1. Baba O’Riley – 5:08
2. Bargain – 5:34
3. Love Ain’t For Keeping – 2:10
4. My Wife – 3:41
5. The Song Is Over – 6:14
6. Getting In Tune – 4:50
7. Going Mobile – 3:42
8. Behind Blue Eyes – 3:42
9. Won’t Get Fooled Again – 8:32
1971’s Who’s Next is the fifth album of legendary British rockers The Who, right in the middle of a peak sequence of their most revered and classic works. Though it is a time run thing and I’m never quite sure of my own personal preference, this album does tend to be the consensus pick when it comes to arguments over which work is The Who’s peak. It is one of those albums whose status and cultural ubiquity seems to almost eclipse the details of some of the content within. Though the whole album is quite consistent throughout in its sustained crisp, professional overall quality, it can (and rather will here throughout) be argued that the majority of the album is a bit middling. It’s not that anything is bad, or indeed anything less than fundamentally excellent. This is the only album The Who ever made where there is truly not a filler minute throughout (and that’s partly the point). It is all a top class expression of mainstream, melodic, thoughtful, still powerful hard rock which continues The Who’s trajectory towards the complex and melancholy relative to their earlier raucous party anthems. Few contemporary works were comparable. But relative to their own deep catalogue of classics, and to universally acknowledged seminal masterpiece albums of similar acknowledged all time great status, quite a lot is merely ‘fine’.
Why then, is this album so particularly special? It just is. It’s the vibe of the thing, both in your ears and throughout the surrounding cultural ether. It just feels right that when it comes to all timer discussions, Who’s Next is going to be involved. Everyone with any kind of rock ‘n’ roll focus in their musical preferences knows its associated iconography. The cover is famous, with its brilliant mixing of raw working class imagery and unsettling, monolithic mystery. The boys are committing the rawest of filthy rock ‘n’ roll acts, urinating on a concrete pile that for no apparent reason lingers protruding from a slag heap so desolate as to to evoke the dystopian and alien. The clear 2001: A Space Odyssey reference in the concrete monolith is both topical and further enforcing of its otherworldliness. But even more importantly and famously, the three main masterworks that elevate the album are as perfect, adored and totally widespread a trio of popular music classics as there’s ever been.
The legendary excellence of the three masterpieces that bookend the album result in maybe the greatest album ever rooted in a structural flow common to many other worthy albums. It is what I call a concave album, or a fishbowl (halfpipe, whatever vaguely inaccurate analogy you want). The top and bottom carry the load with a lull in the middle. While many greater albums maintain a similar level throughout, it is no fault of the middle five tracks that they can’t reach the all-time obscene heights of Baba O’Riley (and to a lesser extent Bargain) up-front, then Behind Blue Eyes and Won’t Get Fooled Again at the back. Sometimes, this natural dip can make me underappreciate the album, by creating a misleading sense of filler sameyness through the bulk of the album. But it also is to its benefit. As I’ve talked about on this blog before, an easy to wrap your head around intuitive flow to proceedings helps make an album easier to swallow. So it’s even less surprise than it already was how huge this record was, because it so clearly and drastically fires straight up into a grand and momentous opening, then comes back full circle to an even more mighty closing sequence. The sounds within are indelibly iconic the whole way though. The patented familiarity of Daltrey’s power and passion, Townshend’s simple, driving, power chords and Entwistle and Moon’s speeding semi-trailer of careening chaos is all there. But it has been harnessed in a crisper, clearer, more direct and melodic way than ever before, with new sounds and technology added in to the mix.
The Who were already one of the hugest bands on Earth. There had been countless pop hits, spectacular live shows and diverse album directions peaking with the previous tome Tommy. But with the 70s upon us and rock music evolving into its era of most reverential self-importance, one of the great rock ‘n’ roll bands had not really yet produced that one true masterful, start to finish ‘serious’ work’. There’d always been ambition. There’d been Tommy of course, which was ambitious in scope, dark in theme, and generally sensational. But like all concept albums it was rather weighed down by its own pretensions, limited in musical scope by its recurring themes, and with enough breaks into filler or camp comedy as to not feel complete as a whole coherent masterwork. Looking forward, Quadrophenia trades in some of the camp and humour for even more repetition and weightiness, to its detriment. Both these adjacent rock operas, and all the albums and singles of their whole discography are full of quality, with delirious peaks everywhere. But no other album from The Who, before or after, ever presented as clear and coherent a flowing musical vision where every track was its own fully fledged original idea as Who’s Next. There was always either schlocky elements early on, lower end filler throughout, or the occasional vices of conceptual tomes. But on Who’s Next quite simpler, there are nine rich, deep, mature, largely brooding and introspective cuts, all original, unique and both sophisticated yet accessible.
Townshend himself knew the importance and seriousness with which modern rock was being held, and was a wholesale proponent of it. Rock ‘n’ roll being a vitally important and unifying force in the world was root thematic core of the Lifehouse project from which Who’s Next ultimately developed. Seeking the ultimate follow up to Tommy, Townshend found himself in rather a Brian Wilson style situation, trying to achieve the impossible and turning all the ambition, scale, scope and pretension meters up to 11 until invariably it all became too unwieldy and disappeared up its own backside. What exactly Lifehouse would have been is not entirely clear, and I’m not sure it ever firmly was even for Townshend himself. But the general idea was a multimedia project exploring and extolling rock music as a great unifying universal force in the world. There was scope for recorded, live and film components, and more. The basic narrative was a rather commonly done concept (though I think Townshend was first of those I know), involving a dystopian future where music is banned, and revolutionaries bring it back to the masses.
As part of the preparation work, Townshend organised a series of concerts involving an invited youth audience with the intention being to involve audience participation to shape the musical and narrative structure in an organic live way. One example that eventually bore some relevant fruit on the album, was of That the result, after breaking down the concept into constituent fragments, was to have audience members input some of their own personal details into the numbers-based computers that then translated their data into synthesized musical output. As a futuristic story, computers and futuristic sounds were at the forefront of the plans, and would eventually manifest as the iconic synth parts on the album’s two most famous bookending tomes. However, unsurprisingly if anyone knows the nature of people and society, Townshend couldn’t get audience participation buy-in, from crowds that just wanted to be entertained by a major pop act with their major pop hits. On top of all this, the project was clearly an unwieldy mess, with mileage varying in terms of band member commitment, clear skepticism from and an eventually falling out with manager Kit Lambert, and a general lack of focus and coherence. Townshend just couldn’t corral his almost boundless ambitions into any kind of achievable reality and both his own mental state and the fraying edges of the band invariably decayed into Wilsonesque territory, until eventually it was all dramatically abandoned.
That such a bonafide professional masterwork resulted from the burning debris of Lifehouse, not the kind of low-fi cathartic controlled terrain-burn of Smiley Smile, makes the achievement of this album all the more remarkable. The songs were clearly there, and with the advancements in available instrumental and recording technology meted to Townshend’s conscious attempt to leap into the future, a richer sonic landscape than ever was there for The Who to work with. This new and improved sonic sophistication and expansion was layered on top of, and provided structural discipline and precision for and alongside, all the tried and true elements of The Who’s established thick, raucous, hard rock sound. Strip these mighty compositions of the extraneous fiddle-faddle of trying to tie them all together and craft the perfect rock opera, and you’re just left with a sequence of top quality melodic hard rock.
What can anyone say about the magnificent Baba O’Riley? It is one of the foremost of all rock’s universally revered gems. It feels so strange to me in hindsight that I did not know it at all, compared to my intimacy with the two classics at the end of the album, until hearing this whole album properly as an adult. That can largely he put down to CSI and Limp Bizkit more than anything I guess. But it drives home just how special this is because if you told me as a teenager that Behind Blue Eyes and Won’t Get Fooled Again would only round out the podium on their albums, with neither as the best track, that would have seemed absurd. But this structurally simple and emotionally charged rock classic has just the right amount of extraneous brilliance to elevate it to another level. First is the otherworldly synth intro of course. Is there a more recognisable and unique opening to any classic album ever? The namesakes of the song are most directly referenced in this intro. Meher Baba, the Indian spiritual guru, influenced Townshend greatly and although this isn’t the final data, the original idea as per Lifehouse ideals was to input data related to Baba’s life and personality into synthesizers to be translated into music. Meanwhile, the eventually hypnotic ostinato used is inspired directly by the modal work of modern classical composer Terry Riley.
This synth intro is cut into by yet another sacred monument, those three simple and constantly quoted trusty notes on the piano. Once the whole band has launched into things, the song bounds forward, driven by Moon’s busy newly focused playing and Daltrey’s endless energy. Townshend’s pained ‘Teenage Wasteland’ bridge is a change of mood and tone that makes the re-launch back into the verses even more powerful. Everything is excellent. From the intro through the bulk of the track, you already have a classic, but then comes the most profound beauty yet at the end. Guest player Dave Arbus slides into the outtro with the most achingly gorgeous violin part, to which the whole rest of the band eventually gives way, only to surge back an re-accelerate into a cacophonous finale as monstrous as the track deserves.
Bargain is a remarkable smooth piece. Sometimes I feel it’s the most underrated masterpiece in their whole catalogue, though I think that’s just from me personally as I didn’t know it like their hit singles until getting this album. Everyone in the fandom appears to adore it and I certainly understand why. I can also understand why it can be forgotten when you’re thinking about the very best of The Who. They are usually defined by constant energy, volume and driving momentum. But Bargain is so, almost relaxed? It has a cool, smooth vibe to it that best drives home what an effective new atmosphere this modern more disciplined, evolved and high fidelity new Who could achieve.
It’s all anchored in some unusually tempered acoustic guitar, starting the song and recurring throughout and laid alongside the famous excellent synth additions. The way the band then fires in after the brief prologue is indicative of the whole track. By no means is this not still a monumentally hard rocking song, with Moon in fine form, Townshend’s vintage power chords and Daltrey in full hoarse grunge mode. But it is the crispness of production and in particular, the patience and dynamism at play that makes this track work. Each of those hard bursts occur after so many gorgeously tense and satisfying little pauses and breaks, where things never stop but generally calm down into some combination of acoustic work or uncharacteristic Moon precision. You can just get the sense that every single note has been lovingly crafted from composition to production, to make an ultra-professional but still fun and driving rock classic. No track better reflects the influence and brilliance of producer Glyn Johns than here.
Love Ain’t For Keeping is a simple and pleasant short detour which has a bluesy country feel. It’s two light and breezy minutes of romantic optimism awash with gorgeous acoustic guitars, an instrument Townshend continued to explore more as The Who moved through and then beyond the 60s and their harder edged beginnings. Though reasonably forgettable, it is indicative of this album that instead of the patchiness of the filler on most Who albums, this is still a track of utmost top of the line professionalism and pleasant sonic textures. Bassist John Entwistle’s contribution to the album is My Wife. It is the only non-Townshend track and only non-Lifehouse derived piece on the album, and its mood shift is perfect. Entwistle’s compositions tend to share similar characteristics each time, with highly simple driving hard rock pieces led by memorable, often goofy main riffs or melodies and generally comic lyrics. This is no different, with a hilarious and very awkwardly vintage take on the old ball and chain, telling a story of a man caught cheating and going to all lengths and the very ends of the Earth to avoid the fiery wrath of a woman scored. It is brilliant and interesting musically though, and Townshend was lavish in his praise of the song. It is a wonderful showcase for Entwistle’s many talents, fitting nicely and effectively in his vocal range, with driving bass and piano and a feature horn section as a functional chorus, all played by the man himself. Moon’s drums pound away ferociously and in a less refined manner than most of the album. The reverb-heavy, thick low end sound of Moon’s rolling toms would not have been out of place on early hits like I’m A Boy or Happy Jack. Overall, you get a piece that is clearly light comic relief on the album, both lyrically and sonically, but the more you listen the more you realise it’s also a bonafide highlight.
Side A ends with The Song Is Over, the album’s big mid-track showcase and the most overtly Lifehouse derived piece throughout. It is a song I tend to underrate, as implied earlier by my talking about the bowl-like structure of the album and putting the start and end pieces on a pedestal. This is an adored Who epic, but it’s where the whole glowing sheen of the evolving Who really starts to take over. By the 1973 follow-up Quadrophenia, the energy of The Who had for me arguably given way to more pedestrian albeit gorgeous ‘high-end’ mature stuff. It’s certainly not a criticism overall, but it makes songs like this a little less immediately accessible and penetrable. Furthermore, it was the originally planned closer of the whole Lifehouse narrative and one that I feel suffers the most from being divorced of that context, where it could have been spectacular. It gets right to the crux of the core Lifehouse concept, of the sacred spiritual power of music as some great social unifying force. It effectively shifts between tender, reflective ballad, with Townshend’s melancholy vocal and piano, and a powerful Daltrey driven inspirational and optimistic rock section. A darling song among the ‘serious’ rock critics, that juxtaposition is musically and emotionally interesting and effective, allowing this piece to flourish both as beautiful softer piece and the kind of grand anthemic statement they were always so good at.
Side B opens with another core thematic Lifehouse piece, Getting In Tune. This is a Who classic I think I underappreciate it a bit, but it does show the unmatched consistency of this album that I consider it one of the weaker numbers. It is another critically adored, subtle, dynamic piece. Up front it has a fairly standard, unchallenging hooky pop nature to it, alternating between melancholy piano sequences and harder rock sections, but as ever, those dynamics are amazing, with all kinds of tempo shifts and an easy to overlook fabulous raucous conclusion. The lyrics are a very clear, up front, relatable metaphor that more than any other summarise the basic themes at play throughout and on Townshend’s mind at the time, as he laments his current relationship to music, rock ‘n’ roll, industry and lifestyle, but lauds and works to seek the spiritual and human connecting power of music. Like us all, he’s trying to ‘get in tune’ with what matters to him, spiritually, in love and life. That’s a universal and powerful analogy but in this case, it is double layered as music itself is the avenue for which Townshend seeks this enlightenment. Next comes the light relief of the much maligned Going Mobile, where the density and intensity of proceedings loosens up in a happy, light, fun little acoustic-led country-influenced pop ditty celebrating the joys of adventure and travel. It is often dismissed by ‘serious’ critics and for sure it is the weakest track on the album, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong it. It has pleasant melodies, a driving energy even without the usual Who hard and sharpness, and Townshend’s limited but tender vocals fit the key and the atmosphere of the song perfectly. This track, and its place within the album, is an example of how important the right sequencing is on an album. With the twelve elite and overwhelming minutes to come, this little rest is in fact absolutely perfect and just feels right as a still enjoyable intermission from the high intensity. By the end, you’re intuitively ready to reorient back into a big finish, and they don’t come bigger than here.
Behind Blue Eyes. You all know it. You probably had an emo phase of it being one of your all time favourite songs as a teenager, even this many generations divorced from its original release and context. Depending on age maybe it was even Limp Bizkit’s competent enough cover (given it lacks the payoff of the late section and given its you know, Limp Bizkit). I’m of the right age that distressingly and hilariously, I knew that first, when only aware of the most mighty of huge pop mega-hits of The Who. But I knew of them and this classic is around enough that I quickly became aware of the original, and just as quickly enamoured with its astonishing beauty and power. In its earliest Lifehouse narrative context, this was the theme song of the misunderstood villain of the piece, Jumbo, which makes total sense. It is a deathly sad song in reality, lamenting the feelings of being misunderstood, maligned and forced by society to play roles that don’t reflect well on you and maybe you don’t want to. The tender aching beauty of Daltrey’s delivery, over the perfect simple acoustic figures, make it as iconic a moving soft elegy as any other melancholy acoustic number that ever exists. Then it really gets good.
What was already a masterpiece of simple, direct, effective emotion, transcends to another level in its ferocious, powerful, technically genius second half. Daltrey’s sweet oohs give way to a monumental rockout, where Keith Moon leads the way as ever, finally unleashing at his fullest and most breakneck speed on the whole album. Townshend solos alongside, all over brilliant powerful base chords that anchor a beauty and power all the same to proceedings, and frame Daltrey’s angered, impassioned delivery of some of Townshend’s all time great lyrics. It is all excellent of course, but Moon really is the star. It’s the greatest sequence of his entire wild repertoire, as skillfully frenetic and crazy as he always is, but showing his undervalued intelligence as a unique, clever, drummer in service of the tune. Moon isn’t filling the space between the vocals and Townshend riffs with his fills, he’s using that space to just drive, propelling the whole energy forward by sticking to the main rhythms, but then as Daltrey spits the vitriolic lyrics, Moon chooses that moment to fire away, adding to the feeling of anger and chaos.
Won’t Get Fooled Again takes things to another level again to finish the album. Maybe the most famous and iconic of all Who songs, with similar pop cultural presence in my time growing up through CSI: Miami, this is the album’s ultimate centrepiece. All the different Lifehouse themes, hard but crisply produced rock sounds, and synth experiments, come together in one eight-plus minute tome that is one of all the time classic rock ‘n’ roll epics. Entwistle’s basslines the whole way through are absurd and this is one of the handful of occasions where the general penchant towards burying the bass in the overall Who production sound is a bit frustrating. Moon and Daltrey are at their best doing what they do, with Moon particularly cleverly and satisfyingly keeping himself alongside the subtle rhythmic shifts of the synthesized Lowrey organ figures that are the song’s anchor. But the star here is the particularly crunchy, buzz-saw sound of Townshend’s guitars, which whirl away further from his usual power chord base than ever.
Each verse, chorus and breakaway solo workout is subtly different and more interesting than the last, before it all eventually builds to a final breakdown, leaving just that astonishing, hypnotic synthesized organ to pulse away in a long slow-down bridge. The re-entry from this synth section is close to the greatest and most famous in all of rock, with Moon thundering back in with fill after fill, before building to the ultimate crescendo of Daltrey’s CSI-tastic memefied yeah scream, his and perhaps all of rock’s most famous ‘rock yeah!’ That, somewhat strangely I’ve always felt, leaves a random little final section with an entirely new lyric and vocal figure, but the ending is still big and fabulous. It’s not necessarily so that this is definitely the album’s best track. The utter untouchable mastery of Baba O’Riley and Behind Blue Eyes makes that a difficult question. But it is the album’s centrepiece. Nothing better summarises what The Who at their very artistic peak at this time were about.
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