A school friend's sister had a few first release albums from the 60s and taped The Who Sell Out for me. It was a puzzle. I Can See For Miles was on it and a few other greats like Tattoo and Armenia City in the Sky. There was a lot of fun with radio jingles but so much of the album sounded soft and poppy. Wayne didn't bring in the cover art which would have cleared up a few things but my first listen was a dissapointment. The album starts with bravado but loses puff and deflates for the second half. Though I now think more highly of it, I still think Sell Out is a little less than the sum of its parts.
I approached Tommy through this but more immediately through the movie and soundtrack album which had beefed and candied it up for the 70s, Townshend's synth orchestras blazing louder than his power chords. While I liked the dark mysteries of it at the time I couldn't quite let the whole thing play at one sitting and ended up playing the fun tracks.
Later, when I'd moved to Brisbane and evidence of my brother's and others' collections lay around the house in odd places as though hidden by addicts, I found a cassette of Who's Next. It was wound to somewhere in the middle of the tape. I put it in and heard some tracks that sounded soft or quirky (Going Mobile), took it out and didn't bother with it again. Post punk was on the radio, it wove into the exciting politics of dissent during the Bjelke Petersen years and some goofy little ditty like the one I heard was a loser out of the gate.
In the 90s with a steady income I began retracing steps and picking up stray threads from eras I only knew incompletely or not at all. Come payday, I'd grab something current, something pre-classical and a classique de roque. The remasters of the Byrds back catalogue were mighty and followed by The Kinks and The Who. I snapped up A Quick One and Sell Out without a second thought and then came to this one. It was affordable and I'd learned in the interim that it was considered their best 70s album. So I got it, too.
I'd heard the more famous numbers from it by this time but never up close. The overall sound was meatier, beatier, bigger and bouncier than anything from the 60s. The opener, Baba O'Riley breaks into a big deep stadium rock anthem and its refrain of "teenage wasteland" sounded contrived and embarrassing at first. As the tracks moved on it occured to me the same way that post Syd Pink Floyd still does, it sounded older. I played it through, heard the bonus tracks and packed it up again.
But when I came to consider it among the candidates for the continuation of this series I had acquired a hi res version and put it on to see if a minty new mastering would make a difference. And it did.
Baba O'Riley starts with a sound that's still weird, a kind of skidding diddlydiddle figure on a keyboard which sounds like a tapeloop until you realise that it's also going through slow paced changes. It's being played as recorded. There is a curly abruptness to it that sounds like classical Indian music but it's as electronic as Switched on Bach. It's joyful and skittish but alien and troubling.
A piano comes in and makes sense of the changes by making them obvious. I-V-IV/F-C-Bb, a rock and roll staple but here in this exotic setting massive and heralding. Moon's drums kick in, restless and ready and when Daltrey bellows his opening line "Out here in the fields I fight for my meals" John Entwistle's giant bass joins the procession, grounding it but driving it on in unison with the piano; this is not the strut and raunch of My Generation it's sheer grandeur, massive, architectural. Townshend's powerchords roar along with the three chord pattern, making the waves tidal.
And then it subsides settling gently into the restless deedling which is now more a texture than a motif. Over this comes Townshend's choir boy tenor: "don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only teenage wasteland." This, the sound alone, alsmost despite the words, can still choke me up.
And then BAM it's back into the anthem, propelled but still comfortable enough with its own power to make a stately progress, now Entwistle and Moon tense rather than relax into their respective virtuosities and the procession spreads and continues. Really, it could do one more verse and easily fade from here. But there's another lull for a bright fanfaring solo and the big chorus again. And then a development section with the diddlydiddle and the trumpet like guitar ushering in a gypsy viola which plays from a slow snakey figure to a frantic Romany knees up with Moon and Entwistle driving it on to a sudden stop. And it's "what just happened?"
The title is a compound of the song's influences Townshend's spiritual leader Meher Baba and avant garde composer Terry Riley. The track before you know that is already impressive with its easy gravity shifts and rangey aural pallette. But once you do know that unlike any of his contemporaries' statements of spiritual affiliation Townshend took his to the stratosphere; unlike those other dabblings in avantgardism that put a backwards recording here and musique concrete there Townshend used the electronics of Terry Riley in a way that no one, prog rockers included, had applied them to rock music before. And then it still emerges as rock music, uncompromised, enriched. Hearing this in 1971 would have been like hearing Tomorrow Never Knows in '66, Venus in Furs in '67 or Whole Lotta Love in '69. It's the sound of exploration and discovery. And it's still rock music.
The soft riverside strummed acoustic guitars and moaning backwards electric at the beginning of Bargain promise a strange relief from the previous onslaught but this kicks into a huge powerchord driven anthem of spiritual commitment that is written loosely enough to apply to a lover if religion turns you off (as it does me). And I mean commitment: "to win you I'd stand naked, stoned and stabbed. I call that a bargain, the best I've ever had." Daltrey's soaring scream, repeating that last line seems to leave the atmosphere as his earthly self begins the devotion anew back on earth. After two verses we're back to the opening langour and Townshend's choir boy confession changes the mood but not the music, deepening the central thought. A brief wail of synthesisers low in the mix glides down to the last verse, same as the first which fades into a jammy vamp before falling back into the riverbank reverie again which in turn is wedded to the rockier elements by first Moon's drums, Entwistle's bass and Townshend's guitar. Yes, you can have the violence of the rock song but you also get the meditation. We end cleanly on a gentle shining acoustic guitar. Even after Tommy and its complexity this is a step beyond.
What can appear as restlessness in the arrangements emerges as sophistication as the music provides setting for the lyrics that goes well beyond the bash through the verse progression, bash through the chorus, thrill with the guitar solo and take the bridge to the end and fade. Townshend's lessons in orchestration from his reading and the influence of co-manager Kit Lambert (son of composer and English classical champion Constant Lambert) had come to the point where, just in time for the '70s, a song on an album was as important as any other; they had to flow in sequence and make a whole and to really serve the message of each and all, the music had to respond to it, not just hammer it in.
So, even Love Ain't for Keeping whose title might suggest promiscuity is actually about sharing love with the rest of humanity and manages to be a Moon driven rocker even when the guitar doesn't rise above an acoustic (with a solo straight out of a merrie Pentangle album) and is carried along by a light-filled choir. Song is Over starts like a plaintive show tune but soars to the stadium cumulus at the first chorus. The minimalist one chord thrash instrumentals of The Kids Are Alright or I'm a Boy have become breakout sections with rolling piano and distant synthesisers ringing like string section. The final couplet about the note pure and easy like a breath rippling by sung in the distance by Daltrey over a guitarless trio sounds like a finale. There's a point to that which I'll get to. Getting in Tune is another show tune that rocks out in the chorus and returns to the Broadway spotlight for the reprised opening verse. It's easy to forget that the two last songs (which are easy to confuse until you know the album better) were separated by an LP side.
The epic scale they are played on would fatigue from evenness were it not for John Entwistle's My Wife. Entwistle contributed some of the most enjoyable numbers to the Who's repetoire with their gothic comedy just this side of parody like Boris the Spider, Whiskey Man or Heaven and Hell. When moments that Townshend couldn't bring himself to write for Tommy came up he gave them to the Ox who gave us the paedophilic Uncle Ernie and psychopathic Cousin Kevin. Here he turns a fight he had with his wife into a kind of violent Rom Com with tanks and machine guns. It rocks along, giving us just the right amount of jarring interruption to his spiritually enlightened band leader's ponderings to give the album some necessary breadth. And humour. Going Mobile has grown on me but mainly because its arrangement takes it from cute to accomplished in a very short while.
And then we get to one of the most extraordinary closing sequence of any of the albums of its time.
Behind Blue Eyes with its serious minor key acoustic arpeggios and dead eyed confession lyrics and delivery from Daltrey travels from the lonely grey of the opening verse to the second backed by a shimmering but heavy choir to the rage of the middle eight and then a slow decompressing half verse in closing. There is nothing of the skittish invention of the tracks that surround it because the gravity of the plea at its centre is too strong for that.
Then, with musical links to both its predecessor and the album's opener comes one of the band's most quoted and appropriated anthems, Won't Get Fooled Again. As we began with the squiddlydiddly innovation of Baba O'Riley we start here with a more momentous keyboard figure. Like the opener, it's an organ filtered through a synthesiser (particularly the sample and hold function which squeezes a signal through random frequencies that it picks up from a reference source like white noise). It kind of sounds like an organ played with a wah pedal but the beep-beep insistence seems to bode something big and heavy. There's less delay in getting to that as the whole band come in with powerchords, Moonie drumming and big Ox bass. Daltrey comes in with a bright vocal whose melody is flavoured by blues inflections and a fanfare. Unlike other larger songs on this set there is no trade in vocal sections between Daltrey and Tonwshend who appears in harmonies but no lead vocals. This would be a call to arms except that for all its monster gig bravado it is more a humble beg for awareness which, given its setting in such a rampaging rocker, is quite sobering. After a lengthy powerchord monster rally the whole thing quiets to the wahing keyboard like a mass thought taking form. The drums kick in for a big full band onslaught over which Daltrey screams wordlessly and then cautions: "meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." And then we are left with a little raunchy sweeping up and a final instrumental grunt. With that The Who begin the 1970s.
And it sounds like it. Arrangements are broader with more space. The recording quality is stellar by comparison with previous efforts. The entire album feels more coherent that the rock opera that preceded it. The use of motifs is much subtler. There is a suggestion of coherence in the lyrics as well even if an overall narrative is missing. But between the still 60s-sounding Tommy and this there sounds like a gap of about five years. What happened?
Tommy itself happened. The rock opera sprawled inside the head of a boy traumatised into insensibility and brought him to a godlike fulfillment all of which was arranged modestly to enable the band to play it on stage as an instrumental trio and vocalist. Ambition within means. But then they toured it and their audience bred like a virus into an uncountable mass worldwide. And the gigs just got bigger and bigger. The dawning sun hit their eye as they began See Me Feel Me at Woodstock and all lay before them with a "take me" sign glued to its forehead.
As, Townshend's head swelled with this success and his conscience chided him with the new spirituality his ideas became so big and incomprehensible that not even he could communicate to the others. He dreamed of a world so oppressed by its own technology that its citizens were imprisoned in VR suits, soma-ed out with entertainment. Somewhere was the notion that breaking through to reality could reveal that everything was resolvable within a single note whereupon everyone who heard it vanished into eternal higher consciousness.
Mentor Kit Lambert, feeling useless and unloved after his Tommy screenplay was rejected, drifted into a formless cloud of opiates, offering his protege no guidance. In the end were the songs. Pete could at least do those. These were the best. They only hint at the story, include a few leitmotifs as Tommy had (and would even more when Townshend reworked it for the Kenn Russell film) but they stood and stand as a coherent set of statements about emotion, maturity and spirituality as nothing the band had done could approach. And, more, they were ready for the decade of the stadium tour.
Once you know about the Lifehouse project and the factors that led to its failure it's hard not to see this album as a kind of patch to cover Lifehouse's absence. Townshend wanted to extend the merging of band with audience by involving them in the creation of the album and film that Lifehouse was intended to be. The synthesiser aided arpeggiation that runs through Baba O'Riley like its DNA sequence was meant to be altered every time they played it live by taking the vital statistics of a randomly selected audience member and plugging them into the synthesiser. The band set up at the Young Vic Theatre in London to this end and played before
This was a major advance in the band's approach and sound but it's also true that it was the template for the rest of the decade's output, at least until Moon's death in 1978. If future albums felt different it was mainly due to their being more of what Who's Next was. Even Quadrophenia, the next major Townshend canvas, is more an extension of the belt-loosening of arrangements, absorption of electronic sources and expanded lyrics that was there in this one. The arpeggiating synthesiser and sections of Who Are You are a direct descendant of Baba O'Riley.
This is not to say that the band peaked too early in their second stage but rather that they found their idiom and continued with it. Who's Next's contemporaries were similarly heralds for the decade to come. Sticky Fingers continued the groove that the Stones' had found with Beggar's Banquet and Let it Bleed. The Kinks kept riding the concept disc until one contract stipulated that Davies not attempt another. Beatles solo albums either sounded like Abbey Road outtakes or succumbed to the lack of intra-band conflict and grew progressively bland. With the false clarity of hindsight it seems obvious that all the major rock bands of the '60s would adopt or invent a '70s sound if they were to survive. The Who didn't know it yet but Who's Next brought them into the era of massed swaying bic lighters and multitudinous singalongs. Taken as individual instances this and each subsequent Who album until Who Are You either equal or bravely emulate this peak. It's just that none best it.
I would have rejected it if I'd heard Who's Next just after that compilation I bought in my teens. There's nothing as young and dumb and bursting with cum as I Can't Explain or The Kids Are Alright in any of its minutes. I remember Quadrophenia being offered to my ears at a session when my stoned older brother and a friend decided to induct me into great rock music after I'd shown such promise in hooking up to Zeppelin. I didn't even take it out of the sleeve and wouldn't hear it for another three decades. What I really wanted with rock music would snarl out of the tv at the end of the following year when the Sex Pistols starred in a four minute curio on Weekend Magazine.
Now, after a few faltering attempts at it, I revere Who's Next. It's widescreen optimism and worldly detail sing to me. After many listens I still love the rock band's adoption of electronics which was far more advanced than any of the supersonic virtuosity of the prog rock gods of the time. I love hearing the germ of the stadium singalong and the contrary forces of skyward creative ambition and the humility of a band that was always at heart a tough and committed rock act. Now I can hear the stuttering mod in the supersized crowd as well as the power chord. So, yeah, after all that, it's good.
