Song · The Who
“Substitute” by The Who
From the EP The Who (1967)
“Substitute” by The Who appears on 20 radio countdowns from 10 stations between 1991 and 2023. It was first released in 1967 on the EP The Who. Its best result is #48 on the Virgin Radio Top 500 Songs of All-Time (December 2004). In the combined RockLists rankings it is #2,519 alternative song of all time.
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"Substitute" was the Who's March 1966 single, a Pete Townshend song that climbed to number five in Britain and packs a lot of swagger into a few minutes of chiming, cocky power pop. Townshend got hooked on the word from Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' 1965 hit "The Tracks of My Tears" and decided it deserved a song of its own. The verse riff came from somewhere even less likely: "Where Is My Girl" by Robb Storme & The Whispers, a single he'd been handed to review for the New Musical Express that November.
The American release in April used a different vocal take that swapped out a line about race in the chorus for something tamer. Pitchfork later ranked it 91st among the 200 greatest songs of the 1960s.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
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