The Who album Roger Daltrey found easiest to sing: “That was a piece of cake”
Few rock bands made their lives look as much like hard work as The Who did in their prime.
Every aspect of their work flew against the grain of presenting being in a rock band as the ultimate fantasy. Running around with your best mates, making music together, thousands of fans worshipping you every night as you travel the world, getting paid boatloads of cash for the privilege. Then you had The Who, who were more than happy to show the other side of the story.
For one thing, The Who never really liked each other, let alone were best mates. The band’s rhythm section, drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, had time for each other and could regularly be found partying in Soho together when not on the road. Most of the time, band relations were usually terse when they weren’t an outright punch-up, especially between singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend.
They were also only too happy to let people know that they spent most of the 1960s broke as a joke, staying that way until they finally broke America in the early 1970s. Above all, the band were happy to let everyone know the absolute truth behind making music, that it’s really, really hard. Typically for a band like The Who that revelled in chaos more than perhaps any other British band of the 1960s, their history is littered with as many creative failures as successes.
Even when they did pull through, it was a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. It’s something of a miracle that their breakout album Tommy was made at all, as whenever Pete Townshend would begin talking about the concept of a “rock opera”, people looked at him like he was mad, including his bandmates. Creating that album nearly destroyed the band, but not only did they finish it, it was a colossal hit, certifying the band’s reputation as one of the most exciting groups of the 1960s.
What was the hardest project for The Who to make?
This caused Townshend to double down on his ambitions and begin conceptualising arguably the most famous abandoned project in rock music. Infamously, no one really knows what the Lifehouse project was at its core beyond a bigger, more ambitious rock opera in the Tommy vein. Unfortunately, this isn’t because Townshend was private about it or never talked about it publicly. In fact, quite the opposite. He talked about it in public a lot, but no one could ever work out what the lad was on about.
One almost feels sorry for him, especially because this isn’t a case of some drug-addled rock star trying to sound smart with nothing going on between the ears. Townshend totally believed in what he was doing; he just, in true Who fashion, couldn’t explain it well enough. There was also the fact that he was trying to make music so pure that the vibrations would make the audience “dance themselves into oblivion”, whatever that means. It sounds like a tough ask for a rock quartet from Shepherd’s Bush.
Nevertheless, the songs that Townshend had actually written for the Lifehouse project were some of the best he’d ever made. In trying to make the project happen, the band played those songs in countless live shows, which made the record they made after Townshend scrapped the Lifehouse project (after a nervous breakdown, natch), and, ironically enough, one of the easiest they ever made. Daltrey spoke of this in an interview with Rock Cellar Magazine.
He said, “With Who’s Next, for instance, that was a piece of cake. It was easier than anything ‘cause we played it live for about three or four months before we actually recorded it, so it was living in my head already, and I already got my head around what I wanted to do with it and got it out of my head to where I wanted the voice to be.”
One can only imagine how distressed Townshend must have been after Lifehouse; hopefully, it was gratifying to know that the sheer work he’d put into the project wasn’t for nought.
