siLLy puPPy Following in the trendy 60s mod and art pop scenes as the Detours, the band that changed its name to THE WHO quickly wooed audiences with its slick crafty menagerie of garage rock mixed with rhythm & blues and found instant success with the single “I Can’t Explain” which was admittedly a derivative of The Kinks “You Really Got Me” which shot up the British charts and launched the band into the big leagues right out of the gate. The unexpected success of that single that hit #8 on the charts opened the doors and quickly followed by another top 10 in the form of “Daddy Rolling Stone.” Due to these two high charting singles THE WHO was rushed into the studio where they cranked out their debut album MY GENERATION which debuted in December of 1965 and while a bit fashionably late to the British rock invasion, once THE WHO had arrived they wouldn’t stop until they hit the big time which happened practically overnight.

Like many albums of the era, MY GENERATION found two slightly different releases for its British audiences and another for the US with two different album covers. While a rushed job for sure with a mixed bag of varied tracks, MY GENERATION is notable for being one of the first British rock albums to showcase a more energetic aggressive approach which by today’s standards sounds laughable but around 1965-66 was quite shocking and single-handedly signaled an arms race of heavier and faster guitar riffs that ultimately led to the unthinkable variety of extreme metal and punk that would come a few decades down the road. That means THE WHO are considered both a proto-metal as well as a proto-punk band and although the songs on MY GENERATION are fairly standard blues driven pop rock that was fairly common for the British scene of the mid-60s, the drumming prowess of Keith Moon in particular along with heavier jangle guitars upped the ante in harder rock.

While i wouldn’t call MY GENERATION the most essential release by THE WHO, the album is interesting in connecting the dots between classic 50s rock and roll with the hard rock and proto-punk bands that followed. The title track was the only single off of this one which was a huge hit peaking at #2 on the British charts but also one of the best songs THE WHO ever did in its early years. The other notable songs are the opening “Out In The Street” and the instrumental “The Ox” which prognosticated the heavier and more progressive route that the band would take. This feisty number features incessantly heavy drums, a hyperactive piano groove and a punkish guitar and bass attack unlike anything that had been released at the time although it still retained a melodic connection to the R&B driven rock and roll era that THE WHO emerged from.

The album is decent but many rushed albums in the 60s included fluff and this album is no exception. The album features not one but two covers from James Brown: “I Don’t Mind” and “Please, Please, Please” as well as “I’m A Man” from Bo Diddley. Decently done but nothing more than adequate covers that really don’t hold up well over time. While touted as a masterpiece of the ages, i really don’t find MY GENERATION to be that exciting of a listen other than tuning into the zeitgeist of the mod scene of the mid-60s. Other than the title track and “The Ox” there is really nothing memorable about this album however if you have the Deluxe remastered version (the one i have) then you will be treated by extras such as the excellent track “Circles” as well as the singles that were released before MY GENERATION. Overall, this is a decent slice of mid-60s British blues fueled pop rock but hardly the best the era had to offer and certainly not THE WHO’s magnum opus but a great place to explore the band’s music for sure.

Warthur Panned on release by those who believed that the Who without Keith Moon weren't the Who at all, Face Dances really isn't that much worse than Who Are You - an album on which Moon's participation was incidental at best. The problem is, Who Are You wasn't that great - I consider it to be highly overrated, possibly due to it being Moon's last album before his death. You Better You Bet is a catchy enough song in the vein of Who Are You from the previous album, but like the opening track from the previous album (with its allusions to constantly rewriting "the same old song") the lyrics reveal a bit more than necessary. When you have to namedrop one of your own best albums (Who's Next, in this case) in order to remind people that you're the same band that recorded it, that speaks to a severe lack of confidence in your own current material - and Face Dances isn't an album the Who should have been proud of. It doesn't stink, but it's just incredibly mediocre.

Warthur Supposedly, Who Are You was Pete Townshend's stab at fusing art rock and punk. It didn't really work; the opening track, New Song, is symptomatic of this, consisting of a proggy bit here, a punk-lite bit there, the two flavours never really merging to form a cohesive new sound. It might be a ballsy move to kick off an album with a song about rehashing "the same old song with two new lines", but it's also embarrassing if it turns out you're actually doing that - and not hitting the standards of the old song in question either.

The best track on the album is probably Who Are You, which is most famous these days for being the soundtrack for a cop show. It really does sound like cop show soundtrack material too. If you want hard-edged art rock with raw punkish energy lurking under the surface from The Who, you'll find it on Quadrophenia, not here.

Warthur After producing a string of influential hit albums, nobody could begrudge The Who the opportunity to kick back a bit and just play some straightforward rock numbers - especially considering that lead songwriter Pete Townshend was mired in alcoholism and, if songs like How Many Friends are anything to go by, mired in depression with it. A few more upbeat numbers like Squeeze Box mix up the pace a bit but there's no changing the fact that The Who By Numbers is exactly what it says on the cover: the band going through the motions for the sake of getting new product out there. Sadly, it would seem that the high points of Who's Next and Quadrophenia represented a peak the band would never be able to reclaim, and Who By Numbers is the album which made that obvious.

Warthur The Who's second great rock opera at points blows Tommy out of the water, but its double album format means that it's a less lean and compact prospect than its predecessor. Incorporating the muscular hard rock approach and synthesiser experiments of Who's Next into a narrative structure based around a confused teenage Mod trying to integrate the different aspects of his personality (each of whom is based on a member of the Who), I found the album both more musically rewarding than Tommy, where occasionally the musical quality took a back seat to the demands of the narrative, as well as simply telling a better story - though one which relies a little too much on mythologising and hyping up the mod scene in question.

Quite simply, on a lyrical and narrative level Quadrophenia makes Tommy look like juvenile, shallow hippy nonsense. Taking a universal human dilemma - trying to work out which of the differing personas we present to the world best reflects our real selves - and weaving it into a semi-autobiographical story looking back on the Who's Mod roots, Townshend creates a story with more depth and genuine literary merit than Tommy or Tommy's many imitators, whilst the other band members give their all to this performance. The use of synthesisers are carefully and tastefully judged, and together with Who's Next this album contains some of the band's most powerful rock anthems.

In the wake of this album, it is difficult to see Tommy as anything other than an experimental prototype, a cobbled-together blueprint that was more successful in pointing the way to Quadrophenia than as a musical piece in its own right. It's on this album that the Who reached their peak in terms of producers of rock opera. At the same time, there's strands of filler here and there - particularly on the second disc, which is significantly less tight than the first disc - and the emphasis on telling a more coherent story does sometimes overpower the music.