The Who BioThe Who evolved in 1964 from a group called the High Numbers, which included Daltrey, Townshend and Entwistle. They were joined by Moon, who'd played in a British surf group called the Beachcombers. The newly charged-up band came on as equipment-smashing Mods who brashly declared, "Hope I die before I get old," in their stuttering anthem, "My Generation." The early Who demonstrated a mastery of the three-minute single, articulating the frustrations of adolescence in such combustible classics as "Can't Explain," "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" and "Substitute." However, it wasn't until the 1967 release of "Happy Jack," an antic piece of art-school whimsy from the album of the same name, that the Who cracked the U.S. Top Forty. A turn toward psychedelia and consumerist satire yielded The Who Sell Out and its illuminating key song, "I Can See for Miles," which became the Who's biggest stateside single, reaching #9. |
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By the late Sixties, Townshend and the Who had turned their attention from singles to their antithesis. In 1969, they released the conceptual rock opera Tommy, a double-album about the spiritual path of a "deaf, dumb and blind boy." An excerpt from Tommy provided a concert highlight of the Woodstock festival and its subsequent film documentary. Always one of rock's most hard-hitting live acts, the Who documented this side of their multifaceted personality with Live at Leeds (1970), a warts-and-all concert recording packaged to look like a bootleg. From the ashes of Lifehouse, another would-be concept album that Townshend abandoned in midstream, came the Who's next studio recording: Who's Next, a flawless album of discreet numbers that helped define the sound and sensibility of rock in the Seventies. From "Baba o'Riley"'s album-opening, synth-propelled discourse on "teenage wasteland" through to Daltrey's electrifying scream on the closing track, "Won't Get Fooled Again," Who's Next stands as a virtual rock primer. From this they returned to the rock-opera format with Quadrophenia, a hard-rocking memoir and documentary of the group's Mod origins. |
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