Writer: Pete Townshend
Producer: The Who with Glyn Johns
Recorded: 1971, Olympic Studios, London
Released: May 1971
| Players: | Pete Townshend—guitar Roger Daltrey–vocals John Entwistle–bass Keith Moon–drums |
| Album: | Who’s Next (MCA, 1974) |
“Behind Blue Eyes” was originally intended as a track for Pete Townshend's aborted Lifehouse project, an album and concert designed to spiritually bond performers and audience.
Townshend has said, “'Behind Blue Eyes' really is very off the wall because that was a song sung by the villain of the piece Lifehouse–the fact that he felt in the original story that he was forced into the position of being a villain whereas he felt he was a good guy.”
The song, a longtime Who concert staple, wasn't released as a single until 1972. It stumbled into the top 30 of the Billboard singles chart and dropped off.
“Behind Blue Eyes” is the best-known non-synthesizer song on Who's Next.
Townshend, in the 1996 biography Behind Blue Eyes by Geoffrey Giuliano, said: “I think there's a lot of vengeance involved in the insecurities writers have. I used the word 'vengeance' in 'Behind Blue Eyes' and the vengeance in a sense is saying, 'Listen, why don't you understand me without me saying all this stuff? Why don't you love me as I really am without me demonstrating who I really am?'”
Townshend, in the liner notes to the demos album Scoop, wrote, “I remember my wife saying she liked this one from the kitchen below after I had finished the harmony vocals. The band later added a passion and a fire that really made it blossom from the sad song it appears to be here in Townshend's sparse demo into the proud self-expose it became on Who's Next. Not a personal song at all, or at least not intended to be.”
The song's central idea–an outcast feeling bitter because nobody bothers to get to know him–became a continuing theme in Townshend's music. “I'm One” and “The Real Me,” from Quadrophenia, plus parts of The Who By Numbers, cover the same ground.
