Songfacts®:

• Like many early songs by The Who, "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" captures the band enjoying the unfettered freedom of youth: they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. Pete Townshend, who wrote the lyric, described it as "anti-middle age, anti-boss class, and anti-young marrieds."
• Townshend thought up the title while listening to a Charlie Parker album. Parker, known as "bird," sounded free when he played.
• This was The Who's second single, following "I Can't Explain." Their producer at the time was Shel Talmy, who could wrangle a lot of noise into something coherent. After "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" was released, the group made their first album with Talmy: My Generation. The title track to that one was another feat of controlled chaos and a defining hit for the band, but The Who had their manager, Kit Lambert, produce their next one, breaking their contract with Talmy and setting off a legal battle that ended up giving Talmy royalties on every Who recording into 1971.
• This contains one of the first uses of feedback on a record. The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey recalled to Uncut magazine October 2001: "We were doing this feedback stuff, even before that. We'd be doing blues songs and they'd turn into this freeform, feedbacky, jazzy noise. Pete was getting all these funny noises, banging his guitar against the speakers. Basically, the act that Hendrix is famous for came from Townshend, pre-'I Can't Explain.'"
  
  "'Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere' was the first song when we attempted to get that noise onto a record and that was a good deal of time before Hendrix had even come to England," Daltrey continued. "The American pressing plant sent it back thinking it was a mistake. We said, 'No, this is the f---ing noise we want. CUT IT LOUD!'"
• This is a rare songwriting collaboration between Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, who share the writing credits. Most Who songs were written by Townshend alone.
• Nicky Hopkins played piano. A session man at the time, he would go on the work with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.