With a piss The Who entered the Seventies

With a piss The Who entered the Seventies

In August 1971 the Who they fed to the market “Who’s Next”which is considered by many to be their best album and by many others one of the best in the entire history of rock. What you can read below is our story/review of that album.

And to think that if only:

– their Rolling Stones friends had self-exiled to France a few months before it actually ended up happening;
– their second rock-opera “Lifehouse” had not imploded;
– their manager Kit Lambert had not fallen prey to hard drugs, ending up definitively breaking up with Pete Townshend also because of his manifest inability to produce the first songs recorded at the beginning of the year at the Record Plant Studios in New York,

their best album would never have seen the light.

And instead he saw it. “Lifehouse” didn’t happen and in its place “Who’s Next” was born.

(But, after all, how could The Who have ever missed that wonderful bus – 1971 – that was rolling through rock like a magical trail?)

They didn’t lose it, in fact.

As “Sticky Fingers” was being released, the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio was parked at Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s estate where – on the verge of a nervous breakdown and so close to losing his band forever, worn out by a project that never got off the ground – Pete Townshend recorded the first version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, the song that, together with “Baba O’Riley”, would place “Who’s Next” on the noble shelf of the rock library.

But then the great simplifier, a production genius in his own way, had entered the scene. Glyn Jones had clear ideas and, with only one goal in mind – the sound of the album and the group – he immediately dragged the boys to Olympic Studios in London, where he helped them insert the synthesizer into their music.

The synthesizer had a sense of the future and experimentation, it wasn’t immediately easy to handle and it certainly wasn’t a rock band tool. But Townshend, having finally left behind both Kit Lambert and the anxiety of being able to keep the Who at the sidereal level of “Tommy”, fortunately had now cleared his mind and used it like a veteran.

The most energetic band on the world scene, in search of a new phase that had nothing to do with the mod epic, thus entered its own future.

“Lifehouse” had taken shape through a series of articles that Pete Townshend had written and published for the English music magazine Melody Maker, then evolved into a concept album, and then veered in the author’s head once again towards rock opera, the format that had made the figure of the blind-deaf-mute-pinball champion boy legendary.

His songs followed a script centered on an unknown hero who acted to save society from the dystopian condition it had fallen into. Two years after the moon landing, with “2001: A Space Odyssey” very vivid in the pupils, the future was truly a great theme for music too (ask David Bowie for references).

The one imagined by the leader of The Who – who will pay homage to Kubrick in his own way with the album cover – is not science fiction; on the contrary, the future of “Lifehouse” is a near future and, therefore, more frightening.

In that work, Bobby would have been the hero of the story because he was able to play rock music in the rooms where people lived locked up (rooms ominously called “experience suits”). No small feat in an Orwellian society where music is forbidden and human and material connections function practically through a “grid”, the Grid – something very similar to the internet (speaking of visionaries…).

But, as mentioned, “Lifehouse” imploded. Fortunately, its songs did not: they would come out in other forms and on other albums over time, most of them – the best ones? – on “Who’s Next”.

Producer Glyn Jones put the Who to work on eight of the nine tracks that were supposed to make up the aborted rock opera. His was a basic, orderly production, aimed at privileging the quality of the sound and, perhaps also thanks to the introduction of the synthesizer, capable of giving new life and an updated style also to Keith Moon’s drumming, perhaps less imaginative and unpredictable than elsewhere but hardly more effective than here.

Jones, always keeping things simple, had another merit: he convinced Townshend to downgrade the idea of ​​the double album. And Pete, in the end, perhaps exhausted and perhaps convinced, left him free to decide on everything, including the selection and order of the tracklist.

In addition to the leap into the future, Pete Townshend also combined a return to the past. Yes, because to counterbalance the synth he had chosen a 1957 guitar received as a gift from Joe Walsh: the future guitarist of the Eagles had given him that Gretsch in New York, when things at the Record Plant had not gone well, and that six-string became a traveling companion for him from that moment on.

“Who’s Next”, released in August 1971, went straight to number one in the British album charts. It was the first and last time for the band and, despite being a concept album (at least eight-ninths of its original project), it resonates in all of our ears mainly through three songs written by the golden pen of Pete Townshend.

The opening track, “Baba O’Riley”, takes its title almost from a portmanteau between the names of Meher Baba, the author’s personal guru, and Terry Riley, an American composer best known for having characterized the minimalist movement. A small masterpiece that, like the album to which it belongs, should have had another title, well shouted and repeated in the piece: “Teenage wasteland”. It is with this song that Townshend daringly offered himself to the purest fans by offering them the synthesizer for the first time through the programming of the Lowrey organ. He won a triple challenge – that with fate, that with the fans and that with a phalanx of unanimously praising critics – but he would always have the good sense to reprocess the organ and piano parts on the guitar once live, making “Baba” a killer of the Who’s concerts from that year and forever.

The closing track, that “Won’t get fooled again” at the origin of the album that mocked the meaning and danger of revolutions. Another live battle cry, a primordial scream to act as a slide for Pete’s power chords, another very successful experiment with the synth. As had happened six years earlier with the iconic “My generation”, this time too Pete managed to sign an angry manifesto; here, however, he raised the bar of criticism from the bubble of teenagers to the adult world, increasing the seriousness of the complaint.

And finally, “Behind blue eyes”, the song that saw Keith Moon remain still for the longest period of his life (this, unfortunately, is not mine, but of the great Dave Marsh): before the drummer “entered” the piece, in fact, there had already been space for a three-way harmony between Daltrey, Townshend and Entwistle. Originally dedicated to the villain of “Lifehouse”, Brick, musically it could be defined as a dissociated song, composed as it is of two different parts that could each walk on their own legs (like “Layla” for Clapton, to be clear).

Of course, in an album that deserved to be called The Who’s best ever – and for many critics at the time even the best rock album of 1971 – there must have been, and was, a lot more inside.

For example, the quality of Roger Daltrey’s singing, never better than on any other album.

But also “My wife”, the song written by John Entwistle who, with his usual comic touch made immortal by “Boris the spider”, exaggerated the story of an argument with his wife and, on the occasion, showed off killer bass lines.

To package the album that should have been “Lifehouse” and never was, the right idea to flow into a sufficiently futuristic-dystopian graphic took shape from Keith Moon and John Entwistle. Inspired by a conversation between the two based on “2001: A Space Odyssey”, photographer Ethan Russell dragged the band to the mining town of Easington Colliery, where there was no shortage of greyness and where from a mountain of waste a concrete parallelepiped rose, chosen to recall the dark obelisk around which the monkeys gathered in Stanley Kubrick’s film. Russell shot and shot, the poses seemed to lead nowhere, to the point that Pete – apparently bored – urinated on the wall of the concrete block.

Thus – from a real piss, then enriched with jets of stage water that surrogate the missed urination of Daltrey, Moon and Entwistle – was born the cover of “Who’s Next”, the album that had definitively transported the Who into the Seventies after “Live at Leeds” had not made it (too legacy). Thanks also to its fifth track, “The song is over”, Pete Townshend’s hyper-realistic farewell to the Sixties. The farewell of a born intellectual who had chosen rock as his poetic code.