THE WHO'S MY GENERATION @ 60

How this intro has never been used to introduce a bad guy in a movie, I'll never know. The big grumbling guitar chords descending, slow and aggressive. Pete Townshend is already playing them tremolo (rapid back and forth strumming but on whole chords cause this bad guy is not a mandolin) but he's going through the tremolo setting on his amp. It's hot clean, on the very edge of overdrive. And it's a twelve string. And this is not jingle jangle like the Byrds or the Beatles, it's something else. At the second iteration Roger Daltrey shouts, "OUT!" Pause.

"Out in the street!"

The whole band crashes in  with a doctored Bo Diddley beat and falsetto backing vocals as Daltrey growls to his woman. A brief talking blues moment is followed by Townshend flicking the pickup toggle switch to make his guitar stutter. then its back into the punchy groove. These lads have joined the party through the kitchen door and it's going off.

And that is pretty much the early Who. Except there's more.

Younger listeners might wonder at the presence of cover versions on the first outings of British Invasion outfits. There are reasons. First, these early platters were meant to represent the live band and no band ever began with a set list of originals. Second, covers were a way of identifying themselves to an audience who knew the numbers. Third, when you covered your heroes there was always the chance that you'd outdo them. Showbiz and hubris. On the latter, it was an act of defiance to follow their derivative opener with something by James Brown. Brown's original is one of his more subdued tracks. His vocal is mostly smooth and the track is piano led with shining backing vocals. The Who do all this but tighten the rhythm and thicken the texture with the same guitar attack as the first song. It's how we play it in Shepherds Bush, mate. It's the cheek of it that gets them through.

Then there's something that sounds like it crawled out of the drains. The Good's Gone begins with a jingling twelve string that starts a bright drone over the pulsing band. Daltrey comes in, mean as ever, complaining about the vaporising love in his relationships. He's joined by Townshend and John Entwistle on backing vocals. The track punches and drones for over four minutes (almost heretical even for an album track back then). Such an insistent return to the tonic note and a refusal to add too much as its long course plays out make it sound like psychedelia two years early. What Townshend is doing is trying to outdo Ray Davies whose powerful droning numbers like See My Friends and Tired of Waiting For You inspired any songwriter who heard them, leading to an heralded early eastern music influence into British rock. The harmonies repeating the title with their bright and smooth solemnity sound as much like a funeral dirge as a beat group love song. The Brits were changing rock music and it wasn't just The Beatles.

La-La-La Lies starts with a Motown rhythm on the piano, energetic tom toms from Keith Moon. Daltrey's vocal is almost sweet and the shoop shoop backing vocals could be from anywhere in the Vandellas' songbook. It's brief and enjoyable and feels like it's in there as a show of variety. Much too Much follows with a more natural British rock swagger with Daltrey recriminating from the shadows while the chorus turns the light on with Beach Boys choirs.

And then there's this. A pummelling assault of guitar and bass that are indistinguishable from each other and manic drumming. It's a song of pauses with instrumental responses. 

People try to put us d-down. (Talkin' bout my generation)

Just because we get around. (Talkin' bout my generation)

The things they do look awful c-c-cold. (Talkin' bout my generation)

I hope I die before I get old. (Talkin' bout my generation)

It's all out salvo across the divide without a wink of cuteness. Nothing on this side has approached the hard density of this number. All members are driving with the rising to the seventh of the refrain, the hard crunching stops, Daltrey's intentional stutter that evoked a Mod searing with speed and Entwistle's gymnastic bass breaks. The home stretch where the backing vocals and the lead blend off balance under Townshend's powerchords leads to a key change that feels breathless and violent. Daltrey is outright screaming as the band sing the refrain in rapid fire underneath. It comes to a searing final chord and a final repeat of the title, emerging from the dust of the rubble. It's too big for the fade that would have routinely finished similar tracks from the time. 

This song was a declaration of war that rang out well beyond the generation it claimed. It was 1977 before I heard it in full and it fitted perfectly in with the punk singles coming out of the U.K. at the time. Not a second of this song doesn't work. Even the stutter with its contested origins, sounds like someone too young and hyped to be polite blurting it all out because it has to come out. Like You Really Got Me, Satisfaction, The Beatles' version of Twist and Shout, this is song to play to anyone who doesn't understand what was so special about rock music.

If you heard this album on CD or an old C90 tape, the next song might have you puzzling as to why they followed one teen epic with another. The Kids Are Alright begins side two of the LP. Just as side one started with a Townshend signature guitar chord so does this except that it's very differently mooded. First, this is another twelve string rocker and the single guitar track dominates the same way that later Who songs would thunder with overdrive. This tone is clean and heavily compressed. It starts with a lone hard strum on an A sus4. This always struck me as a response to the brash bash at the start of A Hard Day's Night. That one would have bedroom guitarists puzzling for decades (it's an accumulation of all the band's instruments playing somethign different as well as a piano chord). That Townshend wanted to show he could do it, too, suits this song of sadness and anger perfectly.

After that chord the block harmonies come in acapella. "I don't mind" Daltrey takes over. As the band crashes through this constantly energetic rock song, his voice is as much a character performance as it is in My Generation. The two pair well as a kind of mini song cycle. But if My Generation was Clockwork Orange's Alex shouting at the world, this one is more like the original final chapter where the droogs are a few years older and mellowing out into normies. In The Kids it's the mod who needs to quit the scene. It's tough, though, he can't get married to his girl because they're both underage and her parents shut it down. The scene is getting samey and he wants to quit it for the rest of the world at least as far as he can go. Everything's old and sour now. The guys dance with his girl and he doesn't mind. It makes it easier, if anything, for him to quit and get out into the light.

The constant ringing guitar and stormy rhythm section provide a frenetic confusion for the situation. They sound like the best party band in history but the guy at the mic no longer feels it and hates that he has lost that. My favourite moment of this favourite of mine is the solo. After the third verse ends there's a kind of clearing of the floor. Townshend plays a single note. It feels small but solid. As a twelve string note it's doubled so it's shiny. This builds to a chord as the band swells around it, insisting until it's pumping, sharp and heavy. Then, a single big chord rings before a machine gun muted 16 round chord from the middle eight kicks everything back in and the final verse leads to a repeated harmony chorus with a slight variation in the higher register before ending with the opening sustain chord ringing below. If I have the time when I listen to this I always play the whole song again.

Please Please Please is another James Brown cover that does credible service to the original. It's a guitar led attack rather than the piano of Brown's version but it's performance, apart from Daltrey's impassioned screaming, is an impression rather than a conveyed message. It's Not True combines harmonies with a jaunty 2/4 beat and a strutting vocal from Daltrey. A series of increasingly absurdist lies that give it the sense of a first run of the far superior Substitute from the following year.

I'm a Man is a cover of Bo Diddley's assertive statement in talking blues which the Yardbirds had already fed amphetamines. The Who's version features the kind of dynamic arrangement  with piano breaks, some electronic growling on the guitar as well as the Townshend stutter. But it's a different thing when Bo declares his stance in the world of chicken fried steaks and the much younger Londoner at the mic here. Daltrey sounds like the youngest Athur Daley Spiv in history or one of those people who wake up one day speaking Medieval French. The pretty twenty-one year old mod with the voice of the flasher from under the bridge cannot work. It probably did work live but here it sounds weird.

A Legal Matter is Townshend's only lead vocal. It's a kind of retake of the Stones' The Last Time, with a touch more country twang. His narrator is restless in his marriage and had served his wife up a divorce. While the sense of joke is high here, it sounds out of place already in an album with My Generation and The Kids Are Alright. The mood wouldn't be revisited until John Enwistle was asked to write the song for the molesting Uncle Ernie in Tommy.

The Ox is a whole band jam based on a pedestrian blues riff. Moon stars as the octopus drummer who is still lofty on purple hearts. A young Nicky Hopkins is heard giving the studio piano a workout. Some nice noise making on the guitar and amp combination from Townshend but this is one that I'll leave on only if I don't bother to press stop. It fades after a while. End.

Shel Talmy's production is different here. The thin and scratchy sounds of the early Kinks records has gone and is replaced by a much fuller sound and attention to the details of the blend. Townshend's compositional guitar playing is always exactly where it should be, whether he's sneaking around with automotive coughs, rapid stutters or proto power chording. Entwistle's bass is never shy nor allowed to fall below the mix into a general boom. Moon's drums are clear to the extent of detail of each part of the kit (well, under those circumstances, you shouldn't expect to hear a lot of kick drum) and the vocals, if at too many times, pitchy, come in where they need to. So, who did the learning? The Kinks albums kept sounding thin and The Who just kept growing. Ok, so this was the only Talmy production but Townshend's influence beyond it becomes clear.

I still find those covers annoying because the originals aren't my kind of thing. But the best of this platter can make me crave repeat listening. The breadth of mood, from anger to humour, is impressive even in a scene where both qualities were abundant in postwar youth. The more I see these debuts in context of each other the richer I find the experience. If nothing else, this record served to slam the experience of a violent live sound into a vibrant and dynamic beast that could break its own bounds and keep running. The cover with its thick stencilled font in two colours features the band looking up from what might be the docks. None of them are smiling like The Beatles still did on their albums. Are they searching the sky or waiting for an answer to their challenge?

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.

1969@50: THE WHO - TOMMY (this is gonna be a long 'un)

This Who album is known for a few things. It's a double set. It's (arguably) the first rock opera. It took the band from playing covers and rock standards to assuming the stage of ever increasing masses with an opus beyond a grab bag of singles or jamming. Its substance was the fulfilment of a growing expression on the previous two albums of narrative song cycles. What it isn't known for is being anyone's favourite Who album.

It shares this with the debut My Generation. A Quick One gets a guernsey for the title track. Sell Out is higher than a listen would warrant for the sheer pluck of its concept of celebrating pirate radio. Then, leap over Tommy and land on the one that everyone claps, Who's Next. Who By Numbers is overshadowed by the inferior Who Are You as that is the final with band legend Keith Moon. Even the live album gets accolades and the first release of that was mostly covers. But Tommy? It had a film treatment and a complete musical overhaul as well as many stage productions and the band toured on it for years afterwards. These are far better known than the album at the spark end. But this ambitious offering that closed the band's first phase goes oddly unsung.

It really shouldn't, though, as it forms a perfect bridge between the cheeky experiments of the mid sixties and the stadium bombast of the seventies. Yes, it's a big concept that just seems to get bigger as it goes along, right up to the mass prayer at its close, and yet it is the most stripped back the band would ever be. This is an opera with choruses, arias and recitatives, introducing itself with a classical calling card and then crashing through into two fisted rock all on a bed of shining acoustic guitars and harmonies that sound like an orchestra imagined by someone who had never heard one. And even newer Who fans look at the blue latticed pattern cover art and think it's a version of the stage show.

So, what's it all about?

THE STORY 
This isn't always clear from the music and lyrics alone but here goes. Mrs Walker hears of the disappearance of her husband on a military mission. She gives birth to their son, known henceforth as Tommy. He returns after the war and murders the man she has taken up with. When the pair see that Tommy has witnessed this they bear down on him with such force that his sight, hearing and speech all shut down. Cures are tried including a sideshow charlatan, a psychedelic drug dealer and a real doctor. The latter reports that the boy's senses are fine but that he needs his inner block broken. That's not so easy when he has left with a psychopathic cousin and paedophilic uncle. No wonder all he can do is stare into a mirror. And play pinball. That's important. His parents become so frustrated that one of them smashes the mirror and Tommy is shocked back into reality. Far from signing up to the local labour exchange he is hailed as a hero (he's already the pinball champion) and then, with a message of enlightenment, a kind of Messiah. He gathers a mass of followers but they come to spurn the commercialism of his ministry with its "pricey deals". They realise they don't want more or any religion and abandon him. At the peak of a life of lucky breaks and traumatising disasters he retreats into himself and sings the prayer we've already heard: Listening to you, I get the music ..... End.

Hokey? Sure, but that's a lot more plot than most operas get and it touches on a lot of the decade grinding to an end, heavy with gurus, drugs, excess and fatality. Like those other operas we might not scruple to take its events entirely literally. Townshend had embarked on his own devotion to the teachings of Meher Baba (whose influence would continue in Who songs not without some characteristic worldliness from his devotee). He had recently failed to be won over by acid but it had affected him deeply. Like Ray Davies, Townshend was intensely self-reflective and while he enjoyed his rock stardom never ceased to question it while still young. War, family dysfunction, hedonism, the assault of touring, the push and pull of swinging London: what did that add up to? Tell it as a story and see what comes out. That's Tommy.

What's also Tommy is the continued influence of co-manager Kit Lambert, son of a famous conductor, full to the brim with Euroculture and his suggestion that the early experiments with narrative and character in songs might be the only way of progressing. He had an orchestral extravaganza in mind. His protege had other ideas. But the notion was sound. The song cycle A Quick One from two years earlier is still a convincing musical story. Rael from the year before has less cohesion but hinted at the power of abstraction (and revealed more than a few musical figures that found their place in Tommy). The Sell Out album has great highlights but loses puff as a concept album. There were a few pointers on the road and Townshend took them.

First, opera. Rock opera. Not just a concept with a story with songs and narration like SF Sorrow or Ogden's Nut Gone Flake. But opera, with an overture, recitatives, arias and choruses, done as rock music. I won't be going through this double album track by track but there will be stations that require some examination. Like the Overture.

THE ALBUM
From the big tolling chords of the opening to the cymbal crash of the last chord the Overture to Tommy is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, while it does run through themes to come it doesn't play them as a quilted medley as composers of third tier opera had. Nor does it play as a more textured indication of the mood of the tale (Mozart's sprightly overture to The Marriage of Figaro screams great big comedy) with figures that begin and end there. And it doesn't just set the scene programatically like Wagner's preludes: the Ring cycle begins with a long pedal note over which the orchestra expresses the strengthening and widening of the Rhine.  But it is very classical in structure. The booming opening chords are from 1921. The sprightly guitar and drum interplay is from Go To the Mirror, the blinding organ chords at the end are those of the prayer Listening to You and the coda is a portent of Pinball Wizard but none of this is a series of instrumentals waiting their turn. The chords of one piece will serve the melody of another, the strident French horn figure of We're Not Gonna Take It is easily supported by the chopping rhythm of The Hawker. And so on. This is not a quilt, it's a weave presented by a composer who wanted the piece to serve as a welcome as well as intrigue his listeners.

Also, this was the era of concept albums with big ideas. It was the epoch of Days of Future Passed with its grand orchestral soundscapes and grave poetic narration. Apart from some guitar overdubs, piano reinforcement and big percussion, The Who could play Tommy down the pub as a four piece. The sole orchestral instruments on the album could be played by Entwistle (French horn and trombone) and Moon (gongs, kettle drums) but really, the band would do. Would? Did. The Who spent the next few years playing most of the opera as a good half of their stage show. The sense that, after the hyperbolic responses to things like Sergeant Pepper, this band could rock an opera anywhere they'd fit.

The Overture ends with a bang but from under its dying cymbals comes a pretty acoustic guitar figure which gets strident as Townshend sings about Captain Walker's disappearance and then meanders and glitters until settling into what I'll call the birth theme (slow F# two beats G and D one beat each and D for two beats) which will resurface whenever Tommy comes upon renewal or discovery. Townshend in choirboy voice announces the birth of Mrs Walker's son.

1921 begins with the big tolling chords of the Overture but settles into a jangling major key base as Mrs Walker and her new man declare mutual love and look forward to the future. Enter Captain Walker. Murder! "What about the boy? He saw it all." The parents bear down on the child, scaring him into a sightless, deaf and mute state.

The narrator returns for Amazing Journey. Roger Daltrey in very smooth voice tells us over music that rises and falls like waves that Tommy is not as poorly off as he might seem as his inner life is rich and exploratory, finding wisdom in the disturbance of his illness and even has a vision of a sage or god. And as sickness takes the mind where minds can't usually go we cross a bridge of lovely grinding psychedelia into the instrumental Sparks which plays like an extension of Amazing Journey but progresses further into aural rooms that just seem to get larger. The birth theme plays on acoustic guitar as Entwistle's boomy picked bass brings things back down to earth in an increasingly gentle landing procedure.

The Hawker starts with bright guitar arpeggios before kicking into a strident four on the floor rhythm with a gigantic kettle drum punctuation as Daltrey screams in praise of his woman. He claims she has miraculous powers. This song is accredited to bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson although the musical setting owes a lot of Townshend's reimagining. Tommy's parents are trying religion to cure him. There is an instrumental section which suggests a ceremony or process and it features a tremolo style electric guitar rising between firsts and fifths before the preacher takes over again, letting us know the only thing working around there is his opening pitch.

Christmas bashes into gear with a solid Daltrey vocal backed by powerchords a choral harmony augmented by some very clever tape delay. The day brings both guilt and frustration to the parents who try to coax the boy back to awareness with an increasingly shrill and desperate plea: Tommy can you hear me? And then we hear for the first time the See Me Feel Me response that only Tommy can hear, bright in a clear high pitch against solemn chords before it's back to the parental screaming and a final verse of continued frustration.

Cousin Kevin torments Tommy. A sweet guitar figure plays under equally sweet harmonies that tell of tortures while "the grown ups have all gone away". This is one of two songs that bass and brass player and resident ghoul-humoured member John Entwistle contributed. Coming from his gothic nursery rhymes and proto-metal riffs in earlier albums with songs like Silas Stingy and Boris the Spider, Entwistle imagines the bully as having the confidence of the sneak. Musically, it travels from the glee club opening to some very curly and modal harmonies as the band in choir mode. It's nastier for its sweetness.

Tommy gets lobbed along to the Acid Queen a West End psychedelics dealer and maybe sex worker (it's intentionally ambiguous here) who induces a trip by way of treatment. The lyric about tearing souls apart and twisting bodies is terrifying but the music of the verse is jangling soft rock arpeggios and a five-quaver figure in the chorus to add a little (and really just a little) force. Townshend's vocal approaches a nasty break but never quite gets there. The song sounds solemn rather than scary. There is a  tremolo guitar figure in the break that is unmistakably similar to the one in The Hawker. Subsequent interviews with Townshend have revealed that he not only linked the two figures but suggested that the woman of the earlier song was the Acid Queen. Why would they be so far apart in the overall sequence, then? A foreshadowing? No idea but it's an intriguing notion.

The Underture is no longer the joke title and space filling instrumental I first took it for. At over ten minutes it's the longest track on the album. Beginning with the birth theme played on a clean electric guitar and palm muted bass, it uses a figure from the previous album's Rael, this time augmented with powerful kettle drums over Moon's building momentum on the kit. Breaks include a creepy choir under a single note tremolo, frequent returns to the birth theme. This is maintained with this scant material against expectations. It took me a long time of skipping most of this track to realise that this is the trip the Acid Queen gave Tommy and the soaring flights of inner space exploration in Sparks are now fully fledged, dark and cathedral-sized, and expanding. I now think it's a magnificent piece, foreshadowing (for better AND worse) the excesses of prog rock by outfits like Yes or Genesis in the decade to come. The evocation of a mind growing beyond its bounds is certain and powerful, easily imaginable as cinema. An orgasmic triple blast of cymbals and dissonant French horn brings to the end of the first part, first disc, and leaves us with a Tommy as a kind of accidental god.

Do you think it's alright to leave the boy with Uncle Ernie? The next song answers in a profound no. John Entwistle's two contributions to Tommy were (I'm going by autobiographies here) due to Townshend's difficulties in approaching material about bullying and child molestation. Townshend claims he was victim of both. I'm going to believe him, for the record. But it's revealing that he gave them to the member of the band who was best given to the monstrous. Uncle Ernie's song Fiddle About is punctuated by a low growling trombone figure (contributed by Entwistle) and a high and unsettling solo vocal by the bass player. The power of the absence is never felt on this set as keenly as here.

Pinball Wizard begins with excited acoustic guitars that are quickly beefed with  power chords and the rest of the band. Daltrey's vocal is forceful. Tommy's inner life is turning into pure power and it makes his parents think. So There's a Doctor follows with sprightly harmonies and hope.

Go To the Mirror is a marvel. The kind of growling amp distortion power chords that Townshend would soon be known for are here displayed in full flight. It's just an E and B-A E but boy does it work. Daltrey in the place of parents and doctor sing that the boy's reflexes are normal but not breaking through and is interrupted by Townshend in chorister mode singing "see me, feel me, touch em, heal me" ready to break through. Townshend as opera composer does this twice before a thrilling whole band imprecation that Tommy approach his mirror. And then, and this still sends shivers, one of the parents says they wish they knew what was happening in his head when the prayer Listening to You breaks out in full band thrust. But only Tommy has heard that. They are still no wiser.

The parents plead Tommy Can You Hear Me to an acoustic wash and lively bass backing to leave the name alone echoing into the void. Smash the Mirror bursts to life like the most potent soul records as the parents scream about his infatuation with the reflection. It ends with breaking glass ans a weird choral ahhh.

In the gentle acoustic rocker Tommy comes to awareness of his fame and miraculous recovery and declares himself a sensation. Note for the strident and lovely French horn accompaniment of the Ox, here. The song Miracle Cure is another chorus in choral Who style.

Sally Simpson is important but often overlooked. As a song it was pulled in from the repetoire as a comment on crowd violence at the live shows but appropriated for the album. Sally, in a narrated verse chorus, is a fan who reached too hard and was left damaged. But then, she did end up with a rock musician who came from California.

I'm Free does the old You Really Got Me trick of starting in one rhythm and continuing in another. Tommy declares himself free of his bounds in increasing passion (courtesy of Daltrey's increasing passion) until the soft to hard rock song ends in a choral descent through the Pinball Wizard riff.

Welcome is a strong emotive Daltrey vocal over a smooth acoustic backing, asking everyone in until too many take him at his word. But, not dismayed, he keeps the message going. Tommy'[s Holiday Camp is the song Townshend wrote for Keith that introduces us to the merch.

We're Not Gonna Take It is the sound of a crowd wising up to commercial snow jobbing. They reject the carnival spruiks and deals and leave him where he is. Alone he resorts to his plea to be felt, seen and healed and loses himself in the prayer Listening to You.

OR

He wins the crowd over and they sing the prayer.

Which do you think it was, children?


Me? I think he reverted and sank back into self immersion. Otherwise, you have to deal with a crowd wised up falling for another carnival trick.


THE BAND
As any account of the experience of this album is going to be work. So much is going on that one moment must have its performance celebrated and another its structure. It's complex but the thing is that after all that this still sounds like record made by a rock band. Actually, they sound more like a band here than on any record since the debut album. The mid '60s saw The Who extending themselves wildly into new sonic territory and Kit Lambert's production was growing ever more adventurous in itself. But Tommy had to be special. If they didn't want to get tagged with pretension or bombast they needed to serve this complicated story up as plainly as they could while still serving the concept. And that's what happens.

Townshend laid down a lot of acoustic guitar tracks with the intention of replacing them with electrics. But he found the effect of the glittering acoustic textures which could shift into strident marches or fanfares. It also added greatly to both the back-to-basics approach and added a more transparent layer, enhancing access for the listener. When he rocks out it feels like it, roaring or crunching electric tone that can settle into a gentle jangle. The sheer breadth of his guitar playing, while it might at first seem on a short spectrum, delivers worlds.

Entwistle and Moon are both solid in partnership and brassy in bravado throughout. Moon takes many opportunities to lighten his famous lead pipe style to provide some real subtlety but then creates thunderstorms when needed. The instrumental performances on this album manage to keep the freshness in. When extra voices are brought in like Entwistle's brass, piano or orchestral percussion it feels taxed by the phrase. As the band provide all their vocals, solos, duets, choruses etc, what might have really sounded overblown ends up far more candid. Kit Lambert's wish to set the piece to a full orchestra was well vetoed by the band. As it is they could play it on stage and they avoided it sounding as dated as the Moody Blues do now.


TOMMY AND ME
Tommy was the first album I bought with my own money. Well, not really. I was newly teenaged and hard to buy presents for so it was Mum's Christmas present that I chose. Oh, and it wasn't this album, it was the movie soundtrack. I wasn't to see the movie for a few years but the inner sleeves and gatefold art with its quilted stills from the film engorged my imagination. But one thing that did come across was a pretty clear sense of the story.

Each character had a particular voice and there were female as well as male voices. Townshend's arrangements leaned heavily on the kind of synthetic orchestration he had been exploring with the Who albums and it was solidly expressive. The experience felt like overhearing a movie and when I finally got to see it at the Twin Cinemas in Townsville with a bunch o' school friends it was actually much better than I had imagined. I knew the name Ken Russell from my sister's accounts of movies like The Music Lovers and I'd seen a local radio station's advance screening of Lisztomania at the same cinema at the end of the year I bought the record. Those experiences seemed to bring a world of creativity and art flashing into my brain.

So, when, after I found I did actually like the Who after getting a dub of Sell Out from a school friend and buying a copy of the Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy compilation, and after many visits to Ken Hurford's Records ended in my leaving the big blue double sleeved opus where it was and exiting the shop confused as to why I should threaten my relationship with the opera by listening to what I could only imagine was a feeble first go.

But one morning in the cooler part of the Townsville year I went into Ken Hurfords and picked it up. Once home, I put it on and was immediately confused that the Overture was not like the big brassy Wagnerian thing from the movie but a rock band playing through what sounded like bits of songs. From there all I heard was weedy vocals and a lot of acoustic guitar. The only Tommy track on Meaty Beaty was Pinball Wizard but that had a full throated Daltrey vocal and some great power chording from Townshend. I liked the weird wobbly choir and guitar crunch in Christmas and Go To the Mirror but I'm Free sounded like The Seekers. As for the Underture ....

You should understand that this was 1978. My most played album was Never Mind the Bollocks. I had a strong sense that The Who's legacy fed straight into the Pistols (they even covered Substitute on the Swindle soundtrack) and this thing ... I made a cassette of the tracks I liked and left it at home when I moved to Brisbane.

But here's the thing (and this is a way of incorporating my listening notes in the main article) the original LP master is muddy and lifeless (and this on the deep dish import vinyl that Ken Hurford sold). It would have taken gentle understanding well beyond my capability to read through that. The record sounded dark in the other sense, also, like the complicated cover art with its strange storybook illustrations and the main triptych of a latticed planet in a starless black sky surrounded by white birds and a fist breaking through the void. I could easily relate all that to the concept but I felt nauseated by it.

Some time in the 2000s I happened on a re-release on CD at a discount and bought it for the sake of it. The remaster opened windows. The shine of the acoustic guitar and growl of the electric, the brightness of the vocal harmonies and meatiness of the bass and drums just popped. It was an extraordinary difference. I started listening to the whole thing regularly. Then when the DVD-Audio appeared with a surround mix overseen by Townshend I snapped it up. And then all the way up to the recent Blu-Ray Audio version (which has the offputting feature of putting the drums to the rear left  speaker of the 5.1). I settled on the legit download from and online shop which is how I listen now. The current mastering is "a sensation".

LISTENING TO YOU
It still works. It doesn't invite you in the way that Who's Next or Sell Out do. Bolder in concept but more modest in execution than either of those, this album flaunts the expectations by not sounding like a musical progression. It is the idea that, when you grasp it, does that job. A group that seemed destined to roar and thunder in the stadiums to come stepped back from the foldback speakers to craft a testament to its imagination and maturity. Fans will sooner put I Can See For Miles or Won't Get Fooled Again on eleven while this understated marvel seems to plink underneath them. But, I swear, if you should step from that light into the big dark universe of Tommy and follow its peaks and valleys through to its upsetting inner-cosmos you will feel richer for it, strained, perhaps, but richer.

1966 at 50: The Who's A Quick One (While He's Away)

As with some of the other examples here the wake of the Beatles' success strengthened the idea that recording artists should also be writers. This created a divide between acts whose albums reproduced their live shows and those that increasingly exposed a gap between stage and studio by pursuing their own statements. As the Kinks left their handful of R&B covers behind them with Face to Face and the Yardbirds struggled to strike a medium between the two worlds, The Who, also addressed the issue but in the strangest way out of all them.

Each member was to contribute two songs each. This management-led move almost worked and it is both a strength and weakness of this album. Pete Towshend had penned almost all of the debut album the previous year and, while the results are mixed, offered a set that could stand on its own. Now, with success and pop-business concepts bidding their public view the band as riding the ratrace, it was time to expand beyond the rock band mold and play the conventions rather than the reverse.

The cover says it all, here. A richly coloured cartoon of the band bursts out of their panel and into the darkness around it, titles emitting in huge goopy letters from each member. The basic field is solid black. The band name and much smaller title are given in a plain, sobering font. And there they are, refulgent, spilling into the universe, each with his own cry of detonation. Well, that's how the marketing went and it's persistent in the mythology to this day and probably beyond. The Who weren't just a rock and roll band they were rock and roll, barely controlled chaos amid the shards of guitar bodies and kicked in drum heads, amphetamine punchups and bombast. And this was the one where they were each king for a track. Let the noise begin.

And it might have.

The Who were, in fact, more of a functioning oligarchy than an anarchic free-for-all. Pete Townshend was at the helm with his songwriting and directing but his ear was taken by a management team who got him and knew how to guide him. If the Beatles had made the grade in matching suits and then the Rolling Stones replaced that with their cooler designer label effect The Who drove right into the pop art shopfront and plundered the colour and post-modern appropriation and took the stage like a dayglo commercial break and burst into fragments of autodestruction. Though many saw the Sex Pistols as the inheritors of this the big difference was that the Townshend/Lambert/Stamp team actually did the kind of things that Malcolm McClaren only claimed in table talk. So, giving each of these ponced up yobs their own soapbox was bound to implode. Well, it doesn't.

Run Run Run opens with a blasting 2/4 swing of power chords and busy drums. It's messy but groovy. Daltrey sings on the downbeat about someone trying to outrun a plague of bad luck. A lovely few minutes of thrash, tough leads and cooing harmonies in the chorus. Great mid '60s hard rock. It's the sole Townshend song on the old Side One.

Boris the Spider smashes to life and introduces us to the realm of John Entwistle, classical soloist level bass player and imagineer of strange portraits in music. A big dirty bass descent through the semitones ends in a scattering of amp tremolo from Townshend as though the note shattered on contact with the floor. Entwistle sings in unison with his proto-metal bassline. He sees a small spider which gives him the creeps so he kills it with a book and grinds it into the floor. End of story. If you're terrified of spiders you're laughing with him. If you aren't you're laughing at him and his quaking anxiety. The chorus replays the opening chromatic descent as Entwistle matches the bass notes in a cartoon horror voice so low it sounds like a purr. The Ox claimed to have written this one in twenty minutes after a pub conversation with fellow bass icon Bill Wyman. It was to follow him for decades begging to be sung until he wrote a song to replace it as its notes would have worn through to transparency by that time. But for me it never grows old and so never has to hope it dies. In there among all the Purple People Eaters, Alley Oops and Hands of the Rippers, Boris hangs on above, clinging to a tiny silken thread.

I Need You. The legend goes like this: Keith Moon thought The Beatles used a secret language to talk about him. The lyrics are all paranoid in clubland as Keith moves around the coloured social circles being embraced with insincerity and threatened with hatchets. Mostly it's a light rock excursion lifted by a harpsichord adding some wit and an instrumental section that begins with a scouser talking about Rorge and Jingo. Beach Boys fan Keith sings mostly in falsetto which is what he would contribute to the band's harmonies. How much of this is Townshend lending a compositional hand or simply providing a lot of guidance is unknown and usually goes without comment in memoirs but I find it hard to credit the writer of this not champing at the bit to contribute more. Let's credit it a Moon since no one else seems to differ and leave it. In the album sequencing it forms a further change in texture after the opening two blasts and has a great aching chorus.

The Ox re-enters with another tale of crazy. Later, when Pete had the task of writing too close to his own bones songs for Tommy about child abuse and bullying he had to give them to John. Entwistle gave him Uncle Ernie and Cousin Kevin which are driven by genuine horror. It was thus from Entwistle not so much being fearless in looking at the abyss but detached from it that some plain descriptions and good rhymes set in unnerving chromatic melodies became so powerful. (Youtube the movie versions of these songs and you'll hear why as they are heightened by cinema where the originals from the album are left subtle.) In Whisky Man the narrator enjoys a friendship with the title character who only comes out when they drink which is nearly all the time. His doctors cry hallucination but he keeps drinking with his friend. When they take him to his padded cell his worry is that Whiskey Man will waste away and die. Finally, the first lines are revisited so he seems to be back drinking and chatting with the W. Man. Has he broken out or just gone further into delusion? The chunky rock is kept thick but light and features not the first but the best so far of Entwistle's brass talents, a French Horn solo that works beyond novelty value. It's musical and atmospheric. It would point to more and better. The final line of vocals ends with Townshend playing a sparkling clean riff around the open D which keen listeners will recognise from the next album's Rael and more pervasively throughout Tommy. Here, if you know that, it has the feel of someone trying out a pattern and trying it anywhere it might work. When you go back and listen to almost any of the early Who recordings it's easy to hear how much of Tommy came from musical scrapbooks. I think this is the first instance of this riff outside of the opera, though.

Roger Daltrey only finished one song in time and where the other one might have gone they placed a cover. Heatwave harks back to the band's R&B roots with a joyous Martha and the Vandellas number done here as thrashing rock with a perceptible swing. The mono original brings the piano to the fore which will be a revelation to anyone better used to the power chord version on the stereo mix.

The US release of the album replaced this with the single Happy Jack (and gave the title to the whole album) and common wisdom applauds this. So would I except for two things: Heatwave forms a bright and spirited farewell to the Motown swing of the mod scene they had outgrown and fits in the flow, and; the end of side one was an even more blasting drum workout.

Cobwebs and Strange begins as a short arc melody played on the penny whistle by Townshend and soon lopes around into near chaos as he is joined trombone by Datlrey, trumpet by Entwistle and, of course the nominal author, Keith on drums. It's a crashing drums piece with some pesky instrumentation in the way. But while neither a solo nor a gathered and concentrated outing it gets old quickly. On the end of Side One it can either run its course while you go and check the letterbox or you can lift the needle and flip the record. In the digital realm you let it play for fifteen seconds and click on skip. Maybe Happy Jack could have gone here.

The old Side Two begins with a bounce as a country flavoured bounce takes us into Don't Look Away. A confident vocal from Daltrey courses over a 2/4 cantering beat of tidy drums, acoustic guitar and picked bass. Over his voice comes Townshend's descant which reminds any of us who has forgotten how strong The Who's vocal harmonies could be. The descants in this song are notably nothing like the kind of harmonies found on records by those better known for vocal blocks like the Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys or the Hollies. There is less concern with them to form chords than for the vocals to be fixed in the arrangement. Whether matching the lyric word for word or providing wordless support they feel like other instruments. In this case they tighten in toward the chorus with its gorgeous modal setting of the word of the title. The sudden brilliance of this washes over a sombre modified chord that forms something like a 9th. What might read like a teen angst ditty becomes a Gregorian lament .. beat group format. My favourite underrated Who cut.

If Townshend had only one song on Side One he dominates Side Two with all but one short track not of his authorship. Roger Daltrey's sole writing credit on the album (and for most of The Who's career) is the tiny but interesting See My Way. If there's any profundity in the lyric it's deep within the mind of its author as it reads unambiguously like a my way or the hy way ultimatum. After a brief ba-ba-da-ba-da vocal introduction we drive straight into a kind of modified Buddy Holly gallop as the narrator lets his girl know he's really only interested in hearing himself played back to him (I can find no trace of irony in this as there might be in a Lennon lyric) and as such might easily remind us of a lot of the taunting statements on the Stones' Aftermath album earlier the same year. The vocal is sprightly and the Daltrey/Townshend vocal interplay even tighter than on the previous track and its's more varied, going from the ba-ba fanfare at the start through light descant to full falsetto glory. Moon chugalugs on the tom toms delivering big crash cymbal moments and some unexpected but highly effective French horn playing that acts percussively, giving us a kind of Townshend style rhythm solo in pure smoothness. This would survive long without the nutrition of the album tracks around it but in place it provides just under two minutes of bouncy fun with a delightful message of committed narcissism.

So Sad About Us. When bands try to recreate the excitement of their live sound in the studio they all too often get lost in the atmospherics or pare things back too far in the name of authenticity. Long Tall Sally is not the most inspiring of Beatle tracks but the backing was done in a single take and pounds with energy and great abandon in the solos while some of Shel Talmy's worst efforts left songs shrieking under too much reverb until they drowned. The Who played a perfectly orchestrated teen anthem like a make or break audition that showed off the players' individuality and interdependence. It sounds like the studio but so hotly that you want to get in front of them live urgently.

Bass and drums work in lock step like timpani before Townshend thrashes through his chord riff, lifted with modfications from Needles and Pins to become a fanfare. Enwistle and Moon lift this to their shoulders as the choir sings the fanfare in la-las. Bam! The chorus eases the tension with long harmonies in high head voice which give way to the urgent minor key verse before kicking the door down for another chorus. And this just tightens until it is driven beyond words to a machine like chorus of la-las which gets cranked up another gear before bursting into the chorus again. Finally, the brakes are hit and we hear the aftershock of wordless vocals and the engines of the rhythm section crunching to a perfect stop. All the power pop of the '70s and beyond was born here in this apotheosis. This and stations leading to it like I Can't Explain and The Kids Are Alright are my go-to examples of why I think British rock music completely eclipsed its American inspiration.

Then we close on A Quick One, the longest track on the record. Kit Lambert was always on Townshend's case about breaking boundaries and orchestra conductor's son Kit kept pushing his protege toward opera. Not Italian histrionics nor the week long horned helmeted other kind but something that came from t-shirts with POW! printed on them, Beatle boots and purple hearts, of working class London in the war and beyond. Townshend cobbled some scraps together and complied.

A big a capella barbershop chorus tells that her man's been gone for longer than he should. A light guitar figure curls upward from a major third to a fifth before the band kicks in and a tough voiced Daltrey talks about all the available women in the town made vulnerable by the war. A chorus of joyous oooohs carries his lead as the band cruises on. A sudden stop and a full 12 string fanfare very similar to So Sad About Us begins stridently and Townshend as a messenger or civil servant cheers the wife up with what might as well be an offical lie about her man being late rather than dead or missing in action. This is cut short by a few crashing chords that give way to a sneaky sounding arpeggio, palm muted and spidery. The voice of the predator from the first part comes in an identifies himself as Iva the Engine Driver who brings sweets and treats and easy seduction. As he starts to get his way the band speeds up and he repeats his tune but lets it grow into more of a threat as the others chime in on choral vocals, mixing a Beach Boys sweetness in with the sleazing carnality. This crashes to a close as we imagine what is happening. It gives way to a cowboy lope on the guitar and bass and a very restrained Moon clopping and teasing the ride cymbal. It's the husband singing as the horses take him forward that he'll soon be home. We mosey on with this for a while until it is suddenly interrupted by some sharp chords and arresting vocal harmonies - fourths, ninths rubbing shoulders with minors - repeating what sounds like "Dane" or "daing!" Your guess = my guess. After a breath that Townshend open D rings and moves to an open G in stately fashion before the band comes in at a gallop and the choir sings "cello cello cello cello...." (because they didn't get the planned cello to play the part). Over this, Townshend in calmer voice plays the returning husband numb but thawing with joy as he runs to the arms of his wife amid the glorious harmonies (and a riff that could have served as the hook of a single). And then a dramatic pause as Townshend as the wife confesses the infidelity with Iva the Engine Driver, a matter of fact single note per line, a fall to describe her fall and a collapse at the finish. Underneath this (almost like the child to come) the D riff from Tommy slowly rises to life and hubby says, "you are forgiven." This repeats over a growing falsetto choir to a purely liturgical plagal end but then bashes back in as everyone is forgiven as Pete speaks it under the final chords.

The war, loneliness, sexual predation, reconciliation and forgiveness and for the first time something transcending mere pop arrangement toward complex orchestration. And this was all playable live. And to the extent that the falsehood of their performance of it kept the airing of Rock and Roll Circus from release for decades due to the supposed envy of the hosting Rolling Stones (it was licencing disputes, in fact, because it always is). At 9:05 the track is a few minutes shy of the 11:35 that the Stones used for the playout of their 1966 set Aftermath but it feels much shorter. There is no soloing or exploration of grooves, no jamming; there is drama, characters, dialogue and restless scenery and costume changes as roles progress and the story unfolds on the stage. As such it speeds by and goes down like dessert. It is to my mind more focussed and immediate than the more complex suite that Brian Wilson was beginning at the time (and would only be allowed to finish decades later) or The Beatles blockbuster album to come. It is certainly superior as a sustained work to The Who's own Rael song cycle on 1967's Sellout. The durable themes and their access give it the kind of moment they would not each again until 1969's Tommy and by that time they were soaring.

It's not all wonder n invention, though, as we turn an ear to the production and have to deal with something important. Having wrested themselves from the ravages of Shel Talmy (which deal held up the reissue of the first album for decades) they were free to fly into the celestium of minute to minute innovation. Instead of that they let Kit Lambert produce. While his engineer keeps the recording free of unintentional clipping there is nothing between Kit and the compressor to make the ride cymbals sound like steam engines and the guitars either too big or small. Too much reverb here and too flat there. Almost none of this sounds intentional but rather like amphetamine inspired instructions followed to the letter. Sellout suffered from all of this, too, the bizarre moment-squashing levels and weirdly stodgy vocal tone. His intentions might well have been to celebrate new ideas with new sonics but any innovative ideas he might have had were well above his ability to command them. The difference between this and other manager-producer confusions like Andrew Loog Oldham and teams like the one at EMI at the time can be heard in how Rubber Soul still sounds fresh and A Quick One sounds like the mid '60s. Tommy has it's problems but is generally free of them and it's tempting to think that the band had learned lessons that eluded its mentor. By the era-change album Who's Next Lambert was set adrift and the production shifts to the band itself and the steady hand of Glyn Johns and production standards that remain standard. Back in '66 this album was made to excite 1966 and only a few years later its listeners would have to listen through that filter.

Nevertheless, this is a statement of a band from rock music's second stage where it grew beyond adolescent hedonism and explored the observations that its newfound cultural power endowed. In the great change year of 1966 when songs about suicide, middle class drug dependence, social status, loneliness, genetic shopping, self-empowerment and the great black space of possibility rumoured to exist beyond the workaday world all made the top ten A Quick One (While He's Away) just added more flavour and punch. A tip top result for a second platter.



Listening notes: I used the most recent high resolution remaster from one of the online hi-res audio stores. Very clear and deep sound that would be a great deal better than the original vinyl and certainly superior to the '80s reissue vinyl that I used to own.

Unheard #3: THE WHO: WHO'S NEXT

The Who came true. When I was able to hear them for real, with the needle on the groove with the volume up, everything I liked about rock music was right there. The drums pummelled, the guitar slashed and bludgeoned, the vocals cut or screamed and the bass held everything up like an oil rig base and it all moved like an F111. It was the mid 70s, I had a compilation called Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy composed entirely of 60s tracks: I Can't Explain, The Kids are Alright, My Generation; everything kicked the speakers down and bumped everyone's shoulders on the way in. There was nothing like it on the radio ... except for oldies. It had the kind of sensual violence this thirteen year old craved. Because it was bigger and better it felt younger and newer. I was hooked.

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.