The Who were constantly on the look-out for a gimmick, and when Pete Townshend feared his latest batch of songs weren’t fierce enough and lacked a sense of overall purpose, managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp suggested he unify them with a pseudo-pirate radio concept full of zany adverts and wacky station identification spots. Thus, The Who Sell Out was born. With its completely unselfconscious humor, sensitive performances, sumptuous harmonies, and songs that may have lacked ferocity (well, not “I Can See for Miles”) but wanted nothing for beauty and harmonic complexity. The album’s light-touch, colorful cartoonishness, and lack of pretension (well, not the operatic “Rael”) have made it the favorite of a lot of Who fans, including myself. The Who Sell Out certainly hasn’t been played to death as Tommy and Who’s Next have been, so it still feels fresh in a way that so many Who war horses no longer do. So if you were to, say, sit down for several hours to pore over a 5-CD box set devoted to Sell Out before digging into a 2-LP Sell Out vinyl set, you probably wouldn’t even get sick of it!
That is indeed something you can now do as Universal Music has released The Who Sell Out in several new deluxe iterations. Naturally, that big CD-set provides the deepest plunge into The Who’s most appealing project with its stereo and mono presentations of the original albums, demos, session highlights, period-adjacent singles, and outtakes. For vinyl enthusiasts such as myself, the stereo double-LP vinyl set basically gets the job done. Yes, it would have been cooler if more of the ultra-rare material was on board, such as newly unearthed oddities like Townshend’s demos “Kids! Do You Want Kids, Kids?” and the blatant Beach Boys tribute “Inside Outside” and the atypically jazzy backing track for John Entwistle’s “Facts of Life”. I’d wish even harder for a vinyl iteration of the big box’s fourth disc dubbed “The Road to Tommy”, which compiles tracks recorded between The Who’s third and fourth albums, such as the terrific single “Dogs” and the fab odds and sods “Melancholia”, “Little Billy”, “Faith in Something Bigger”, and “Glow Girl”. All of that stuff has been released before, but it would be neat to gather it together on vinyl in an approximation of what Lambert considered releasing as Who’s For Tennis? in 1968. I would be surprised (and disappointed) if that disc didn’t see vinyl release as a Record Store Day exclusive in a year or two.
As for what we have on the stereo vinyl (there’s a limited edition mono one too), there’s a fabulous album in its fabulous original stereo mix remastered with fuller bodied sound (or “DYNAMIC TENSION,” if you prefer) than the 1967 release. Yes, “Rael” still features that awkward edit in the first verse corrected on many remixed reissues, and yes, you will hear “Track Records, Track Records” repeat endlessly if you forget to pull the needle from the run-out groove. The bonus LP contains the most significant stereo-detritus from the Sell Out sessions, which means it features the first official appearances of outtakes such as “Early Morning Cold Taxi”, “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, “Girl’s Eyes” (all in their 1970 mixes), “Jaguar”, “Sodding About”, and the studio version of “Summertime Blues” on vinyl. It would have been groovy if the radio concept had been carried over for these bonus tracks as it had been on previous CD editions of the album, but the tracks on this LP are all banded without any surprise jingles to bridge them. Nevertheless, it’s great to finally have great sounding versions of these songs on vinyl, and the package is very nicely assembled with liner notes on the inner sleeves and a repro of Adrian George’s psychedelic poster included as limited edition bonus in the original UK vinyl release.
