The Who Quadrophenia (1973)
From altrockchick.com
I’ve had several requests to give Quadrophenia a shot, and my response has always been “Ugh.” I chalked it up to Tommy Trauma Syndrome: the fear of having to suffer through another Townshendian trip into pretentiousness, of having to deal with another cast of loathsome characters bound together in a rat’s nest of a plot. I resented the identification of Tommy as the first “rock opera” (it wasn’t). I dreaded the commercial compromises that marked Tommy, such as writing “Pinball Wizard” for an influential critic who liked playing pinball and had been unimpressed by the demo of Tommy that Townshend presented to him.
My initial engagement did nothing to calm my fears. Let’s begin with the contrived and faulty description of the lead character contained in the liner notes:
A tough guy, a helpless dancer
A romantic, is it me for a moment?
A bloody lunatic, I’ll even carry your bags
A beggar, a hypocrite, love reign over me.Schizophrenic? I’m bleeding quadrophenic.
Simple library research would have told Townshend that schizophrenia is not split personality, making his discovery of quadrophenia a ridiculous and uninformed leap of ignorance. It’s suspiciously handy that our hero has four different personalities, as there were . . . let me see . . . one, two, three, four . . . yes, there were four band members who made up The Who. Finally, a little digging revealed that around the time of the recording, The Who attempted to build a recording studio that could handle what they thought was the next big thing . . . quadrophonic sound.
Townshend went even further, integrating the marketing jive into the lead character’s DNA, for lo and behold, he’s a Who fan! Who woulda thunk it?
This primitive attempt at branding and clumsy effort to capitalize on The Next Big Thing heightened my fears and raised my hackles. It seemed to me that Quadrophenia was another example of flim-flam from an overly-ambitious musician who didn’t know when to quit. I privately cheered when I learned they couldn’t pull off quadrophonic technology and had to drop out of the music industry’s latest race to the moon. Still, Townshend had gone too far in his commitment to quadro-everything to change the name of the album to Stereophenia.
I was ready to chuck the possibility of doing a review down the crapper, and probably would have had I not engaged in my annual spring ritual of getting rid of the useless junk I’ve accumulated over the previous year, during which I ran across an ancient copy of a book I treasured as a child, a book I consider the greatest contribution ever made to world literature:
“I do not like green eggs and ham! I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.”
“You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say.”
Fucking Sam-I-Am will haunt me until the day I turn into compostable material.
I have to admit that John Entwistle’s bass part on “The Real Me” also urged me forward, as that is my favorite bass part ever, hands down, no lie, no shit, don’t fuck with me on this one. After some more hemming and hawing, I finally decided to go full monty and bought a copy of the deluxe edition. While I did get a generally pleasant hit from the original release, it was Pete Townshend’s carefully mapped out demo versions that triggered my aha moment.
All that stupid quadro-marketing was completely unnecessary. The entire quadro-concept was a nonsensical distraction. Strip away that crapola and you have a thematically coherent (though not entirely lyrically coherent) and sometimes moving coming-of-age psychodrama built around the struggles of a young man, one that could have culminated in a perfect ending with some disciplined editing. The tale of Jimmy’s journey through peer pressure, music culture and piss-poor parenting is related through the music of a band working at their professional peak, on top of their game individually and collectively. Yes, there are times when Townshend goes overboard with the repetitive motifs and foreshadowing, and other times when musical gaps are filled with tried-and-true Who-isms. Sometimes the songs simply do not work because they fail to advance the plot or develop the character. Quadrophenia could have been a great album had they eliminated the filler tracks and abandoned the obsession with double albums that dominated that period in popular music history, but even with its flaws, Quadrophenia is a pretty solid piece of work that would have been better served by a low-key marketing approach.
The opening segment of Quadrophenia features two forms of overture surrounding one great song, “The Real Me.” The first, “I Am the Sea” is a musique concrète piece integrating a field recording of waves crashing against a Cornish beach with snippets of songs that form the “four themes” (the four aspects of Jimmy’s personality). The other, “Quadrophenia” is a more traditional overture compiling the primary musical motifs. As “I Am the Sea” establishes the dominant metaphor and encompasses the intro to “The Real Me” (which establishes the central character and hints at the plot lines), “Quadrophenia” seems a superfluous waste of recording space, a sop to the wannabe snobs in the listening audience who needed a few classical music tropes to confirm the album’s status as a gen-u-ine rock opera, serving to raise their own status in the process.
But “The Real Me” is the real deal, the kind of explosive bash that brought out the best in the band. Keith Moon, unchained from the restrictions imposed by Glyn Johns during the recording of Who’s Next, reverts to his naturally maniacal style, a perfect complement to Jimmy’s panic-ridden angst. Daltrey confirms his reputation as one of the great interpreters of rock, imbuing Jimmy with high-powered anxiety and immeasurable frustration as he realizes that the people who are supposed to help him aren’t doing dick. Townshend takes on more of the conductor role, facilitating the beat with sharp power chords while letting the others work their magic. The lead magician here is John Entwistle, who supplied the horn arrangements that add an extra layer of excitement to the arrangement and . . .
Wow. Just wow.
Entwistle’s bass work on “The Real Me” is the rock equivalent of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” a virtuoso performance that is almost impossible to replicate. Accomplished in a playful mood and in a single take, flipping between rhythmic support and arrhythmic fills, his most notable contributions come when he’s playing call-and-response to Daltrey’s vocal, forming patterns that raise questions and doubt (by ending on slides to higher notes) and express disappointment (through a combination of slides to lower notes or patterns that simply collapse in frustration). His uneven staccato on the choruses where he picks at high-speed while occasionally eliminating notes sounds like a heart monitor on the fritz, another echo of Jimmy’s fragile psychological state.
Our first encounter with Jimmy finds him in the office of a therapist, one whose therapeutic technique can be summed up in two succinct phrases: “blank stares” and “our time is up.”
His mother isn’t much help beyond a shrug of a shoulder and the observation that mental illness “runs in the family.” His girlfriend is now his ex-girlfriend, no doubt due to his perceived mental instability. His last stab finds him running to a preacher “full of lies and hate,” who finds Jimmy frightening, probably because there’s nothing in the good book about how to deal with mod angst. Jimmy is going through what most adolescents go through—the process of individuation, the search for self in relation to others, the quest to find one’s true identity independent of parental influence. What makes him interesting is that he oscillates between the roles of observer and participant, providing cheeky observations of the world around him and direct expressions of raw teenage emotion.
In “Cut My Hair” Jimmy questions the notion of going along with the crowd (in his case, the mods) in the context of the mod-rocker clashes over Whitsun weekend in May 1964. He frets about fashion, the pressure to fight and “that uncertain feeling still here in my brain.” The arrangement reflects Jimmy’s internal split, flipping from sweet-and-mellow to the sharp punctuation of the “Zoot suit” chorus. There are some remarkable performances here from both Moon and Entwistle, but what really stands out is Townshend’s guitar as he leaves the power chords behind for sweet, clear picking that sounds remarkably empathetic. The appended bridge is sung over a reenactment of a BBC broadcast describing the weekend battles in Brighton and environs, a narrative that dissolves over the sound of a tea kettle fighting the bulletins for attention.
“The Punk and the Godfather” seems to break the narrative, so Townshend felt the need to explain what the hell was happening in the liner notes to the deluxe edition demos:
If it was never revealed that Jimmy was once a frustrated musician I realised that, once this song was written, it didn’t matter. What matters is that he looked up to his heroes in The Who, young men critically a few years older than he, and felt let down by what they’d become, and what they had allowed to happen to their music. I quoted my own song “My Generation” as an example of the promise that Jimmy felt had been broken.
Glad to hear Townshend kinda-sorta acknowledging that “hope I die before I get old” was nothing more than deliberately provocative bullshit. Townshend’s lyrics don’t entirely sync with his explanation, though, as is often the case in many a narrative attached to a rock opus. Musically speaking, the song is well-constructed, kicking ass with explosive power chords and enthusiastic drive from Entwhistle, while Moon displays remarkable discipline balancing caveman power and gentle cymbal work in the sweeter passages.
The song that reveals Jimmy as frustrated guitarist comes next in the form of “I’m One,” featuring a rare extended acoustic guitar passage that highlights Townshend’s nimble fingers. Part of me wishes that they hadn’t turned on the power switch midway through the song, as the acoustic passage is quite entrancing, but Townshend’s choice to turn on the juice is true to Jimmy’s character, a guy likely to explode any time he feels frustration—which turns out to be most of the time.
Circling back to the narrative in “The Dirty Jobs,” Jimmy does what almost every kid does in their quest for independence—winds up in a shit job. His chosen occupation of dustman (garbage collector in American English) turns out to be quite the learning experience, as he interacts with adults in other shit jobs while making the rounds. The bus driver is particularly perceptive, commenting on Britain’s dying industries and the impact of a rigid class system:
I am a man who drives the local bus
I take miners to work but the pits all closed today
It’s easy to see that you are one of us
Ain’t it funny how we all seem to look the same?
The idealistic whippersnapper isn’t having any of it, and Jimmy pushes back against “this is the way things have to be” while trying to buck up the old farts:
I am a young man, I ain’t done very much
You men should remember how you used to fight
Just like a child I’ve been seeing only dreams
I’m all mixed up but I know what’s right
The music here is driven by rhythmic contrast, with synthesized staccato strings handling the basic thrusts and Keith Moon displaying restless power as he pounds away at will. Daltrey is excellent once again, his phrasing clear and his command of the fluid emotional content absolutely first-rate. There is another lengthy patch of field recordings after the song, featuring men shouting in rhythmic unison as if on strike, and a brief passage from John Philip Sousa’s The Thunderer. This was something of a compromise, according to Townshend: “No sound effects were available to get the stink across so we used a brass band. Incongruous enough?”
Works for me!
“Helpless Dancer” (Roger’s Theme) begins with dramatic continuous piano and Entwistle’s luscious French horn before dissolving into insistent piano block chords. The arrangement is pure musical theatre with Daltrey coming out of either channel to mimic theatrical dialogue. This aspect of Jimmy’s personality rants about virtually everything that is wrong in the world, from war to rat-infested housing to homophobia to racial tension to the depersonalization inherent in modern society. If it sounds overwhelming, well, it’s supposed to be—this is Jimmy awakened to the ugly truth about the world, an awakening that smashes his shiny ideals into smithereens. When he finally gets to the impact of a society gone mad, that impact is expressed through a long pause in the vocal where the dramatic piano and French horn return to build sufficient tension before Daltrey delivers the clinching phrase:
And when a man is trying to change
But only causes future pain
You realise that all along
Something in us is going wrong . . . .. . . you stop dancing.
As if to mock the freedom we feel when dancing to rock ‘n’ roll, Townshend inserts the opening to “The Kids Are Alright” over the sounds of a live audience. We also get the foreshadowing of “Is It Me?” (John’s Theme), part of the structural design intended to link the four disparate aspects of Jimmy’s personality.
Having expressed himself with unusual clarity, Jimmy begins to doubt the validity of those insights and questions his sanity in the song “Is It in My Head?” The lyrics describe someone with unusual sensitivity to the world around him, an affliction that has led many artists to attempt or succeed at suicide. Some of his perceptions are paranoid, but most are unconsciously insightful as he struggles with the age-old mystery of opposites:
I see a man without a problem
I see a country always starved
I hear the music of the heartbeat
I walk and people turn and laugh
Jimmy does fall into the trap of believing that intelligence has more validity than emotion by simply asking the question, “Is it in my head or in my heart?” If I could leap through the speakers, I’d slap some sense into him and scream: “It doesn’t fucking matter! Both are valid!” Of course, if I did that, I’d be interrupting one of the strongest arrangements on the album, a tightly-played mix of melody, harmony and power that strangely manages to lift my spirits . . . perhaps just considering the possibility that I’m going off the deep end is a healthy thing to do.
No comments from the peanut gallery re: my sanity.
“I’ve Had Enough” opens with The Who operating on high power, Entwistle’s bass pumping away, Moon getting ready to blast away . . . then . . . wait a minute . . . did they just switch to the non-synthesized interludes of “Won’t Get Fooled Again?” Hold on . . . now we’re covering Jimmy’s fashion choices . . . again? Oh, wait . . . why are they foreshadowing “Love Reign O’er Me” here? Holy shit! Now they’re ripping off “Tom Dooley!” Anything worthwhile in the lyrics? Hmm . . . Jimmy’s into nihilism now. Thanks but . . . I think I’ve had enough.
Purple hearts go well with nihilism, so Jimmy gobbles them up while riding the “5:15.” Love the horn section, love the interplay between Townshend and session pianist Chris Stainton, but the rock ‘n’ roll feels a bit too slick and there’s not much story movement beyond Jimmy’s escape to Brighton to renew his spirits after having smashed up his scooter. Meh.
The second Brighton experience is covered in the song “Sea and Sand.” Once the seagulls and waves have faded into the background, Jimmy thankfully fills in the many plot holes that have accumulated over the last few songs:
I just couldn’t face going home
It was just a drag on my own
They finally threw me out
My mom got drunk on stout
My dad couldn’t stand on two feet
As he lectured about morality
Now I guess the family’s complete
With me hanging ’round on the street
Or here on the beach
The arrangement reflects his warring feelings—soft arpeggiated guitar and restrained bass for the anguish, amped-up power to express disgust and justify his decision to split. A new musical theme is introduced in the following verse where he talks of his girl’s expectations, similar in mood to the soft passages in the opening verse but with different chords and melody. There we learn that the girl is into fashion and that Jimmy still hasn’t escaped the power of someone else’s expectations, vowing to “match her.” This brings on a third passage, the same truncated verse that appeared in “I’ve Had Enough,” which now qualifies as the worst-ever act of foreshadowing. More back-and-forth between disparate parts follows, with the damned seagulls squawking away, and you finally realize that “Sea and Sand” is one of those suites that people were so enamored with in the early ’70s. Unfortunately, I am immune to the charms of piecemeal thinking, and to my ears, “Sea and Sand” is pure patchwork. Too bad, because there are some promising possibilities there.
It’s followed by “Drowned,” a strange twist on even more nihilism, uncomfortably supported by rollicking piano and upbeat rock ‘n’ roll . . . and because that wasn’t working, the song fades on the sax theme from “5:15.” Townshend admitted the song didn’t fit on Quadrophenia, remarking “When the tragic hero of Q sings it, it is desperate and nihilistic. In fact, it’s a love song, God’s love being the ocean and our ‘selves’ being the drops of water that make it up. Meher Baba said, ‘I am the Ocean of Love.’”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Move the fuck on.
As he strolls down Brighton Beach, Jimmy takes a trip down memory lane back to the good old days when mods and rockers were bashing each other’s brains out. He runs into a personage referred to as “ace face” in the prose narrative contained in the album booklet, a mod leader he admired for his sawn-off shotgun and fearlessness in shattering glass.
Charming fellow, I’m sure.
Thankfully karma has claimed another worthy victim, and Jimmy is surprised to see the guy he looked up to “always running at someone’s bleedin’ heels” in his role in “Bell Boy” (Keith’s Theme). There isn’t much musical variation on Quadrophenia; for the most part, it’s patented Who music played very, very well. That’s why Keith Moon’s exaggerated Cockney and the dissonant harmonies of the phrase “bell boy” grab the listener’s attention. Even when Moon drops the Cockney to sing a verse in his natural voice, it’s a welcome diversion from the norm. Oh, how the mighty have fallen:
Some nights I still sleep on the beach
Remember when stars seemed in reach
Then I wander in early for work
Spend the day licking boots for my perks
While Moon’s vocal qualifies as comic opera, he really does manage to express the bitter humiliation and disillusionment of a young man who was on top of the world when free of adult responsibility, brought down hard by the socio-economic order of things.
The Who then make a remarkable comeback from suite-form failure with “Doctor Jimmy,” an exceptionally strong composition delivered with passion and precision. The howling winds and crashing waves that open the song tell us that despite his effort to achieve self-understanding, Jimmy’s soul remains in turmoil. The dignity of Entwistle’s French horn gives us a tiny bit of hope that Jimmy may recover his own sense of dignity, but Moon’s assertive drums wipe out that possibility in a heartbeat. Daltrey’s vocal, full of bite and bravado, confirms it: Jimmy remains a confused young man afflicted with a severe case of toxic masculinity, aggravated by substance abuse:
I’ll take on anyone
Ain’t scared fo a bloody nose
Drink ’til I drop down
With one eye on my clothes
What is it? I’ll take it.
Who is she? I’ll rape it.
Gotta bet there? I’ll meet it.
Getting high? You can’t beat it . . .You say she’s a virgin
Well, I’m gonna be the first in
Her fellah’s gonna kill me
Oh, fucking will he?
Roughly midway through the song we get a brief glimpse of the vulnerable side of Jimmy through “Is It Me” (John’s Theme). The transition from the core song to this passage is well-executed, with Townshend providing just the right number of measures to allow the listener to catch their breath and get comfortable with the decelerated tempo. The moment of vulnerability vanishes in two lines, as Daltrey makes a sharp turn from the gentle voice of self-reflection back to the rough voice of a violent past that Jimmy is unable to escape:
Is it me for a moment?
The stars are falling
The heat is rising
The past is calling
After returning to the main theme and wrapping up the song proper, we encounter an extended fade that begins by restating the musical themes but eventually collapses into a chaotic melange of sound, as if Jimmy is close to losing his hold on reality. “Doctor Jimmy” is a stunning work balancing drama and discipline that should have been the perfect set-up for a grand finale.
Of course, Townshend had to fuck it up by inserting another useless restatement of Quadrophenia’s musical themes in the form of “The Rock.” This is classic double-album filler, with no ostensible musical or narrative purpose that completely breaks the listener’s connection to Jimmy at the worst possible moment.
It certainly weakens the impact of “Love Reign O’er Me,” which now feels detached from the disturbing revelations in “Doctor Jimmy.” That detachment highlights the fundamental problem of a narrative that requires the listener to consult the liner notes to know what the hell is happening. Townshend wasn’t the only songwriter guilty of this error; Ray Davies did the same thing on Soap Opera, forcing the listener back to the liner notes to discover the essential truth of Norman’s identity. As for the song itself, Daltrey is great, the synthesized strings are now quite tiresome and I think Townshend’s use of the poetic contraction “o’er” is fucking ludicrous. I will give him credit for his decision to leave Jimmy’s fate hanging in the balance, for ambiguity is what it means to be young.
As double albums go, Quadrophenia doesn’t have near the excess of The White Album, but proves to be an even more frustrating experience because it is a lot closer to perfection. Reduce the tracklist to the ten or eleven songs essential to the narrative (allowing for an intelligent rewrite of “Sea and Sand”), insert a brief lyrical passage that explains Jimmy’s state of mind and gets him into the goddamn boat, and you have a masterpiece that wouldn’t have needed a milligram of marketing hype to entice people to buy the album and cement The Who’s status as musical artists of the highest order. The musicianship on Quadrophenia is outstanding . . . as for the composition . . . well, it’s a lot better than Tommy, but still a fair distance from nirvana.
The Who ‘That’s When They Were on Fire’: Inside the Who’s ‘Live at Leeds’
From yahoo.com February 14th 2020
On the 50th anniversary of their most legendary show, longtime sound engineer Bob Pridden reflects on capturing the group at their peak
It was 50 years ago today that the Who walked into the University of Leeds Refectory in Leeds, England, and played what many rock fans consider to be the greatest concert of all time. At the very least, the album they recorded that night — Live at Leeds — is one of the most celebrated live albums in the genre’s history, up there with the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East, Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York, the Band’s The Last Waltz, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s Live Bullet, and Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Live at Leeds, we phoned up the Who’s longtime sound engineer Bob Pridden to chat about the momentous gig. He joined their ranks in 1966 and, amazingly, stayed on the road with the Who until 2016 when he decided that half a century traveling around with a rock band was enough. “It was getting hard,” says the 74-year-old. “I wasn’t getting any younger. The pressure each night was getting hard for me.”
Pridden witnessed well over 1,000 gigs during his life with the Who, but he says they reached their peak in the late Sixties and early Seventies. “That’s when they were on fire,” he says. “The were working all the time and just on top of their game. As a unit of just four people, a band couldn’t be any better.”
It was his job to mix the sound every night for the room, but actually recording the shows for posterity wasn’t even a thought for the band in their earliest years. Tragically, that means that the hundreds of gigs they did between 1963 and 1968 have been completely lost to history beyond little bits here and there.
“About two years before Live at Leeds, I thought I’d try recording them with a couple of microphones plugged into a tape recorder,” Pridden says. “I brought an Akai seven-and-a-half–inch reel-to-reel and started taping shows on it. We went from that to a Vortexion where you can take a D.I. [direct input] into it and then put two mics into it and mix them in together.”
The enormous success of 1969’s Tommy forced the band to think more seriously about recording their shows. The rock opera gave them a huge new audience, but it was largely a studio creation that didn’t capture their explosive onstage sound. When they headed to America in the fall, Pridden was instructed to tape 30 shows for a live album that was envisioned as the perfect follow-up to Tommy. (Bootlegs were also becoming big business at this point, and the band wanted to beat the pirates at their own game.)
In Pete Townshend’s memoir Who I Am, he recalls speaking to Pridden after the tour and realizing he hadn’t taken any notes about the relative quality of each show. “There wasn’t enough time for us to wade through 30 shows again,” he wrote. “Plus we now had an additional eight that Bob had recorded in England — including the most recent show at the London Coliseum. For me to listen to 38 shows would take five days in a studio. Even with notes I would lose track. The live album was never going to happen if we didn’t do something, and fast.”
This was early in February 1970, and the band had only two gigs coming up before a long break, at Leeds University on February 14th and Hull’s City Hall the following day. “‘Hire an eight-track rig, record the shows, I’ll mix them both at home on my new eight-track machine, and the best of the two nights will have to do,’” Townshend instructed Pridden. “Bob was looking anxious again. ‘What do I do with the live tapes from the tour?’”https://www.youtube.com/embed/XhGyq2YjSiI?feature=oembed
In a move he’d later label “one of the stupidest decisions of my life,” Townshend told Pridden to burn the tapes so that they’d never wind up in the hands of bootleggers. Pridden remembers the moment well all these years later. “I burned them in a dustbin in the back of a cottage I had,” he says. “I put them in the bin, dropped a match and that was it. I felt weird, but we were already planning on playing another show. I didn’t think that 20 years on people would be crying out for these things. But it couldn’t have been everything because some of them did eventually surface and they got used.”
Pridden’s bonfire put immense pressure on the Who as they headed to Leeds and Hull. They had just two nights to capture a perfect concert after thinking they could simply pick the best out of 30 in America. Making matters worse, the mobile recording kit that Townshend envisioned the label sending over wound up being “a bunch of bits and pieces in military-grade boxes” that arrived in a van. This equipment was set up in the cafeteria one floor below the general assembly hall where the Who were performing.
“They played in the room where students would get together and the headmaster or the teachers would talk from the stage,” says Pridden. “There were no seats at all and it was really packed. People were hanging off the side of the wall and onto things. It was packed to the gills. I don’t think these days that amount of people would even be let in.”
The set featured the vast majority of Tommy along with earlier hits like “I Can’t Explain,” “Happy Jack,” and “Substitute,” along with covers like “Fortune Teller” and “Summertime Blues,” and a nearly 16-minute version of “My Generation.”
“I played more carefully than usual and tried to avoid the careless bum notes that often occurred because I was trying to play and jump around at the same time,” Townshend wrote. “The next day we played a similar set in City Hall in Hull. This was another venue with good acoustics for loud rock, but it felt less intense than the previous night.”
When Pridden listened to the tapes, he was horrified to discover that John Entwistle’s bass parts somehow weren’t recorded at Hull. “Forget about Hull then,” Pridden recalls Townshend telling him. “Concentrate on Leeds.”
That show had its own problems though. In addition to intermittent clicks, the backing vocals weren’t recorded properly. “I arranged a session at Pye studios,” Townshend wrote, “played the show back, and John and I simply sang along. We covered the backing vocals in one take, preserving the immediacy of the live concert.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/kcVmJGkMTgc?feature=oembed
Townshend tried slicing out the clicks with a razor blade and quickly realized it would be impossible to get all of them. But subpar-sounding bootlegs were flooding the market at this time, so the band just added a note to the label saying the clicks were intentional. The cover was a faded stamp reading “The Who: Live at Leeds” on brown paper, mirroring the look of illegal vinyl bootlegs of the era.
The original Live at Leeds, released May 23rd, 1970, featured just six of the 33 songs played at the show, and not a single one of them was from Tommy. It wasn’t until 1995 when a CD version arrived containing 14 of the songs, and the complete gig wouldn’t see the light of day until the release of a deluxe edition in 2001.
All this time, the master tapes for Hull sat in storage. They were presumed to be worthless because of the issues with Entwistle’s bass parts, but when prepping a 40th anniversary of Live at Leeds a decade ago, Pridden listened to the full Hull show for the first time. “That bass wasn’t there for the first five or six numbers,” he says. “Then all of a sudden it kicked in and stayed.”
He went to Townshend with his discovery. “Let’s get someone to overdub a bass on it,” Townshend said. “We can use it.” Horrified at the idea of someone else attempting to replicate John’s bass parts, Pridden came up with a better solution. “I thought to myself, ‘They did exactly the same set both nights,’” says Pridden. “‘Maybe we can lift the bass from the first few numbers on Leeds and drop it in.’ This is when Pro Tools was on the go.”
He tasked an audio engineer, Matt Hay, with the delicate task of lining up the Leeds bass parts to the Hull recordings. “We went in and set up an eight-track machine, which Hull was recorded on, and lifted the bass from Leeds and dropped it onto the track with Pro Tools,” says Pridden. “Poor Matt was running for two days and nights marrying the bass from Live at Leeds. But when we did, it was fantastic.” (Live at Hull was released on the 40th-anniversary edition of Live at Leeds in 2010 and as a standalone disc two years later.)
After the Leeds and Hull shows, the Who slowed down the pace of their touring considerably so they could focus on the creation of complex studio releases like Who’s Next and Quadrophenia. Their tours after 1971 were shorter affairs marked by private planes, drug binges, and sloppier sets, especially when it came to the work of Keith Moon. These were still incredible gigs by the standard of most any other band, but the magic of Live at Leeds — the culmination of seven years of relentless road work — was never quite achieved again.
After Moon died in 1978, the group never again played as a four-piece band, despite coming close in 1999 and 2000 when Daltrey, Townshend, and Entwistle were joined only by drummer Zak Starkey and keyboardist John “Rabbit” Bundrick.
“They are still fantastic, though,” says Pridden. “I went to the concert at Wembley last year. It was certainly different with the orchestra, but it was magical. Maybe the next thing they’ll do is go back to a four-piece, but I don’t think there’s a chance in hell it’ll happen. It would be amazing, though.”
And looking back at Live at Leeds five decades later, Pridden says he and the band were moving so quickly they didn’t realize what an amazing legacy they were leaving for future generations to discover. It was just another show.
“We were making history,” he says. “But we weren’t history. We never thought about making history. We were just wandering minstrels out there having fun.”
The Who Tanglewood 1970
From wolfgangs.com
During the summer of 1970, Bill Graham presented an extraordinary series of concerts at Tanglewood, the renowned classical music venue located in the scenic Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. At the time, presenting rock music in a classical venue was a surprising and precarious step to take. To many, hearing the Fillmore and Tanglewood in the same sentence equated to “when worlds collide.” Much like his approach at the Fillmores, Graham’s “The Fillmore at Tanglewood” series presented diverse, handpicked triple bills, but with the added advantage of a beautiful open-air venue and plenty of informal lawn seating. With the Fillmore East crew providing technical support, these concerts would be hailed as a technical and artistic triumph and would entertain the largest Tanglewood audiences to date. In a year plentiful in memorable concerts, these Tanglewood performances truly stand out. Artists like the Who, Miles Davis, Santana, and Chicago all delivered inspired performances, several of which remain career-defining moments to this very day.
The Who’s July 7th performance at Tanglewood was certainly one of the most highly anticipated of the three concerts that Graham presented during the 1970 series. Along with the Jefferson Airplane, the Who headlined Graham’s one-off 1969 experiment at Tanglewood and the success of that gig was indeed the inspiration for the 1970 series of concerts. By 1970, The Who were experiencing monumental success, having taken the musical world by storm with Peter Townshend’s rock opera, Tommy, the previous year. Not since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper had a rock album been so perceived as a “work of art,” and the momentum of Tommy sustained the group throughout 1969 and 1970. The public and critical reaction to Townshend’s rock opera had a profound effect on the group and Townshend in particular, raising the Who’s profile to stratospheric proportions. The group even booked several of their performances of Tommy into the most prestigious classical music venues in Europe and launched their 1970 American tour with two presentations at New York City’s renowned Metropolitan Opera House.
Although the group’s 1970 performances were universally well received, the massive popularity and critical analysis of Tommy inevitably became a double-edged sword. The band was being embraced and criticized by the highbrow classical community as well as rock fans and critics. The new trappings of fame and the relentless media bombardment that now followed the group began to take its toll on Townshend. Partially motivated by anxiety at being perceived on a strictly artistic level, the band issued Live at Leeds, one of the rawest, loudest, most visceral live recordings ever (released seven weeks prior to this show). It was in this mode, balancing between the artistic aspirations of Tommy and the blistering hard rock of their other live repertoire, that the Who embarked on their 1970 American tour. The final night of this tour culminated in this now legendary concert at Tanglewood, where the Who headlined a bill that also included San Francisco’s It’s A Beautiful Day and Jethro Tull.
In Townshend’s own words, the band would have “another bash at it,” in terms of Tommy, in addition to introducing some intriguing new material. Unreleased at the time, “Heaven And Hell would appear as a non-album b-side, making its inclusion of particular interest here. The entire performance is quite remarkable and these new multi-track transfers reveal the Tanglewood gig to be a far better performance than any previous bootleg recordings revealed. Often as powerful as the legendary “Live at Leeds” material and generally superior to their Isle Of Wight performance days later, these new recordings will come as a revelation to hardcore fans, providing one of the finest examples of Keith Moon and John Entwistle’s live prowess circa 1970 ever recorded.
Following Bill Graham’s opening announcements and introductions of the individual band members, the Who launch into one of John Entwistle’s most powerful songs, “Heaven And Hell,” their standard opener during this era. Released as the b-side of “Summertime Blues” three days after this performance, “Heaven And Hell” is distinctly different from Townshend’s writing. Entwistle’s atheistic and at times acidic social commentaries, of which this song is a prime example, often relegated his songs to b-sides and non-album tracks. Nonetheless, it’s a propulsive opener that provides an interesting contrast to Townshend’s more spiritually-oriented writing of this era, while emphasizing the group’s strength on stage. It is a clear signpost to where Entwistle would head on his first solo album, Smash Your Head Against The Wall, the following year. The oldest original number of the set, the Kinks-like “I Can’t Explain,” follows in fine form. Unlike his musical peers in the 1964/1965 era, most of whom were still writing love songs (including Lennon and McCartney), this first single by the Who focused on the frustration of being unable to articulate one’s feelings and is an excellent example of what made Townshend’s writing stand out from the very beginning.
Throughout this set, Keith Moon’s double bass drumming is astoundingly complicated, and he plays with a furious intensity that threatens to spin out of control, yet never does. The band’s mastery of tension and release is impressive here but even better represented on the next tune, a searing version of Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues.” Much like the furious performance on Live At Leeds, this is another vehicle for the group to expel more raw energy before tackling the long haul of Tommy.
At this point, Townshend addresses the Tanglewood audience, explaining that this will be the last gig in America for 1970; the final gig of this tour and the performances of Tommy will soon be retired. Townshend sounds genuinely happy and appreciative, no doubt in part due to the technical excellence of the show itself (i.e., great stage monitor mixes that allow these musicians to clearly hear each other and perform as one). Reflective of the ideas that would soon propel his Lifehouse project, which, at its core, addressed the symbiotic relationship between the group and its audience, Townshend makes a point to include the audience when stating that it’s time to “have you and us have another bash at it” in terms of Tommy, which is greeted with exuberant applause. He then introduces Keith Moon as “the conductor of our particular orchestra” who, with the clicks of his drumstick baton, begins humorously assembling the musicians.
Included from this set is the only cover song in the Tommy opus, an urgent reading of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Eyesight To The Blind,” “Fiddle About” (in which Entwistle gets his second lead vocal as the wicked Uncle Ernie), and “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” on which Townshend and Moon humorously share the vocal spotlight.
The fire and passion of the Who in 1970 and the symbiosis that these four musicians achieve here is nothing short of astounding. The Leeds and Isle of Wight recordings will always remain as two of the Who’s landmark 1970 recordings, and deservedly so, but thanks to this spectacular new transfer of Bill Graham’s recordings, Tanglewood is now equally worthy of attention.
The Who – Who (2019)
From progarchives.com
Review by TCat
The Who’s studio output has, of course, been rather spotty since 1982, and after several breakups and reunions, has only resulted in two studio albums; “Endless Wilre” in 2006, and more currently “WHO”, which was released in November of 2019. All that remains of the band is Roger Daltrey doing almost all of the lead vocals, and Pete Townshend on guitars, background vocals and lead vocals on “I’ll Be Back” and all three of the deluxe edition’s bonus tracks. All other instruments are performed by guest musicians and these guests all perform on different specific tracks. Of course Keith Moon died in 1978 and John Entwistle died in 2002, or course each death had a lasting effect on the band and it shows in the lack of new output.
On this album, both Daltry and Townsend provide the consistency of this album, and they still provide that same The Who signature sound, however, both of them recorded their parts separately and the other parts were added by various musicians. As far as the bass parts; most of them are provided by Pino Palladino who has been in The Who’s line-up since 2002 and has also performed with John Mayer. Zak Starkey (Ringo Starr’s son) has also been a regular drummer for The Who since 1996 and performs on 4 of the tracks. Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s band “The Heartbreakers” plays keyboards on 3 tracks and Joey Waronker (session musician for Beck and “R.E.M.) also plays drums on 3 tracks. Everything else is done by various other artists.
One of the most interesting things about the album is the cover which is a series of photos that represent influences to The Who’s music along with different notable symbols and things that pertain to the band’s history, including the word “Detour” which not only references one of the more catchy tracks on this album, but also is a nod to the name “The Detours”, the name the band used before becoming The Who.
As Daltry is lead vocalist on almost all of the tracks on the regular album, so is Townshend the songwriter on all of the tracks except “Beads on One String”, The Who’s version of a nice ballad (where Daltry even tempers his vocals accordingly), which Townshend shares with Josh Hunsacker, and “Break the News” which is written by Simon Townshend, Pete’s younger brother.
The music on this album is definitely interesting enough in that it really reflects the trademark sound of The Who’s music through the years. “Ball and Chain” is the first single off the album, yet it really lacks anything interesting. However, as mentioned previously, “Detour” is the first really memorable song up to this point (which is track 4) with a nice catchy hook and rhythm pattern. After that, “Beads on One String” is a definite highlight as a more ballad-like track, and “Hero Ground Zero” features some great orchestral (mostly strings) effects that go uncredited on the album, and that gives it a sweeping feeling that helps it stand out.
Daltry’s vocals haven’t suffered or changed much over the years, and that is mostly a good thing. I do believe he has more restraint and control most of the time on this album, maybe a bit mellower at times, however, he still proves he has plenty of strength when he needs it, and most people might not even detect a difference in his vocals. In most cases, it has been proven that more restraint never hurt Daltry’s delivery, and in this album, even his outbursts are timed quite well. There is still a bit of over-the-top dramatics from time to time, but it works well here.
Townshend’s guitar work is still quite similar to his past work also. He doesn’t do anything that stands right out, but still performs as he is expected to, which is where his strength has been. His other strength is in songwriting, and, even though there isn’t nothing as amazing as “Baba O’Riley”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or even close to the amazing rock opera albums “Tommy” and “Quadropheia”, it’s definitely much more interesting and varied than most of the songs on “Who Are You” and “It’s Hard”. Townshend still has his voice also, as shown on “I’ll Be Back” which has the help of vocal effects to keep him on target, and unfortunately, this makes what might have been an interesting song turn into a schleppy sounding song that rips off Stevie Wonder complete with harmonica drenched instrumental support.
These songs are varied, which is really the best thing The Who could have done to try to bring in new listeners. I don’t think anyone expected to hear any rock operas or amazing rocked out tracks that the band was famous for in the past. But the good thing here, is that they didn’t revert to the post-“Quadrophenia” style of songs that sound all the same or heavily soaked in 80s style synth beats. They did keep things organic here, for the most part, and they give the songs more personality by giving a large amount of variety among the songs. The place where it all suffers is that most listeners would love to hear more of a rock edge among the mellower, more radio-friendly tracks. But even that gets some fulfillment especially in tracks like “Rockin’ in Rage” and “All This Music Must Fade”. But again, don’t expect anything that will get your blood boiling and you might be able to see how they use variety to their advantage here.
Are the 3 bonus tracks sung by Pete Townshend worth getting the deluxe edition for? Well, personally, I have liked Townshend’s vocals better in the past that were effectively used to smooth out the roughness of Daltry’s vocals, but he doesn’t always have the strength to carry off a full album as some of his solo work has proven. In the case of this album, “This Gun Will Misfire” is much better than the track that is used on the regular album where Pete sings, and should have been used. “Got Nothing to Prove” has a really cool retro vibe that will make you think this track came from “The Who Sell Out”, with strings and a definite pre-1970s sound to the production. Cool. “Danny and My Ponies” is okay, but it uses the annoying auto-tune effect again. I’d rather hear his real voice. So, two of the bonus tracks are great and the last one gets ruined by electronics.
It’s not a bad album, but its not excellent either. It’s just nice. It’s no “Quadrophenia” but its also better than “Face Dances” and “It’s Hard”, and as such, it stands out in the group of later albums. Still, there is not much in the way of progressive music here, but things aren’t necessarily boring either. In the end, it comes off as a little better than average, but not quite enough to be considered excellent.
Review by lazland
A few years ago, I saw an interview with Roger Daltrey, in which the legendary Who vocalist waxed lyrical about how his old sparring partner, Pete Townsend, had “written the book” on teenage life, angst, and growing up in a harsh world, but hoped that he would one day write the definitive album about growing old.
Well, 2019 saw the release of “Who”, a brand new collection of Townsend songs written for his cohort and recorded virtually, with Daltrey allegedly taking some time to “get into it”.
Is it the definitive old rocker collection of words? Well, maybe not, but what it is is a fine collection, and, to this long-standing fan, that is likely as much as we are entitled to.
To these ears, Townsend has absolutely rediscovered his ear for fine and catchy rock tunes. The album leaps out at you with the opener, All This Music Must Fade, a somewhat bitter rock track, and Townsend shows that he has lost none of his old penchant for awkwardness when, at the close, he follows up a monologue with “who gives a [%*!#]?”. Indeed.
Daltrey sounds absolutely fantastic throughout. Of course, the range is a lot narrower than days of yore, but for a man in his 70’s, it ain’t half bad.
Ball & Chain opens with delicate piano and guitar, before providing us with a fine modern day blues riff discussing the horrors of Guantanamo Bay. And therein probably lies my deepest satisfaction with this album. I like it that Townsend still has the ability to have a damned good old rant, and that Daltrey is still the only singer and man alive with the capability of translating this into the polished product.
I adore I Don’t Wanna Get Wise, a testimony to growing old in rather rude fashion, this rips along at such a pace that you really believe it is being performed by a group half their age.
Zak Starkey and Pink Palladino shine on drums and bass on Detour, a richly produced rock number with more than a nod to the past (Detours was the forerunner of The Who).
Talking of production, there are hints of some of the rich keys which blessed albums such as Who’s Next and Quadrophenia all the way through, and nowhere more than on the expansive ballad Beads On One String, and my only minor gripe here is that it would have been nice to have a lot more, because they allow this track to soar in places. Ditto with Street Song, which contains keys which both remind one of Baba O’Reilly in parts, and provide a touch of Middle Eastern textures, and had this been more to the fore, a better track might have followed. As it is, I find it one of the rare throwaway tracks present.
Having said that, nowhere does the entire album sound better than on the wonderful Hero Ground Zero, with orchestral soundscapes backing a very strong Daltrey vocal. This track was written by Townsend as the opener to an as yet unfinished opera, and it is utter proof how just how much Daltrey brought into the recording process. The pair of them might have fought like cat and dog for decades, but they clearly respect each other, and I dare say love each other very much. Music this good doesn’t come out of hatred.
Townsend saves for himself the longest track, at just over five minutes, I’ll Be Back, a ballad sung and played by him, with Daltrey supporting on harmonica only, and it again features some good orchestration. An interesting track which provides an eclectic contrast to the overall album. The closing chord, by the way, is straight out of Quadrophenia.
The album reasserts itself strongly with the fine single release, Break The News, a song which simply shouts out the pleasure of still being alive, performing together, and rising above the chaos of being the world’s greatest rock band. This track was the first I knew about the impending release of a new album when I heard it played on Planet Rock Radio. It was, and remains, a joy to listen to, and worth the admission price alone.
Rockin’ In Rage does what it says on the tin, and probably only Daltrey could get away with this at his age. As a latter day protest rock song, it doesn’t quite work for me, and I regard this as the other “filler track”, being a wee bit too forced.
The album closes with She Rocked My World, a blues infused curio.
That these two are still knocking out music of any, let alone this, quality some 56 years after they started (they have been playing some 6 months longer that I have been alive) is nothing short of miraculous. They have weathered the loss of two of the greatest rock musicians ever to stride this Earth, and, more to the point, they still sound vital and relevant.
Four stars for this. I think fans old and new will enjoy much of what these two old geezers still have to offer. If this is their recording swan song, it is a fine way to go out.
The Who Odds and Sods (1974)
from progarchives.com
Review by Sean Trane
As its title indicates, this is a bit of bottom-of-drawers release, one that was thrown together when Daltrey was busy playing in Tommy (the movie), when Townsend and Entwistle toyed around the studios for the group or their solo career (I seem to remember both putting out a solo albums around this year), but unfortunately where Moon was left on its own and went on lengthy binges that would eventually destroy him four years later. Presented with an ugly shot of the group sporting American Football helmets, this collection was assembled from tracks that were leftover from 68 & 69 and others remaining from their monstrous project: Lifehouse and Quadrophenia or unrelated but still written in those years.
Opening on the brass-laden (courtesy of Entwistle) Postcard, while Farmer is an outstanding track with amazing Moon drumming, both from the 60’s, O&S is an entertaining album that proposes over half of its tracks from that decade. Indeed Little Billy seems like it could’ve been another hit (read the story in the booklet) and Glow Girl (a cousin to Glittering Girl) then Faith In Something Bigger are intermediate track from the two years of silence between Sell Out and Tommy. A real surprise is the ’64 cover of I’m The Face, which could be a Stone track of the times: while it sticks out a bit, it’s lovely to hear it once in a while.
The 70’s track include the interesting Put The Money Down (Daltrey lays some classic yells), while Pete yells out to Moonie that Too Much Of Anything , like Pure And Easy (probably the most Lynyrd-ish Who track in its middle section) , both originally for the Lifehouse and left away from Who’s Next make a big positive argument for the album. Also from the 60’s, but really sounding like Tommy (’69, thus sounding much more 70’s >> hence why I discuss it in this paragraph) is the excellent Naked Eye, probably the best track (and proggiest) of the present album. The closing Long Live Rock is linked to Quadrophenia, which in itself is a compliment.
After the other compilation of MBB&B (regrouping for the first time many hits that had not been available other than in singles), in some ways this recognized “unreleased track compilation” will resemble much the official following studio release the tedious By Numbers and in some ways the excellent Who Are You, by mixing songs from years gone by. Personally (and since I tend to treat this compilation as a real album) I prefer O&S to BN, because the choice of tracks is simply superior to the next release
Review by Tarcisio Moura
I had this album back in 1975, a friend dropped it at my house with Carly Simon´s Hotcakes and Supertramp´s Crime Of The Century. For a pennyless teenage student it was pure gold! I heard those Lps so much I must have wore tham out! The Who´s Odds & Sodds was not a compilation album as much, but really a collection of unrelased songs they recorded over the years before. And I must say I was astonished by the level of quality those otherwise “rejected” songs had. It´s ok that the track order was not one of the best since John Entwistle´s Postcard and Townshend´s Now I´m A Farmer are probably the weakest tunes here and certainly not the ones I´d choose for opening the CD. However, they are not bad songs at all. In fact, I like them both. But they are inferior to the remaining sutff.
And, boy, do they have strong ones here! Pure And Easy is the highlight of Odds & Sods: probably one of The Who´s best tracks ever, it is a crime that they had drop it from the Who´s Next LP (it seems that the new remastered edition corrected this fault by including it as a bonus track). With a beautiful melody line and lyrics, one of Townshend´s most emotional solos and a stunning perfomance by the other members, this is probably the most underrated song this legendary group has ever recorded. Little Billy is another great tune that could have been a huge hit if it was released as a single (oddly, it was said to be music for an ad against students smoking in school). The late Keith Moon did a great job on this one.
Naked Eye, Long Live Rock and Too Much Of Anything are other fine rock tracks, while Glow Girl was a song that originated the whole Tommy idea (just listen to the final lines: It´s a girl, mrs. Walker… it´s a girl…). The only real odd number here is the group´s first ever single (when they were known – or rather unkown – as The High Numbers) I´m the Face. It´s a bit out of place here and if they wanted to included it as a collector´s item, then they should have also put its flip side, Zoot Suit, as well.
Odds & Sods reflects a time when the band was at its peak. So don´t be fooled by the ugly cover. If you´re a fan of the band, this is a must have. I really wish that other bands would have such quality material among they ´rejected´ tracks!
The Who – Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy: Pete Townshend (1971)
From rollingstone.com by Pete Townshend
“I quickly realized that it was really the brilliant, untapped writing talent of our lead guitarist that held the key to our success.”
On listening to this album, it’s very easy to imagine that the whole Who world has been made up of singles. Where Tommy and his lengthy and finally expatriated self come in, it’s hard to say. Probably nearer the time of the second album, A Quick One, or Happy Jack, as it was called in the States. Before we even approached the idea of making an album that was an expression of our own feelings, or in the case of the Happy Jack, an album expression of our own insanity, we believed only in singles. In the top ten records and pirate radio. We, I repeat, believed only in singles.
In England albums were what you got for Christmas, singles were what you bought for prestige. It was the whole recreation of the local dance hall cum discotheque in your own sweet front room. You had to have the regulation tin speaker record player, tin, not twin, housed artistically in a vinyl covered box under a lid with a two-watt amplifier worthy only of use as a baby alarm, and a record deck on which the current top 20 singles could be stacked 12 or 15 high for continuous dancing of the latest dance – which differed only from last week’s in the tiniest possible hip-waggling details. A long sentence, but a single sentence. One sentence and you have the truth about singles. We made them tinny to sound tinny. If you made them hi-fi to sound tinny you were wasting your time, after all.
Shel Talmy, who produced our first three singles, was a great believer in “making groups who were nothing, stars.” He was also a great believer in pretending the group didn’t exist when they were in recording studio. Despite the fact that I go on to say that our first few records are among our best, they were the least fun to make. We only found out recording was fun when we made Happy Jack and the ensuing album with our later-day producer Kit Lambert. However, dear Shel got us our first single hits. So he was as close to being God for a week as any other unworthy soul has been. Of course it was a short week; I quickly realized that it was really the brilliant untapped writing talent of our lead guitarist, needless to say myself, that held the key to our success. Talmy and all following claimers to Who history are imposters.
As you can see, I feel pretty good about my own contributions to this, the greatest of Who albums. John Entwistle’s contribution should have been a single too, that’s why it’s here. Without a hint of guilt I shout aloud that singles just could be what life is all about. What Rock is all about. What the Spiritual Path is all about! Ask Kit Lambert about shortening a song two hours long with 24 verses, six choruses and 12 overdubbed guitar solos down to two minutes fifty or preferably shorter. Ask him how he did it without offending the composer. Deceit. Lies. Cheating! That’s what Rock is all about.
It really is the most incredible thing that after two years of brainwashing himself into being a producer of singles for Top Ten radio play, Kit Lambert actually turned his brain inside out and came up with Rock Opera. Enigmatic paradox. But good thinking for a group who stopped getting hits. Listen to “Magic Bus” and “I Can See For Miles” and tell me why those cuts weren’t hits. Tell me why Tommy was. Kit Lambert knows some of the answers, and perhaps because this album covers not only a huge chunk of our English success record-wise, but also our evolving relationship with Kit as our producer, it is, in my opinion (doubly prejudiced, and tainted by possible unearned royalties helping to pay for the tactical nuclear missile I am saving up for) the best collection of singles by the Who there is.
It’s all our singles, and it includes all our earliest stuff, excluding “I’m The Face” which might be released soon on the Stones label. “I’m The Face” was our very very first record on an English label called Phillips. It was “written” by our then manager Pete Meadon, fashioner of our mod image. He pinched the tune of “Got Love If You Want It” by Slim Harpo and changed the words to fit the groovy group. That is another, even earlier story, which if ever told, would banish Who mystique forever.
“Can’t Explain,” more than any other track here, turns me on. We still play this on stage, at the moment we open with it. It can’t be beat for straightforward Kink copying. There is little to say about how I wrote this. It came out of the top of my head when I was 18 and a half. It seems to be about the frustrations of a young person who is so incoherent and uneducated that he can’t state his case to the bourgeois intellectual blah blah blah. Or, of course, it might be about drugs.
“Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” our second record, was written mainly by myself, but those were political days in late ’64. Or was it ’65? Roger helped a lot with the final arrangement and got half the credit. Something he does today for nothing, bless him. I was laying on my mattress on the floor listening to a Charlie Parker record when I thought up the title. (It’s usually title first with me.) I just felt the guy was so free when he was playing. He was a soul without a body, riding, flying, on music. Listening to the compulsory Dizzy Gillespie solo after one by Bird was always a come-down, however clever Gillespie was. No one could follow Bird. Hendrix must have been his reincarnation especially for guitar players. The freedom suggested by the title became restricted by the aggression of our tightly defined image when I came to write the words. In fact, Roger was really a hard nut then, and he changed quite a few words himself to toughen the song up to suit his temperament. It is the most excitingly pig-headed of our songs. It’s blatant, proud and – dare I say it – sassy.
Musically it was a step forward. On “Can’t Explain” we had been fully manipulated in the studio, the like of which hasn’t been seen since (aside from my darstardly treatment of Thunderclap Newman). Jimmy Page played rhythm on the A side and lead on the B, “Bald Headed Woman.” He nearly played lead on the A, but it was so simple even I could play it. The Beverly sisters were brought in to sing backing voices and Keith has done poor imitations on stage ever since. “Can’t explaaaain,” he screams, hurling drumsticks at the sound man who turns the mike off because he thinks it’s feeding back.
“Anyway” was the first time we encountered the piano playing of Nicky Hopkins, who is a total genius, and likes the Who. He likes John Lennon too and a lot of other people who give him work. A lot of bands breathed a sigh of relief when he and his missus showed their weary cheery faces in England again this summer. We did, and so on. He’s still working.
Kit Lambert described “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” to reporters as, “A pop art record, containing pop art music. The sounds of war and chaos and frustration expressed musically without the use of sound effects.” A bored and then cynical Nick Cohn – Christ he was even more cynical than me – said calmly, “That’s impressionism, not pop art.” I repeated what Kit had briefed me to say. mumbling something about Peter Blake and Lichstenstein and went red. Completely out of order while your record is screaming in the background: “I can go anyway, way I choose, I can live anyhow, win or lose, I can go anywhere, for something new. Anyway anyhow anywhere.”
Then we released “My Generation.” The hymn. The patriotic song they sing at Who football matches. I could say a lot about this, I suppose I should say what hasn’t been said, but a lot of what has been said is so hilarious. I wrote it as a throwaway, naturally. It was a talking blues thing of the “Talking New York” ilk. This one had come from a crop of songs which I was, by then, writing using a tape recorder. Kit Lambert had bought me two good quality tape decks and suggested I do this, it appealed to me as I had always attempted it using lesser machines and been encouraged by results. But when you sit down and think what to play, it’s a little hard. The whole point is that blues patterns, the ones groups use to jam with one another, are somehow the only thing forthcoming when you are gazing at a dial and thinking mainly of how good it’s going to be to play this to Beryl and proudly say, “I played all the instruments on this myself.” All the instruments being guitar, guitar, bass guitar and maracas.
Anyway, ensconced in my Belgravia two-room tape recorder and hi-fi showroom, I proceeded to enjoy myself writing ditties with which I could later amuse myself over-dubbing, multitracking and adding extra parts. It was the way I practiced. I learnt to play with myself. Masturbation comes to mind and as a concept making demos is not far off. “Generation” was then praised by Chris Stamp, our “other” manager, who was worshipped only as a source of money from his ever active roles as assistant director in various film epics. He was convinced it could be the biggest Who record yet. Bearing in mind the state of the demo it shows an astuteness beyond the call. It sounded like (I still of course have it) Jimmy Reed at ten years old suffering from nervous indigestion.
Kit made suggestion after suggestion to improve the song. He later said that it was because he was unsure of it. I went on to make two more demos in my den of magnetic iniquity, the first introduced the stutter. The second several key changes, pinched, again, from the Kinks. From then on we knew we had it. I even caught a real stutter which I only lost recently.
Over the period of rewriting I realized that spontaneous words that come out of the top of your head are always the best. I had written the lines of “Generation” without thinking, hurrying them, scribbling on a piece of paper in the back of a car. For years I’ve had to live by them, waiting for the day someone says, “I thought you said you hoped you’d die when you got old in that song. Well, you are old. What now?” Of course most people are too polite to say that sort of thing to a dying pop star. I say it often to myself. The hypocrisy of accusing hypocrites of being hypocritical is highly hypocritical. See the new Lennon album. See “My Generation.”
It’s understandable to me, perhaps not to you, that I can only think of inconsequentially detrimental things to say about the emergence of lyrics from my various bodily orifices. “Substitute,” for example, was written as a spoof of “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.” On the demo I sang with an affected Jagger-like accent which Kit obviously liked, as he suggested the song as a follow-up to “Generation.” The lyric has come to be the most quoted Who lyric ever, it somehow goes to show that the “trust the art, not the artist” tag that people put on Dylan‘s silence about his work could be a good idea. To me, “Mighty Quinn” is about the five Perfect Masters of the age, the best of all being Meher Baba of course, to Dylan it’s probably about gardening, or the joys of placing dog shit in the garbage to foul up Alan J. Weberman. “Substitute” makes me recall writing a song to fit a clever and rhythmic sounding title. A play on words. Again it could mean a lot more to me now than it did when I wrote it. If I told you what it meant to me now, you’d think I take myself too seriously.
The stock, down-beat riff used in the verses I pinched from a record played to me in “Blind Date,” a feature in Melody Maker. It was by a group who later wrote to thank me for saying nice things about their record in the feature. The article is set up so that pop stars hear other people’s records without knowing who they are by. They say terrible things about their best mates’ latest and it all makes the pop scene even snottier and more competitive. Great. The record I said nice things about wasn’t a hit, despite an electrifying riff. I pinched it. We did it, you bought it.
“The Kids Are Alright” wasn’t a single in England; it was in the States. Funnily enough, this broke really well in Detroit, an area where both Decca records and the local community were a little more hip to the Who than they were elsewhere. Detroit, or at least Ann Arbor, was the first place in the States we played after New York.
There are a few cuts on this album that are good because they are as simple as nursery rhymes. “Legal Matter,” for example, is about a guy on the run from a chick about to pin him down for breach of promise. What this song was screaming from behind lines like, “It’s a legal matter baby, marrying’s no fun, it’s a legal matter baby, you got me on the run,” was “I’m lonely, I’m hungry, and the bed needs making.” I wanted a maid I suppose. It’s terrible feeling like an elegible bachelor but with no women seeming to agree with you. “Pinball Wizard” is, quite simply, quite pimply, from Tommy. It’s my favorite song on the album and was actually written as a ploy to get Nick Cohn, who is an avid pinball player to be a little more receptive to my plans for a Rock Opera. Nick writes on and off for New York Times. I know which side my Aronowitz is buttered, mate!
From the superb production of ‘Pinball” it is hard to imagine that anything produced by Kit Lambert with the Who before “Pinball” could stand up. There are two songs that do. “Pictures of Lily” just jells perfectly somehow. Merely a ditty about masturbation and the importance of it to a young man. I was really digging at my folks who, when catching me at it, would talk in loud voices in the corridor outside my room. “Why can’t he go with girls like other boys.” The real production masterpiece in the Who/Lambert coalition was, of course, “I Can See For Miles. “The version here is not the mono, which is a pity because the mono makes the stereo sound like the Carpenters. We cut the track in London at CBS studios and brought the tapes to Gold Star studios in Hollywood to mix and master them. Gold Star have the nicest sounding echo in the world. And there is just a little of that on the mono. Plus, a touch of homemade compressor in Gold Star’s cutting room. I swoon when I hear the sound. The words, which aging senators have called “Drug Orientated,” are about a jealous man with exceptionally good eyesight. Honest.
Two of the tracks here are produced by the Who, not Kit Lambert. One is “Substitute.” We made this straight after “Generation” and Kit wasn’t really in a position to steam in and produce, that honor being set aside as a future bunce for Robert Stigwood. God forbid. A blonde chap called Chris at Olympic studios got the sound, set up a kinky echo, did the mix etc. I looked on and have taken the credit whenever the opportunity has presented itself ever since. Keith can’t even remember doing the session, incidentally, a clue to his condition around that period. The other Who-produced cut was “The Seeker.” “The Seeker” is just one of those odd Who records. I suppose I like this least of all the stuff. It suffered from being the first thing we did after Tommy, and also from being recorded a few too many times. We did it once at my home studio, then at IBC where we normally worked then with Kit Lambert producing. Then Kit had a tooth pulled, breaking his jaw, and we did it ourselves. The results are impressive. It sounded great in the mosquito-ridden swamp I made it up in – Florida at three in the morning drunk out of my brain with Tom Wright and John Wolf. But that’s always where the trouble starts, in the swamp. The alligator turned into an elephant and finally stampeded itself to death on stages around England. I don’t think we even got to play it in the States.
The only non Townshend track on the album is also a non single. Politics or my own shaky vanity might be the reason, but “Boris the Spider” was never released as a single and could have been a hit. It was the most requested song we ever played on stage, and if this really means anything to you guitar players, it was Hendrix‘s favorite Who song. Which rubbed me up well the wrong way, I can tell you. John introduced us to “Boris” in much the same way as I introduced us to our “Generation”: through a tape recorder. We assembled in John’s three feet by ten feet bedroom and listened incredulously as the strange and haunting chords emerged. Laced with words about the slightly gruesome death of a spider the song had enough charm to send me back to my pad writing hits furiously. It was a winner, as Harry would say. It still is, for the life of me I don’t know why we still don’t play it, and the other Entwistle masterpiece, “Heaven and Hell,” on the stage anymore. There is no piece for the wicked, John’s writing is wicked, his piece here is “Boris.”
Of interest to collectors is “I’m a Boy.” This is a longer and more relaxed version of the single which was edited and had fancy voices added. The song, of course, is about a boy whose mother dresses him up as a girl and won’t let him enjoy all the normal boyish pranks like slitting lizards’ tummies and throwing rocks at passing cars. Real Alice Cooper syndrome. Of course Zappa said it all when he wrote his original Rock Opera. Nobody noticed, so he had to write a satire on the one Rock Opera people did notice. “I’m a Boy” was my first attempt at Rock Opera. Of course the subject matter was a little thin, then what of Tommy?
We get right down to the Who nitty gritty with “Magic Bus.” Decca Records really smarmed all over this one. Buses painted like Mickey Mouse’s first trip. Album covers featuring an unsuspecting Who endorsing it like it was our idea. “Magic Bus” was a bummer. For one thing, we really like it. It was a gas to record and had a mystical quality to the sound. The first time ever I think that you could hear the room we were recording in when we made it. The words however are garbage, again loaded with heavy drug inference. For example, “thruppence and sixpence every way, trying to get to my baby.” Obviously a hint at the ever rising prices of LSD.
When I wrote “Magic Bus,’ LSD wasn’t even invented as far as I knew. Drug songs and veiled references to drugs were not part of the Who image. If you were in the Who and took drugs, you said “I take drugs,” and waited for the fuzz to come. We said it but they never came. We very soon got bored with drugs. No publicity value. Buses, however! Just take another look at Decca’s answer to an overdue Tommy; “The Who, Magic Bus, On Tour.” Great title, swinging presentation. Also a swindle as far as insinuating that the record was live. Bastards. They have lived to regret it, but not delete it. This record is what that record should have been. It’s the Who at their early best. Merely nippers with big noses and small genitals trying to make the front page of the Daily News. Now Peter Max – there’s a guy who knows how to use a bus! They pay him to ride on them.
To wind up, this album is a piece of history that we want you to know about. It’s really a cross-section of our English successes, and when in the States, and we get compared to come and go heavies who, like everyone else, influence us a little, we get paranoid that a lot of American Rock fans haven’t heard this stuff. They might have heard us churn out a bit on the stage, but not the actual cuts. As groups, Cream, Hendrix & Zeppelin etc. have gotten bigger than the Who ever did and a lot quicker. But they don’t have the solid, rock solid foundation that we have in this album. This album is as much for us as for you, it reminds us who we really are. The Who.
The Who Endless Wire (2006)
From progarchives.com
Review by Chicapah
In the summer of ’67 I saw The Who in concert. The experience altered my life and that’s no exaggeration. No longer could I be satisfied with sucrose pop songs about puppy love or perky odes to hot rods and surfing. Pete, Roger, John and Keith were compelled to exorcise their demons by playing rock music hard, fast and loud and that’s what I craved. To heck with subtlety, theirs was an edgy roar rooted in the rough, soot-stained back alleys of London and it was join the rumble or get out of the way. Who music became as life- defining for me as any ever would. I bought every album dutifully through “Quadrophenia,” after which my adventurous tastes and limited budget kept their later works from inclusion in my wooden crates of LPs but I never lost track of what they were doing. Only in the last few years have I finally caught up with “By Numbers” through “It’s Hard” and, while acknowledging their flaws and inconsistencies, those four studio albums still managed to insightfully reflect the often confused and frustrated mindset of their maturing generation. It’s also easy to see why they stopped recording new material after 1982. Moon couldn’t be replaced. The fire was out.
When this CD came out in 2006 I was curious but I chose not to grab up a copy simply because I didn’t want to hear my heroes fail. After all, Pete & Roger are the only two of the foursome still above ground and they’re both in their 60s. I wondered if they had anything relevant or even entertaining to offer me at this juncture. But after seeing them perform the touching “Tea & Theatre” on TV some months back I knew I had to investigate and I’m glad I did. While glaringly bereft of any smidgen of humor (as is this review), it’s honest, forthright and doesn’t try to fool their fans into thinking they’re still snotty, rebellious punks. Thank God.
One of the album’s most admirable traits is the respectful homage they pay to the group’s signature sounds and the opener, “Fragments,” is a fine example. Lawrence Ball’s whirling synth intro instantly brings to mind a “Who’s Next” vibe and the clever arrangement of this rocker is a reminder of the progressive attitude that distinguishes so much of their catalogue. While Daltrey’s voice has lost much of its range and esteem over the decades, his passion remains intact and he delivers the song’s metaphysical lines (“We are a billion fragments exploding outward/like broken glass we damage even in defeat/we are tiny pieces falling now and settling/like snowflake crystal building on the city street”) with undeniable conviction. It’s worth mentioning that all of the musical instruments on the first seven tunes are capably played by Townshend.
The riveting poetry of “A Man in a Purple Dress” proves that Pete’s ability to slay with words is intact. A naked yet forceful, folk-styled acoustic guitar-with-vocal approach allows the bold lyrics to stand out like the constellations on a moonless night. Penned after viewing Mel Gibson’s powerful movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” Townshend expresses what we yearned for Jesus to say to his cruel, ridiculously adorned accusers. “How dare you/do you think I’ll quietly go?/you are much braver than you know/for I can’t die/your staff, your stick, your special cap/they’ll protect you in hell?/what crap!/believe the lie…” Roger snaps. Music this indignant and angry needs no embellishment. “Mike Post Theme” follows and it’s a strong piece that expertly weaves hard and soft dynamics as Pete does a good job of piecing together the tight feel of a band all by himself. Daltrey sings for all of us who know the angst of aging firsthand. “We’re not strong enough/we’re not young enough/we’re not alone enough/not cold enough/emotionally we’re not even old enough/for love…” he screams. Ahh. Love, the elusive phantom of human existence.
I can’t help but think that in the Waits-ish “In the Ether” Townshend portrays the specter of a lonely Keith Moon, drifting in purgatory. Accompanied only by droll piano and acoustic guitar, Pete literally growls lines like “In the ether I wait for you/hanging in this mist that I know’s unreal/there is nothing there/there’s no you, no me/even though it’s crazy/I still appeal/this is heavenly hell/I appear insane/I have no idea who there is to blame…” and the effect is both sobering and chilling. This isn’t something that would’ve worked on any previous Who disc but it fits perfectly here. Speaking of Moonie, Zak Starkey sits in on the drum kit for “Black Widow’s Eyes” and effectively summons the wild man’s inimitable spirit, adding punch to this driving number. Roger is in particularly healthy voice as he sings about a hostage stricken with Stockholm syndrome. “Strange that when infatuation calls/we think we’ve got real love in our life/it pumps like the pressure in the station hall/as the express train thunders on by” he intones.
“Two Thousand Years” is a stark, undecorated folk tune where we find Judas Iscariot quarantined in his own dark nook of the underworld, unable to find out what has happened above since his treachery. “…Two thousand years I have waited/to ask if I have loved you/to know if I have served you/to find if I’ve obeyed you/to know if I’ve betrayed you,” he calls. For Judas, it would seem, an eternity of isolation is the harshest sentence. Townshend and his acoustic guitar go solo for the melodic “God Speaks of Marty Robbins” as he describes the Creator’s decision to bring music into being. “I heard the heavens sing/predicting Marty Robbins/I knew I’d find music and time/were the perfect plan,” he sings. Again, nothing fancy, just simplicity at its most effective.
Employing the skills of studio musicians, “It’s Not Enough” applies a swift kick to the buttocks as they put to music the maddening frustration that every man has experienced with his woman since Adam was rudely ribbed by Eve. Daltrey’s dry grit is more than appropriate as he shouts out biting lyrics like “you said you’d go as far as to turn to my friend/who once warned me of you/said you’d hasten my end/he’ll choose you over me/because I have lent every ounce of my juice/my essence is spent,” and “I gave you cash/I gave you love/all that I heard was/’it’s not enough…'” Been there, Bubba. I feel your pain. Townshend then does a complete 180 with the quiet “You Stand By Me” in which he praises his lady companion for not abandoning him even when he was being a vile ogre. “I suppose I could make it all on my own/I know I’d arrive all skin and all bone/you are the strongest back I’ve ever known/you carried me, carried me, carried me home…” he confesses. It’s a love song without flowery schmaltz.
The mini rock opera “Wire & Glass” is more of an interesting freight train of short sketches streaming by than a cohesive whole. Still utilizing the full band, they start with the raucous “Sound Round,” a nostalgic throwback to their beginnings when they only needed to “feel the ground/feel the pulse.” A quadrophenic atmosphere pervades the rocking “Pick up the Peace” in which the ether man (Moon) looks down on the remaining trio who’ve decided to carry on and laments “I see them older when life is done/I was a loser at the game they won.” (Pete’s explanation of the story is different and can be found online but this is my interpretation so sue me already.) On “Unholy Trinity” Townshend brings in mandolin and banjo for a folksy effect and I’d swear he’s describing himself, Entwistle and Daltrey here. “Three kids from the neighborhood/three different lives/three different ways to be/three identical smiles,” Roger sings. Pete scored the orchestration for “Trilby’s Piano” on his own and that’s dandy but it comes off like filler in a boring Broadway musical and marks the low point of the proceedings.
The album’s namesake may be sing-along hokey but it’s also extremely contagious and I love it. Townshend drawls “we found this pile of paper/written by the ether man/he hatched a mad old caper/he had a mad old plan/he’d turn us into music/he’d show us to our portals/he gathered wire and angels/to entertain immortals” but it’s the repetition of the tune’s title on the chorus that serenades. It fascinates me and I find myself mumbling it under my breath at the oddest moments. “Fragments of Fragments” follows and, yes, it’s a reprise but this time the vocals are eerie, the background chorale is different and the synthesizers take center stage. “We Got a Hit” is another glimpse of early Who that avoids parody. “We got our folks together/we broke down barriers,” Daltrey announces. (They most definitely did.) “They Made My Dream Come True” is a snide dirge and a commentary on the irony of fame in which Pete sings “People died where I performed…,” a somber reference to the ’79 concert tragedy in Cincinnati. “Mirror Door” has a palpable “Tommy” aura but Roger’s overwrought croaking is embarrassing and the question of who’ll have the nuts to step up and revitalize modern music goes unanswered. Fortunately, they end it all on a beautiful note with the thoughtful “Tea & Theatre,” a heartfelt requiem presented with reverence as Pete and Roger face the road ahead without John. “We made it work/but one of us failed/that makes it so sad/a great dream derailed,” he wails, “One of us gone/one of us mad/one of us, me/all of us sad…”
They tack on a couple of extended tracks and both are excellent. “We Got a Hit” has urgency and they artfully toss in the chorus of “They Made My Dream Come True” for the bridge. The longer “Endless Wire” is like a second helping of a decadent dessert and, since I adore the song, I don’t mind being a glutton. There’s also a bonus concert DVD, “Live at Lyon,” that shows them as they are today but Daltrey seems preoccupied with attempting to hit the required notes and Townshend doesn’t know what to do with himself. It just makes me cherish even more my fond memories of seeing the original lineup twice in my youth when they were full of spit and vinegar and took no prisoners.
I’m surprised at how much I like this album. I knew the technical aspects would be exemplary and the performances more than adequate but I didn’t expect the tunes to be as engaging as they are. It’s not all that progressive per se but that’s not the point. If you’re knowledgeable about the history of The Who then you’ll find this to be a delightful bookend to their amazing legacy. It may not be the last we hear from Pete & Roger but, if it is, they definitely went out on a High Number. 3.8 stars.
The Who Concert Memories: Charlton Athletic Football Club 18th May 1974
From vintagerock.wordpress.com
The Who Charlton Athletic Football Club 18th May 1974
Support Acts, in order of appearance: Montrose, Lindisfarne, Bad Company, Lou Reed, Humble Pie, Maggie Bell. The support acts were chosen by The Who.
The Who spent some time considering venues for a big outdoor London concert, and selected Charlton ground because, accordingly to Townshend, it had “particular acoustic qualities” and offered “excellent views of the stage from the terraces.” I went to the gig with two mates, travelling down to London by coach, leaving the north east at midnight on Friday night and arriving early on Saturday morning. We then caught the local train across to Charlton.
By the time we arrived the ground was pretty full, and fans continued to flood in throughout the morning. By the time Montrose exploded onto the stage at 12 noon, the place was ram packed. The concert was intended to have an attendance limit of 50,000 fans, but breakdowns in security resulted in many additional people getting in, and an estimated crowd of 80,000 (The Complete Chronicle of the Who 1958-1978, Neill & Kent, 2007).
I ran into quite a few mates from home on the terraces, several of whom had managed to push or blag their way in without paying. The supporting bill was very strong, with Montrose and Bad Company both going down well. This was one of the first appearances of the new Lindisfarne Mk II line-up.
Lou Reed and Maggie Bell both played ok, but didn’t go down as well with the crowd as the others. Humble Pie were pure class, with Marriott on his top OTT “my skin is white, but my soul is black” form. They almost upstaged the main act.
There was a long wait before The Who took to the stage, and several reports recall an atmosphere of violence, which I must say I don’t remember. I do remember that it was a very hot day and that there were some fights, a heavy smell of dope with many people openly smoking joints, and lots of cans thrown around throughout the day. Brian Farnon writes of a “lunatic…wandering around with a foot-long spike….sticking it in peoples necks” on the excellent ukrockfestivals.com site.
Charles Shaar Murray reviewed The Who’s performance in NME: “They performed with a freshness and enthusiasm that they haven’t had for quite some time, and generally acted like the epitome of what a rock and roll band should be…The Who are it; as good as it ever gets, and good as we can expect from anybody.”
Pete Townshend admitted (also in the NME): “At Charlton I got completely pissed… I was so happy to get out of it…. I felt really guilty I couldn’t explode into the exuberant and happy energy our fans did….”
When the concert finished it was absolute pandemonium trying to get out through the crowd, and a number of us decided to try and climb over one of the fences. We managed to get over, but one of my mates cut his hand quite badly on the sharp metal top of the fence. It looked quite nasty, and was bleeding a lot, so we decided that we needed to get to a hospital.
We pushed our way back into the ground, which wasn’t easy as we were walking against all the people leaving, and made our way to the St Johns Ambulance post, where we all bundled into an ambulance. A poor guy with a pretty cut up face, who had fallen onto a broken bottle, was lying next to us in the ambulance. The ambulance sped through the crowds and 5 minutes or so later we were in the hospital, where we spent most of the night, while my mate had his hand stitched. The hospital was full of fans suffering from injuries, and worse for wear from alcohol and drugs. It was daylight by the time we got out of the hospital, and we walked back into central London and made our way to Victoria where we caught our bus home.
The things you do for rock’n’roll
The Who setlist: I Can’t Explain; Summertime Blues; Young Man Blues; Baba O’Riley; Behind Blue Eyes; Substitute; I’m a Boy; Tattoo; Boris the Spider; Drowned; Bell Boy; Doctor Jimmy; Won’t Get Fooled Again; Pinball Wizard; See Me, Feel Me
Encore: 5:15; Magic Bus; My Generation; Naked Eye; Let’s See Action; My Generation Blues
The Who Thirty Years of Maximum R&B
From progarchives.com
Review by fluxi
This is an extraordinary box set which introduces the listener to ALMOST all the best music the Who recorded between 1964 and 1994. When it came out I bought it immediately and I still remember how thrilled I was. As a long-time Who fan I found it incredibly exciting to have so many superb tracks in a single compilation, interspersed with bits of dialogue from Pete Townshend and wonderful snippets of ‘Goon style comedy’ from Keith Moon. Since the music is spread out over four CDs, the set contains much, much more than the usual hits and commercial highlights. The Who are also well represented at their most delicate and eccentric. For these reasons the set would make a near-ideal introduction to the newcomer. The voluminous photo book is attractive as well.
A look at the extensive track list will show you that all the band’s classic singles are here, from “I Can’t Explain” and “My Generation” to “Happy Jack” and “Pictures of Lily”. The studio albums are well represented, too – particularly The Who Sell Out, Live At Leeds, Who’s Next, The Who By Numbers and Who Are You, where the selection could hardly be bettered. Who’s Next, the band’s greatest album, is included almost in its entirety. For once, the sublime original version of “Pure and Easy” appears right between “Bargain” and “The Song is Over” – exactly where it should be. (I personally would have preferred to see the studio version of “My Wife” included, rather than a 1976 live performance, but I guess you can’t have everything…) To their everlasting credit, the compilers also took the trouble to include a fair number of obscure but fascinating tracks such as “Disguises”, “Girls’ Eyes”, “Jaguar”, “Melancholia” and “Dogs”, most of which had never before been released. (“Dogs” quickly developed into one of my all-time Who favourites!)
Any gripes with this set, then? Well sure, I’ve got plenty!!!
1. Among the early tracks, why has the crisp studio version of “Substitute” been replaced with the Live At Leeds version (as on some earlier compilations)? This seems anachronistic and plain wrong.
2. “A Quick One, While He’s Away”, as represented here, is a patch-up of the original studio version and (during the finale) the live version from the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. (Thus allowing the compilers to state, rather misleadingly, on the back of the box, that their version is ‘previously unreleased’.) I’ll gladly admit the Who’s Rock and Roll Circus performance was one of their greatest triumphs, but this kind of approach neither does justice to the studio version, nor to the live version.
3. I can’t help thinking Quadrophenia (a clear favourite with many proggers) has been shabbily dealt with. Why are only four tracks represented here? Why is there no trace of “The Punk and the Godfather”, “I’ve Had Enough” or “I’m One” when the compilers DID find space for less exciting tracks from an earlier project, such as “Join Together” and “Relay”, and (even more disappointingly) for those turgid 1980s live versions of “Twist and Shout” and “I’m a Man”? And, most of all: why include a terribly pedestrian 1979 run-through of “The Real Me” featuring Kenney Jones, when the original studio recording (with Keith Moon) is one of the band’s most explosive performances?
4. Finally, as a secret admirer of the 1982 It’s Hard, I can’t help wondering why the only track that always gets chosen from that album is the soporific “Eminence Front”. I much prefer the sprightly “Athena” and the dramatic closing number “Cry If You Want”.
In spite of my complaints, I feel this set provides a splendid overview of the best part of the Who’s career, so if you can find it at a reasonable price, you should have no qualms about purchasing it.
The Who: The Kids Are Alright Review DVD (2003)
From thedigitalfix.com
Maximum R&B…it quickly became the description that The Who applied to their music throughout their lifetime, as well as being the title of their outstanding four-CD boxset. Even amongst the roar of late-sixties rock, The Who stood out, both by their volume and their ambition. With a clutch of great albums behind them, 1979 saw the compilation of this documentary, showcasing the greatest British rock band during the years in which everything they touched, even a mini-rock opera about Ivor The Engine Driver, put their peers to shame.
In as much as the recent Led Zeppelin two-disc set had a story of sorts, so The Kids Are Alright is the story of The Who from their earliest years playing in London clubs as The High Numbers through their near-bankruptcy during their year before the release of Tommy and how a deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard saved them from financial ruin. As Tommy ended the album freed from his obligations as a saviour so that album gave The Who the opportunity to indulge in further concept albums and rock operas, head-staggeringly loud concerts and great rock music.
Yet, in as much as the story of Led Zeppelin ended with the death of their drummer, John Bonham, so The Kids Are Alright ends with the disappointment at seeing Keith Moon age and, although it is not captured in the film, his death two weeks before its premiere. There’s no doubt that Moon’s death, like Bonham’s, was largely self-inflicted given his prodigious drug usage but the difference between the young Moon on one side of the DVD sleeve to the overweight, bearded, understudy to Oliver Reed seen on the other is a clear picture of how The Who changed from art-school punks and creators of daring rock operas to a band who faded from before both prog rock and punk with barely a breath left for a fight.
Unfortunately, The Kids Are Alright is rather too fond of celebrating Moon’s performances outside of the stage and recording studio, barely allowing an interview opportunity to pass by without choosing those moments when it dissolves into chaos due to Moon’s influence. Even in those moments when Townshend and Moon share a television studio, the film’s need to include a moment of destruction from Moon detracts from the intelligent comments offered by Townshend on the band and its place in pop culture, whether as a mod band, as the writers of Tommy or as pensionable rock stars.
But there’s always the concert footage and never is it better than during the years either side of Tommy in which Daltrey finally let himself go to be the front man who deserved to be standing to the front of Entwhistle, Moon and Townshend. With Tommy‘s messianic songs came the need for Daltrey to become the deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard who is miraculously healed, before opening a retreat within a British seaside holiday camp and as seen at Woodstock in his tasseled leather jacket, he provides Zeppelin’s Robert Plant with a marker for his entire wardrobe for the next ten years. Although Entwhistle only changes from year to year by the cut of his moustache and Moon leers out from behind his drumkit, Townshend remains the focus of the music, remaining great so long as he plays either a Rickenbacker, Les Paul or SG and in the Clockwork Orange garb at Woodstock, is the whip-smart street thug to Daltrey’s messiah. When it all comes together, as it does on the euphoric performance of See Me, Feel Me at Woodstock, with The Who taking to the stage at 4am, unpaid and having been spiked with LSD, the performance is all that The Who were meant to have been.
Elsewhere, Stein has rescued The Who’s performance of A Quick One While He’s Away from The Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n Roll Circus from whatever archive it was lost within and there’s a fistful of great performances and interviews from US, British and German television shows, including Townshend defending The Who from an audience accusing him of having little artistic merit and another in which a young Jeremy Paxman spars lightly with him over his youthful anger.
As good as all this is, The Kids Are Alright still has glaring omissions, of which Quadrophenia is the most obvious. Arguably a better album than Tommy and certainly better at holding tight to a more difficult concept, Quadrophenia has been repeatedly written out of The Who’s history and although it was never as extensively toured as either Tommy or Who’s Next, neither was Sgt. Pepper but imagine a documentary on The Beatles that failed to mention it. Jeff Stein would have produced a better film had he considered moving away from the concert footage to allow five minutes to the likes of Quadrophenia, Lifehouse, I Can See For Miles and other moments that are either never or only briefly mentioned in the rush to include another shot of Moon’s arse or a couple more minutes of live footage.
According to both Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon was disappointed to see himself looking grizzled, overweight and old but neither Townshend nor Daltrey ever give much away in their appraisal of their band, preferring to stay together, tour the old songs and occasionally get back to finishing off abandoned projects like Lifehouse. As The Who prepare to tour once again, with only Townshend and Daltrey alive, The Kids Are Alright is a great way to look back on the fury, the dazzling rock operas and the Union Jack jackets from when The Who still meant a four-piece piercing 12″ speaker bins with the distant end of a Rickenbacker.
Picture
Even from the film’s opening minutes, it’s evident that the transfer of The Kids Are Alright makes it look better than it has in years, even better than its Laserdisc release, according to Jeff Albarian, who remastered the film for DVD. The quality of the image is terrific and although it is a vast improvement on the quality of the VHS release and that of recent cinema screenings, The Kids Are Alright is never quite as flawless as a number of other recent music releases, the Led Zeppelin set included.
Sound
The Kids Are Alright has been transferred onto DVD with a PCM stereo soundtrack or a choice of surround soundtracks, either Dolby Digital or DTS. Of the three, the stereo track is the most immediate with the rear channels on the surround tracks being used to add presence to the music tracks if not the interviews.
Extras
Audio Commentary: Martin Lewis introduces and hosts the commentary track, joined by director Jeff Stein and the man responsible for the restoration of the film on DVD, Jeff Albarian. As expected from these guests, Stein is good on the origins of the footage and the reaction of the band to seeing the film in 1978-79 whilst Albarian chips in with details on his work for this year’s DVD release.
Eyesight To The Blind: This set of subtitles offers liner notes for each song and interview featured in the film.
Guitar & Pen: Whilst given this title, this extra is only English subtitles for the songs and interviews in the film.
Miracle Cure (40m26s, 1.33:1, 2.0 Stereo): Opening with an interview with the producer of the DVD release of The Kids Are Alright, John Albarian discusses his efforts in sourcing footage for this release. In addition to his comments on the old VHS and Laserdisc releases of The Kids Are Alright, Albarian also talks about the amount of searching that was required to track down all of the negatives of the original footage and how the owners of the footage assisted in the restoration of this film. This is an exhaustive documentary and one of the best yet presented on DVD as regards the restoration of a film for release on DVD.
Getting In Tune (6m13s, 1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): Using three scenes from The Kids Are Alright – I Can’t Explain from 1965’s Shindig!, John Entwhistle skeet-shooting his gold discs and Won’t Get Fooled Again from the Shepperton Film Studios – this compares the sound from previous releases of this film to the restored sound on this DVD release, showing a clear and improved difference from one to the other.
Trick Of The Light (5m05s, 1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): Using split screen, this bonus feature demonstrates the improved quality of the DVD release over the VHS and Laserdisc releases, again using three chapters from the film, including Baba O’Reilly from the Shepperton Film Studios performance, the tour of John Entwhistle’s home and a recording of Who Are You in Ramport studios.
The Ox (1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): With multiple angles, one for each of the members of The Who, this bonus feature allows John Entwhistle’s bass track to be isolated within recordings of Baba O’Reilly (6m42s) and Won’t Get Fooled Again (11m39s) from the Shepperton Film Studios performance. Both songs can also be played in full with 5.1 Surround and 2.0 Stereo audio tracks.
The Who’s London (8m44s 1.78:1 Non-Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): This bonus feature looks at twenty key places in London related to where the members of the band were born, where they met, played their first gigs and lived during their early years.
Behind Blue Eyes (25m38s, 1.33:1, 2.0 Stereo): This is an interview with Roger Daltrey, who is now looking very old and who, compared to Pete Townshend, was never the most articulate of interviewees. As a result, this plays up on Daltrey’s tough Londoner character and his frequent refusal to give a straight answer soon grates.
Anytime You Want Me: (1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): Using the same multiple angles as The Ox – Ox Cam, Pete Cam A, Moonie Can and Roger’s Pit Cam – this includes the recordings of Baba O’Reilly (6m42s) and Won’t Get Fooled Again (11m39s) from the Shepperton Film Studios performance. Given, however, that John Entwhistle’s bass track can be isolated on this extra, Anytime You Want Me is really no more than a retitled version of The Ox.
Pure And Easy: This is a trivia game of twenty-one questions on The Who leading to a recording of Ringo Starr promoting The Kids Are Alright.
It’s Hard: Another trivia game of twenty-one questions on The Who leading to a recording of Who Are You (6m21s) remixed in 5.1 Surround.
See My Way (29m23s, 1.33:1, 2.0 Stereo): This is an interview with Jeff Stein, the director of The Kids Are Alright as to his introduction to The Who, how he came to make the film and how his relationship with the band changed during the making of the film, particularly as he requested they perform live for the film.
Overall
I’ll admit to being biased as the mix of Daltrey and Moon’s wild-eyed anger and Townshend’s art-school concepts have always impressed me much more than the pop noodlings of The Beatles and the brief bloom of The Rolling Stones. In particular, during the years from the writing of The Who Sell Out, through Tommy, Quadrophenia and Who’s Next, The Who left a thrilling set of albums that sit rock and pop next to concept albums about freedom, responsibility, maturity and Odorono deodorant. Yellow submarines? Doesn’t get anywhere near…
The Kids Are Alright would have made a perfect boxset had it shipped with Quadrophenia as then the story on The Who would almost have been complete. But to buy both those films and the Maximum R&B boxset, then you’re getting close to as good as rock has ever been.
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