The Who : Classic or Dud

I was talking to someone about this shift in recent years, where early Who and early Stones have sort of been steamrolled into relative obscurity compared to the '70s stuff. Like, when people generally think of the Who, I think they're thinking the arena rock sound of "Who's Next." When people think of the Stones, they're thinking of, like, "Brown Sugar," that sort of similar arena, Keith in open G riffing thing. The Beatles might have escaped this, but I'm trying to think of the last time I heard anything from their early records in the wild.

Personally, I'm good with "Live at Leeds" and "Quadrophenia."

It's more pronounced with the Who than the Stones, I feel like, because a lot of '60s Stones is still very much part of their agreed-on canon — "Satisfaction," "Jumping Jack Flash," "Paint It Black," "Sympathy for the Devil." Where with the Who, I feel like you'll very rarely hear anything pre-Tommy except maybe "My Generation." My issue with Who's Next and what comes after is I feel like they largely lost their sense of humor and absurdity, which was a defining element up until then.

(also I said "I feel like" 3 times there, so ... I guess that's just how I feel.)

Hmm, you're probably right about the Stones, though I do think that what people generally think of as a Stones "sound" is the later stuff.

For sure the Beggars-Let It Bleed-Sticky Fingers-Exile years are peak/ur Stones. I just don't think there's as sharp a cut-off for the earlier stuff.

I was talking to someone about this shift in recent years, where early Who and early Stones have sort of been steamrolled into relative obscurity compared to the '70s stuff. Like, when people generally think of the Who, I think they're thinking the arena rock sound of "Who's Next." When people think of the Stones, they're thinking of, like, "Brown Sugar," that sort of similar arena, Keith in open G riffing thing. The Beatles might have escaped this, but I'm trying to think of the last time I heard anything from their early records in the wild.

Personally, I'm good with "Live at Leeds" and "Quadrophenia."

That sounds like a US phenomenon.

You've got all that Classc Rock nonsense to put up with.

For sure. Classic rock radio in its current form pretty much ignores anything before 1970. (Even the early '70s are starting to get squeezed out, though things like Zep and Lynyrd Skynyrd will stay forever.)

Wait, so you don’t have that nonsense? And you hear the early Who singles played upon occasion?

I don't listen to the radio and I'm sure there are classic rock stations in the UK these days but it's not a something with any kind of history in the UK.

Generally speaking, then, how often do you hear those early Who songs without seeking them out?

I don’t want to get too sentimental like those others sticky Valentines whilst my immune system is fighting off the Rona, but I do often feel a sense of loss when I think about the way love the radio used to be when I could hear all the different decades of the rock era going back to the 50s with just a slight shift of the dial.

I don't know where I would hear the Who anyway tbh? The Who are very closely associated with the mod thing in the UK - I imagine that is not the case in the US! So, when I went to see them a couple of years ago, there was a sizable contingent of mod types, of various ages, in the audience.

In fact the only reason I was there was because my sister, who is a member of a (Mod) scooter club, was given the tickets by a guy who'd won them in a competition or something but she couldn't go.

It's worth remembering that, in the late 70s, the most popular band in the UK was the Jam, who were fairly obviously influenced by 60s Who and not at all influenced by the 70s Who, and that association has stuck.

Well I guess I can call myself an honorary U.K. Who fan, then. Because I also love both '60s Who and the Jam.

I thought for years I was sick of Who's Next--I played it to death in high school--but I gave it a listen a few years back and most of it still sounded great. ("Won't Get Fooled Again" is pretty much dead to me.) Live at Leeds I never liked, and with Quadrophenia, even though I think it's objectively great, I can't get past the horns or Daltrey's over-emoting.

Objectively I can acknowledge Who's Next is a solid record, but man, "Behind Blue Eyes" came on the radio the other week and I changed stations. That song seemed quasi-deep to me when I was 15, now it just seems like a lot of whinging.

I stopped listening to classic rock radio a long time ago. It wasn't really a conscious choice - I listened to the radio every day when I drove a car, but once I moved to the city, I stopped driving and had no reason to listen anymore (i.e. it was now an iPod on the subway or bus). But I remember when the Drive and other Chicago stations played the shit out of Who's Next, so I get how fans can grow sick of it if you wind up hearing it all the time in exclusion to any other Who music. I still love it, it's always been my favorite Who album, but I generally don't hear it unless I put it on. (I should add that I don't watch network TV anymore - commercials and TV shows used to license the shit out of Who's Next, and I'm sure that doesn't help matters either.)

I would steer any new listeners towards Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy before anything else though. It's still missing some essentials from the '60s - the Rock & Roll Circus performance of "A Quick One" that's on The Kids Are Alright, "So Sad About Us," some favorites from The Who Sell Out which is arguably their best album - but the Who distinguished themselves with hilariously weird and insane shit that took a back seat to pretentiousness after Tommy, and as much as I love Who's Next, I miss that aspect of their music.

Yep, exactly.

Thirded

Tommy’s pretentiousness is still to some degree laced or connected with that earlier weirdness. Either that or I give it a pass because it is the album I knew best first.

Also, don’t know if I should scratch this itch or not, but there is also the delicate question of whether The Ox started overplaying at some point.

You'll be accusing Keith Moon of overplaying next.

Ha, that’s different

as a teen in Australia in the late 80’s early 90s the only Who i ever heard was 60’s Who - substitute, my gen, i’m a boy, kids are alright, happy jack, all that stuff —- but there are was a lot of early Kinks in the mix too, all that mod/teddy stuff was kinda cool for some reason, mixed w sex pistols & british punk for reasons i am not sure of

i didnt really encounter late Who ~in the wild~ until i moved to the US, radio was always playing Who Are You or Eminence Front which seemed v weird to me, like why do they play THIS and none of the cool stuff

maybe the 60’s stuff just hit better in Australia bc of british invasion Easybeats & all that idk

Tommy is completely absurd, being about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who becomes a messiah via pinball. I can see how Who’s Next might be seen as lacking in humor, but then there’s “Goin’ Mobile” and “My Wife.” Quadrophenia has “Bell Boy,” but the inclusion of “We Close Tonight” and/or “Four Faces” would’ve taken a big chunk out of that record’s heaviness. By Numbers has “Squeeze Box” and “Success Story,” and while Who Are You is probably their most po-faced record, “Guitar And Pen” is certainly absurd (and doesn’t quite work), and “Who Are You” has some funny lines.

But there wasn’t going to be another “I’m A Boy” or “Dogs” after Tommy, it’s true. And “classic rock” radio has all but erased that side of them for US listeners. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” or Sell Out for friends who only know The Heavy Seventies Hits; the reaction is always, “That’s the Who?!”

I'm totally a '65-67 Who lover (extending to some songs from '68) these days, and have been for quite some time. But one thing that keeps Who's Next alive for me are the songs that aren't one of the overplayed three (and for some reason, I've never gotten tired of "Baba O'Riley"): "My Wife," "Going Mobile," and "Bargain" especially. I think the only song I've never cared for, not now and not back in high school, is "The Song Is Over."

In addition to The Jam there were also other explicit and implicit connections between the punk/New Wave and Mods/British Invasion.

xp 2 VG

The punkfox

i didnt really encounter late Who ~in the wild~ until i moved to the US, radio was always playing Who Are You or Eminence Front which seemed v weird to me, like why do they play THIS and none of the cool stuff

Yeah, “I Can See For Miles” you would hear quite often on US radio. Whereas for “My Generation” you really needed an edgier show or station.

A lot of the music on Tommy still sounds something like the earlier stuff. “Rael” and “Sparks” obviously, but even beyond that.

a guy in my year 10 art class had I WAS BORN WITH A PLASTIC SPOON IN MY MOUTH scrawled on his pencil case in white-out

the who were fkn cool as shit to us 90’s teens lol

i still love their 60’s stuff the best

I would suggest that the erasure of the '60s era Who in the US mostly happened after the mid '80s. Yes, US Decca famously mishandled the early Who records and they weren't the hits they should've been, but in the late '70s you could find those double album reissues of their pre-Tommy LPs in every record store; they'd been reissued in that form in '74 but were still in print into the early '80s. Also both Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy and Odds and Sods sold very well in the '70s and The Kids Are Alright soundtrack went platinum. I guess it was the increasingly exclusionary AOR/Classic Rock playlists plus the lack of mod tradition in the US that eventually buried that early material.

One thing is that, apart from “I Can See For Miles,” none of the early Who singles were big hits in the US. Some, like “Anyway,” didn’t chart here at all, and others, like “Dogs,” weren’t even released in the US at the time. That said, I do remember hearing some of the ‘65-‘68 songs regularly on the radio in the late ‘70s - mid ‘80s but haven’t heard them in the wild in at least 20 years.

I was going to mention the fact that they 9 Top 10 hits in the UK so they were a pretty successful pop group.

.., in the 60s that is.

Their US label, Decca, had no idea how to promote them (or any other rock band, for that matter) here. Their early singles got a lot of airplay in the industrial Midwest — Detroit embraced them immediately — but they didn’t make a national splash until they’d done a couple of coast-to-coast tours and appeared on the Smothers Brothers TV show. And even then, Sell Out’s chart peak in the US was #48.

The interesting thing is that — as Dave Marsh has pointed out — in the US in the ‘60s, the Who were seen as part of a nebulous “UK underground” scene, with Cream and Hendrix; but in the UK at the time, they were a pop singles band, and no threat to the Heaviness of Cream or Hendrix.

I count "Substitute"/"Circles" as the greatest two-sided single ever.

Nice interview by Kenney Jones on his time with the Who, which makes it a rarity. Some very sweet anecdotes:

From the last time he saw Keith Moon, who was a close friend:

Afterwards, we met each other in the lobby, and I said, “See you later, Keith. See you soon.” And he went, “Yeah, great, see you Kenney my friend, bye-bye.” That was it. In the morning, the news came on straight away on the television and reported he died of a drug overdose. I thought, What’s he up to now? He’s playing another bloody joke. He can’t be, because I’ve just been with him. Sure enough, it was true and I could not believe it. Absolutely could not believe it. It’s only when I joined the Who when I found out exactly what happened...He went home, took his nighttime pill (Heminevrin), which was prescribed to Moon by his doctor., and went to bed. He woke up a couple of hours later and thought it was morning, so he took another pill. If you take too many pills close together, it slows your heart down. That’s what happened. It’s terrible. It all happened so fast. I’ll never forget the next few days. Near my home was where he was cremated, and I wanted to get to the crematorium before anyone, no press or anything, so I went earlier in the morning with a little wreath and a note, and I said good-bye to him on my own.

His friendship with Roger Daltrey - even though Daltrey has criticized Jones's drumming, Jones was friends with all of them, long before he joined the Who:

I used to see Pete a lot. Roger, not that often because he was living in the countryside that was outside of London. I went to see him a few times there. He had a fantastic trout farm...Every time I visited he would go, “Get in the boat,” and we went out in a row boat and fed the fish. I remember one day we boated out to the middle of the water with food and a bunch of piranhas circled the boat. He just went, “Don’t fall over the edge, they’re going to bite your leg off.” How the hell did they get into the trout farm? [Laughs.]

On Zak Starkey:

I was already doing stuff with Paul Rodgers and various other bands. I’d made my break from the Who and that was that. We were moving on. I wasn’t surprised that Zak joined. I virtually taught him how to play the drums when he was a little kid. I was great friends with Ringo StarrOne of the most amusing rock facts (to this writer, anyway) is that Ringo, noted famous drummer for another band, is Zak’s father. and his wife, Maureen, even though they were separated when Zak was young. When I joined the Who, I got Keith’s white drum kit out of storage and gave it to Zak. He had told me as a little boy that Keith had always promised him that drum kit. So I put it in a van and surprised him after school with it one day. I did my bit for him. I like him. I think Zak’s done a wonderful job with the Who. It’s a great thing and I think it’s lovely. They needed a young drummer, someone fit.

Didn't realize this, but some of the pop-up footnotes in that interview actually got copied into the main body of the text.

Great drummer; I'd pick Ogden's Nut Gone Flake over any Who album except Quadrophenia.

Yes, he's a fantastic drummer.

Dunno how to link to it, but there’s a great new Townshend thing on Audible called Somebody Saved Me. It’s focused on 1978-2002, bookended by the deaths of Moon and Entwistle, and includes solo re-recordings of some ‘80-‘82 songs.

Thanks for the tip!

Re: 80-82 songs, I've actually grown to like Empty Glass quite a bit, which seemed to have a good number of fans anyway. But I've also come around to the idea that Face Dances could've been a good and commendable album. The 1997 remix actually rectifies the soft, muted sound of the original mix - Kenney Jones's drums really did sound like "pudding" on the original LP (his words at the time) and that alone is a big improvement on the remix. Better still are the bonus tracks included with the remix, and at least a couple of them should have made the album - I would replace "Cache Cache" and "Did You Steal My Money" with "It's In You" and "Somebody Saved Me" respectively. Throw in the Pete Townshend B-side "Dance It Away" to open side B, and the final 10-track album would have been a good one to go out on. (Even though "Dance It Away" was released as a Townshend B-side, it may have been a Who outtake - notice that Jones and Entwistle are the only players besides Townshend, and from what I can tell there were no sessions for Townshend's solo recordings back then that had the three of them booked.

“Cache” is one of my favorites on Face Dances, and “Steal” has really grown on me over the years — a weird Police/Steely Dan pastiche that I can imagine Donald Fagen singing. The weakest song for me has always been “You” — I don’t know if it’s on this or another Who thread, but I wondered why/how Entwistle’s writing went from wry and funny to crushingly generic.

That said, yeah, Face Dances would’ve been improved by the inclusion of a couple of the then-unreleased songs (“I Like Nightmares” is my favorite of those). But apparently the rest of the band made the decisions about what should or shouldn’t be included (they had previously rejected “Empty Glass” and “No Road Romance” for Who Are You). If Daltrey was the one who rejected “Somebody Saved Me,” I’d be surprised, since he sang it on solo tours.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Face Dances is the horrible production. Bill Szymczyk made some comment along the lines of, “Entwistle needs to understand that he’s the bassist, not a lead player.” I mean, had Szymczyk even heard the Who before?

The “Dance It Away” that came out as a Townshend b-side is a different recording from the Face Dances outtake, and was recorded with either Mark Brzezicki or Simon Phillips on drums, and Tony Butler on bass. Here’s the Who version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJtJp359dY

Interesting, where did you get that info on "Dance It Away"? I know that version posted in the YouTube link, it was shared on the Hoffman forum, and in the same thread the consensus seemed to be that the personnel for the Townshend B-side had Entwistle on bass and Jones on drums.

I'm still searching, but while there are a ton of blog posts and a reddit thread that credits Entwistle and Jones to that B-side recording, I still haven't found a definitive sessionography. I know it was included as a bonus track to the 2006 reissue of All the Best Cowboys since it was a B-side to one of its albums tracks - for that reason, it would make sense for either Mark Brzezicki or Simon Phillips to be on drums and for Tony Butler to be on bass, but there doesn't seem to be credits that confirm this either.

Honestly, it just doesn't sound like Jones and Entwistle to me. It sounds too slightly-ahead-of-the-beat for Jones, and I don't hear any of Entwistle's trademark fingertaps/slaps. And the 16th-note figure on the bass drum that I hear in the verses (starting at 0:23) has much more pop than any recording of Jones' bass drum that I've heard. Also, what would've been the occasion for the session/recording? The Who were waiting around for Pete to get out of rehab, and actually started It's Hard without him ("It's Your Turn" has Andy Fairweather-Low in Townshend's place). So why would Pete have recorded "Dance It Away" with John and Kenney during the Cowboys sessions (it definitely sounds like a Chris Thomas production) in lieu of a Who session?

To be sure, I could be completely wrong about this, and Kenney had played on Townshend solo records before -- he's on "Rough Boys," but compare the drumming and sound on that track to "Dance It Away." They don't sound like the same drummer to me.

Further muddying the waters, there are supposedly tracks on the 1980 McVicar soundtrack that have everyone in the Who, but a) I've never done a serious dive into that album to try to find out, and b) I haven't seen any documentation saying who's on which tracks on that record.

Also, what would've been the occasion for the session/recording? The Who were waiting around for Pete to get out of rehab, and actually started It's Hard without him ("It's Your Turn" has Andy Fairweather-Low in Townshend's place). So why would Pete have recorded "Dance It Away" with John and Kenney during the Cowboys sessions (it definitely sounds like a Chris Thomas production) in lieu of a Who session?

It sounds like those who say it's Entwistle and Jones are arguing that it could very well have been another take from Face Dances. Honestly can't say myself, I just put my trust in their judgment since they seem to know the Who far more than I will ever know.