A blast of brass and a choir through a modulation effect intones Monday. Blast. Tuesday .... and so on. And then from the silence comes the trumpet of the Apocalypse fading in with a single droning note before the drums kick in and the band crashes to life. Someone (see below) sings about disorientation and going to Armenia City in the Sky as the churning rock drives around him and the trumpet (is it a backward guitar or Entwistle on the French horn?). Pure energy and light.
Rising through the fade are the same cybermen choir as at the beginning. It adds a sinister bent to thing until it plays out as a jingle for "wonderful Radio London. Whoopee."
If you know the Who well enough to try and guess who sings lead in the track be apprised that it is not Keith Moon singing the kind of falsetto he used on the previous album's I Need You. It's the song's co-author Speedy Keen. If you look him up you might stop at the information that he was Pete Townshend's chauffeur. Well, he was also an aspirant songwriter and this was his hell of a break. You'll also hear him on Thunderclap Newman's massive one-off hit Something in the Air.
This isn't trivia; it has a lot to do with the way this album presents itself. First, there's the radio format. Sell Out is a homage and a piss take on the pirate radio stations that were boarding and pillaging the audiences who would otherwise have been doled out tiny morsels of new rock music at a time when the form in the UK was undergoing an explosive upsurge in creativity and innovation the like of which has never been seen again (and was barely imaginable before). It's a celebration but it's a cheeky one. The Radio London ads are genuine and the band do their own and it can be difficult to tell if the first bars of a track are going to be about love or deodorant. One of the consequences of this is that the band itself, surfacing and submerging with the ads, sacrifices its identity. It's no accident that the singer is hard to pick from the opening track. This is radio. It's a rock record. But it's radio. They are the same. Why? Because The Who Sell Out. It's like the Beatles giving one of their most adventurous albums the dismissive title of Revolver and then pretended they weren't even the Beatles but Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Who are going a step further and daring you to buy something that admits it's just more product. The cover art has already told you that, though. Two band members per side in mock ad photo shots with the kind of square-but-there copy about the person and the product. No false fake advertising here.
A real trumpet (Entwistle) barps out a brass band tune as Moon tattoos along beneath. "Wot's for tea, mum?" a high kid's voice that could be anyone in the band. Theme again but with more arrangement. "What's for tea, darling?" intones a posh voice that might be Townshend. Theme with even more arrangement. "Darling, I said what's for tea?" Theme, bigger. "Wass fer tea, dawghtah?" comes a depraved old man voice that could only be Keith Moon. The brass band is by this time massive with trills and booming kettle drums right up to the chorus of "Heinz Baked Beans." It's still funny.
A droning male voice choir from a chaving cream ad: "more music more music more music more music."
Maryanne With the Shaky Hands crashes in but turns out to be an acoustic number somewhere between the Everly Brothers and D.H. Lawrence. If it were in a different language it would sound like a pretty love song instead of a smutty one about a girl who gives handjobs.
A bashing workout on the drumkit with the name Premier Drums! chanted.
A big brassy intro is hijacked by a wobble and stylus scratching.
Odorono begins like a proper Who song with steely clunking chords and a supple descant on the guitar. Townshend comes in like a boy soprano, singing about a cabaret singer who tries to impress a handsome regular and does until he leans in for a kiss. He begs off and beats a retreat. She should've used Odorono. It works much better as a song than a joke with a lovely extension ("she'd seen him there" "it ended there") the second one with a perfectly judged choir behind it. Still, when you can throw material like that away ...
A lovely clear female vocal that sounds like its owner is singing in a mink stole over lush strings: "It's smoooooooth sailing with the highly successful sound of wonderful Radio London."
Tattoo starts straight away, jammed up against the choral ending of Odorono but abruptly different with a spidery acoustic figure (doubled with a rich electric guitar through Vox amp tremolo) that uses fretted and open strings, ingeniously playing an F twice but making it sound like two different chords, which descends and just gets more interesting as it lands on a Bb 9th. Daltrey, himself in choirboy mode, sings of a boy who decides, along with his brother, to get a tattoo to become a man. Their dad beats one because his says "mother" and their mum beats the other for getting a naked woman. The narrator goes through life believing in the power of his tattoos and even marries a tattooed woman. A slighter social commentary than many from Townshend but, considering how the guy in the song is so committed to his individuality, the tale of triumph over trivia works. Plus, it's a winner of a song that the band kept in their live repertoire into the stadium era.
A choir plagally intones: "Radio London reminds you, go to the church of your choice."
As the last note is out the staggered bright guitar riff of Our Love Was starts its chiming descent. The singing of the title over this but not the full chorus that will be also sound like a commercial. But it's a mid-pacer about the rocky waves of love with a doubled guitar riff that first goes down the dark steps but then winds back on itself as the chorus soars along with the lyrics. There's a gorgeous acapella breakout chorus of "love love love long" stretches over the band crashing in again as Townshend glides back in with the verse. Then that gets another boost with a clean slide solo (on the mono original) or a big screamy Jeff Beck sonic missle (on the stereo version). Each verse is differently arranged but not for show. Whether it's a Beach Boys choir or Entwistle's French horn filling the space under the chorus as it sustains to a real ache the new texture feels like an extension rather than flash. It's sheer brilliance, actually.
A quick mashed garble of station ID ending in a huge American male voice: "BIG L." The band provides the winking beer ad "speak easy, drink easy, pull easy" and then the second of two ads that actually got them products from the names dropped in the jingles (see also Premier Drums). "Hold you group together with Rotosound strings."
And then the first song on the album that sounds individual. I Can See For Miles. The band crashes in with huge raunchy chords, epic drums and Entwistle's giant bass. There is a massive landscape before us. Daltrey comes in: "I know you've deceived me now here's a surprise. I know that you have 'cause there's magic in my eyes. I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles." The last line seems to lift like an airliner as the chords and vocal harmonies rise through a kind of minor scale complicated by 9ths and 4ths. It sounds as mysterious as Eight Miles High but it just keeps ascending as the the vengeful jilted boy at its centre reaches the clouds. This is a massive rock number for a band that hadn't really got as rough and tough since their first album. The folklore has it that Paul MacCartney read an interview with Townshend who was boasting that the band had just recorded their nastiest, dirtiest track yet. Paul's response was Helter Skelter. Does that really work? The timeline puts about a year between a prerelease interview of a 1967 album and a 1968 Beatles recording session. Maybe Paul just kept it on ice. In any case.
A plinky country band fades in before John Entwistle tells us about the Charles Atlas course with (giant reverb) "DYNAMIC TENSION" will turn you ... into .... (his Boris the Spider growl) "a beast of a man!"
A plonking piano starts I Can't Reach You which settles into a mid-paced rocker with lean clean guitar lines and a Townshend vocal. I always thought it was about an old man and a young woman but now that I finally refer to the lyric it seems more about a failure to connect as a list of differences rolls out, leading to a middle eight in which it finally gets physical but his mind tears them apart. The gentle pace and boy-choir of the final line of each chorus (very Tommy, have a listen). Listened to with this in mind there is a real sense of exhaustion that comes through the pastel candy of the arrangement.
John Entwistle leads the band in another of the originally produced ads. This one is an acne cream and is always funny.
Relax starts with an organ and then glides down into a hippy hymn about relaxing and sharing. Like the opening track it comes close to outright psychedelia. Not much more to say about it from here except I's always surprised to hear it appear after decades of being familiar with it and it's always a pleasant surprise. Groovy.
In Silas Stingy John Entwistle pulls another from his pirate's chest of romper room gothic. The miser man of the title, tormented by the children of the neighbourhood spends so much money protecting his fortune that he goes broke. A funny story but the delivery and descriptions are the key. Over Hammer movie organ Entwistle declares in clipped radio acting: Once upon a time there lived an old miser man by the name of Silas Stingy. He carried all his money in a little black box." Then the Shepherd's Bush choir kicks in with traded lines: "with a big padlock, which was heavy as a rock. All the little kids would shout when Silas was about." Then they go into a lovely round: "Money money money bags (money money money bags) there goes mingy stingy." Two different middle eights and more choruses later and you've got a song so far out of the flow it fits perfectly. I know, I know, Tommy and all but I really wish John Entwistle had written a stage musical at this point. He was blazing.
Straight into Sunrise and some lovely Bossa Nova acoustic from Townshend as his helium falsetto intones with a strong first line: "You take away the breath I was keeping for sunrise." At first the crush like admiration he has for the other makes it seem like another song to her. Then (I should check this) this might well be around the time of discovering Meher Baba and the beginning of his devotional life.While I care not for any religious conviction I am impressed by Townshend's scene setting. It's so cinematic. Big and beautiful sunrise but the sense of the infinite beyond it both dejects him and sends him soaring above the droopy old skinly shape he was. Because it can so easily hide behind a love song he can lend a sense of powerful awe and serve both. It does make me turn back to I Can't Reach You and think on't again.
Rael bursts to life with clashing cymbals and a falsetto choir (if you listen to the stereo version you'll hear Townshend struggling unpleasantly with his pitch). The story is about the red chins in their millions invading Rael home of the narrator's religion. Nothing devotional about this one, it's an odd imaginary scenario whereby the godless Chinese (Red Chins ... erm....) invade the holy land and stir the latter into defensive action. But things take an interesting turn when the narrator says that as the odds are stacked against him doing his best with almost guarantee his failure. He then ponders desertion, giving instructions to a captain to look for signs he will leave to let everyone know whether he shall return or has fled. The several sections that suggest different scenes of characters reminded the contemporary listener of the mini opera from the previous album, A Quick One. Today's audient will receive a first run at Tommy with the big bass and kettle drums of the theme from that opera's tracks Sparks and the Underture. While Rael is never less than listenable it suffers from its own context in place between the brash modernist rockers thrashing out a tale of infidelity and the massive vision of the cosmos inside a traumatised boy who rises to Messianic glory. Rael feels both heavily worked on and unfinished. At nearly six minutes of precious LP side, that's going to be it's own skip recommendation.
Finally, if you leave some of the versions going you'll hear the band or part thereof looped as they say "track records" until it fades. A joke on The Beatles, their own new record label and the phenomenon of cracked records.
The pirate radio concept weakens after a few tracks and as the band take over the kitsch of this with their own ads it starts sounding like the follow-up to A Quick One rather than a blastin' new concept album for the modern world (pop and postpop as pop). The comparison song against song does not favour Sell Out. There is nothing as strong as So Sad About Us or Whiskey Man. The attempted excursion into epic pop loses its identity and settles into an uncompelling instrumental, having none of the violence, musicality or tightness of the previous one. Even within the concept of sellling out and making a record that sounded like commercial radio works uneasily between coyness and satire. And the irritatingly muddy production leaves it well behind the crispness of the previous album and those of its contemporaries like Sgt Pepper or Something Else by the Kinks (which I'll get to soon enough in this series). The overall effect, if listened to as a concept, is patchy at best but mostly a long winded failure winding down from fun to incomprehensible sludge.
However, listen to it as a set of songs and you'll probably enjoy the hell out of it. The great songs (I Can See for Miles or Tattoo) work in or out of context and the flow is fun with the silly mix of real and fake ads. There is an easily visible progression from A Quick One, particularly regarding the humour of it, and from itself forward to Tommy. The Who finally broke through to the USA in this year and they grew as a live unit with an ever increasing audience, one so large that only something as massive as a Tommy or Who's Next would satisfy. This album has its cultists and I can see why but knowing the power of what was still an outstanding singles band versus a toe-testing albums group The Who Sell Out hangs in the breeze made by the albums either side of it, swaying to each and occasionally touching but never quite folding in with them.
Listening notes:
My first hearing of this for years was on a home taped cassette. I later bought a copy of the twinned Sell Out and A Quick One as a double LP. Then when the mid-'90s CD remaster came out with extra tracks and the the two CD Deluxe package with a mono mix and more extra tracks. Most recently, I've got the legal Hi-Res Download of the mono mix which makes the most sense as a package; it's tight and solid and all the ads are in the right places. I frequently checked the stereo from the Deluxe set as there are some arrangement differences (including a completely different guitar solo in Our Love Was). Of these I would recommend the mono in 24 bit 96 kHz as it's the purest (non-compressed) representation you'll get of the original. Try the vinyl if you prefer the noise with the music. Otherwise the Deluxe CD set will deliver fine results.
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