Review: 'The Who Album by Album: Listening to You'

A few decades ago, The Who easily floated in the same atmospheric level as The Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin. They seem to have spent the subsequent years drifting back to Earth despite the tremendous quality of Pete Townshend's songs and the utter power and uniqueness of his, John Entwistle's, and Keith Moon's musicianship. So it's nice that a fan such as Dante DiCarlo still cares enough to devote a book to the albums this top-tier band made.

Review: 'Their Generation: The Who in America 1967-1969'

In 1961, Pete Townshend was a sixteen-year-old kid who played in a band part time while attending Ealing Art College. It was there that he met his flat-mate Tom Wright, a visiting American with a taste for jazz and blues and pot. The pot got Tom kicked out of the UK in 1963, but the jazz and blues records he'd left behind blew little Pete's mind, influencing his still developing taste in music and guitar skills.

Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Pete Townshend's 'Iron Man: The Musical' and 'Psychoderelict (Music Only)'

After The Who broke up, Pete Townshend seemed to want to distance himself from his old band's roiling and raw hard rock as much as possible, so he issued a series of slick LP musicals that ranged from the personal to the surprisingly impersonal. First up was a project of the former stripe, as White City was largely inspired by Townshend's experiences working alongside his then-wife in a women's shelter, and though it revealed its 1985 origins with its synthesizers and glossy production, there was still some bite in tracks like "Give Blood" and "Secondhand Love". With its themes of anger, shame, and fame, White City was nearly as personal a record as either of Townshend's two more Who-like ones that preceded it.

Review: Vinyl Reissues of 3 John Entwistle Albums

Much like George Harrison, John Entwistle was an excellent and unique songwriter in a band with songwriters who rank among the top-five rock songwriters of all time. Sometimes you just can't win, but Harrison at least deserved the last laugh when The Beatles split and he released what is arguably the best Beatles solo album of all. 

Review: 'Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976'

There have been so many books about The Who that it only makes sense that, sixty years after the band's formation, a new entry in their library would be almost unbelievably specific. The very title of Edoardo Genzolini's Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976 announces its specificity. That is not a mistyped conjunction; this book does not track the years 1968 through 1976, when The Who were pretty much the greatest live band in the world. Genzolini's only covers two years in The Who's history, and not conspicuously auspicious ones either. 1968 was the first year The Who did not release an LP since their beginning, and the few singles they managed to squeak out in '68 are often dismissed as novelties made by an out-of-touch band desperate for fresh material (I'm not one of those dismissers though, largely because the zany "Dogs" is one of my faves). In 1976, they were touring their most troubled album, the virtual suicide-note The Who By Numbers, with rapidly deteriorating intraband relationships and a rapidly deteriorating drummer with just two years left in the world.

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Pete Townshend's 'Rough Mix' and 'Empty Glass'

Because he wrote the vast majority of The Who's songs, Pete Townshend seemed less likely to need a solo career than frustrated songwriter John Entwistle. So, naturally, the bass player was the first member of the band to release a proper solo album, but Townshend had frustrations of his own. Incorrigibly prolific and eclectic beyond The Who's patented bash and bluster, Townshend ended up with a massive backlog of material. Some of it squeaked out on records mostly passed out to followers of his preferred spiritual leader, Meher Baba, and a more widely distributed release called Who Came First that was credited to Townshend but also included songs by fellow followers Billy Nicholls and Face Ronnie Lane.

Review: 'Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child'

In the introduction to their new book, Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child, Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik point out that "virtually no one claimed to know Hendrix." This sort of absolves them from digging any deeper than the myriad existing books exploring the life of the guitar genius (at least 300, according to the curator of an exhaustive Hendrix website). However, their oral history approach makes one hope they might uncover something new, something personal, something that sheds at least a little new light on what made Jimi Hendrix so different, so innovative, so remarkable. Yet, even his own sister, Janie, doesn't provide any revelations. More often than not, the book's contributors react to Hendrix, like rubes recounting sightings of UFOs speeding over cornfields. He was shy. He was visually striking. He had trouble with audiences who wanted to put him in a box (more than once he is frustrated with dum-dums shrieking for "Purple Haze" while he has other things to express). He was brilliant. 

This isn't a knock against Voodoo Child, because anyone who has ever seen the special edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind knows how disappointing it is to go inside the UFO. Some mysteries are worth preserving, and if few got close to Hendrix, that fact ultimately may be the story to tell. And the Kuberniks do interview or quote people who personally knew Hendrix: producer Eddie Kramer, fellow black artist in a white scene Johnny Echols, bandmate Billy Cox, tour-mate Micky Dolenz, friend and rival Pete Townshend, and so on. Even Janie Hendrix says that she has been learning more about her own brother by curating his legacy as president of the Experience Hendrix company. Oddly, there are quotes from neither Mitch Mitchell nor Noel Redding, whom Moody Blue Justin Hayward speculates may be the only people who really knew Hendrix.

Voodoo Child is also a great-looking book, a small-scale yet photo-filled hardcover as resplendent in color as one of Hendrix's outfits or guitar solos. You may not learn anything from it, but you'll love looking at it.

Review: 'The Who: Much Too Much'

I still haven't worked out who wins the Great British Rock Sixties Sweepstakes. Is it The Beatles, Stones, Kinks, or Who? No matter. They all made sublime records. However, when it comes to visuals, the prize certainly goes to The Who, who tended to present themselves nattier than the Stones and more individually than The Beatles. With their pop art shirts and Union Jack jackets, and action-packed snaps of them trashing their gear on stage, I could gaze at pics of The Who all day. 

Its visual component is the main selling point of The Who: Much Too Much as long-time fans are not likely to learn much from Mike Evans's text. The selection of pictures is sharp. Many will be familiar, but the large, colorful layout of Much Too Much is particularly nice and shots of Pete hanging out with his parents while his mom wears a pop art jumper worthy of Keith Moon or Moon abusing his kit while wearing what looks like a tee proclaiming "Jesus Saves" are amusing and new to me. 

Evans also provides a basically fine nutshell history of The Who (with the occasional fumbled date, apocryphal detail presented as fact, misinterpreted lyric, or other little gaffe, such as attributing Entwistle's vocal on "Twist and Shout" from Who's Last to Daltrey) and has the distinction of being the only writer to date to tell The Who's story up through that album they released a couple of years ago. Nearly half the book is set in the period following Moon's death. 

Review: 'The Who Sell Out' Deluxe Double-LP

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!

Review: 'A Band with Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk'

The great irony of The Who’s career is that despite their utter musical uniqueness they were constantly on the look out for a gimmick to distinguish them from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and the rest of their Rock & Roll peers. Although no group had a songwriter as equally tender and perverse as Pete Townshend or such combative yet virtuosic instrumental interplay, The Who and their management were convinced that the only way they could rise above the throng was to refashion themselves as Mods… or end their act with a brutish yet intellectually rooted act of “auto-destruction” (i.e.: guitar smashing)… or maybe position themselves as the pop equivalent of an Andy Warhol silkscreen… or compose rock operas.

Review: 'The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who’s John Entwistle'

One of the many things that made The Who so unique is that each member of the band had such a distinct and iconic personality. Consequently, Pete the Genius, Roger the Tough Guy, and Keith the Madman have all been the topics of multiple biographies. As the Quiet One, John Entwistle had not. Had he been, the flimsiness of that oft-used label may be better known. Entwistle may have been a man of few words and the one member of The Who who refrained from leaping around on stage, but he was also the most enduring Rock & Roll animal in the group. He remained a restless, relentless partier, an incorrigible spender seemingly dedicated to materialism above all else, and a serial philanderer right up until his death in 2002.

Review: 'The Who Live at the Fillmore East 1968'

The Who were essentially an unknown quantity in America until they distinguished themselves in 1967 with stateside performances at Murray the K’s concert series on the East Coast and the Monterey Pop Festival on the West Coast. When word of their autodestructive act got out, The Who rapidly developed a reputation as the ultimate Rock & Roll circus act. To capitalize on that deserved status, the planned follow up to The Who Sell Out would be a devastating live album recorded at New York’s Fillmore East in April 1968.

Review: 'Night Comes Down: 60s British Mod, R&B, Freakbeat, & Swinging London Nuggets'

Despite a very specific origin in London’s jazzy coffee houses of the early sixties, Mod has gone through so many changes that it basically just means “British” at this point. That elasticity didn’t have to wait until Paul Weller and Phil Daniels reinvigorated the cult in the late seventies; it was already happening ten years time ago in the mid-sixties.

RPM Record’s new triple-disc box Night Comes Down: 60s British Mod, R&B, Freakbeat, & Swinging London Nuggets draws all incarnations of homegrown Mod music in a manner that implies a sort of sound progression by playing with chronology.  Had these 87 tracks been arranged chronologically, they would have sounded like a senseless jumble of cool jazz and R&B, bulls-eye power pop, underground-scene psychedelia, and sprinklings of other styles, such as the more mainstream pop of Twinkle’s “What Am I Doing Here with You” and the eccentric genre-shuffling of the two instrumentals from the soundtrack of the Marianne Faithful vehicle (tee-hee) Girl on a Motorcycle. Instead, the songs are more-or-less arranged according to style, so the set strolls from the kind of hard R&B (Lita Roza’s “Mama”), Booker T.-style work outs (The Mike Cotton Sound’s throbbing “Like That”), and jazzy slow-drips (Laurel Aitken’s “Baby Don’t Do It”) the original Mods dug to the red-with-purple-flowers detonations championed by The Who and The Birds to the U.F.O Club sounds that really have nothing to do with the movement except for maybe giving ex-Mods a spot to drop acid now that they were done popping purple hearts.

Needless to say, the real theme here is “smashing music,” so who cares what’s “real Mod” and what isn’t. That distinction sure doesn’t matter when tracks such as The Moody Blues’ soulful “And My Baby’s Gone” is rubbing elbows with The Attraction’s amp-slashing “She’s a Girl”, Fat Mattress’ trippy “I Don’t Mind”, and Twiggy’s magnificent “When I Think of You”, which somehow draws those three disparate styles together without sounding like some sort of hack-and-glue job. There are other familiar names too, such as Arthur Brown, Spencer Davis Group (post-Stevie Winwood), John’s Children, Chad & Jeremy, Alexis Korner, Mark Wirtz, and Mike D’Abo (as well as tracks featuring such future stars as Jimmy Page and Lemmy, who gets in on the thievery of a “Kids Are Alright” rip so blatant that the track is credited to Townshend), but none of the artists are represented by their best-known numbers, so there’s a lot to discover on Night Comes Down.

Review: '1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love'

The intriguing progress Rock & Roll started displaying as soon as The Beatles busted out in 1964 hit an ecstatic, elastic, multi-colored peak three years later. Any existing rules were incinerated as the pop song busted well beyond its two-minute structure, guitars were regularly muscled aside to make room for Mellotrons and sitars, and love songs were often sidelined for tunes based on Joyce’s impenetrable Ulysses or ditties about gnomes named Grimble Crumble. The LP officially displaced the single; stereo started doing the same to mono, making way for the ritual of consuming high-concept albums through headphones…possibly while under various influences; and bland band portraits plastered onto jackets no longer sufficed. In other words, Rock & Roll became art with a vengeance in 1967.

Harvey Kubernik pays tribute to the auditory and visual arts of ’67’s revolutionary music in his new book 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. That title is actually misleading unless one regards 1967 as twelve months of summer—and the Californians Kubernik favors probably did. The book is actually a month-by-month chronicle from January through December, dropping details about the year’s major music releases, festivals, innovations, main characters, and attitudes in stand-alone chunks. The book is also something of an oral history, as Kubernik’s own observations are more than supplemented with old and new commentary from the likes of Andrew Loog Oldham, Mary Wilson, George Harrison, Barry Miles, Michelle Phillips, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Roger McGuinn, Ravi Shankar, Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, Ram Das, Ray Manzarek, and many others. There is little effort to link the multitudinous topics, but that’s to be expected when dealing with a year that was probably a puzzling jumble of disconnected ideas and events for a lot of its participants. You know what they say about people who remember the sixties.

A coffee table book at heart, 1967 supplies a vibrant lot of images from pop’s most imagistic year, though some of the year’s phantasmagorically rendered album covers would have made for an even more kaleidoscopic visual experience. Kubernik should still be commended for covering the vinyl within the sleeves as thoroughly as he does—referencing the obvious (Sgt. Pepper’s dominates the June topic along with the Monterey Pop Festival) and the more regularly overlooked (The Hollies’ Butterfly, Donovan’s A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, Captain Beefheart’s Safe As Milk, the Stones’ Between the Buttons, etc.) in kind. The one inexplicable oversight is his failure to even mention The Who Sell Out, my personal pick for the finest album of pop’s finest year. Maybe Kubernik has a hole in his memory where that album belongs because he had a little too much fun in ’67.

Review: The Who 'My Generation' Super Deluxe Edition

The nineties saw a well-intentioned but essentially misguided attempt to snazz-up The Who’s back catalogue with radical remixes that regularly sacrificed key instruments or even replaced them with alternate or newly recorded parts. Jon Astley told me he remixed these classics just to give the fans something a bit different and interesting, which is fine, but the novelty of such things wears off quickly, and the definitive original mixes were allowed to go out of print for years. Many of them are still out of print in the U.S. and UK.

That reissue campaign that began over twenty years ago basically wrapped up in 2002 with the very first stereo mix of The Who’s raging debut, My Generation. As was the case with the other remixes, the novelty was ample, but it wore off real quickly as we lamented the loss of ferocious guitar tracks in “My Generation” and “A Legal Matter” and came to the realization that this noise-fest demanded the unified power of mono to knock our knee caps off the way it was meant to.

The original mono mix soon became available in Japan, a big audiophile market, but it has taken fourteen years for My Generation to return to its proper mono origins on physical media in the west. It arrives in another in The Who’s series of big Super Deluxe box sets that also saw reissues of Live at Leeds, Tommy, and Quadrophenia (of which, only Tommy was included in its original mix).

The latest remaster is very comparable to the Astley’s excellent one released in Japan in 2008, so if you’ve never heard My Generation as it must be heard, this Super Deluxe is a fine place to start.

A recent stereo remix put out on iTunes a couple of years ago is distinctly wider than the 2002 stereo remix, which tended to center everything except for one guitar track shoved off to the left channel. That means it takes advantage of stereo better, but is even less powerful than the 2002 version. One very interesting development of these 2014 mixes is the reinsertion of those missing parts from “My Generation” and “A Legal Matter” with newly recorded guitar from Townshend, who used vintage, authentic equipment. They don’t sound exactly the same as the ’65 originals, but they do sound a hell of a lot better than those hollow 2002 versions. There are also some neat new vocal touches on “My Generation”.

The rest of the set is filled out with lots of alternate versions, alternate mixes, singles and period outtakes such as “Lubie (Come Back Home)”, “Instant Party Mixture”, and the definitive Who version of “Heat Wave”. Some of these are superior to the 2002 mixes too, as Entwistle’s French horn returns to the stereo “Circles” and the tambourine clatters once again on the stereo “I Can’t Explain”. 

However, the real gem of these extras is Disc Five, which gathers together eleven Townshend demos from his initial writing days. One of these had been released on Townshend’s Scoop comp and a few have made the bootleg circuit, but they never sounded this good (and it's interesting to note how central a role “Mary Ann with the Shaky Hand”-style Latin percussion plays on these recordings). A demo of “Sunrise”, which would not get the official Who treatment until 1967, has more of a languid Antonio Carlos Jobim feel than the flushed version that ended up on The Who Sell Out.

The big surprise is several previously unheard Townshend songs that make their debut here. There’s a bluesy rocker called “The Girls I Could’ve Had”, which may spark conspiracy theories that Elvis Costello somehow got his hands on this rarity before he wrote “Tokyo Storm Warning”. There are also a couple of tracks that were probably among those that made Roger Daltrey conclude that Townshend’s early songs were too sweet for him: the Quick One-like “As Children We Grew” and the unusually romantic “My Own Love”.

The big question whenever one of these massive boxes comes out is: “Is it worth it?” There is certainly a degree of excess here. The music on these five discs could have fit on three. The set comes with an 80-page book, replica posters, flyers, and cards, none of which were included in the review package I received, so I can’t comment on them. The bottom line is if you dig fancy packaging, a fine remaster of the mono album, a better crop of alternate mixes and version than were included on the 2002 edition, and some terrific demos— and you’ve got the money to burn— you’ll likely be happy.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 351

The Date: September 15

The Movie: The Kids Are Alright (1979)

What Is It?: This isn’t a “let’s sit back and reflect nicely on what a nice band the nice, old Who were” documentary.” This is complete anarchy. There are no gestures toward chronology, or telling the story of the band properly, or finding out what The Who’s colleagues thought of them (aside from a barely coherent rant from Tommy filmmaker Ken Russell). This is a movie in which Keith Moon conducts an interview while wearing a leather mask and getting whipped by a dominatrix. This is a movie in which John Entwistle goes skeet shooting with his collection of gold records (which he later joked were Roger Daltrey’s solo albums). This is a movie in which a really, really drunk Pete Townshend regales his drummer with a side-splitting story about how his doctor warned him that he’s going deaf. This is The Kids Are Alright. Put it on your television. Then throw your television out the window.

Why Today?: On this day in 1967, The Who appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which would be used as the first sequence in The Kids Are Alright a dozen years later.

Review: 'Pete Townshend’s Deep End: Face the Face'

It was a thrill when The Who reunited in 1989 for their first tour in seven years, particularly since I had just discovered them, but the decision to present their raw Rock & Roll with a veritable orchestra including multiple horn players, keyboardists, singers, and percussionists made the experience a bit less thrilling than it could have been. The format was put to better use four years earlier when Pete Townshend christened that big band Deep End for solo shows to promote White City.  Townshend’s most processed album to date ended up sounding more organic with the group, which deemphasized the use of synthesizers (the wrenching and majestic “The Sea Refuses No River” and the fierce “Rough Boys” are two unfortunate exceptions that received inappropriate synthesizer embellishments). The horn section could still overwhelm certain songs, such as the insistent “Give Blood” and the emotionally naked “Slit Skirts”, but the arrangements generally worked very well. Most important of all, Townshend seemed revitalized after his old band had gone out with a whimper rather than a bang. He certainly did a lot of dancing during this Deep End gig.

Pete Townshend wrapped up the Deep End experiment with an 85-minute appearance on German’s Rockpalast concert series in January 1986. Eagle Rock Entertainment is now releasing that show as a DVD/CD combo. One of the big treats of this set is seeing Townshend play with guest guitarist Dave Gilmour, who seems equally footloose to be performing apart from his own troubled band. He even breaks out into a little dance when Simon Phillips’s double bass drums start thundering on “Give Blood”. Gilmour is also responsible for one of the draggier numbers in the show, his own “Blue Light”, a recycling of Little Richard’s “Lucille” with a dopey lyric and a percussion solo that threatens to never end. For the most part Pete Townshend’s Deep End: Face the Face is a neat time capsule of Townshend in the mid-eighties shortly before he surrendered himself over to The Who again for good.

Video is typical of the era looking a bit like a first-generation VHS tape, but audio is totally solid. The CD includes the entire video set with the exception of “I Put a Spell on You”, which is no great loss since this Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (by way of Nina Simone) cover doesn’t work that well.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 232

The Date: May 19

The Movie: White City (1987)

What Is It?: Pete Townshend and Richard Lowenstein bring Townshend’s “novel” White City to life as a series of music videos set around a West London housing estate. The tale of a Rock Star returning to his meager hometown links the videos. Townshend gets to act!

Why Today?: On this day in 1945, Pete Townshend is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 154

The Date: March 2

The Movie: All My Loving (1968)

What Is It?: One of the first documentaries to take Rock & Roll seriously. Perhaps too seriously. Along with some annoying sound effects, there’s great footage of Cream, Pink Floyd, Eric Burdon, Donovan, Hendrix, Zappa, various Beatles, and those classic pontificators Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend.

Why Today?: Today is 3/2, and “All My Loving” is track #3 on Beatles’ album #2.