How to follow Tommy? In album terms, we know that The Who’s next release was the classic concert recording Live At Leeds, and then, after the ill-starred Lifehouse sessions, 1971’s revered Who’s Next. But just after the taping of that Leeds University gig, and before its release as an LP, Pete Townshend’s next creative expression was a non-album single whose title reflected his increasingly desperate search for spiritual fulfilment.

That song was “The Seeker,” released as a U.K. single on March 20, 1970 and on April 25 in the U.S. Recorded in the January at IBC Studios in London, it was prompted by a real-life experience that Townshend and his then-wife Karen had had on a tourist walk around San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1967.

There, they had a close encounter with a wild-eyed Vietnam War veteran who, as Townshend recalled in his Who I Am autobiography, grabbed Karen’s arm and wouldn’t release it, “gazing at her like he’d found his Holy Mother.” In the lyrics of “The Seeker,” the narrator calls himself “a really desperate man,” searching for answers and asking in vain for help from Dylan, The Beatles, and Timothy Leary.

It was only in retrospect that Townshend recognized how the song foretold, as he put it, “the desperate, chaotic and increasingly fragmentary nature of my life over the next 20 years.” As Roger Daltrey sang in the hook, “I won’t get to get what I’m after ’til the day I die.”

The band’s performance on “The Seeker” was augmented by ever-in-demand session A-lister Nicky Hopkins on piano. Cash Box wrote: “This side shows the Who still operating with blistering instrumental thrust, but turning to lyrics more meaningful than before. AM and FM food for thought and play.”

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In a 2012 article in American Songwriter, Jim Beviglia wrote: “One of the ingenious things about the song is how Townshend married those downbeat themes to a typically bruising Who rock arrangement. Roger Daltrey sounds like the toughest S.O.B. on two feet as he bellows above the relentless rhythm section of John Entwistle and Keith Moon.”

Featuring a rare solo composition by Daltrey, “Here For Now,” on the B-side, the single reached No.19 in the U.K., where it was The Who’s tenth Top 20 hit there. Billboard’s review said of “The Seeker”: “Driving rock item from the pen of Peter Townsend [sic] has all the ingredients to put the group back up the Hot 100 in short order.”

The new release peaked at No.44 on that chart, also reaching the Top 20 in several European countries, and went on to be included on the November 1971 compilation Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. By June, The Who were scaling the U.K. Top 3 with Live At Leeds and performing Tommy at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.

Buy or stream “The Seeker” on the Who Hits 50! compilation.