Blue Red and Grey Pete Townshend Fueled by Pete Townshend ' s high octane power chords and ambitious operatic album structures , The Who by 1975 were the most important and most artistically successful extant rock band . The Beatles had broken up five years earlier . The Stones were lost in a creative wilderness . Southern rock , led by the Allman Brothers , had introduced a new element of virtuosity to rock , but it never tackled grand themes with the force of The Who . So , it came as somewhat of a surprise when Townshend retrenched and delivered The Who By Numbers , a brief set of personal , nearly confessional songs that left critics scratching their heads . Today , By Numbers stands as respected part of The Who ' s canon . It by no means reaches the heights of Who ' s Next and most of its predecessors , but it ' s also superior to anything that came after . One of its most enduring songs is Blue Red and Grey , a simple , lifeaffirming number sung by Townshend and supported by an unlikely for The Who ukulele and haunting , muted trumpet . The rest of the band and , indeed , Townsend ' s electric guitar sits out while Pete sings this simple paean to love and how it can infuse every second of life with delight . There ' s no other Who song quite like Blue Red and Grey , and I suppose that it ' s arguably a Pete Townsend solo tune inserted into a Who album . And yet . Pete had already embarked on his solo career . Who Came First was three years old , and the brilliant Rough Mix was twoyears imminent . There were other outlets for the song , so I prefer to think that he wanted it on a Who album for a reason . Maybe he wanted his listeners to look past the usual Townshend themes of angst , anger , and the fraught relationship between star and audience . Maybe he wanted to remind us of the simpler joys of living in a context that guaranteed a larger listenership than a solo album . Or maybe Blue Red and Grey is a simple leavening of the confessional tone that dominates so much of By Numbers . No matter , it ' s a terrific and sensitive song , an anomaly in The Who catalogue , perhaps , but also perhaps all the more likable for that .