77. The Who, "Who’s Next"

 


Swear to God, I'm not trying to be intentionally provocative for clicks, but it's gonna come across like that when I say this album is overrated, a sometimes bore sandwiched between two deadass all-time classics.  

The first ATC is, of course, "Baba O'Riley," with its chattering synth background (apparently played on a living room Lowrey TBO-1 organ on the "marimba repeat" setting) and it's soaring, majestic "Don't cry/don't raise your eye/it's only teenage wasteland" crescendo that still gives me chills occasionally.  The song, like most of the rest of the album, was left over from an ill-fated project called Lifehouse that was to be the follow-up rock opera to Tommy, as if the world was just clamoring for more and more rock operas.  Thankfully, that project was abandoned and the band used the leftover songs on this record, recorded from April to June of 1971. 

Although the cover is unmistakably juvenile, featuring what appears to be the band having just pissed on a concrete slab, it could have been so, so much worse: "Other suggestions for the cover included the group urinating against a Marshall Stack and an overweight nude woman with the Who's faces in place of her genitalia."  Sadly, the world was deprived of this artistic vision.

Almost all the songs on this record have been staples of right end of the dial FM programming for years.  You couldn't turn on WTBR THE BEAR or KWVE THE WAVE without hearing "Substitute" or "Bargain" or "Behind Blue Eyes," despite the fact that those are all just OK songs.  What really elevates all these songs is Keith Moon's wild, inspired drumming.  Listening to it now, you kind of come to the realization that almost all drumming today is pretty boring compared to what Moon was doing, which was wildly inventive without overpowering the songs, something that's very hard to pull off.  (I think Greg Saunier of San Francisco's Deerhoof comes close.)

I think "Getting In Tune" kinda sums it up:

I'm singing this note 'cause it fits in well with the chords I'm playing
I can't pretend there's any meaning hidden in the things I'm saying

But I'm in tune
Right in tune
I'm in tune
And I'm gonna tune
Right in on you

Pretty much nailed it, Pete.  You are definitely in tune!  (I read someone say that Pete Townsend couldn't find the pocket if you pushed him into it, which is hilarious but also maybe true?)  "Going Mobile" is also a hoot, wherein the "hippie gypsy" narrator is pleased that he "can stop in any street/Invite in people that we meet," which sounds nightmarish but it isn't the early 70s any more.

Then we get to the other absolute lock classic on this record, "Won't Get Fooled Again," which has also been "American Pie"-level overplayed but which somehow still works every fucking time.  It's got another incredible synth sound (programmed by Townsend) and that iconic CSI:Miami Daltrey scream and it's so fucking dark, I love it.  It's about how revolution is a scam and the it's gonna be the same all the time and there's nothing you can do, a lesson we all learned when the hippies of the 60s turned into the NIMBYs of the 00s.  Fuck those guys.

Is this album in my personal Top 500? I'll take it for just the first and last songs.

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