How ‘A Quick One’ predicted The Who’s future
The Who were never meant to be a one-trick pony. Although they had the ability to do a lot of things whenever they got on a stage, their penchant for the kind of maximum R&B that populated the London clubs seemed to be their future if they kept pumping out songs like ‘I Can’t Explain’. ‘My Generation’ may have been their earliest way of etching themselves into rock history, but A Quick One was the first time they actually started to predict their own future.
Since the band was already being dictated by Pete Townshend’s songwriting, there was no real reason to stop now, but that’s not what their label had in mind. After all, there are always problems when it comes down to songwriting royalties, so this was the first democratic Who album where each member of the band submitted songs for the project.
While tracks like Keith Moon’s ‘Cobwebs and Strange’ are more funny than anything else, Townshend is still the star on most of the album. ‘Run Run Run’ is the kind of typical rock song that you would expect out of him by now, but ‘So Sad About Us’ was the first time he showed a different side of himself, almost predicting the kind of power pop that would come out once the 1970s kicked into gear.
The major milestone here came from John Entwistle. Whereas ‘My Generation’ sounded heavy for its time, ‘Boris the Spider’ was the kind of music you would have expected from a B-tier horror movie, with Entwistle growling through the chorus half the time. Even though The Who are typically thought of as the fathers of punk, this is actually closer to the sounds of heavy metal.
That kind of eclectic style also bled over into Entwistle’s ‘Whiskey Man’ as well. The story about an imaginary friend that shows up when he gets wasted is funny, but the strange chord progressions are actually a decent look at how Entwistle would later twist his songs into different shapes on tracks like ‘My Wife’ off of Who’s Next.
Now that we’ve lingered on the other songs long enough, the title track at the end is the moment where nothing would ever be the same. Whether it was designed to close the album or was just another exercise for Townshend, ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ is a nine-minute epic that demonstrates four different song ideas stretched out over one piece.
This song was probably not cut out to be a single, but it is never boring for any of its nine minutes. Anyone who likes their music a bit more punchy could probably use this as a way to get into longer pieces, usually being able to latch onto sections like ‘We’ll Soon Be Home’ for a few seconds before crashing into ‘You Are Forgiven’.
This experiment could have certainly been fun while it lasted, but Townshend had a vision for where this kind of song could go. After trying the same episodic song structure on ‘Rael’ from The Who Sell Out, Townshend was slowly losing his ability to write story-driven songs.
Looking at the band’s future classics, ‘A Quick One’ is practically a test run for the more ambitious rock operas like Tommy and Quadrophenia. Instead of having to distil all of the song ideas into one epic track, Townshend would use the entire length of an album to tell his story, eventually breaking up his story into separate scenes for every song on tracks like ‘Go to the Mirror’ from Tommy or ‘The Real Me’ from Quadrophenia.
Even when something fell through, like on Lifehouse, Townshend still knew how to properly craft the scene of a song, with ‘Baba O’Riley’ being the perfect introduction to the rock classic that was never made. While most prog bands stole that kind of multi-part structure from Townshend directly, there were others who tried putting together that kind of song together from scratch.
Just take one of the biggest Who fans in the world, Eddie Vedder. His entrance into Pearl Jam revolved around him giving Stone Gossard a tape of three separate songs spread out like a mini-rock opera. That kind of mentality stretched into the 2000s as well, with Billie Joe Armstrong using songs like ‘A Quick One’ as a guide when honing down ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ from American Idiot.
More than anything, The Who’s sophomore release feels like a statement of intent for where they could go. Townshend dared himself and the entire rock world to dream bigger on A Quick One, and by breaking down the barriers of what rock songs were supposed to sound like, he broadened the landscape for where the next generations could go.
