UPDATE 8/1/2024: Edited for typographical and formatting errors, and to add additional context.
Timing is a funny thing. We’re reliably informed that this is what life is all about, that temporal chance can be the make-or-break difference. Sometimes you’re ahead of the curve, and sometimes you’re late to the party. The latter is an obvious cause of misery, but the former can be debilitating as well.
This doesn’t just apply to business. Timing is a huge success factor in art as well. For you rock fans out there, Elvis Presley was talented, sure, but he took what guys like Chuck Berry were doing, made it more palatable to the mainstream, and came out at just the right time. Ditto the Beatles: we remember them as starting the British Invasion of rock n’ roll because they were at the right place at the right time—totally unplanned.1
Some guys got it and some guys don’t. And some guys are both on the bleeding edge and Johnny-come-latelys. Take The Who. This band had all the ingredients to be the biggest band in the world: a fantastic songwriter and innovative guitarist in Pete Townshend, the prototypical rock-god frontman in Roger Daltrey, a man who revolutionized the bass guitar in John Entwistle, and a drummer who played like every jazz great hopped up on every methamphetamine2 in the book in Keith Moon. Their music was ambitious and melodic and aggressive, their live shows controlled chaos, their image that of aristocratic, if slightly snobby art nerds with a rough working-class lead singer. They wrote the first rock opera, they pioneered a heavy style of music, and they pushed the boundaries in recording technology, live sound, stage shows, and the use of synthesizers and sequencers. Their albums were increasingly conceptual and ambitious, their sound ever-changing. And yet it seemed like somebody was always taking what they did and getting popular for it before them.
Out In the Streets
It wasn’t like that at the beginning. The Who arrived on the scene in 1964, and their first single, “I Can’t Explain,” didn’t drop until December 1964 in the U.S. and and January 1965 in the UK, a full two years after the Beatles debuted and a year after two other little bands called The Rolling Stones and The Kinks dropped their lead singles. In the interim were The Yardbirds, The Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, and The Merseybeats, among others. All smash successes, all massively influential.
Speaking of the Kinks, the Davies brothers’ little combo made quite the mark on Townshend. I mean, “I Can’t Explain” sure sounds like it’s The Who’s take on the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” or “All Day and All Of the Night,” right? Except Townshend claims this was a song he dashed off the top of his head when he was 18 (which would have been in 1963), before hearing either of those songs, and before either of those songs came out. Whether true or not, and I’m inclined to believe it is because if Townshend is anything it’s being painfully honest, The Kinks were not impressed. But we see a pattern emerge: while appearing to be derivative, The Who were actually too far ahead of everyone else for their own good.
An aside: it’s not like The Who had a bad career. All four members made tons of money, got to play music for a living, and are considered four of the most influential ever at their respective instruments. Entwistle and Moon quote literally reinvented the rock rhythm section; I’m convinced that without Entwistle and Moon, bands like Cream, Led Zeppelin, Vanilla Fudge, Rush, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer, Grand Funk Railroad, and Iron Butterfly wouldn’t have been able to do what they did.3 They had a great, trendsetting pop-art aesthetic that was very cool and very English. Further, the band is now regarded as one of the top 10, and in my opinion easily a top 5, greatest rock band ever.4 But I’m sure it didn’t feel like that at the time.
Back to the story. Townshend’s choice of producer for “I Can’t Explain” probably didn’t help the “Kinks rip-off” comments I’m sure they endured: Shel Talmy. Talmy himself later admitted that the song’s similarity to the Kinks caught his ear, butt he was effusive in his praise of The Who as a band and a ferocious live act, even though they were ripping through blues and r’n’b covers at the time:
Shel Talmy was very well known for accentuating loud guitars on his records. In an interview with Songfacts, Talmy said: “The Who, when I first heard them, I thought, ‘This is the best actual rock n’ roll band I’ve heard in England.’ Pete wrote a song he thought would catch my ear, and he was correct.” Up until the point before they released their first single, The Who did not really have any original material to show for. Roger Daltrey, in an interview with Q Magazine, explains why: “We already knew Pete could write songs, but it never seemed a necessity in those days to have your own stuff because there was this wealth of untapped music that we could get hold of from America. But then bands like the Kinks started to make it, and they were probably the biggest influence on us – they were a huge influence on Pete, and he wrote ‘I Can’t Explain’, not as a direct copy, but certainly, it’s very derivative of Kinks music.”
Talmy, eager to replicate the success he had with the Kinks, also had the same session guitarist he used for that band to beef up the sound on “I Can’t Explain”: Jimmy Page. Yes, that Jimmy Page.5 Remember this fact; it’s important later.
The upshot is that “I Can’t Explain” is two minutes of puppy, proto-punk perfection, and popular enough for The Who to leave an impression on the charts. More singles came, like great non-album tracks6 including “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” “I’m A Boy,” “Substitute,” and “Pictures of Lily,”7 as well as hits from their studio albums like “My Generation,” “Happy Jack,” and “I Can See For Miles.” The band’s first proper studio full-length, My Generation, wasn’t released until the end of 1965–the same day The Beatles released their seminal Rubber Soul. The Who, still plying maximum r’n’b, while the tastemakers were moving on to other things.
But wait! Although a good chunk of My Generation consists of rhythm n’ blues and Motown covers and originals inspired by them, Townshend displays some serious songwriting chops with standout tracks like “The Kids Are Alright,” “Circles,” “A Legal Matter,” and the title track.
Ah, “My Generation.” The butt of a million-and-one Internet jokes made at the Boomers’ expense. Technically, born in 1945, Townshend is a Silent, albeit a young one, missing the Boomer window by a year. Further, “My Generation” expresses an attitude that many young people have, but the line most people use to mock Townshend, and Boomers generally, is “I hope I die before I get old.”
Let’s be fair: Townshend was 20 when he wrote it. Lots of bands wrote stupid stuff when they were young: I mean, Blink-182 are in their 50s and they still sing and play some of the most mind-numbingly dumb songs, yet they don’t come under such fire. Probably because they’re not as good as The Who.8
Anyway, listen to this song. This is more raucous than anything I can think of coming out in 1965, even more so than The Kinks. The pounding two-note riff; Daltrey’s stuttered, sneering vocal delivery; Moon’s falling-down-the-stairs drumming; and Entwistle’s heavily distorted bass solos. Lest we forget how punishingly chaotic the band’s live shows were, they were the first to smash their gear at the end of a concert—sure, the whole bit started by accident, but it got them attention, and in the world of entertainment most all attention is good attention. It sounds tame by today’s standards, but think about how ahead-of-its-time “My Generation” is, presaging a more aggressive type of rock music the band would pioneer in the waning days of the 1960s, pivoting from pop to rock. A harder, heavier form of rock.
But you know who else came out playing a harder, heavier form of rock in the waning days of the 1960s?
Only the most influential rock band ever, whose impact is still being felt in 2024. We’ll come back to these guys.
What a Concept!
Now let’s go to the latter half of the 1960s, when rock n’ roll is becoming rock. Serious stuff. 1966: Frank Zappa and his group The Mothers of Invention release Freak Out!, considered the first concept album in rock. At least, Paul McCartney thought so, inspiring him to develop the ideas that would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, widely considered the most influential concept album ever; forget that the concept gets abandoned after two songs.
So The Who were once again playing catch-up, like everyone else from The Beach Boys to The Rolling Stones to The Kinks,9 trying to make more and more conceptual works. Right?
Well, no. You’d be surprised to learn that Pete Townshend already wrote the first rock opera song back in 1966. Always a voracious listener of jazz and classical music, Townshend wanted to marry the chordal structures and operatic themes he loved to rock n’ roll, developing a nine-minute song-suite taking the listener through multiple musical sections with a coherent story. “Coherent” doesn’t mean “good,” but it is kind of funny. I bring you the title track from The Who’s second album A Quick One, “A Quick One, While He’s Away.”
It’s a tale of infidelity and forgiveness, with different band members playing different parts—see, one leg up The Who had over other bands is that Daltrey, Townshend, and Entwistle were all capable of singing lead and in harmony with each other. The song also killed live:
Again, remember this “mini-opera” idea for later.
As if this wasn’t innovative enough, a mere six months after Sgt. Pepper dropped, The Who released what I consider the first true concept album, The Who Sell Out.
I say it’s the first true concept album because, unlike Zappa (“We’re satirizing pop music, but here are a bunch of my weird avant garde compositions that have nothing to do with the concept!”) and The Beatles (“We’re pretending to be a different band, but just for two songs!”), The Who leaned into their concept and never let go.
The short version is that The Who Sell Out is the band’s love letter to the independent pirate radio stations that broadcast stuff the Beeb wouldn’t play. There’s also a sub-concept, which is the band trying to get sponsorship deals from companies like Jaguar, Rotosound Strings, and yes, Heinz Baked Beans.10 Interspersed between several of the songs are identifiers for various radio stations, London clubs Moon famous for carousing in, as well as band-recorded advertisements. The actual songs have nothing to do with the concept, save for being eclectic and genre-hopping, with a heavy psychedelic jangle-pop influence, in the vein of the best radio stations. Some standouts include “I Can See for Miles,” “Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand,” “I Can’t Reach You,” “Odorono,” “Tattoo,” “Our Love Was,” and “Relax,” which gets pretty raucous at the end, as well as another mini-opera, “Rael.”
Naturally, though well-received, The Who were overshadowed by their contemporaries. The Beatles were not only cuter, but technically did it first, and were just the coolest bunch of trendsetters around. The Rolling Stones were the scruffy r’n’b bad boys always pushing the envelope between art and sleaze. The Kinks were the wryly intelligent social commentators. Pink Floyd was pushing psychedelia farther than anyone else dared. Bob Dylan was the songwriter’s songwriter. The Byrds were the reigning jangle-pop kings. Where did this leave The Who?
Well, nowhere to go but farther in the direction they were trending: a full-blown rock opera.
Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Boy
I’m sure you’ve heard of Tommy. But first, prior to the release of The Who Sell Out, what about the Summer of Love?
Ah, the Monterey Pop Festival, the culmination of 1967. The hippies were ascendant. Lots of hot bands were on the bill, including The Mamas and the Papas, The Byrds, Ravi Shankar, Janis Joplin, The Association, and Simon and Garfunkel. The Beatles didn’t make it, but sent their love. You know who did make it?
Yeah, only the most influential rock guitarist of all time. The Who were there too. And they definitely did not fit in. I mean, Roger Daltrey looked the part, but the band sure didn’t sound or act like hippies. They tore through a short, hyper-aggressive set, culminating with them smashing the shit out of both their equipment and the stage.
It’s safe to say they weren’t fans of the hippie movement.11 It’s also safe to say that, being the snake bitten combo they were, The Who had to compete with another ascendant act, Jimi Hendrix, who took what The Who had been doing and cranked it up to 11.
The issue was that neither The Who nor Jimi Hendrix wanted to go on last that final night of the festival. From Mark Blake’s Pretend You’re at War: The Who & The Sixties:
Backstage, the Grateful Dead's sound engineer turned chemist, Owsley Stanley, was distributing free LSD trips and Rolling Stone Brian Jones was drifting around dressed like a Regency prince, but looking, as Keith Richards once said, “like a ghost about to leave a séance”. Roger Daltrey recalls Jones joining him, Janis Joplin, The Mamas And The Papas' Mama Cass and Jimi Hendrix for a jam session in the dressing room under the stage.
“Jimi was playing Sgt. Pepper on his guitar,” said Daltrey. “But, and this was the amazing thing, he was playing all the parts. He would go from a bit of orchestration, to a vocal part, to a solo – the whole thing on one guitar.” The others stood and watched, accompanying Hendrix by beating out a rhythm on anything close to hand.
Others remember it differently. Pete Townshend recalled arguing with Hendrix about who would go on first, as neither wanted to follow the other. At one point Hendrix stood on a stool in front of Townshend to show off on the guitar, as if to say, “Don’t fuck with me, you little shit.” In the end, John Phillips suggested they toss a coin. Townshend won.
The Animals' frontman Eric Burdon, his Newcastle accent now softened by California or drugs or both, introduced The Who as “a group that will destroy you completely in more ways than one”. Behind him, the band crashed into Substitute followed by Summertime Blues. It was hard to imagine anything more removed from The Mamas And Papas' passive California Dreaming or anything else played that weekend.
The Who tore through Pictures Of Lily, A Quick One, While He’s Away, Happy Jack, and My Generation. Instead of peace, love and flowers, they offered wanking, pervert train drivers, adolescent turmoil, and Pete Townshend hacking away at the stage with his guitar, like a lumberjack trying to dismember a log with a blunt axe. In the subsequent Monterey Pop movie, you can hear the gasps from the audience as stagehands rush on to salvage the broken equipment. Ravi Shankar watched the performance and was disgusted by “their lack of respect for their music and their instruments.”
…
There was an air of English decadence about The Who at Monterey. In their paisley jackets, Edwardian ruffles and puffed sleeves, the group looked like a gang of marauding dandies. In 2005, Keith Altham recalled that Moon had accessorised his outfit with a necklace made from human teeth. Even Daltrey, who’d rarely worn targets and chevrons in The Who’s pop art days, had joined the revolution. The cape draped around his shoulders was an explosion of red, brown and burnt orange hues, described in New Musical Express as “a heavily embroidered psychedelic shawl”. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. “It was a tablecloth I bought in Shepherd’s Bush market,” Daltrey admitted. “But it did the job.”
Later, Brian Jones introduced Jimi Hendrix as “the most exciting guitarist I’ve ever heard”. Townshend watched Hendrix's set with Mama Cass: “He started doing this stuff with his guitar. She turned around to me, and said to me, ‘He’s stealing your act.’ And I said, ‘No, he’s doing my act’.”
Townshend has since achieved a Zen-like calm on the subject of Jimi Hendrix, but Daltrey still sounds defensive. “I always have to defend The Who when people start raving about Hendrix at Monterey, and what he was doing,” he huffs. “It was totally nicked from The Who.” Daltrey was right – until Hendrix sprayed his guitar with lighter fluid, set it on fire and tossed the charred remains into the audience. Keith Altham remembers running into a subdued Townshend at San Francisco airport the next day, and being warned not to just write about Jimi. “Hendrix triumphed at Monterey,” Altham points out now, “but it was The Who that had drawn first blood.”
So how do you like that? The Who got what they wanted—the penultimate slot—and still the defining, enduring image of the Monterey Pop Festival was not their set, but Hendrix burning his guitar. Some guys just get no respect.
Still, after a U.S. only compilation, Magic Bus, that didn’t set the world on fire in 1968, The Who were ready to break ground on the project that would launch them into the big leagues.
Times were changing. The band’s 1968 tour saw them getting harder and edgier and louder, with added improvisational flair. Daltrey ditched the straightening goo in his hair, allowing his naturally curly blond locks to cascade past his shoulders. Ever the gym rat, he had also gotten quite buff, often performing in chest-bearing outfits. Townshend began wearing his white Union suit and Doc Martens combo, while Entwistle preferred garish jackets or skeleton suits. And Moon . . . well, his drum set got bigger and bigger, and he smashed the hell out of each and every one.
Tommy represented none of this. While the album rocks plenty at times, its production and arrangements really don’t reflect the experience of seeing The Who on stage. Tommy is highly orchestrated, dense, and thematically wild, with a story best described as both a celebration and a critique of the 1960s-era quest for spiritual enlightenment. Townshend was an earnest spiritual seeker, but had a very healthy skepticism towards gurus peddling nirvana. Read this 1969 Rolling Stone piece for more straight from Townshend himself, but I’ll leave you with this:
One of the central themes of Tommy is the play between self and illusory self. It’s expressed by Tommy (the real self) who can see nothing but his reflection (illusory self) in the mirror – “There had to be a loophole so I could show this. The boy has closed himself up completely as a result of the murder and his parents’ pressures, and the only thing he can see is his reflection in the mirror. This reflection – his illusory self – turns out to be his eventual salvation.
The story is a bit of a mess but dang it, it works. Townshend was trying to say a lot—he was always trying to say a lot—and sometimes the dangers lay in the communication of the ideas. But the music on Tommy is so meticulously crafted, so interesting, so spot-on, anything that gets lost in translation still comes across in the slices of hard pop brilliance of tracks like “Amazing Journey/Sparks,” “I’m Free,” “Christmas,” “The Acid Queen,” “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” and of course, “Pinball Wizard.”
The band throws everything into Tommy: classical guitar and composition techniques, recurring leitmotifs, a twisted blues cover (“Eyesight to the Blind”), disturbing imagery (“Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About,” both penned, naturally, by John Entwistle), and both an “Overture” and an “Underture,” brilliantly recapping the album’s main musical themes.
It was a smash. It was, like Tommy himself, a sensation. It turned the who from musicians into capital-A artists, and they played the whole thing, at maximum volume, live, including a memorable turn at the Woodstock festival in 1969, where Tommy’s conclusion coincided with the rising sun.
It’s pretty epic stuff.
Suddenly, The Who were in demand. “Pinball Wizard,” of all songs, was a radio smash. Tommy was everywhere. Released in May of 1969, the album changed The Who’s fortunes for the better. But uh, oh, what’s that sound?
That previous January, Jimmy Page’s combo—him again!—dropped their debut, featuring a band configuration that looked strikingly similar to The Who’s, and a similarly amped-up sound to boot.
And that fall, Jimmy Page and Co. dropped the heavy rock blueprint, Led Zeppelin II, featuring what some might call the first heavy metal song, “Whole Lotta Love”:
A guitar-bass-drums trio featuring a mighty voiced, good-looking frontman with curly blonde hair? Aggressive, inventive, distorted guitars played by a boundary pushing songwriter and sonic architect? Loud, thunderous bass? A revolutionary drummer who beat the living daylights out of the drumkit?
And their live shows were furious, improvisational, and loud?
No wonder Townshend was not amused.
So the 1960s ended, and so did The Beatles. There was an opening in the rock power rankings, and The Who, with Tommy, were poised to take the top spot.
Except Led Zeppelin swooped in to steal it from right under their noses.
The Led Zeppelin phenomenon cannot be understated. I wrote about the band here in my post “It’s Okay to be Great.” And they were great. But it’s not hard to feel sympathy for Townshend’s bitterness at Led Zeppelin’s greater level of success and adulation for picking up what The Who were doing and running with it.
Not to rest on their laurels or repeat themselves, The Who followed up Tommy with Live at Leeds in 1970, “the definitive hard rock holocaust,” a tremendous, heavy, high-energy glimpse into their prowess as a live act. Just check out their cover of Mose Alison’s “Young Man Blues”:
Further, in 1971, The Who dropped their highest-charting album, Who’s Next, which many consider their best. Who’s Next arose from the ashes of Townshend’s failed Lifehouse project, which was abandoned in favor of a traditional album, albeit one featuring many songs from the aborted rock opera.
What was Lifehouse supposed to be about? Strap yourself in:
“Life House” was conceived as a follow-up to Townshend’s previous opus, “Tommy.” Steeped in Eastern religion via his guru Meher Baba, Townshend attempted to marry the musical and spiritual ambitions of the late ‘60s into a project that (to vastly oversimplify) revolved around the concept that a human being’s spirit could be articulated in a musical note or series of notes. He cooked up a plot set in a future totalitarian society, where people were connected and controlled via a sort of pre-internet called “The Grid” — except for some rebellious musicians who, through their performance, were able to tap into those magical notes and melodies and connect spiritually with their audience (approximations of those melodies underpin such “Who’s Next” classic songs as “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”). The story ends at a concert where they succeed in this spiritual fusion, and the band and audience connect and disappear to some version of heaven… or something like that (it’s explained at length in this set’s liner notes).
The rest of the band indulged Townshend for as long as patience allowed before being all “Yeah, no.” Townshend was pissed, felt like a failure, and naturally Who’s Next became the band’s highest-charting effort. It helps that the songs are so good, many like “Baba O’Reilly” and the epic “Won’t Get Fooled Again” featuring the band’s pioneering use of synthesizers and sequencers. Everybody knows those two songs, along with “Going Mobile,” and Entwistle’s “My Wife,” and “Behind Blue Eyes,” but my favorite of the bunch is probably “Bargain,” which I consider to be the quintessential Who song:
Of course, you know what album came out a month later and sucked all the oxygen out of the rock room?
Can’t The Who Ever Catch a Break?
The Who were doomed to spend the 1970s being compared to Led Zeppelin both on stage and in studio. While I think both bands were great live, The Who were more consistently great, thanks in no small part to Townshend not being a smack-head and Daltrey taking care of his voice. Naturally, Moon and Entwistle were rock’s most notorious party boys—yes, Entwistle was hardly “the quiet one” we’re led to believe he was—but The Who kept it together and kept it tighter than Led Zeppelin. Albums? It’s closer. I think Led Zeppelin gets the slight edge, as their albums tended to be punchier, but The Who were no slouch.
In 1973, The Who released their second rock opera Quadrophenia, an album which was enormously important to me as a teenager and which I wrote about here. It did well, but it didn’t reach Tommy heights. I have a theory why. It’s not only that Quadrophenia had a framing story about a very niche, very English subculture; it’s that it was very male-oriented. It also rocked pretty damn hard, featuring popular singles like “5:15” “Love Reign O’er Me,” and “The Real Me”:
In fact, that’s my theory as to why The Who, despite being the first to do so much, were constantly in the shadow of bands who did the same thing: the girls weren’t into The Who.
For instance, check out the band’s logo:
The “o” is the traditional symbol for male. This is reflected in not just the band’s sound, but their lyrical content.
The Who were personal, and as chief songwriter and lyricist, Pete Townshend felt like he was talking directly to you, the angry and confused teenage boy. He got you. He understood all of your frustrations and insecurities, with the world, with girls, with yourself, because he had them too. This continued into middle age: 1975’s The Who by Numbers is all about Townshend’s midlife crisis and dissatisfaction with music—he holds nothing back and it’s actually a pretty harrowing listen despite some seemingly upbeat tunes like “Dreaming From the Waist,” “Slip Kid,” “However Much I Booze,” and Entwistle’s wonderfully snide “Success Story.”12 Other songs are a bit more on the nose:
This vulnerability isn’t a male trait, but the content of it sure is. The Who are a dude band, a concrete, real, heart-on-their-sleeve dude band. No hiding behind layers of metaphor or winking irony.
Led Zeppelin were aristocrats, singing behind dense layers of abstraction from on high, impersonal larger-than-life demigods with guitars, sex set to music. The Beatles were too cool to be vulnerable, aiming for and achieving the universal.13 The Kinks could get personal, but it was all with a sense of smiling detachment—plus, they had a late-career renaissance in popularity and finances when Van Halen released their cover of “You Really Got Me,” and all the hip, cool, young punk and new-wave bands started citing them as an influence.14 Pink Floyd and Genesis and Yes and Rush and ELP and King Crimson did the proggy, concept album/rock opera thing more consistently, more adventurously, and with greater commercial success. Black Sabbath was darker and heavier. David Bowie was artsier. The Doors were sexier. The Rolling Stones just wanted to bang your girl. Okay, Led Zeppelin also just wanted to bang your girl. Ditto the glam rockers like T. Rex and Roxy Music. Then the punks, who were influenced by The Who, were louder and faster and snottier and more abrasive and more working class.
The Who? They were too smart for their own good. Too real. Too ahead of their time. Sometimes being the first mover means you get overshadowed by others once they catch up with you. You blaze the trail through the trackless wilderness, and others who come after get the benefit of your work and are able to go farther. You end up being considered the second or third best at everything, never the first. Life isn’t fair, but those are the breaks. Art is a business as much as any vocation, but being second or third best still beats being forgotten. And for my money, The Who will never be forgotten.
Overshadowed, sure,15 but them’s the breaks.
Who’s Last
The Who soldiered on, almost making it through the 1970s unscathed. A series of self-induced health problems forced Keith Moon, and therefore the band, to curtail touring around 1976. Alcohol is a hell of a drug. Drugs are a hell of a drug. The original quartet would release one final album, Who Are You, in 1978, and one last, exquisite live performance for use in their documentary The Kids Are Alright . . .
. . . before Keith Moon choked on his own vomit in his sleep and died.
Know what other drummer choked on his own vomit in his sleep and died two years later?
Oh, come on! Couldn’t The Who have had at least this one?
- Alexander
Post Script
There were some weird parallels between The Who and Led Zeppelin’s careers. Some highlights:
Fourth albums, Tommy and Untitled, that led to the respective band’s super-stardom.
Fifth albums, Who’s Next and Houses of the Holy, that cemented each band’s status.
Sixth album double-LPs, Quadrophenia and Physical Graffiti, showing off each band’s increasing ambition and scope.
Seventh albums, The Who by Numbers and Presence, recorded under intense personal and physical turmoil, reflected in the music and lyrics.
Final eighth albums with the original group, Who Are You and In Through the Out Door, both of which were very experimental and keyboard-heavy, featured more songwriting contributions from each band’s respective bassists, and which were considered among each band’s weakest save for each album having one final banger of an anthem, Led Zeppelin’s “In the Evening” and The Who’s “Who Are You”:
Both Keith Moon and John Bonham’s untimely, alcohol-induced passings.
The Who did not disband after Moon’s death, recruiting Faces drummer Kenny Jones for two more albums, Face Dances (1980) and It’s Hard (1982),16 while Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones immediately disbanded Led Zeppelin. The Who, at least Townshend and Daltrey, are still technically a going concern (Entwistle died in 2002), releasing two additional studio albums, Endless Wire (2006) and Who (2019), as well as multiple live album from the 80s to today.
The first concert I ever went to was The Who at Great Woods in Mansfield, MA in 1997. It was life-changing, so I, for one, am glad that the band never packed it in after Moon’s death. Maybe it was considered a bad move for a while, but I think remaining visible and playing the songs for new generations has helped cement The Who’s already formidable legacy. They’d already influenced punk rockers like The Ramones and The Clash and mod revivalists like The Jam, as well as 90s alt-rock legends like Pearl Jam, Rancid, and Smashing Pumpkins.
Maybe The Who were victims of being too far ahead of the curve. But every art form needs someone like that. Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, and John Entwistle stuck their necks out so others didn’t have to. They were proof of concept that rock could be about more, and they took—and take—the slings and arrows and calls of being pretentious a-holes, but I like to think they shrugged them off the way Townshend smashed Abbie Hoffman off the stage at Woodstock with the business end of his Gibson SG:
I sincerely hope you enjoyed this rather long piece about an old rock band. If you like my writing, please share and subscribe, and check out my books on Amazon, and toss a few drachmas into the tip jar over at Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you and God bless.
They were also super-talented and had a great image created by their manager Brian Epstein. Luck is always a factor in success, but to claim the Beatles were all luck is false. Their songwriting ability, musicianship, and charisma did 90 percent of the heavy lifting.
This is probably an accurate description, actually.
Even The Beatles were influenced by The Who: Paul McCartney allegedly wrote “Helter Skelter” to prove The Who weren’t the loudest, rowdiest band around.
My personal top 10 of this era is heavily English. In no particular order, the bands I’d put on it are:
The Beatles 🏴
The Who 🏴
Led Zeppelin 🏴
The Kinks 🏴
Pink Floyd 🏴
Jimi Hendrix 🇺🇸
Cream 🏴
Black Sabbath 🏴
The Doors 🇺🇸
The Rolling Stones 🏴
Honorable mentions to Jethro Tull 🏴, Traffic 🏴, Credence Clearwater Revival 🇺🇸, and the Allman Bros. Band 🇺🇸
Page himself says his contributions to “I Can’t Explain” were minimal, and that he was a big fan of the band:
“I’d seen them at the Marquee. To be a kid, in the room, right there in the middle of the sound Pete, John and Keith created, was phenomenal. At the session, my job was to play something behind Pete’s riff – he had his Rickenbacker 12-string. You can hardly hear me, to be honest, because his playing was so powerful. I also played a bit on the B-side, ‘Bald Headed Woman.’ That session really impressed on me the part of a well-drilled rock band.”
The Who had a history of releasing great non-album singles throughout the 70s, like “Magic Bus,” “The Seeker,” “Relay,” “Join Together,” and “Let’s See Action.”
Which has the dubious distinction of being rock’s first ode to, uh, self-abuse.
Here are Townshend’s thoughts about the line from an interview from about 20 years ago:
AD: What goes through your minds now when Roger sings that immortal line, "Hope I die before I get old?"
PT: I spoke about this earlier. But I can say a little more. I now find myself thinking, and sometimes even singing, "I hope I die before I get old." This time I am not being ironic. I am 61. I hope I die before I get old. I hope I die while I still feel this alive, this young, this healthy, this happy, and this fulfilled. But that may not happen. I may get creaky, cranky, and get cancer, and die in some hospice with a massive resentment against everyone I leave behind. That’s being old, for some people, and probably none of us who don’t die accidentally can escape being exposed to it. But I am not old yet. If getting older means I continue to cherish the lessons every passing day brings, more and more, then whatever happens, I think I’ll be happy to die before I get old, or after I get old, or any time in between. I sound like a fucking greetings card.
Death is not what is important in life, it is life itself. If you’re young and reading this, let me pass on to you the words of my teacher and master since 1967 Avatar Meher Baba, these are words that were beyond my comprehension when I was 24 years old:
"Don’t worry, be happy. Do your best and leave the results to God."
I think I understood the second part, because I thought then I knew what God was, or was not. But the first part? Don’t worry? Be happy? How do you do that? Get drunk? Take drugs? Meditate? Be a hippy? Go live in a cave? Laugh when someone beats you up and steals your bag? How is that possible? If you are 24, you have plenty of time to work it out. Trust me, in the end it becomes possible.
In the Kinks’ case, they put out so many concept albums, eight by my count: Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire; Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One; Muswell Hillbillies; Everyone’s In Showbiz; Preservation Act 1; Preservation Act 2; Schoolboys in Disgrace; and Soap Opera. Maybe Low Budget is a soft concept album as well.
Roger Daltrey sitting in a bathtub full of beans was considered disgusting and controversial back in the day. My, how times change.
Quoth Pete Townshend: “The effect of LSD on American music made it crap, with very few exceptions.” Well then!
The only bright spots on the album are the silly “Squeeze Box” and the achingly beautiful Townshend-and-a-ukulele “Blue, Red, and Grey.”
I don’t think the Beatles get enough credit for this: it is incredibly difficult to be so universal and not be cloying or come off as insincere.
To be fair, a good number such as The Clash and The Jam cited The Who as a major influence as well.
Led Zeppelin are the 7th best-selling artist of all time with a reported certified 143 million sold. The Who are way down the list with about 43.3 million. I know this isn’t the best metric of a band or artist’s quality, but it goes to my point that bands that appeal primarily to men don’t get as popular as bands that appeal to women and men: two is more than one, after all. And chicks loved Led Zeppelin. It’s not hard to understand why.
Both albums are pretty good. Face Dances features The Who’s last great single, “You Better You Bet,” while It’s Hard features The Who’s last okay single, “Eminence Front.”
Excellent.
Key point: The Who are a guy band, especially adolescent boys who felt like the band were almost, somehow, personal friends (me circa 1979). And yes, girls ignored them.
I had the maximum R&B poster on my wall as a teenager, and I had the full page picture from Rolling Stone of Pete Townsend with the blood, all over his hand from cutting himself doing the windmill, he sliced his hand like on the bottom string a cheese slicer. A bunch of us went at the Boston to see the movie, the Kids are Alright. and sat through it twice.
YouTube, there are live shows by these guys from the late 60s and early 70s which are unbelievably good. They played long sets, they played deep cuts, they were very heavy. There’s never been anyone quite like them.
The Who were possibly my favorite 60s band. It's not until you get to AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top that modernity overtakes them. But it's not surprising considering my favorite sub genre is punk. The merger of chaos and order is a great aesthetic.