The Who album Pete Townshend called “perfect for its time”
Pete Townshend was never looking to be a role model in The Who. He had seen what being a musical titan was like, and he was more inclined to write songs that had stories to tell rather than preaching from a pulpit like Bob Dylan or Bob Marley. Although not every album came together the way Townshend would have liked, he still considered Who’s Next as one of the best records to come out of the early 1970s.
That’s interesting, given that the project was less than half as good as what Townshend heard in his head. Considering that he had just knocked it out of the park with Tommy and taken to the road to record the live album Live at Leeds, the stage was set up for Townshend to return to the studio to do it again.
The idea was to take the crux of what he had done with Tommy and put it in a different scenario, using the main character of Bobby instead to tell a story about music becoming artificial in a dystopian future. As with most movie series, though, the sequel is never as good, and we’ll never know what the true version of the next project, Lifehouse, was supposed to be since it never came out.
According to Roger Daltrey, most of the storyline of the project didn’t connect with them, telling Classic Albums, “What I remember was Pete gave us a script which was like a film script, which didn’t make any sense, but it had some good ideas in it. Like one that I remember is that if we find a meaning to life, it would be a musical note.”
Since the band were up against a deadline, Townshend didn’t want to bother finishing it, eventually just shoving his best material into Who’s Next. If this was the table scraps of those sessions, they didn’t have to worry about a thing, giving birth to anthems like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.
You also have to remember when this came out. This was the end of the Flower Power generation and the beginning of something new, so hearing songs about leaving to find new lands and meeting the new boss of the next generation was both ominous and hopeful for where rock and roll would be going.
While no one would say that something that they never finished is their best work, Townshend was still proud of Who’s Next, telling VH1, “I knew that album, which appears to be a bunch of songs about nothing in particular are so cohesively tied together by the Lifehouse idea. Who’s Next, in a way, was the perfect record for then. It had humour, it had aggression, it had energy and it had colour, and it was beautifully recorded.”
Townshend may have been calling his shot about the new bosses as well, considering the bands of his generation were about to be swallowed by the sounds of punk, prog, and new wave within the next few years. There’s no way that Townshend could have envisioned that something like table scraps could have become a classic, but if he knew that this would be a classic back then, his brain needs to be locked up and studied by scientists.
