tour, but again, Townshend and Daltrey have soldiered on with supporting musicians, and in 2019 they released their first album of new material in thirteen years, simply titled Who. Pete Townshend followed up Empty Glass with several more solo albums, live recordings, and compilations. Townshend’s “little ditty” has appeared in dozens of TV shows and movies, including Look Who’s Talking, Mr. Deeds, Along Came Polly, Jersey Girl, and Dan in Real Life. In fact, the song is so ubiquitous that Flood magazine did a piece on why Hollywood is so obsessed with it. You can find that here.

The company K-Tel still exists today, earning revenues from songs they distribute and license for use in commercials and TV shows. You can find some of the old K-Tel compilations for sale on eBay and other after market websites. After Full Tilt, I purchased a few more K-Tel records, including High Voltage, Hit Express, and Night Flight (we’ll take a pause here while you laugh it up at those titles because I know you want to!) From those K-Tel records, I would discover three artists that would help shape my musical taste in the early 1980s, and whose albums I would start my collection around: Styx, The Police and Daryl Hall & John Oates. Much more on those artists to come. And of course, you may remember my purchase of K-Tel’s Masters of Metal tape in 1984, my intro to Dio and other hard rock giants. Eventually I kept my promise to myself and built quite a record collection that were not compilations or hit collections. In fact, I have no idea what happened to any of those K-Tel records that I used to own. And the NOW series just keeps going, although the CDs don’t sell as well in the age of streaming music; the latest installment in the US was released in May of 2023. Like the K-Tel collections, you can find a lot of the older CD’s on after market websites. This is a great article from Mental Floss back in 2019 on the NOW series that’s worth checking out. And I feel I must leave you with a video of a Who performance, so here’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, recorded in 1978 at Shepperton Studios. Crank up those power chords. 😊

See you next time…

JS

6/13/2023