Who's next - lightning in a bottle

Photo by Ethan Russell

In their heyday, The Who were a truly exciting live band. There can be little argument about that. It wasn't until the release of their 1971 album 'Who's next', however, that they managed to capture the explosive nature of their live shows on a studio album. 

Their December 1968 stint on 'The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus' showed they were a match for anyone playing live. No one got to see it at the time, though, because the whole project was shelved. The Who's skit did see the light of day on their 1977 biopic 'The Kids Are Alright'.

That confident, cheeky performance of  'A Quick One, While He's Away' was perfectly pitched for the circus tent, and so much more polished and powerful than the Stones' lacklustre act. 

Indeed, it was this upstaging of the Stones, as much as the sorry state of Brian Jones, that convinced Jagger & Co to shelve the Rock and Roll Circus film. It didn't see a full official release for almost 30 years.

From the late '60s on, with the 'Tommy' album as the core of their act, The Who built a reputation as a heavy rock band, culminating in their triumphant early morning stint at Woodstock in August 1969. 

The 1970 'Live At Leeds' album was an all-guns-blazing set, with Pete Townshend and Keith Moon driving each other to new extremes. Check out this clip of them playing the original vinyl album's opener 'Young Man Blues' at the Isle of Wight festival that same year.

As the Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau wrote in 1971, The Who's studio recordings thus far were marred by a thin sound. Their 1971 masterpiece 'Who’s next' changed all that. With the help of master engineer Glyn Johns, they managed to transfer the power and majesty of a Who live show onto a studio record for the first time. Christgau said the group "now achieves the same resonant immediacy in the studio that it does live".

It was a volatile chemistry that made them such an exciting and often unpredictable live act. John Entwistle played lead lines on the bass, allowing Townshend the freedom to jump around, imitate a windmill and bang out his wild riffs.

Moon was the whirlwind, totally unconventional as a drummer, but at his best, as on 'Who's next', he brought exceptional musicality to the drums. 

By '71 and tired of playing 'Tommy' and their 60s hits to the same audiences, Townshend conceived a new album concept as their next big project. He built himself a studio and began creating a new musical landscape.

In the new Apple TV series 1971, Townshend says, “I’d heard about synthesisers and music computers and I could see this new revolution coming.

"Lifehouse was going to be a movie based on a dystopian idea about the way media, electronics and technology would change society. I imagined this world in which there was incredible pollution, incredible difficulty with living in the outside world and so what the government did is it stuck us in our houses and fed us entertainment to keep us happy while they cleaned up the air.

NME review, click to enlarge

“I called it The Grid, this global communication system where everybody would be fed similar stuff. It would be surreptitiously policed and censored. Once they’d got us in and they were feeding us the programmes, we would imagine we had access to everything, because of its richness, its persuasiveness and its beauty. It was an anticipation of the idea that everything would go wrong, but that music would prevail."

Unfortunately, Pete couldn’t sell this concept to the band. They thought he'd gone mad. But producer Glyn Johns was sufficiently interested in the musical ideas to help Pete condense them into conventional backing tracks that The Who could then play along to. 

Rolling Stone magazine’s 1971 review noted that “Townshend wrings more than his money’s worth out of his £14,000-worth of synthesizers, making, I daresay, shrewder at once more adventurous and better-integrated — use of them than any rock experimenter before him."

In 'Baba O’Riley', for instance, he sets the stage for the band’s dramatic entrance with a pre-recorded VCS3 part he obtained by programming certain of his vital statistics into a computer hooked up to the synthesizer, then treats the part as a drone while the song’s two major chords are transposed over it.

All in the best possible taste

The looped and synthesised intro to 'Baba O’Riley' and the trippy electronics of  'Won’t Get Fooled Again' were inspired by minimalist composer Terry Riley’s 1967 album 'A Rainbow in Curved Air'. 

Rolling Stone noted the quality of the musicianship on this album, “with Moon thrashing and bashing more precisely than ever before on record, Entwistle dreaming up all manner of scrumptious melodic and rhythmic flourishes (listen especially to what he plays beneath the chorus of 'Won’t Get Fooled Again').

"And Townshend, with chunky acoustic rhythm, resounding monster chords of the classic sort, and cogent and lyrical solos, playing with exemplary efficiency and taste.” Singer Roger Daltrey also rose to the occasion with some of his most assured vocals, including the legendary scream at the climax of Won't Get Fooled Again. 

Re-reviewing 'Who’s next' in the mid 1970s, the NME’s Steve Clarke noted that Keith Moon’s unique style of playing – often without a hi-hat, hence the wash of cymbal sounds on many recordings – meant he lacked “the bombastic precision of many of Britain’s rock drummers. Instead. Moon sounds spontaneously manic, and nowhere has he sounded better than here.”

back cover photo

While the dramatic opening and closing tracks of 'Who's next' are the ones most people remember, there’s a satisfying variety in the moods in the remaining songs, with particularly melodic passages in 'Love Ain’t For Keeping', 'Song Is Over' and the utterly brilliant 'Behind Blue Eyes'. The acoustic-to-electric transition on the latter exemplifies the tension and release dynamics of The Who at their best – and with lyrics to match.

“When my fist clenches crack it open, before use it and lose my cool. If I smile, tell me some bad news, before I laugh and act like a fool.”

RS described ‘Song Is Over’ as “an unutterably beautiful song in which Townshend sings exquisitely over a gentle piano background with Daltrey charging in exhilaratingly, with breathtaking chord changes in the manner of the “Listening to you I hear the music . . .” refrain from Tommy.”

Pete may have failed to get the broader Lifehouse project off the ground, but 'Who's next' nonetheless carries a strong sense of what Clarke observed as “We’re all part of something bigger and somehow one day we’ll all join together as one.” 

Photo by Ethan Russell

The cover shot of the monolith in a Sheffield slag heap is odd but effective, although as Townshend pointed out, it bears no relation to the narrative of the record. Indeed, photographer Ethan Russell said he thought after they had done it there was no chance it would be used.

Quite how it was selected then is a mystery. Townsend added, "Of course I don’t like it. It’s got no artistic consequence whatsoever. No link to the music. It’s meaningless. It’s four guys stopping in a car and pissing up against a chunk of concrete. Anyway, can we move on?"

Also On This Blog:

Five Days of Drama at The Isle of Wight, 1970

The Who 'Put The Boot In' at Charlton FC, 1976

Sunday Night at The Saville, 1967