#28 – The Who – Who’s Next (1971)

I’ve always felt vaguely oppressed by the fact of The Who.  While they don’t rise to the level of The Beatles or The Stones, they come pretty close in the pantheon of big ol’ historically significant rock bands.  And here am I, a self-professed classicist and general admirer of music of the decades preceding my birth, and I’ve never managed to like The Who.  It’s vexing.

A few weeks ago, I was riding in a cab at night.  My wife needed cake, badly, and the only good option was way across town.  The cab driver, a rare Caucasian American left in the profession, had his satellite radio tuned to a classic rock station, and as I took my seat and announced my destination, The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” came on.  I had only heard it once or twice before, but I knew what it was–or thought I did. (I briefly entertained the idea that it was a similar sounding song called “Teenage Wasteland,” but sorted it out eventually.)  In that moment–in a cab driving through a Central Park transverse at night–I felt a surge of genuine fondness for the song.  I asked the cab driver to turn it up, and he did, though not loud enough.  It wasn’t a perfect moment–the music should have been louder, and it should have been summer with the window open, and in the best of all possible worlds I’d be a little drunk–but it was still pretty good.  It wasn’t the first time I saw some possibility of resolving my Who impasse–the past few albums on the list have treated me better than the first several–but it might have been the first time I heard them in the wild like that and was genuinely into it.

That song opens this album, which boded well for it, and, since I’ve been steadily enjoying the albums more as the project wore on, I figured my chances for liking this, their highest rated one, were pretty good.  And, yeah–it was okay, although I can’t say I loved it.  It may be that my low expectations on the previous few albums helped, whereas my belief going in that I’d actually like this one may have butted up against the limits of my lifelong resistance to the group, which had only recently begun to tentatively soften.  It didn’t help that I recognized the second track on the album, “Bargain,” from my long ago days of involuntary exposure to a Classic Rock station in the workplace.  I’m not sure I even knew it was The Who at the time, it was just one of the songs that I heard almost every day which seemed kind of stupid and over the top in that 70s classic rock kind of way.

But as the album wore on, I relaxed back into it a bit, and had a realization of sorts–that The Who are weird.  I don’t mean that as an insult, particularly.  Over the course of writing about all this music, the word “eccentric” is one I’ve tended to use in a particularly salutatory way.  I mean eccentric in the sense of sui generis–music that seems to proceed in an unusually direct way from the distinct particular makeup of the person writing it.  I think of artists like Sly Stone, Joni Mitchell, John Lee Hooker.  It’s not to say that such individuals are without precedent or influence, or that they exist wholly outside the stream of their musical tradition.  It’s just that there’s a kind of inimitable inner rhythm driving their output that I find fascinating.  And although I have always found The Who’s music in some ways problematic, I think that Pete Townshend is one of those of those artists.

The defining character of his music is a kind of theatricality.  I’m not referring only to the broader “rock opera” structures he experimented with, or just to the long form, multi-sectional songs he wrote, but even just within his regular three minute songs–the way in which they ebb and flow, their system of emotional peaks and valleys, have like a Jesus Christ Superstar quality to them.  “The best I ever haaaaaddd…”  This explains in part why I’ve never been attracted to The Who’s music–I hate that kind of shit.  But it also points toward a kind of heart on his sleeve sincerity that is perhaps not so easily dismissed.

Listening to this album, two images kept coming to mind.  One was Townshend’s trademark windmill motion.  You can actually hear it in the music, as though its not merely a theatrical gesture, but like a pacing mechanism–the distinctive way he has of keeping time and meting out emotional structure as his band’s primary lead instrumentalist.  The other image was of Townshend as a child pretending to be a rock star.  That is, however pretentious the idea of a “rock opera” sounds (and this album, interestingly, is the dregs of a failed attempt at one), underneath it all is a vision that proceeds at least as much from a kind of innocence rather than any kind of calculation or artistic self-importance.  It feels to me as though the quality in his music I’m defining as theatrical proceeds less from some deep abiding love from the stage per se and more from the conditions of Townshend’s childhood–unhappy, immersing himself in books and fantasy, growing up amidst the first great wave of American rock ‘n roll, all roiling around in his person and coming out in his particular–weird–musical style.  It’s an obvious point, but it’s like, to Pete Townshend, this is how music is supposed to sound.

I realize that the idea I’m forwarding borders on the inane–that the same could be said of most any band, or certainly at least of various other “acquired taste” kind of bands, including some, like Steely Dan, for whom I have very much acquired a taste.  And yet it felt like some kind of minor epiphany–that there is an engine of real sincerity and purpose driving this music, just in a direction that I don’t personally found moving or particularly interesting.  I think it accounts for why The Who have always seemed on the one hand one of rock’s biggest bands, and on the other hand something of an acquired but deeply felt taste.  I’ve spoken with lots of people who feel as I do–that The Who’s music seems dissatisfying and unengaging on some fundamental level.  We just don’t respond to Townshend’s vision is all.  But there’s lots of people who really do–who feel every swell and emotive apex in his songs and experience a very strong connection to this band and their music.  And then probably in the middle is lots of people who don’t really feel all that strongly either way, but the music kind of rocks, and is on the radio, and they don’t really think about it all that much.  I think my cab driver was of that camp.

That the music really does rock–that The Who were among the loudest and most aggressive sounding of the big 60s bands–is not irrelevant to this conversation.  If their music didn’t rock, the faintly mawkish undercurrents of Townshend’s writing style would collapse into irredeemable schmaltz– British Billy Joel, basically.  That was part of my basic quarrel with vast swaths of Quadrophenia. And it’s why Tommy, despite my misgivings about its broader conceptual context, wound up being probably my favorite of their albums on this list–the music itself is mostly good, tight, focused rock ‘n roll.   The earlier albums were a bit too much–their sound was too chaotic and untamed, rendered nearly insensible by the busy, hyper-melodic bass style of John Entwistle and especially the volcanic, furious drumming of Keith Moon.  But once they managed to tighten that sound up a little–to exercise a touch of discipline amidst the unruliness–even a sceptic like myself found the sound undeniable in its power.

This album represents a further refining of that sound.  Moon and Entwistle remain impressively busy on instruments whose traditional virtue is humility, but the overall effect is such that it is almost completely undistracting.  I’m not sure if this victory belongs primarily to the group, or if producer Glyn Johns had a hand in fine tuning the sound to present a unified front amidst the underlying tumult.  There is also the noteworthy addition of synthesizers, most prominently on “Baba O’Reilly” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” which adds a new dimension to their sound that is pleasing enough, at least in the limited doses that are present on this record.  Roger Daltry remained stubbornly irrelevant to my enjoyment of the music.  But overall, it was almost certainly the easiest Who record on the list to listen to.

It was not, however, the decisive victory I had been halfway hoping it would be.  “Baba O’Reilly” didn’t really hit me the way it had on that cab ride, although I got kind of into the weird fiddle solo near the end.  “Love Ain’t for Keeping,” a quiet but relatively sturdy little tune–stood out as one of the highlights of side one.  Surprisingly, so did Entwistle’s one songwriting contribution, “My Wife,” which felt like a good straight ahead rocker amidst Townshend’s more proggish eccentricities.  Overall, I liked side two better, and felt it began exceptionally well with “Getting in Tune,” one of my favorite songs on the album.  “Behind Blue Eyes” sounded familiar, probably also from Classic Rock Radio, but not in a way that invited much reaction either way.  “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is obviously positioned as the album’s “big song,” but by the time I got to it, I was a bit too hunkered down in my generally lukewarm response to the album to get very involved in it.

In the end, it feels like a bit of an anticlimax.  It’s interesting that the highest rated Who album on the list should fall right next to the highest rated Led Zeppelin album.  The latter is a band I entered the project explicitly intending to improve my relationship with.  I had no such ambitions regarding The Who, but have found to my surprise, at least in the last few entries, that a grudging appreciation for the group has burgeoned nonetheless.  In light of that, I had hoped perhaps that this album–one I had never heard of going in, and which seemed an odd choice for the top slot–might be the one to push me over into a more consistent sort of admiration for the group.  I liked especially the idea that it was initially developed as yet another rock opera, but that the broader premise fell apart, leaving only the songs.  This to me seemed ideal.  But alas, I only kind of liked it–if anything, a little less than the more formally pretentious Tommy.  It seems likely, then, that I will never really count myself a fan of this group, but I have appreciated the opportunity to hear their music, to reflect on why its not really for me, but to see at least a glimmer of what others see in it.

Source: LP