| Last updated: 15 August 1997 |
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Spearheaded by the genius of songwriter Pete Townshend, The Who is without a doubt one of the four or five greatest bands in rock history. And yet, in many ways, their library of albums is more a testament to their failures than their successes. It seemed like few of their projects ever seemed to quite accomplish what they'd hoped to accomplish. But perhaps their music was the better for it. The Who was widely known as the best live act of their day, perhaps the best live act of all time, filled with the shouts and growlings of vocalist Roger Daltrey, the guitar pyrotechnics of Pete Townshend (who was famous for smashing his equipment into fragments, to the cheers of the fans), the thunderous bass of the solid John Entwistle, and the brilliant, insane drumming of the madman Keith Moon. It is said that their recordings are a distant echo of their live energy - a bitter sensation for folks like me who discovered them long after their heyday. I discovered The Who in 1988, at the urging of the friend of mine, and was only hooked after I'd listened to a number of their albums and learned the backstory behind many of the recordings. Indeed, learning the band's history helps one more fully appreciate their work all the more. The definitive resource in this area is Dave Marsh's book Before I Get Old: The Story Of The Who, which covers nearly every conceivable detail from the band's inception to the death of Keith Moon in 1978. It's quite a trip.
Albums The Early Years I am not a big fan of the earliest days of The Who; I see them as very formative, and quite derivative of many other groups of the day. (Indeed, The Beatles are much the same; I don't own any Beatles albums prior to Rubber Soul.) The Who Sing My Generation is an okay rock-n-roll album, I suppose, but Happy Jack/A Quick One is very rough and rather pointless, on the whole. In the mid-60s, I feel The Who were mainly a singles band, and their best work of that period is contained on the collection Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. Their first single, "I Can't Explain", is as good as anything else they did in the 60s, with its bouncy guitar and sharp drumming. Daltrey's voice was strangely psychedelic through the decade, and he didn't really come into his own until the 1970s. Most of those early tracks are woefully under-produced, and the style of the music and production makes them sound very dated, very sixties. I listen to this stuff once in a while, but not all that often. The Who Sell Out (1967) The first Who album really worth buying is The Who Sell Out, and in a sense it's typical of their turning-failure-into-success phenomenon. The album begins as a tribute to independent radio of the day, and is structured like a radio broadcast, with band-performed fake commercials in-between the songs. The album jacket contains photos of the band in fake ads, the best of which being Daltrey in a huge vat of Heinz Baked Beans. It's a clever gimmick, but it's not carried through, as the commercials and radio theme disappear about 3/5ths of the way through the album, and Sell Out ends instead with a "mini-opera" entitled "Rael" (which is not a significant piece). The vaguely psychedelic feel of the band's early work is very much in evidence here. The album opens with a cover of "Armenia City in the Sky" (pronounced "ar-men-EE-ah", not "ar-MEEN-ee-ah"), with a sliding brass section in the background (possibly Entwistle on french horn, in which he had some classical training). "Mary-Anne With The Shaky Hands", a rather lewd piece lyrically, is really a rather nice acoustic number. And of course the stand-out track is the band's top chart-placer in the US, "I Can See For Miles" (which hit #9). "I Can't Reach You" is another good rocker, albeit a bit lightweight. Sell Out suggested that The Who was trying to break the barrier of light, love-oriented rock-n-roll, and in a very different direction from The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Tommy was dubbed a "rock opera", and catapulted the band into the international spotlight. For all its flaws, Tommy was a genuine step forward in rock music, something which had not been done to this degree before, and which had the definite stamp of Pete Townshend's writing and Roger Daltrey's persona carrying it over the airwaves. Tommy, a double album, is a story of sorts, and also an allegory. The title character is traumatized as a child and becomes functionally deaf, dumb and blind (his brain simply refuses to accept input). Over the course of the story, he finds his own redemption within himself, and becomes a new messiah, helping other people to see as he does. It's a decidedly peculiar piece, taken in that way; it's said that it's essentially a filtering of the teachings of Meher Baba (Townshend's spiritual mentor) through Townshend's psyche of the time. Lyrically, it's never really spoken to me, it always seemed unusually contrived. (Most rock storytelling doesn't work for me. Pink Floyd's The Wall is one of the few that do.) Musically, Tommy suffers from awful production work by the band's manager of the time, Kit Lambert, who worked closely with Townshend and the band in developing the finished piece. So much time was spent wrangling over the story that the arrangements are sparse and often rather flat. The exception is the intended single, the famous "Pinball Wizard", which is a genuinely great piece, due to Townshend's acoustic guitar and the thundering attack by Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon. Otherwise, the album has many interesting fragments, but few solid songs. "Overture/It's a Boy" is a dramatic enough opening, but the album sags for a while after that. "The Acid Queen" is a good rocker, but suffers from a little too much cynicism filtered through what remains of the band's 1970s psychedelia. "I'm Free" is a good, if one-note, tune. "We're Not Gonna Take It" has a great chorus (including the famous refrain "See me, feel me, touch me, heal me"), but rather clumsy verses. One of the most interesting tracks has largely been castigated and omitted from the band's later performances of the opera; "Sally Simpson" is based on an apparently true incident in which a riot occurred during a concert by Jim Morrison's band The Doors, in which a girl was seriously injured. In the song, Tommy plays Morrison, and Sally Simpson is the girl who wants to be healed by him. It's not a great song, but it has more lyrical meat to it than anything else on the album. Tommy signalled a coming-of-age for The Who, but the best was yet to come. 1971 was a watershed year in rock music. Led Zeppelin released their immortal "Stairway To Heaven" album; Traffic released the outstanding Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys (perhaps Steve Winwood's masterpiece), and Roxy Music debuted (thus unleashing both Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno on the rock world). Other releases included David Bowie's Hunky Dory; Jethro Tull's Aqualung; King Crimson's much-maligned Islands, and The Yes Album. All this, and Elton John had just burst on the scene, too. Towering over all of them, though, was The Who's masterpiece, Who's Next. If nothing else, this album is significant for being the great breakthrough in the use of synthesizers in rock music (actually, Stevie Wonder made a similar breakthrough around the same time). Synths have been used as cheap replacements for many things in the last thirty years, and of course, many bands have tried to make use of the full range of sound provided by synth technology to create entirely new sounds of music. But Townshend managed to integrate a unique synthesizer sound into a traditional rock band, and created something new without destroying the old. To be sure, the fact that Who's Next is also a pinnacle of performance in the band's career had something to do with it. Daltrey finally breaks out as a fully-confident interpretive vocalist, putting a driving force behind Townshend's often contemplative vocals. And Entwistle and Moon manage to render every previous band's (and many future bands') rhythm sections obsolete. The album is framed by two classic songs. "Baba O'Riley" kicks off with an extended synth riff, which immediately demonstrates that Townshend views the synthesizer as both a melodic instrument and an augmentation to the rhythm section. Moon, of course, blows away Townshend's programmed melodies when he finally joins in, with Daltrey and Entwistle setting the emotive pace of the track, and the song finishes with a tandem race between Moon and violinist Dave Arbus. At the other end is the 8-1/2 minute "Won't Get Fooled Again", which uses the synth as a pulsating rhythm underneath the main melody, as Moon bashes away at top speed along with it. "Fooled" features Daltrey's "greatest scream in the history of rock music", and lyrically is one of the most biting songs about revolution ever written, being both an "anti" song and an "anti-anti" song in one. The final line, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" is surely among the most-quoted in rock. In-between, of course, are plenty of outstanding songs. "Behind Blue Eyes", a rather wistful piece when Townshend originally composed it, turns into something much more powerful in the hands of Daltrey. "The Song Is Over" and "Bargain" both represent substantial steps forward in Townshend's songwriting, with more confident arrangements and lyrics. The only song that doesn't really fit is the slightly drippy "Love Ain't For Keeping". Ironically, Who's Next is the very example of Who failure turning into a success. It was originally planned to be the soundtrack for "Life House, a movie that Townshend had written, but the concept and execution both turned out to be far more complicated than Townshend had thought, and in an effort to bring his dream to life, Townshend had a nervous breakdown. As a result, the album's producer, Glyn Johns, grabbed nine tracks from the sessions and put together the album. As remarkable a package as it is, several outstanding tracks were left off, including "Pure And Easy", the linchpin song of the whole "Life House" project. Another song from the sessions was "Join Together", which was released as a single (featuring Daltrey's prowess with a mouth harp), and would be used as the title of the album documenting the band's 1989 reunion tour. This track and a number of other odds-and-ends the band had recorded were included on Rarities Volumes I and II, and 1974's Odds and Sods. Townshend was constantly trying to top himself, but it was hard to top the success - artistic and commercial - of Who's Next. Between that album and Tommy, The Who had moved from being a singles band to being one of the stronger album bands around. In Quadrophenia, Townshend tried his hand again at the "rock opera" form, trying to create a more unified story and giving it better production work. Quadrophenia, another double album, is the story of a young man caught between cultures, and between facets of himself. Either literally or metaphorically, he has four personalities, each representing one of the members of The Who (a rather silly contrivance, that). The album is more of a character study than an actual story. Townshend also experimented with the then-new technology of quadraphonic sound (which turned out to be a waste of time), and raised his use of electronic equipment to a new high. Unfortunately, in the process, it turns out that the songwriting got the short shrift. The album starts out strong, with the rocking tune "The Real Me" - possibly John Entwistle's finest moment on record - and then segued into the title track, a lengthy instrumental highlighting the themes of the album (in many ways, these themes work better here than in their individual songs). Then the album falls apart into the same sort of collection of mismatched tunes that hampered Tommy. "5:15" is another rocking tune, but one that seems decidedly ordinary; sort of the lowest common denominator of The Who's music. "I'm One" is musically a direct analogue to "I'm Free". And the closing track, "Love, Reign O'er Me", sees Townshend exercising his synth expertise again and producing a fairly strong ballad. But ultimately there's not a lot here that you can't find on Tommy or Who's Next. It's not an unpleasant album, but it is disappointing. The Quadrophenia tour turned out to be very complicated and stressful for the band, and the album was not nearly as big a success as Who's Next. Moreover, by this time Townshend was having significant personal problems (both he and Moon heavily abused drugs and alcohol, and Townshend and Daltrey often had heated disagreements, sometimes through the press). As a result, The Who By Numbers is both a "back-to-the-basics" album, and a very personal statement by songwriter Townshend. Although it's almost as different an album from Who's Next as The Who ever produced, it's very nearly as good. Of course, "Slip Kid" (another patented Townshend teenage anthem) and "Squeeze Box" (a bawdy tune which Townshend wrote while teaching himself to play the accordion) are well-known, and the latter was a large hit for the band, but the remainder of the album is as good. "However Much I Booze" is perhaps Townshend's ultimate statement of frustration and despair (Daltrey apparently refused to sing it, so Townshend does it himself, and peppers it with stinging guitar blasts). "Dreaming From The Waist" and "In A Hand Or A Face" are based on typical rock structures, but the highbrow lyrics make them something very different - sort of high-energy folk-ballads. "Imagine A Man" is one of the band's most delicate songs. John Entwistle wrote the occasional song for the band, and his track "Success Story", although containing his usual sardonic wit, is an effective counterpoint to the very downbeat lyrics of Townshend's tunes. Musically, the album is very spare; the synthesizers are gone, for instance. Keith Moon was clearly losing much of his ability to substance abuse by this point, and his drumming is competent but little more; the manic brilliance of Who's Next was gone. Daltrey carries much of the album himself, as he lives up to the challenge of the more delicate material that Townshend presented him here. Who Are You (1978) After a three-year hiatus, The Who returned with this album, which proved to be different-yet-the-same from what had gone before. It consisted of largely straightforward rock music, often oriented around the theme of trying to find a new way to break the mold. However, as the song titles "New Song", "Sister Disco", "Music Must Change", and "Guitar and Pen" suggest, it was lyrically not terribly successful. Indeed, of those tracks, only "Sister Disco" is really notable, due to its synthesizer work. John Entwistle contributed three of the nine tracks, with the nondescript "Had Enough", the electronic, science fictional "905", and the thunderous bass of "Trick of the Light" (about an encounter with a hooker). Overall, the album was disappointing, but it was redeemed by the title track, the last one on the album. "Who Are You" is one of the best rock songs ever written, integrating Townshend's synthesizer prowess (as well as his guitar and piano work), Daltrey's still-strong vocals, and a chanted chorus. Based heavily on Townshend's wrangling over what rock music should be, what he could contribute to it at this point, and a rough encounter between Pete and two members of the Sex Pistols, "Who Are You" is as driving and arresting a song as anything The Who had ever recorded. Sadly, there was one flaw in the great song: Keith Moon's degeneration had reached the point where his drumming had become essentially ordinary, and he very nearly drags the song down. As a result, "Who Are You" has rarely been given the treatment it really deserves, although Simon Phillips did a fine job on drums in the band's 1989 tour. Keith Moon resolved to recover from substance abuse after this album was recorded. Unfortunately, he succumbed to an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, and died in 1978. Following Moon's funeral, The Who considered breaking up, but chose instead to soldier on. Townshend recruited Kenney Jones of The Faces (Rod Stewart's old band) to replace Moon, and John "Rabbit" Bundrick to contribute keyboard work. Ironically, although Townshend had the leverage to remold the band as he wanted, what really resulted was what Roger Daltrey wanted: A professional, straightforward rock band dedicated to entertaining its fans. Jones was a very different drummer than Moon, being more of the restrained, Ringo Starr style. As a result, the band's music was far less driving and intense than it had been. The Who spent much of their final four years of constant existence touring. In 1981, they released Face Dances. Face Dances was slickly produced, and apparently more directly targeted for contemporary radio. Although it sounds more "of a piece" than anything since Who's Next, it's really not a very good album. "You Better You Bet" and "Another Tricky Day" are pure pop. "Don't Let Go The Coat" is another of Townshend's Meher Baba works. "Cache Cache" is one of Townshend's songs of frustration filtered into banality by overproduction. Ironically, the best song on the album is "Daily Records", Townshend's paean to his work. The Who returns to Glyn Johns to produce their final album, and the results are something of a cross between Face Dances, Who Are You, The Who By Numbers. The musical style is spare, as on Numbers. Entwistle plays a major songwriting role, as on Who Are You. And the album often seems calculated to please the radio public, a la Face Dances. Still there are high points. "Eminence Front", featuring Townshend on vocals and Daltrey on guitar, is a measured, jazzy tune which succeeds almost despite itself. "I've Known No War", despite its bare arrangement, is a biting commentary on war in the nuclear age. Entwistle's "One At A Time" is cynically entertaining. "A Man Is A Man" hearkens back to the delicate melodies of "Imagine A Man" from Numbers. The album closes with "Cry If You Want", which is eminently appropriate: It's the final song on the band's final album, contains some of Townshend's best lyrics since "Who Are You", and ends with a scathing guitar solo which fades out. Really, it's one of The Who's best songs, and one of their most overlooked ones. Afterward The Who broke up following their 82-83 tour. The three remaining original members embarked on solo careers, building on work they'd done during the 70s. Townshend's career is particularly notable; not surprisingly it carried the standard of the band more than any of the others. In 1989, The Who got back together for a world tour (the same summer that The Rolling Stones did the same). I saw one of their concerts in Boston, and although they were clearly not the band they had once been (for one thing, they had another electric guitarist, a three-person backing chorus, and a horn section), they were still hugely entertaining. Their best numbers that night were "I Can See For Miles" and "Who Are You". A live album, Join Together, was released to commemorate the tour. Since then, the band members have continued on their separate ways, occasionally rejoining to play a few shows. Roger Daltrey organized a couple of concerts in the band's memory, and released an album of one show, entitled A Celebration: The Music of Pete Townshend and The Who. Although the band never seemed to quite accomplish what they wanted to, their legacy remains one of the most powerful in rock music, and their music is still as thrilling today as it's ever been.
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