Who's Next by The Who (1971), № 27 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. The synth on the first track was supposed to be a placeholder. They never replaced it. Glyn Johns engineering. Townshend's concept album about a future internet collapsed into the loudest singles record of the seventies.
Pete Townshend abandoned an ambitious multimedia project called Lifehouse and salvaged its best material into a 41-minute rock album. The Who's most-direct studio statement. Released August 14, 1971. Reached #1 in the UK; #4 in the US.
Pete Townshend's most-ambitious project, a multimedia rock opera called Lifehouse, collapsed in early 1971 after months of failed implementation. The Who salvaged the best songs into a 41-minute album. Released as a straightforward studio LP, it became the band's commercial peak.
Pete Townshend had spent 1970 obsessed with a project he called Lifehouse. The concept: a multimedia rock opera in which a band would perform in a giant concert hall while an audience of approximately 2,000 people would feed the band biographical data (jobs, addresses, romantic histories) through a primitive computer system, and the band would synthesize each audience member's life into a personal note within a collective musical performance. The performance would culminate in a 'lifehouse note', a single sound that each audience member would recognize as their own essence. Townshend believed this would produce 'an experience of total ego dissolution.' The project was abandoned in early 1971 after months of rehearsals at the Young Vic theatre in London produced no usable performance.
What survived was the music. Townshend had written approximately 20 songs for Lifehouse, of which 8 became Who's Next. Recording began at Olympic Studios in London in March 1971, with the band having toured the unfinished material for several months. Glyn Johns engineered and co-produced; the band, Townshend (guitar), Roger Daltrey (vocals), John Entwistle (bass), Keith Moon (drums), was at peak playing strength. The sessions were unusually disciplined; the band tracked the album in approximately six weeks.
The album's signature sonic feature is Townshend's use of synthesizers, primarily a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ and a recently-purchased ARP 2600, to generate the song-opening keyboard patterns that became one of the band's most-imitated sonic signatures. 'Baba O'Riley' opens with a Lowrey-generated arpeggio pattern that runs unchanged for the song's first 33 seconds before the band enters; 'Won't Get Fooled Again' has a similar ARP-generated background that the band performs over. The synthesizer-as-background-element technique was unusual for 1971 rock; it would become standard rock vocabulary across the next decade.
The album's nine songs are a survey of Townshend's range. 'Baba O'Riley' (named after the spiritual teachers Meher Baba and Terry Riley) opens with the Lowrey loop. 'Bargain' is the album's most-direct love song. 'Love Ain't for Keeping' is a 2-minute acoustic interlude. 'My Wife' is John Entwistle's one writing credit on the album. 'The Song Is Over' closes side one with one of Townshend's most emotionally direct vocals. 'Getting in Tune' opens side two with Nicky Hopkins's piano. 'Going Mobile' is the band's lightest moment on the album. 'Behind Blue Eyes' is the album's most-covered song, structured in a quiet-to-loud arc. 'Won't Get Fooled Again' closes the album with the famous Daltrey scream at 7:46 in.
Who's Next belongs at number twenty-seven because it is the album on which the Who, having abandoned a more-ambitious project, produced their most-sustained commercial-and-artistic peak. The album is unusual in The Who's catalog for being a straightforward studio LP rather than a concept album; Tommy and Quadrophenia bookend it. The synthesizer-loop-as-song-foundation approach has been imitated by every subsequent rock band that incorporated electronic elements. Without Who's Next there is no The Joshua Tree's 'Where the Streets Have No Name' opening; no Coldplay's 'Clocks' synth-piano bed; no Foo Fighters' 'These Days.' The road from rock-and-roll-as-band to rock-and-roll-as-band-plus-synthesizers runs through this record.
Original 1971 UK pressing, Track Record 2408 102 (the 2408 prefix is the Polydor-group series, reflecting Track's UK distribution through Polydor), on the matt black-and-silver Track label. It is a single picture sleeve with the distinctive pleated spine, housing Ethan Russell's photograph of the band by the concrete monolith, with sleeve design by John Kosh. First-press runouts typically read '2408 102 A//1 / B//2'. The US issue was on Decca (DL 79182); rather than the UK being automatically superior, many collectors in fact favour the early US Decca 'W1' pressing mastered by Doug Sax.
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