THE WHO BY NUMBERS @ 50

1975 and The Who had had a year. They toured the massive Quadrophenia, appeared in and rearranged Tommy for the big screen (effectively rerecording a double album with guest vocalists), dealing with the likes of Oliver Reed and Ken Russell. When it was time to get a new album done the band was ready for a rest. Pete Townshend hit thirty and worried that he might be too old to play rock music, that the kind of things he was writing might not mean anything to the fan base whomever they might be then. It wasn't as though the band was flagging, having begun the decade with the classic album Who's Next and the epic rock opera Quadrophenia, both of which went down a storm live and sold in respectable numbers. Maybe they had said everything they could say. Maybe it was time to hang up the guitar and keep drinking. Moonie'd be into that. But they made the album, anyway, bugger the critics.

So, is this just the big stadium band by the numbers, a routine platter for the masses?

Side One.

Slip Kid

The album kicks off with an almost Latin drum pattern. Townshend counts to eight and his guitar enters in big growling form. Daltrey comes in with aggression intact. The strange lyric goes from a kind of boy soldier to a much older figure, still fighting. A middle section addresses an old man, telling him that his blackmail won't work. When I first heard this song I was thirteen. It was fresh on the radio and I was trying to work it out. Does it mean the guy is a soldier all his life? And what of the title and the chorus? Slip kid sounded like the kind of slur for non-Anglo Europeans that was spat around where I grew up but it could also easily be about paper slips, items of bureaucracy, things carried for validation and identity. The song has a powerful anger to its rock punch. Finally, the line "there's no easy way to be free" keeps sounding. It's a snarl about responsibility. That Daltrey tirade is followed by a conventional guitar solo. Pete could wheedly wheedle with the best of them but what follows that is the stuff I always found more impressive as he uses a volume pedal to release poignant, painful notes that sound like voices or bowed strings. It's a patch of open sores. A solid bass run brings us back down to the cure, punching rock music. Another verse repeats the points before a quiet chorus of, "no easy way to be free" as the track fades. So, great, we're only getting started and we're already confused. 

However Much I Booze

This song starts with the kind of perky acoustic strum that makes me want to throw the record across the room. When the band comes in it gets worse. Townshend is at the mic and it sounds like one of the big and bright ones from Who's Next. As the boppy arrangement progresses and Pete sounds increasingly chirpy we can't help but hear the desperation. He's describing what might just have passed for a loveable drunk persona, even to the point where his resignation, "there ain't no way out," even sounds cheeky. It isn't until the middle section where a welcome minor key progression supports a howling lament of self-reflection. This just ends with another statement of no way out and when the sprightly song rushes back in it finally sounds as it should, cloying, breathless, protesting too much but resigned. It's a song of surrender.

Squeezebox

There's a diamond in the middle of Baba O'Reilly where Townshend sings a vulnerable moment in his beautiful falsetto. It almost always brings me to tears. Here a similar moment of great poignancy is put into a leering schoolboy snigger. And all of that is set to whacky country swagger (there are even banjos plunking along). After the first two songs, this feels like a grasp at comic relief. It's genial enough but it's also wincingly smutty. This was a worldwide hit, so what the hell do I know? 

Dreaming from the Waist

Like something from Quadrophenia, this is an easy blend of smooth acoustic and Daltrey growl with harmonies of spun silk voices. The ageing rocker can't stop ogling and desiring, screaming in frustration when the sublime harmonies rise to the surface around him to remind him that he's dreaming. The twist is that his dream is for the day he can control himself. Everyone who turns thirty thinks they're over the hill; how must it be for rockstars who have intoxicated themselves with pills, booze and shagging for a decade. They were teenagers before any of that happened and now The Guardian is asking their opinions on welfare. The concern feels funny but it's from real anguish which makes the Pete Townshend of However Much I Booze the main character of this album. This is yet another of his arias. It's also another of his workouts as his fiddly lead really stands up and noodles all that horniness he's on about. Oddly enough, it's an exceptionally clean tone.

Imagine a Man

This ends the old side one. It's one of the three I remember from radio in 1975. Its shimmering beauty caught my tiny mind as I tried and failed to understand its lyric. Daltrey's voice flowed over the broadening music and the swelling harmonies; it could have been about fly fishing and I would have revered it. It is yet another reminder of age and mortality by a thirty year old who seems to feel about eighty. For Townshend's purposes, it feels like a step back for perspective after his confessions of lusts and vices: "Imagine a soul so old it is broken and you will know you invention is you and you will see the end." Musically it might have come from Tommy or Who's Next but it works perfectly here, solemn but uplifting. People forget how good the Who were with harmonies.

Side Two

Success Story

And now for the real comedy song. John Enwistle's Success Story bams into shape as a four on the floor rocker with a big frontal electric 12 string riff. Teen gets home from his job and sees a rock star on tv repenting and getting religion. He sees a gap in the market and forms a band which gets famous to the extent that he's slaving away on take two hundred and seventy six and remembers it used to be fun. He sees the pop star preacher on tv again who has now adjusted for the new religion which for our hero is the same kind of day job slog he left in the first place. It's funny and rocking with no apologies needed for either. As such if forms a kind of antidote to Townshend's ocean of ponderance. Entwistle takes a couple of shots at Townshend who did take up religion and was famous for smashing his guitars. Not all in good fun but that is Townshend slamming away on the 12 string as he used to in The Kids Are Alright.

They Are All in Love

Townshend wanders the streets and clubs, sees the glossy magazines and tries to place himself in a culture where once hoped to die rather than grow old. All of the young things, the consumers and lovers are behind a barrier impenetrable to the motives that made him famous. A mid tempo swing with piano and a melodic vocal from Daltrey who blows a raspberry instead of naming a fashion rag. The title is a chorus of painkilling harmonies but it's a sweetness that reminds him of his isolation.

Blue Red and Grey

A ukelele strikes up and Townshend keeps to a gentle voice, as though he's trying not to wake anyone, and tells us he's not like friends of his who chase the sun, retire at magic hour with cocktails or whatever else their lifestyles demand. The only demand he bows to is the meditative one of enjoying the entirety of his life as it passes, drags, snows, rains or thunders. It is one of the least cloying religious songs on record.

How Many Friends

A slow rock ballad finds our narrator in a bar getting praise from a much younger man whose motives are worrying him. Other scenarios force him to ask himself about his connection. He sees aching beauty on a cinema screen, remembers the value of handshakes and friendship. There's no answer to the question. The music is the kind of shiny declarative rock you could find in the musicals of the time, aria-like verses with rousing choruses. There's nothing essentially stagey about the piece in context but if you heard it outside of that you might ask if it was a number from A Chorus Line.

In a Hand or a Face

This begins with the sharp and brittle three chord riff played on a  12string electric clean but pushed to overdrive. Daltrey comes in with all his force, the band behind him in live power. It's a curtain closer and feels like it but it's also a strong reminder of the LP the band made ten years earlier with its slashing guitars, thunder drums, pummeling bass and central scream. This is at the other end of that tunnel. It bursts with clear sightedness and frustration. The chorus where the tight and insistent harmonies recall the impressive moments of I Can See For Miles (recall without duplicating, those are sublime) repeat: "I am going round and round." The song and the album end cleanly on one of the repetitions. "Is it weird that you hate a stranger? Can a detail correct your dismay?"

After starting their '70s in the stadium with the monumental Who's Next and outsizing that with Quadrophenia, this was a band that had made it over the bump stronger than when they approached it.

I didn't know any of that when I heard it on the radio. I taped Slip Kid and loved its growly rock. I'd disembarked from the ivory tower of the young classical bigot to embrace what rock could offer. I had turned thirteen, started high school and found that anyone else who might have attempted contrarianism on that basis concealed it. No girl alive would turn her eye to such a thing. So, I started watching Countdown and listening for AM radio. After finding a few fresh morsels among the dreck (and enjoying the supply from siblings' record collections) I felt my way to the dramatics of songs like these. They weren't about teen love but the lust of the burnout, it felt like great theatre and rocked like the clappers.

We had a sheet music booklet of hits from a few years before and one of the songs was the Overture to Tommy. I played the opening chords on the home piano and they sounded like Mendelsohn. The textures I heard in Slip Kid and Dreaming From the Waist and more tipped me into Townshend's approach to orchestration. I wasn't thinking in these terms but I was feeling it.

I think of my own panic at approaching thirty and smirk. This was the work of someone who was ready to give up. But it doesn't sound like it. Pete Townshend was not a burnout he just thought he was. The band behind him might not have been emotionally engaged for the recording process but they are in fine form. However much this might be the extended statement of a single mind and however richly his demos for the others got, when they had to, they fronted up and played for their lives. In the end I can say that I heard Quadrophenia much later and have never been able to engage deeply with it. But this one, this by the numbers throwaway made me wonder what kind of adult I would be. I know I can say that of old James Bond movies or Commando comics but this felt like a conversation with someone from the front line whose stories were laced with exaggeration but made of truth and is much more than I could say of Sherbert or Te Sweet (much as I thrilled to them). It made me feel grown up in the best way.