| Year | Album | Rating |
| 1965 | My Generation TODO | B+ |
| 1966 | A Quick One TODO | B |
| 1967 | Sell Out FINISH | A- |
| 1969 | Tommy | A |
| 1970 | Live at Leeds | A+ |
| 1970 | Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 | A+ |
| 1971 | Who's Next | A+ |
| 1973 | Quadrophenia REWRITE | A+ |
| 1974 | Odds & Sods TODO | A- |
| 1975 | By Numbers | A- |
| 1978 | Who Are You TODO | B |
| 1981 | Face Dances FINISH | D+ |
| 1982 | It's Hard FINISH | C- |
| 1984 | Who's Last TODO | D- |
| 1989 | Join Together TODO | C+ |
| 2000 | Lifehouse FINISH | A+ |
| 2003 | Live at the Royal Albert Hall TODO | A- |
| Miscellaneous TODO |
Living proof that volume need not be subtlety's enemy, and in fact the two can go hand in hand. Before I listened to The Who, I had no appreciation for loudness in my music. My two favorite groups were Pink Floyd and The Beach Boys, two groups not exactly known for their hardcore sound. I didn't like loudness because subtlety was what I valued: the exact right synth wash in Shine On You Crazy Diamond, or the right blend of backing vocals in Sail On, Sailor. That kind of listening is dependent on nuances and production, because if you don't spend days in the studio finding the right hi-hat sound or vocal blend, the magic of the song is lost somehow, since it is THAT EXACT FREQUENCY which hits you. There is a school of thought which holds that a truly great song must be great when stripped of its production and instrumentation and reduced to a simple melody on a solo instrument, like a piano. While I disagree with that assessment (I don't need to remind you of how many songs were born just because something sounded cool, like feedback or synthesizers or hell, rock music in general), here is a band which easily triumphs based on that test perhaps more than the other two bands, because they have great songwriting and a great stage presence. What I find valuable in The Who is an appreciation for the unalloyed energy of sound, its merits measured in decibels and freed from the tyranny of the studio, allowed to blare and clash uninhibited on the stage, where songs truly live. The notes mentioned in Pure and Easy are loud because their strength is the strength of you as a listener in the audience, of your own vitality as a human being, exactly as mean and dirty and crude as you really are....
Sorry for that goofy mysticism at the end of that paragraph; it comes straight from the pages of their own lost masterpiece, Lifehouse. The Who knew the power of sound and thrived on the interaction between themselves and their audiences. Pink Floyd's music is often too carefully calculated to truly engage the adrenaline, and The Beach Boys' forte is really not in rocking out. The Who combine a sense of fury and energy with consummate musicianship, avoiding the over-simplicity of the proverbial three-chord wonders while surpassing their sense of what a true rock song is supposed to be because they helped invent rock in the first place! They tackled weighty concept albums discussing the Meaning of Rock Music while still knowing when to shut up and play, and managed to epitomize all of the good parts of pure rock and roll while constantly innovating and trying new things. Unfortunately, The Who's inventiveness has a glaring flaw: it is entirely dependent on guitarist Pete Townshend, which means that when he has a bad day, everyone has a bad day. The Who have few truly class-A albums that are fully listenable from end to end since they can be wildly uneven, often directionless, and infrequent. Their discography is a mess so it's hard to get a lot of their best songs unless you know where to look because of their legendarily bad luck with record companies. Early in their career they signed a notoriously bad deal with their label which made releasing new albums almost pointless, so they concentrated far more on their live performances, which means that when other bands were puting out at least an album or two a year, The Who had to struggle to release two every three years, and they still sound rushed. They did a lot to tarnish their image with exploitative "reunion" tours solely for the money after they broke up, and they ended their careers on a bad note after their drummer died and they had few good ideas left. Some of their albums really are terrible.
But they are so diverse and talented they earn a pass from me. There really is no easy way to sum up a band that has My Generation, Pure and Easy, The Rock, and Eminence Front in their catalog in a single sentence. They were able to unify, for me, a lot of things I liked about rock music and introduce new things that I'd never considered. They had some of the best instrumentalists ever to live all together. Find me a better rhythm guitarist than Pete Townshend who can churn out riffs and yet still solo arrestingly when the need arises. Find me a better bassist than John Entwistle who can anchor the song steadily and yet still duel convincingly for the lead role with some of the fastest, most complex and melodic bass lines yet played. Fine me a better drummer than Keith Moon who can keep time and yet still throw out a blizzard of what would be world-class solos by lesser drummers as offhand fills. Find me a better singer than Roger Daltrey who can portray tender vulnerabilities when necessary and yet still roar powerfully as if he had a megaphone implanted in his throat. When they all get focused in a song like Young Man Blues, you get a compact 4-minute raging thunderstorm that encapsulates the hard rock experience while still standing above the subgenre. And yet they can also set their talents to producing art of the highest kind like Quadrophenia, which makes complex literary points about the pains and pressures of youth while also being a blast to listen to. They are all over the place; sometimes for ill, mostly for good. There is no other band which can present the energy of rock music so poetically.
| B+ | 1965 | My Generation |
 |
For a debut, this is pretty inspiring. I know that the two James Brown covers (I Don't Mind and Please Please Please) seem a little half-hearted and ill-suited next to a monster single like My Generation, but think of this album as the band's Surfin' Safari - a tentative first step into a world they were helping to create. The band's musical palette The Good's Gone's rhythm would be stolen by Rael. |
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| B | 1966 | A Quick One |
 |
Equally uneven. |
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| A | 1967 | Sell Out |
 |
The band's dangerously low level of album sales (due to a particularly terrible record deal with their first producer) and their habit of smashing expensive equipment night after night meant that money was becoming a big concern. Pete set out to craft a higher-quality album which would give them a bit of cash, with hopefully some more singles along the way. The joke in the title is therefore twofold - the band is "selling out" with all those parody ads on the cover and between songs, in the hopes that the album would "sell out" to an eager public. While the failure of I Can See For Miles to chart as well as he'd hoped bitterly disappointed Pete, he shouldn't worry about the quality of the album, because it is leagues better than its predecessor. It's technically a concept album, being allegedly a segment of programming from a pirate radio station, and I'm amazed that such a dumb idea has such great songs on it. It initially comes off like novelty garbage (John's Heinz Baked Beans and Medac, in particular), but what varied and catchy garbage! The subject matter of the songs will also strike you as a little stupid - hand jobs (Mary Ann With the Shaky Hands), deodorant (Odorono), and tattoos (uh, Tattoo) - but what melodic and rocking stupidity! The ads kind of grow on you, too: never in my life will I be able to hear Our Love Was without the choir singing "Radio London reminds you - go to the church of your choice!" immediately preceding it, or I Can See For Miles without the Charles Atlas ad at the end. It's certainly much more carefully crafted and better-produced than the previous albums, as well as more diverse. There's hard-edged psychedelia (Armenia City in the Sky), straightforward pop (Odorono, Tattoo), full-speed rock (I Can See For Miles, which was so heavy The Beatles tried and failed to one-up it with Helter Skelter), lovely ballads (Our Love Was, I Can't Reach You, and Sunrise), and even another mini-opera (Rael). On no other album would they shift so easily from style to style; the only reason I can't listen to this album more is because as catchy as those ads are, they're still only ads. John's songs are the most egregious - while hearing "WHAT'S FOR TEA, MUM?!" the first few times is cute, it quickly gets tiresome. The good songs are all really good, however. The big single was I Can See For Miles, which flopped and made Pete incredibly bitter. I'd be bitter too: it's one of his greatest songs. It has those incredible pounding drums, the best single-note guitar solo of all time, and amazing vocal harmonies which sound dreamlike and accusatory at the same time. My other favorites are all strongly melodic love songs: the quietly gorgeous Sunrise, the soaring, upbeat Our Love Was, and the somewhat more moderate I Can't Reach You. Pete always seems the most convincing to me when he's writing about love, and I suppose that's how he appeared to the world at large too, because when he started his solo career his biggest hits were love songs (Let My Love Open the Door, A Little Is Enough, etc. Hell, even You Better You Bet was a love song. But don't think that these tracks are limp-wristed and mushy just because they're love songs. They're the "sophisticated" part of the album, just to show that Pete wasn't going to subject us to 40 minutes of songs about deodorant and hand jobs. They're definitely a change in direction from A Legal Matter, anyway. Armenia City In the Sky was one of The Who's few ventures into the world of the hippie culture since Pete didn't have much patience for it - remember, this is the guy who whacked Abbie Hoffman off the stage at Woodstock for proselytizing during his set. It's also one of the few times they had someone write a song for them instead of simply doing a cover. The screaming backwards guitars and meaningless lyrics definitely bear the mark of psychedelia, but the song is a bit too aggressive to fully belong in the world of strawberry fields and skies of diamonds. The only thing that prevents Mary-Anne with the Shaky Hands, Odorono, and Tattoo from being timeless classics are their lyrics, because otherwise they're first-rate pop songs. Tattoo in particular has a wonderful chorus, and you can't beat Odorono's guitar part. This album is called "power pop" a lot because even though the songs are catchy, there's plenty of strong guitar playing behind them. This is definitely the funniest album they'd ever release. After this, it was all onwards and upwards to concept albums, because Pete got tired of how badly his singles were doing. |
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| A- | 1969 | Tommy |
 |
Pete stopped flirting with cute little half-steps like A Quick One While He's Away and Rael and invented a completely new album format: the rock opera. Now there are Overtures (and unfortunately Undertures), long instrumentals, multiple characters, and an actual message instead of James Brown covers or fake ads. While not a true opera, since each member of the group does not stay in character the whole time, Tommy is the band's first try at something truly epic, and for the most part it fully deserves its status. I don't think I've ever heard Tommy called progressive rock, but as a milestone towards more "serious" forms of rock music, Tommy is every bit as important as In the Court of the Crimson King, in my mind. Probably even more so; you'll hear Pinball Wizard on the radio way more often than 21st Century Schizoid Man. It doesn't hurt that some of Pete's best material of his whole career is present here either: Overture alone is one of the greatest songs Pete's ever written, and it's not even a full-fledged song! It's just a brief prelude to the album getting started, but it's an adventurous and exciting introduction that arranges the main musical themes of the album in a "musical journey" that fades smoothly into the actual story. And the themes are great! There are plenty of simple, memorable, hummable melodies that get combined and recombined to greater and greater effect throughout the album. Tommy occasionally crosses the line from rearrangement to self-plagiarism, but for the majority of the album, the reintroduction of motifs feels perfectly natural. The band members are all playing at full speed, too. Pete deliberately understated the accompaniments so that it would be possible to play it live, which is why there's a light covering of horns and orchestral instruments from time to time – no more "Cello! Cello! Cello!" To match the nearly-operatic music, a nearly-operatic story is unveiled: the child Tommy witnesses his mother's lover stabbed to death by his father, who was thought dead in World War II until he returned abruptly. He becomes deaf, dumb, and blind from the shock and withdraws into his own mental universe. He's taunted by his sadistic cousin and raped by his uncle, while his parents can only fret over his lack of a Christian upbringing. His skill at pinball is the only thing that brings him the attention of other people as he's bounced around various charlatans, until he realizes that a mirror holds him in psychosomatic sway. He smashes the mirror, regains his sight and speech, and becomes the leader of a new pinball religion, until his excesses lead the masses to revolt and the listener learns that cults are bad. Right about there is where Tommy starts to show its flaws. I don't care how you slice it, most of that story was ridiculous; hardly any better than A Quick One While He's Away. It was so loosely plotted that the band would drop a fairly large percentage of the album from stage versions (Underture, Cousin Kevin, Sensation, Welcome) and rearrange much of the rest (Fiddle About, Pinball Wizard), as you will hear on the following two live albums. The theme of pinball was blatantly thrown in as a ploy to get rock journalist and avid pinball fan Nik Cohn to give the album a better review (which he did). The story is also poorly paced, spending more time chronicling the minutiae of Tommy's early life (did we really need two entire John-penned songs on child abuse?) than the real story: his tenure as messiah. Pete wants to tell a story about the dangers of false messiahs? Good: go ahead and tell it! Only a few songs deal with that theme, and it's obvious that high-concept songs like Amazing Journey and We're Not Gonna Take It had been written first and the rest of the material crammed in after. Most of that rest is of the Sell Out variety: It's a Boy, Tommy Can You Hear Me?, Tommy's Holiday Camp, There's a Doctor, and Miracle Cure are hardly more advanced than all those Radio London jingles and can't have taken more than a few minutes to write, no matter how catchy they are. They're there to move the plot around, because most of the better material like Eyesight to the Blind (a cover, actually), Christmas, Acid Queen, Go to the Mirror!, Amazing Journey, Sparks, and of course Pinball Wizard dwells on particular themes at the expense of the story. Luckily, the better material is so good that the filler is practically irrelevant. Pinball Wizard is still The Who's best-known song, and it almost manages to deserve that honor due to the iconic opening and impeccable riffing. The latter half of We're Not Gonna Take It, where the band makes you really feel the endless mass of humanity following Tommy, is one of the strongest ends to an album I've ever heard. In between are beautiful tunes like 1921, powerful instrumentals like Sparks (which could become a volcanic monster on stage), and all sorts of great guitar rock that doesn't sacrifice energy for tunefulness. Tommy would turn the band into international superstars and give them the luxury to pursue even more ambitious projects, but on its own merits, it's one of the greatest albums in rock history. |
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| A+ | 1970 | Live at Leeds |
 |
Tommy was so huge that immediately after its release the band went on a massive tour to promote it worldwide. I'm going to break with my policy of reviewing original albums because if you don't get the Deluxe Edition, you're depriving yourself of the greatest albums in rock history. It's tough to describe this album, so let's start with a general discussion of live albums: what makes a good live album? One important ingredient would be a good mix of songs: you should play your latest album to promote it, but you should also play some old favorites to keep the crowd grounded. Another would be change: play your songs differently on stage than you would in the studio so there's actually some reason to see you at all. Related to that is energy: take advantage of the ability to play as loud as you want and ROCK OUT. Finally, display some virtuosity: let people know that you know this material well and try to dazzle the crowd with your ability to play all of this stuff without the benefit of second takes or overdubs. Live at Leeds does all of these things. It has a great setlist with plenty of non-album singles, fantastic (in every case better) renditions of a bunch of strong songs, incredible intenstiy, and the instrumental skills on display are dazzling. The amount of instrumental interplay here is astonishing; I've never heard another live album where all band members play with and off each other so well, as you can hear in My Generation, which stops and starts several times as Pete just makes up what's going to come next and it all works. The balance between quick numbers and long numbers is perfect; the listener is never bored by endless jams but they get the opportunity to hear several songs over the 5-minute mark. Listened to in headphones, this album becomes hypnotic after a while as all this perfectly controlled noise washes over you and you are left marveling over how each band member's lines interplay, disconnect, and then reconnect seamlessly and flawlessly for the entire concert. The album is truly its own and not simply a rote live performance of selected hits for the audience, in spite of Pete's jokes about playing "the three easiest" singles at one point. They were forced to focus on their live shows instead of their albums due to that awful record deal they had made, but it turned out for the best as far as I'm concerned. So what does the listener get? One disc of singles, one disc of Tommy. Originally Tommy was played towards the end of the set, but since this is the third version of this album to be released because of moronic record company bullshit they decided to cut it out of place and give it its own disc. This is both good and bad: the listener has the option to listen to the discs separately and Tommy doesn't cut off in the middle, but now Pete's vision is lost. The reason it was in the middle was so that the band could play some short numbers to get the crowd in the mood, then play a rock opera to "elevate the audience's consciousness and energy", and then follow that with more short numbers to try and change the audience's understanding of what rock music should be. I don't know if my consciousness got elevated by listening to this album, but I'm pleased with the results. In any case, now that Live at the Isle of Wight is out you can pick which one you listen to, and I don't think it really matters because all of this stuff is great! The singles are brilliant; absolutely every single one is at least the equal, if not the far superior of its corresponding studio version. Songs like John's Heaven and Hell (possibly his best contribution to The Who's repertoire) were BORN to be played live, and Young Man Blues is absolutely my favorite live Who song ever. Pete switches between clean and dirty guitar tones at just the right times, John thunders away like mad, Keith lets loose constant drum flurries, and Roger roars his lungs out. How were they able to take such a short song and make it such a dramatic barnstormer? Throughout the album the entire band flows together in a way which makes me perfectly understand Pete's fascination with the way that music could unify people, and it's tough to go on from here because this is pretty much the best live album I've ever heard: every note on here is loud, raw, and perfect. There's also great stage banter in the song introductions (A Quick One and Young Man Blues get some hilarious jokes in before they start playing) and even during performances of songs like Magic Bus, which is the definitive version as far as I'm concerned. I can't think of a way in which Live at Leeds wouldn't be a winner unless you simply don't like rock music at all. All of the songs are strongly melodic but still powerful, and there is just the right balance between accuracy and improvisation. There's no way you can get more energy from a live album while still remaining studio-perfect than with Live at Leeds. |
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| A+ | 1970 | Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 |
 |
This album isn't as redundant as it seems from just checking out the tracklist - it was released in 1996 when Live at Leeds did not have the full performance of Tommy attached to its tracklist, plus this one contains a few just-written songs from Lifehouse like I Don't Even Know Myself and Water. Also, and most importantly, Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 presents a different side of the band than its predecessor: whereas the previous album was technically immaculate and a little restrained, here their performance is absolutely incendiary. This may be due to the fact that the Isle of Wight Festival was the British equivalent of Woodstock, rather than the much smaller venue at Leeds University, and the band decided to that the audience of drunken hooligans were more deserving of a completely unrestrained musical explosion than a handful of polite college students. Although the sound quality is slightly worse than the crystal clarity of Live at Leeds, it only highlights the fact that they were even MORE powerful that night, as hard to believe as that is. On first listen, this album might sound a little sloppy or messy, especially when compared to its predecessor. It's clear when you compare the two versions of something like Young Man Blues back to back. The band's emphasis is clearly on volume and power at the expense of subtlety; instead of the careful precision and razor-tight interlock, there are plenty of points where the band just lets go in a burst of crackling energy. Pete has an incredible guitar tone throughout that sounds like he's playing with sheet lightning which gets emphasized during the Tommy set and results in its definitive performance, never to be topped again. Though I personally prefer the other album overall because of its better sound quality and care, there are moments of undeniable power on here and you need this album to hear their music taken to the edge. I won't weigh in on whether or not they are "the best live band of all time" because I haven't heard every band in existence just yet, but I can easily understand how they might get that reputation. This is around the time when Pete was trying to write yet another concept album, this time one that explicitly involved the audience feedback that gave him and the rest of the band such a productive musical relationship. Looking at the dramatic differences between their performances on the two live albums, you can see what a difference the crowd mood made to him and everyone else, making the subject inevitable... but see the Lifehouse review for more on that. Water is a good example of the band's live power and it's my second favorite Who live song ever. Despite its questionable lyrics (which Pete dubiously claims make "water" out to be a codeword for spiritual enlightenment on the companion video of the event), it's a showcase for his soloing skills, which are actually quite interesting. There's a particular point in the song where it almost sounds like the guitar actually explodes with music - and he actually did have to replace his guitar after the song - there's a thunderstorm on stage as the instrument screams and howls with feedback and distortion while you're trapped under the sheer epic length of this song. If Young Man Blues is a quick trip through the energy of punk, Water a momentous journey through the oppressive weight of heavy metal. Just sit back and let all those riffs pile up on you while Roger out-sings Robert Plant by about a billion times. His vocal performance throughout the rest of the album is impressive as well, because he's not just singing, he's screaming his heart out throughout the entire concert. Almost matching Water is the best version of Sparks you'll ever find, which starts off with earth-quaking riffs that just hang there until he smashes them apart with near-volcanic fury. The whole Tommy disc is the same way: louder and dirtier than on Live at Leeds by miles, plus you also get to hear it in the middle of the set the way it was originally supposed to be. There's also good performances of I Don't Even Know Myself and Naked Eye, plus a cover Twist and Shout! A neat thing to watch for is the transitions, like from My Generation to Naked Eye - they played a snatch of Naked Eye on Leeds when it wasn't fully written, and now here it is being slid in seamlessly. I like that this album exists, because it's a fun game to listen to the small differences that make one version of a song like Magic Bus sound so different from another, but it's always the same song and it always feels so natural. Sometimes I feel that this album overlaps with the last album alightly too much, but then I relisten to Sparks and I know that it completely justifies its existence on its own merits. Even though they would go on to play many more fantastic concerts, this album captures them playing to one of their largest, if not their largest-ever audience at the height of their fame and skill, so despite the questionable sound quality and occasionally sloppy playing, the energy here is unique and irreplacable. Just hear it. |
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| A+ | 1971 | Who's Next |
 |
The "ambitious projects" I mentioned at the end of the Tommy review were really one project: Lifehouse, which was to be a concept album of such epic scope as to push Pete to the breaking point. Lifehouse failed for reasons detailed in its own review. Luckily, its leftovers were so impressive that Who's Next managed to become a landmark album on its own merits, with the vast majority of people completely unaware that radio staples like Baba O'Riley, Behind Blue Eyes, and Won't Get Fooled Again were ever part of something larger. There are a few reasons why the album made such an impact: clever placement of the strongest songs at the beginning and the end, a varied instrumental palette, a much harder-hitting production style, and top-notch songwriting. Though it was released in the same year as Led Zeppelin's IV, Who's Next offers a completely different approach to hard rock, moving away from traditional heavy blues numbers in favor of unusual arrangements and the novel use of synthesizers. While older albums like Tommy had been arranged with plentiful instruments, that was an opera. These are normal rock songs, but reshaped to accept these new instruments flawlessly, in a down-to-earth way that all those prog bands couldn't quite manage. Bargain is a good example: listen to it go back and forth between soft synth passages, normal hard rock passages, and odd blends seamlessly as Pete and Roger trade off their lines about love, but love in an almost philosophical way, not the typical "Baby I need you so bad" way. Love is really the theme of this album in all but one song, driven both by Meher Baba stupidity and a genuine passion for the subject. It took the hardest of the hard rock bands to take such "soft" instruments and integrate them so well, because Pete believed that if you took the fiery soul of guitar rock and combined it with those oddly hypnotic synthesizer patterns, you would get... all that Lifehouse stuff, I guess. Peace, love, and ascension to the spirit plane. None of that really comes through in Who's Next aside from what seems to be an odd preponderance of love songs that seem to involve music, like The Song Is Over. You can (and probably have) sung along to Behind Blue Eyes a million times without realizing it's sung from the perspective of an evil Lifesuit corporate executive, but that's OK. Sometimes good rock music outgrows its message. Baba O'Riley opens off with a hypnotic, almost dancing synth pattern that has echoes EVERYWHERE. His experiments with synth loops on this album were not only THE major influence on mainstream rock/pop as far as synths go, but that they've never truly been bettered, either. The song uses a ton of neat tricks, changing tempos and moods, arrangements and vocalists, until a weird sort of jig closes off the song with a bang. I have heard it referred to as "arena rock", that horrible mixture of puffed-up bombast and manufactured emotion that became so big in the late 70s, but that rests on a misunderstanding of the song, which isn't some sort of Behind Blue Eyes-esque appeal to teenagers, but the opening story of Lifehouse - it's about farmers, in fact it's the only fist-pumping radio single about farmers I know. It took the band quite a while until they were ready to try such an unusual modification of their sound while still incorporating all their main virtues in a way that presents their familiar instrumental prowess - check Pete's incredible guitar solo before the closing violin part, or Roger's proud roar - creating something that had never been tried before. Pretty much every song is a mixture of The Who's old sound, with the 3 instrumentalists crashing away like crazy, and then these new synths and pianos and weird guitar filters. The entire album is pretty much a mix of awesome rocking out mixed with soft, almost tender moments, like the acoustic Love Ain't For Keeping, which is sadly not as good as the electric version on Odds & Sods. Or there's the very pretty The Song Is Over, which gets accused of being too bombastic, but I think its grandiosity is perfectly compatible with its near-cathartic love message. People are forever comparing love to flowers or poems, why not songs? That applies to Getting In Tune as well, which also showcases the band's skills at jamming. I have a low tolerance for jamming, usually, but The Who impress me time and time again at their creation of interesting adventures as all of them pursue separate musical ideas that merge perfectly. John can write jams, too; in a break from Lifehouse material, he puts in the funny metallic groove My Wife, which he would sadly begin to rewrite over and over again as he ran out of ideas. But here, it's a great showcase for his songwriting talents as all those instruments (including his trademark horn) get piled on top of each other and crash away. Going Mobile has the same sort of jam in it, but it suffers from a guitar filter that makes the instrument sound like a sheet of metal being bent back and forth very quickly. I like the way the vocal melody leaps around, though, and Pete has a great delivery. Behind Blue Eyes is definitely my least favorite song on this album. I know it's heretical, but this song is whiny and grating and should have been cut. I see Behind Blues Eyes as helping to usher in a million other soft, acoustic, whiny singer-songwriter tunes which do nothing but complain about how no one understands them, their pain is too deep, etc., etc. Not only is that a completely false interpretation of the song, since anyone who is familiar with the plot of Lifehouse knows that this song is sung from the perspective of the story's villain and not some kind of misunderstood teen gripped with anomie, that awful tone Roger has when he's singing it is so repulsive I can't understand how anyone tolerates it. I like the second and more upbeat half of the song, which sounds like a bit more time went into it and contains a poem Pete wrote when he was severely tempted by a groupie, but the first half is incredibly repellent to me and I cringe whenever I hear its fake and artificial "moving" melody and "heartrending" vocal delivery. Last of all is perhaps the band's greatest single song, a sprawling epic that brings together yet another simple and hypnotic synth line over some of Pete's most biting rhythm work ever as Roger screams out the broken promises inherent in so many revolutions and political upheavals. You can't avoid human nature, and sadly Won't Get Fooled Again will always be relevant until the last "people's revolutionary movement of whatever" puts down its AK-47s and commits itself to positive change. In the meantime, this song seems to sum up the album's new direction better than almost any other song except for Baba O'Riley, but I find the grittier and more powerful instrumental bits in this song the tiniest bit more compelling than the flashiness of the other one. Pete emerged from this album worn and tired, but he gamely summoned up all his creative energies for another shot at writing The Album. |
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| A+ | 1973 | Quadrophenia |
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No chances were taken with Quadrophenia. To prevent the album from being sliced into pieces like Who's Next, Pete put in a supporting narrative. To prevent sillier subjects like pinball from showing up, Pete set the story in the comfortable and familiar environment of early 1960s Britain. And to make sure that the band was fully on-board for this latest round of experimentation, Pete not only gave every band member their own musical tip of the hat in the album, he made it about them and about everything in the band's history up to that point. Quadrophenia showcases all the sides of the band, from their incredible instrumental skills to their singing (even in Keith's case), by going back to their roots without needlessly wallowing in it. It's yet another concept album, but instead of the clumsy story and questionable plot of Tommy, you now have a complex and multifaceted portrayal of a mod in London who falls in love with a girl who breaks his heart, runs around with a bunch of kids who don't respect him, tries desperately to fit in, and eventually cracks under the stress and goes crazy, only to realize at the end that he doesn't need any of it, all he needs to do is embrace love. The actual details of the dense, non-linear plot are incidental; the listener doesn't need to know everything about mod lingo, GS scooters, and "blues" (speed pills) in order to appreciate the point. The story of teenage insecurity and eventual maturity actually benefits, in a way, from the fractured narrative that leaps from subject to subject, drawing more attention to each song. Quadrophenia is more than a mindless recital of what it was like to be a young mod, it's a call to grow up. And then even after that, it's a message to the rest of the band that Pete was going to keep making music the way he wanted it - him and no one else. He wrote, arranged, and produced every note on the album, and it is a testament to his skills as a musician that, aside from the atmospheric opener I Am the Sea, nearly every minute thereafter is packed with some of the best songs he'd written to date. Strong melodies, diverse instrumentation and style, complex multi-part songs, and thundering performances from everyone. Quadrophenia is also the story of The Who, because they were a band that catered to these exact people. The band that the protagonist followed "back in '63" was The Who, as the faint snatch of The Kids Are Alright, the refrain of "My, my, my, my, my / G-g-g-g-g-ge-ner-a-tion" in The Punk and the Godfather, the lyrics to Zoot Suit ("I wear a zoot suit jacket / side vents five inches long"), and I'm the Face ("I'm the Face if you want it") show. Since he wrote every single note of this album, this is clearly Pete's way of getting rid of the past, by exhorting their fans to essentially grow up; this is Serious Business. In addition to these aspects, there's another one: this is an album about the band itself. Each members gets his own little theme, from the worried repetitive pain of Helpless Dancer (Roger's theme) to the sad despair barely hidden by the endearingly awful singing in Bell Boy (Keith's theme) to the fleeting and nearly invisible grace of the "Is it me / For a moment?" bits scattered in songs like Doctor Jimmy (John's theme) to the almost impossibly majestic descending guitar riff of Love Reign O'er Me (Pete's theme) at the end of the album. Each of Jimmy's four personalities gets a theme and play a role in his inner struggle as he fights to find himself. This aspect I find somewhat poorly represented, since not only is it somewhat unecessary to the story but John does not even get his own song, but it is still interesting nonetheless. The music is first-rate. Structurally it's fairly similar to Tommy, with Quadrophenia and The Rock replacing Overture and an Underture in form and content, though The Rock adds a brilliant twist when it takes the character themes and repeats them in a manner just like Quadrophenia, but instead of merely presenting them, it is reviewing them in order to make clear Jimmy's revelation. The four themes play in the same order and then a new, fifth theme is presented with the piano of Pete's theme, the chord sequence of Keith's theme, the synths of Roger's theme, and the guitar of John's theme. See, Quadrophenia has themes just like Tommy and uses them much in the same way, though with much more complexity. The beginning of 5:15 sounds a lot like Cut My Hair, etc. Songs like I've Had Enough |
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| A- | 1974 | Odds & Sods |
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In a way, the fact that I like Odds & Sods so much pisses me off. Plenty of these songs are absolutely incredible - so why weren't they on regular albums so that people could hear them? The Who have always suffered from their nightmarishly complicated discography, and while it's fantastic that so many of their top-tier songs could be aggregated neatly in one place, just think what these songs would be like if they were on the albums they were SUPPOSED to be on in the first place! Or even any album at all, come to think of it - wouldn't Faith In Something Bigger have been interesting on Tommy? Little Billy would have been a great Sell Out track, and the version of Love Ain't For Keeping here is much stronger than the Who's Next cut, to say nothing of songs like Time Is Passing, Pure and Easy, Too Much of Anything, and Water. Now I'm a Farmer steals all over the place from Tommy, but so does the start of Little Billy. |
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| A- | 1975 | By Numbers |
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The gargantuan complexity of Quadrophenia clearly broke Pete in two as far as innovation and progression was concerned. What happened to all those brilliant layers of meaning and music sprawling across 80 minutes? They got replaced by a "normal" album of... good songs. Actually, some of them are great songs, but this is one of the most dramatic drop-offs in ambition I've ever heard. If you wanted to call this album a whine-fest, I really couldn't argue with you. Save for the Lifehouse reject (though I don't get exactly how it's related) Slip Kid and the almost unforgivable redneck stupidity of Squeeze Box, every single other track on here is so downbeat it might as well be on a Roger Waters solo album, if Roger Waters were an alcoholic. Life sucks! No one likes me and I just keep rewriting the same old songs! I can't stop drinking, and being a rock star is tiring and emotionally unrewarding! I am a faker and I'm mindlessly obsessed with sex! What saves this album from being 40 minutes of Behind Blues Eyes-level self-pity is not only that I feel the lyrics are more cleverly written and more truly heartfelt and universal, but the music itself is more interesting and rewarding. Think of it like a burnt-out Pet Sounds AFTER the drug abuse had stolen most of the artist's truly creative abilities and not before. I won't claim that there are any songs on here that rise to the level of creativity that was on Quadrophenia because frequently the songs feel stuck in the same groove in the same chord on the same subject for slightly too long. Pretty soon, though, you're reminded that even on the downslide, these guys are still determined to make good rock music and their musical skills certainly haven't declined. Little bits of harmony vocals, nice piano work, and strong performances all around are what help save this album from feeling as creatively spent as their later ones. You're not going to find many prefab anthemic stadium arena-rockers on this album aside from the dammable Squeeze Box, just a lot of songs that sometimes deservedly, sometimes undeservedly fit the "overlooked" label. Like I said, these guys are still at the top of their game as far as instrumental prowess. Pete can still write beautiful guitar solos, whether he's aiming for "gritty yet conflicted" like in Slip Kid or "sad and tearful" like at the beginning of Dreaming From the Waist. He even picks up the ukelele on Blue, Red, and Gray, which is my favorite song on the album because of the moving and humble instrumentation and the plaintive lyrics. It's a great anti-suicide statement. John's bass solos are stille amazing - Dreaming From the Waist is second only to Drowned in my book as his finest moment on record, even if Success Story falls into that predictable metallic groove all of his songs seemed to have. Keith's explosive drumming on songs like How Many Friends or However Much I booze is certainly not weak by stretch of the imagination, it's just less symphonic since these are all "normal" rock songs. Roger's still got that ability to shift between the tenderness of Imagine a Man and the power of They Are All In Love, which has some gorgeous harmonizing. What doesn't satisfy most people, I think, is that while all of the ELEMENTS of a great album are here, it doesn't feel like they add up to a classic. I mean, as far as singles go, Squeeze Box certainly isn't Baba O'Riley, and most of these songs have a quieter, calmer feeling to them. There's a lot of negativity, a lot of samey-sounding songs, and an almost palpable sense of a band on the decline. I mean, love it or hate it, Quadrophenia was a band trying its heart out to impress, amaze, and dazzle, while By Numbers is a step down in every way. It's the product of a still-strong band that can SEE itself slowly slipping below the high water mark and worse, resigned to the fact. I give it such a high grade because Pete still knows how to write some lyrics - if you don't come out of However Much I Booze a little depressed you weren't listening closely - and some great ALMOST-perfect tunes, but he's past his prime and knows it. What sets this album apart from the following three albums is that its confessional honesty is backed up with delicate, personal arragements which sound tired without sounding TIRED, if you know what I mean. It's not revolutionary, but you still haven't heard all of these songs done better somewhere else. From here on out it's all downhill. |
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| B | 1978 | Who Are You |
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It's a real shame when a band runs out of ideas to the extent that they even mention it in their lyrics. Pete already sort of did that on By Numbers, but the very first track announces to the world the depths to which he has fallen, and John is happy to tag along. Of course, the album is not atrocious by any means, but it's a sad step down in quality for the most part. There's not even a drum track for some of these songs, since Keith's descent into alcoholism was seriously taking its toll on his drumming abilities. There are 3 songs which I would consider to be at least pretty good: New Song, Music Must Change, and Who Are You. New Song is painfully honest |
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| D+ | 1981 | Face Dances |
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I'll put this simply: you don't need this album. There is nothing creative or interesting on the whole album, because Pete stopped writing songs that allowed the band to say or do anything meaningful. While the loss of Keith Moon was undoubtedly a near-fatal blow, adding a new drummer did not help the band at all, because Pete failed to realize that the problem wasn't their lack of a drummer, it was their lack of a songwriter who had any new ideas. Kenny Jones is really not that bad; check out some bootlegs from the tours they did after Keith died (let's not go near Who's Last just yet, OK?) and you'll see that he was actually a strong and steady presence. His work on songs like Daily Records certainly isn't any worse than Keith's drumming on half of Who Are You. Besides, even if Keith had kept on ticking, these songs are so comatose that he could hardly have livened them up significantly. While Face Dances doesn't have quite the dramatic ups and downs of Who Are You, it also lacks a clear-cut winner like the latter's title track. The closest thing to a "classic" on here is the poppy and catchy yet somewhat tired and stupid You Better You Bet, which is as good an indication as any of how low the band had fallen if that was supposed to be the smash hit. I know that everyone loves this song, but I think its lyrics ("You welcomed me with open arms and open legs!") are a joke and the synths are too cheesy. I think it clearly represents Pete's growing boredom (or growing inability) with the guitar; where Who Are You had that great, classic snarling guitar part, this has nearly inaudible vamps going on in the background which could have been done by anyone. It sounds more like his solo stuff (think A Little Is Enough or Let My Love Open the Door) than anything the band had traditionally done, so I guess he was just getting bored with rock and roll in general. It's generally held that Pete reserved his better material for his solo career, where he didn't have to worry about writing more and more of the same style of song, and that seems logical to me. So see Face Dances as the dregs of Pete: bad lyrics, cheesy synths, and a decreased emphasis on guitars (except for John's songs) haunt this album like the ghost of Keith Moon. I think it's the lyrics which reveal the most. Remember how depressing By Numbers was? Most of the less head-scratching lyrics are kind of like that, but what was tolerable in 1975 just sound rote and trite now. Pete had always had a somewhat curious sense of humor as far back as Mary-Anne with the Shaky Hands, but never before had he written such astonishingly stupid songs as Cache Cache, a song about going to the zoo of all things, but sadly there aren't any bears ("Not a single bear in there!"). It's unforgivably retarded, but the synth line right before the chorus somehow EXACTLY reminds me of a adorably confused bear not unlike Winnie the Pooh, I swear to God it does. Don't Let Go the Coat is a Meher Baba-inspired plea for love ruined by Roger's delivery. Did You Steal My Money has a "vocal loop" of the title repeated endlessly and annoyingly instead of a synth loop, which puts it in with the crowded field competing for "dumbest song on the album". How Can You Do It Alone just sounds confused - the bombastic synth and guitar opener, the bouncy verse, and the roared chorus try to add up to something that never happens, completely undermining the lyrics. All of them boldly move forward in no particular direction, exploring the sights and sounds of an unfailing midtempo with boring or baffling lyrics, rudimentary melodies, and dreary synths. Somehow John's mildly exciting formulaic rockers (The Quiet One and You) end up being sounding refreshing in comparison with the remainder. I don't know what else to say: his album is certainly rock and roll by all technical standards, but it's disappointing even by the questionable standards of Who Are You. I somewhat like Another Tricky Day, which has a nice rhythm, a friendly sound, and a decent chorus despite being as relentlessly negative as every other song on here. It's still no great shakes, though. This record is not actually offensive at any point but I really don't think anyone needs this album for any reason. If you have sworn a solemn oath to collect every Who single ever, You Better You Bet is on thousands of Greatest Hits compilations; look for it on one of those. |
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| C- | 1982 | It's Hard |
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I can explain everything I don't like about It's Hard as a whole in terms of what I do like about Eminence Front, the only song off this album that Pete wisely decided to keep around in the setlist into the 21st century. Its backing synth loop is very reminiscent of Baba O'Riley's, true, but it has a bright, glittering tone to it that its predecessor lacked. The drumming is not very original, but it has such a metronomic strength that it gives the song more gravity, instead of dead weight. There's a strong and sorrowful guitar lead that conveys all of the anguish and frustration of the lyrics, which are of the cryptic Naked Eye school but make clear, poetic sense with Pete's bitter, depressed delivery. It's their last great song, and even if it isn't as good as Who Are You, it's a damn sight better than You Better You Bet because it absolutely embodies the alienated anger Pete was going for. None of the other songs really do very much, though, and it is almost impossible for me to remember how most of them go once they're finished playing. A lot of them aren't "rock" in any clear sense, and unlike Pete's previous |
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| D- | 1984 | Who's Last |
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I can explain everything I don't like about It's Hard as a whole in terms of what I do like about Eminence Front, the only song off this album that Pete wisely decided to keep around in the setlist into the 21st century. Its backing synth loop is very reminiscent of Baba O'Riley's, true, but it has a bright, glittering tone to it that its predecessor lacked. The drumming is not very original, but it has such a metronomic strength that it gives the song more gravity, instead of dead weight. There's a strong and sorrowful guitar lead that conveys all of the anguish and frustration of the lyrics, which are of the cryptic Naked Eye school but make clear, poetic sense with Pete's bitter, depressed delivery. It's their last great song, and even if it isn't as good as Who Are You, it's a damn sight better than You Better You Bet because it absolutely embodies the alienated anger Pete was going for. None of the other songs really do very much, though, and it is almost impossible for me to remember how most of them go once they're finished playing. A lot of them aren't "rock" in any clear sense, and unlike Pete's previous |
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| C- | 1989 | Join Together |
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I can explain everything I don't like about It's Hard as a whole in terms of what I do like about Eminence Front, the only song off this album that Pete wisely decided to keep around in the setlist into the 21st century. Its backing synth loop is very reminiscent of Baba O'Riley's, true, but it has a bright, glittering tone to it that its predecessor lacked. The drumming is not very original, but it has such a metronomic strength that it gives the song more gravity, instead of dead weight. There's a strong and sorrowful guitar lead that conveys all of the anguish and frustration of the lyrics, which are of the cryptic Naked Eye school but make clear, poetic sense with Pete's bitter, depressed delivery. It's their last great song, and even if it isn't as good as Who Are You, it's a damn sight better than You Better You Bet because it absolutely embodies the alienated anger Pete was going for. None of the other songs really do very much, though, and it is almost impossible for me to remember how most of them go once they're finished playing. A lot of them aren't "rock" in any clear sense, and unlike Pete's previous |
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| A+ | 2000 | Lifehouse Chronicles |
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Don't pay a whole lot of attention to that tracklist on the right: the definitive list of songs that were or were not supposed to be part of Lifehouse exists only in Pete Townshend's head. Scattered over countless studio albums, live albums, rarities collections, and solo material, Lifehouse is one of those Smile-like albums that had everything going for it at the time and yet just couldn't get finished. Much like Brian Wilson, Pete carried this album around with him for decades until releasing the Lifehouse Chronicles box set and Live: Sadler's Wells 2000 almost 30 years after it was supposed to make Tommy look like A Quick One. It was shelved because Pete just couldn't get all the songs together in a way that satisfied him, and the demands of his band to explain the concept just ratcheted up the pressure until the project was abandoned and nearly forgotten. While Who's Next certainly came off in far better shape than Smiley Smile, it too dumped the concept and a good number of the best songs. Lifehouse was supposed to be a science fiction album with some actual science fiction in it; a boundary-pushing epochal rock album that would establish The Who as THE leading musical visionaries of the day. In such a prog-heavy climate, such a grandiose aim required a truly lofty concept: it's some year in the future and Dark Dystopian Future Government rules the world with an iron fist, except for those few farmers who struggle for an existence out in the pollution and decay. Most people live a dreamlike existence in the cities wearing so-called Lifesuits, self-contained capsules distributing entertainment, thoughts, and dreams to the populace to make them forget an existence so meaningless that even rock music has been banned. But a rebel radio DJ out in the wasteland is holding a grand concert to overthrow the government based around a discovery: everyone's life pattern can be turned into music, which is a way of saying that everyone IS music. A farmer's daughter joins the throngs of people leaving the city to go to the concert, pursued by her worried parents at the same time as the government struggles to find and destroy the fortified concert venue known as the Lifehouse. As they finally burst into the arena, they witness the people dancing around to the strains of their own personal songs as interpreted by the DJ (modestly represented by The Who) so quickly and with such intensity that they become their songs through the power of music and achieve a higher plane of existence or something. Pete's failure to get anyone to understand what the hell was going on with Lifehouse caused him to make two decisions: the understandable one to scrap the project, and the unforgiveable one to place only half of the songs on Who's Next while condemning the rest to scattershot exile in The Who's singularly messy discography. I say unforgivable because this stretch of songwriting from 1970 to 1972 was the most brilliant period of songwriting Pete ever had. The plot of Lifehouse hardly shows up at all on Who's Next aside from some snatches in songs like Baba O'Riley or The Song Is Over so it's hard to get an idea of its scope, but the cool thing about it was that all that stuff about everyone having their own song was actually going to happen in concert. The band rented a venue in New York and invited a few people to start going to small but regular shows. The idea was that as they kept going to concerts, they would get their own little musical theme written for them by Pete, so that the setlist and music would reflect the audience, which was a neat way of expressing the near-mystical fascination he had with the band-audience interaction that let the band perform so well. Anticipating The Wall, there was to be a film as well, using concert footage and the songs to accompany and explain the action, which Pete eventually ended up doing in the form of a radio play for the BBC. Concept aside, the songs themselves are astonishing, and the first thing to notice about them is that unlike on Tommy, where fully-written material was surrounded by toss-offs, every single Lifehouse song is fully-written and complete. The second thing is that Pete's discovery of the synthesizer and its rhythmic possibilities mean that most songs have an incredibly catchy synth backing track for rhythm, freeing up the band to explore new ways of using their instruments.The third thing is that the diversity of styles is incredible. You can hear the difference most clearly in the night-and-day contrast between Baba O'Riley and Teenage Wasteland - the former is the comfortable old powerhouse rocker it's always been and the latter is a haunting piano ballad which gives the familiar fist-pumping lyrics a completely new and touching dimension. The lyrics are another new feature of the project, as Lifehouse completely drops the light-hearted humor of Tommy and concentrates instead on love songs. |
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| A- | 2004 | Live at the Royal Albert Hall |
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After the immense disappointment of Who's Last and Join Together, it was good to see the band putting its heart into a new live album. For a band which built its career on touring (and couldn't stop even though there wasn't a new studio album), the fact that their urge to show off |
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| Miscellaneous |
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Singles
This album isn't as redundant as it seems - this album was released in 1996 when Live at Leeds did not have the full performance of Tommy, plus it contains a few songs meant for Lifehouse which weren't written as of Live at Leeds. Also, it kicks ass in and of itself, so don't worry! Luckily the performances are just as strong as on its twin, and they are different enough to be interesting. I don't need to redescribe their live technique, so I won't, but I'd like to say that although the sound quality is slightly worse than the crystal clarity of Leeds, it only highlights the fact that they are somehow even MORE powerful tonight, if such a thing is powerful. Unreleased Tracks
Alternate Versions
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