The first rock opera The Who ever recorded
In the mid-1960s, The Who joined the British Invasion fray, coming head to head with The Kinks, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in violent chart wars. The guitarist and principal songwriter, Pete Townshend, tapped into the countercultural zeitgeist with early hits like ‘My Generation’ and ‘The Kids Are Alright’, but they had yet to find their artistic identity.
Sure, smashing up your guitars and lining kick drums with explosives is an absorbing quirk, but an artist must have creative nuance to add depth to an eminence front as such. The Who found its identity in storytelling, thanks to Townshend’s insatiable appetite for fantasy fiction. In a recent interview with Far Out, the guitarist discussed his Magic Bus bookshop and revealed that his “first arrest as a young boy was for shoplifting in a bookshop”.
In 2023, Townshend released Life House, a graphic novel that finally completes a narrative idea The Who abandoned in 1970. What was intended as the band’s second so-called rock opera proved too difficult to translate into Townshend’s ambitious multimedia plans. After skirting on the edges of a mental breakdown and disbandment of The Who, Lifehouse was shelved with much of its musical material featured on the masterpiece 1971 album Who’s Next.
Giving Townshend the audacity to humour such a grandiose and multi-faceted project as Lifehouse, of course, was Tommy. The Who’s first concept album and often regarded as their first rock opera, Tommy explored Townshend’s childhood trauma through the fictional titular character, a psychosomatically blind, deaf, and mute boy who “sure plays a mean pinball”.
“The Who were running out of ideas pre-Tommy, the rock opera,” Townshend told Far Out in 2023. “And that album started off as a mythic tale. It’s loosely inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. But I was also reading lots of Sufi tales and mystical writings by Hazrat Inayat Khan. He wrote a book called The Mysticism Of Sound. A musician but also a spiritual teacher. All of that was flooding through my head.”
Townshend’s spiritual and literary journey would also inform Lifehouse, which was greatly inspired by Meher Baba. But when it came to writing the comparatively grounded rock opera Quadrophenia in the early 1970s, it seems Townshend had come full circle. Unbeknownst to many fans, Tommy wasn’t technically The Who’s first rodeo with rock operas.
In 1966, The Who entered the studio to record its second album, A Quick One. As it says on the tin, this release was little more than an EP and perhaps would have been had Townshend not devised the nine-minute closer ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’ at the last minute. It seemed the group had been running out of ideas a couple of years before Tommy, in fact, but this protracted “mini-opera” indicated the way out.
After recording what they had for the new album, The Who’s manager, Kit Lambert, suggested that Townshend round it out with “something linear… perhaps a 10-minute song”. Townshend responded by saying rock songs should be “2:50 by tradition,” but Lambert said, in that case, he should compose the song from four 2:50 chapters.
As the group’s first completed rock opera, ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’ follows the strange and disturbing story of a lovelorn girl who gets sexually involved with an ill-disciplined substitute lover named Ivor The Engine Driver’. The short narrative had been preceded by an earlier rock opera concept titled Quads, which spawned the 1966 single ‘I’m A Boy’ and the Ready Steady Who EP cut ‘Disguises’. Like Lifehouse, Quads was abandoned.
Listen to The Who’s ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’ below.
