1971@50: WHO'S NEXT - THE WHO

I've covered this here. The series it was part of was Unheard Classics, records in the margins of what I got into while forming my tastes. While I knew and loved the Who that I heard on Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy and a little later on A Quick One and Sell Out I didn't give much credence to the '70s Who. I can recall hearing Slip Kid from By Numbers and Who Are You on the radio when they were fresh. I heard bits of this in the '80s when someone had left a cassette of it at my place in Brisbane but it wasn't until the '00s that I bought a copy of the re-release with bonus tracks. So, I knew three songs: Baba O'Reilly, Behind Blue Eyes and Won't Get Fooled Again. I thought they were great but still prefered Boris the Spider.

Getting the full album and, with its liner notes, an understanding of its origins added meaning to the songs I heard, though I found no easy link betwen the Lifehouse story and Bargain or My Wife. I found most of the tracks more than listenable with the standouts remaining the ones I already knew. Then in 2015, planning the blog article, I walked around on my urban hikes taking it in and letting the whole sequence form and the album appeared. I always stopped after Fooled as I wanted to hear the original as released. 

So, while this might well contain a lot of the stadium rock cliches that were only newly minted back in 1971 and my still vigorous punk sensibilities fomr my own youth resisting them, I grew to admire this set. It makes a strange follow-up to Tommy which exists at a point between the psychedelia of Sell Out and the '70s rock of Who's Next. Most of Tommy is acoustic, at least the memory of it is and most of this seems arranged so Pete Townshend can leap and windmill his way around a massive stage. Getting past that, which is the real life lesson here, and simply listening to the passion of a band who were breaking through to their next phase as arena gods and still managing to sound honest and modest is humbling. Sometimes getting over a barrier is worth it if only to see how slight it was to begin with.