Who's Next

Who's Next
Studio album by The Who
Released	14 August 1971 (1971-08-14)[1]
Recorded	March–May 1971, Olympic Studios, London; mixed at Olympic Studios; "Won't Get Fooled Again" recorded at Stargroves and mixed at Island Studios, London
Genre	Hard rock[2]
Length	43:38
Label	Track, Decca
Producer	The Who, Glyn Johns (associate producer)
The Who chronology
Live at Leeds (1970) Who's Next (1971) Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy (1971)
Singles from Who's Next
"Won't Get Fooled Again" Released: 25 June 1971 (1971-06-25)[3] "Baba O'Riley" Released: 23 October 1971 (1971-10-23)[4] "Behind Blue Eyes" Released: 6 November 1971 (1971-11-06)[5]

Who's Next is the fifth studio album by English rock band The Who, released in August 1971. The album had origins in a rock opera conceived by Pete Townshend called Lifehouse as an attempt to follow Tommy. The ambitious, complex project did not come to fruition at the time and instead, many of the songs written for the project were compiled onto Who's Next as a collection of unrelated songs.^[6] After difficulty with initial recording sessions at the New York Record Plant, events stabilized with the arrival of producer Glyn Johns, who worked on the finished album. The album featured the group's first use of the synthesizer, particularly on the tracks "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again".

The album was a critical and commercial success when it was released, and has been certified 3× platinum by the RIAA.^[7] It continues to be critically acclaimed and has been reissued on Compact Disc several times, adding additional material intended for the Lifehouse project.

The Lifehouse project

The album had its roots in the Lifehouse project, which Pete Townshend has variously described as intended to be a futuristic rock opera, a live-recorded concept album and as the music for a scripted film project. The project proved to be intractable on several levels and caused stress within the band as well as a major falling out between Townshend and The Who's producer Kit Lambert. Years later, in the liner notes to the remastered Who's Next CD, Townshend wrote that the failure of the project led him to the verge of a suicidal nervous breakdown.^[8]

After giving up on recording some of the Lifehouse tracks in New York, The Who went back into the studio with new producer Glyn Johns and started over. Although the Lifehouse concept was abandoned, scraps of the project remained present in the final album. The introductory line to "Pure and Easy", which Townshend has described as "the central pivot of Lifehouse," shows up in the closing bars of "The Song Is Over". An early concept for Lifehouse featured the feeding of personal data from audience members into the controller of an early analogue synthesiser to create musical tracks.^[8] It was widely believed that inputting the vital statistics of Meher Baba into a synthesiser generated the backing track on "Baba O'Riley", but in actuality it was Townshend playing a Lowrey organ.^[9] A primary result of the abandonment of the original project, however, was a newfound freedom; the very absence of an overriding musical theme or storyline (which had been the basis of The Who's 1969 project, Tommy) allowed the band to concentrate on maximising the impact of individual tracks.

Although he gave up his original intentions for the Lifehouse project, Townshend continued to develop the concepts, revisiting them in later albums. In 2006 he opened a website called The Lifehouse Method to accept personal input from applicants which would be turned into musical portraits.

Arrangement and songs

The album was immediately recognised for its dynamic and unique sound. The album fortuitously fell at a time when great advances had been made in sound engineering over the previous decade, and also shortly after the widespread availability of synthesisers.

Townshend used the early synthesisers and modified keyboard sounds in several modes: as a drone effect on several songs, notably "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again", and as a playful noisemaker, sounding almost like a tea kettle whistle on "Song Is Over". Townshend also used an envelope follower to modulate the spectrum of his guitar on "Going Mobile", giving it a distinctive squawking sound that degenerates into a bubbling noise at the end of the song.

The album opened with "Baba O'Riley," featuring piano by Townshend and a violin solo by Dave Arbus.^[1] The violin solo was drummer Keith Moon's idea. The song's title pays homage to Townshend's guru Meher Baba and influential minimalist composer Terry Riley (and is informally known by the line "Teenage Wasteland"). Other signature tracks include the rock ballad "Behind Blue Eyes", and the album's epic closing song, "Won't Get Fooled Again."

Artwork

Cover artwork shows a photograph, taken at Easington Colliery, of the band apparently having just urinated on a large concrete piling protruding from a slag heap. According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the members were unable to urinate, so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect. The partially cloudy sky seen above the site was also composited from a separate image. The photograph is often seen to be a reference to the monolith discovered on the moon in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had been released only about three years earlier.^[10] Pete Townshend stated it was an ironical answer to Stanley Kubrick turning down the direction of Tommy.^[11] In 2003, the United States cable television channel VH1 named Who's Next's cover one of the greatest album covers of all time.^[12]

An earlier cover design had featured photographs of obese nude women and has been published elsewhere, but never actually appeared on the album. An alternative cover featured drummer Keith Moon dressed in black lingerie, holding a rope whip, and wearing a brown wig.^[13] Some of the photographs taken during these sessions were later used as part of Decca's United States promotion of the album.^[14]

Recording sessions

• 1970/71 – Demo sessions at the home studios of Pete Townshend and John Entwistle that produced two reels of songs.
• January–March 1971 – Live recordings at the Young Vic (mobile Studio).
• March 1971 – New York sessions at the Record Plant, Lifehouse songs recorded with Kit Lambert and Jack Adams at the desk. These sessions were abandoned, along with the Lifehouse concept.
• 26 April 1971 – Final Lifehouse concert which was recorded and later released (in part) on disc 2 of the Deluxe Edition of Who's Next
• May 1971 – Recording at Stargroves Studio London, the sessions were abandoned.
• May–June 1971 – Olympic Studios in Barnes produced by The Who with associate producer Glyn Johns. The Olympic sessions were used for the original vinyl LP album.

The album has now been re-issued in many countries and remastered several times using tapes from different sessions. The master tapes for the Olympic sessions are believed to be lost or destroyed. Video game publisher Harmonix had previously announced that Who's Next would be released as downloadable, playable content for the music video game series Rock Band. However, this never came to fruition, since it was discovered that many of the master tapes to the album were missing, as confirmed by Townshend.^[15][16] Instead, a compilation of Who songs dubbed "The Best of The Who," which includes three of the album's songs ("Behind Blue Eyes", "Baba O'Riley", and "Going Mobile"), was released as downloadable content, in lieu of the earlier-promised Who's Next album.^[17]

There were quite a few songs recorded for the project that became Who's Next. "Let's See Action" and "When I Was a Boy" were released as a single in 1971, and "I Don't Even Know Myself" was released as the b-side to "Won't Get Fooled Again". "Let's See Action" appears on various compilations, while "When I Was a Boy" and "I Don't Even Know Myself" achieved album placement on the compilation Who's Missing. The songs "Pure and Easy" and "Too Much of Anything" are featured on the album Odds & Sods, while "Time is Passing" was added to the 1998 CD version. A cover of "Baby Don't You Do It" was recorded and the longest version currently available is on the deluxe edition of the album. It is believed that two other Townshend songs, "Greyhound Girl" and "Mary", were recorded by The Who sometime during the 1971 sessions, however, only Townshend's demos of the songs have been released.

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[18]
Blender	[19]
Robert Christgau	A+[2]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[20]
Mojo	[21]
Q	[22]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[23]

In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau called Who's Next "the best hard rock album in years" and said that, while their previous recordings were marred by a thin sound, the group now "achieves the same resonant immediacy in the studio that it does live."^[2] Billy Walker of Sounds magazine was especially complimentary of "Baba O'Riley", "My Wife", and "The Song Is Over", and stated, "After the unique brilliance of Tommy something special had to be thought out and the fact that they settled for a straight-forward album rather than an extension of their rock opera, says much for their courage and inventiveness."^[24] Rolling Stone magazine's John Mendelsohn felt that, despite some amount of seriousness and artificiality, the album's brand of rock and roll is "intelligently-conceived, superbly-performed, brilliantly-produced, and sometimes even exciting".^[25]

According to Q magazine, Who's Next is "considered by many" to be the Who's best album.^[22] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine viewed the album as more genuine than Tommy or the aborted Lifehouse project because "those were art — [Who's Next], even with its pretensions, is rock & roll."^[18] BBC Music's Chris Roberts cited it as the group's best album and "one of those carved-in-stone landmarks that the rock canon doesn’t allow you to bad-mouth."^[26] Mojo magazine said that its sophisticated music and hook-laden songs featured innovative use of rock synthesizers that did not weaken the Who's characteristic "power-quartet attack".^[21] In The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1998), Colin Larkin wrote that the album "set a hard rock standard that even its creators struggled to emulate."^[20] Larkin remarked that the group's "sense of dynamics" was highlighted by the contrast between their powerful playing and the counterpoint produced at times by acoustic guitars and synthesizer obbligatos.^[20]

Accolades

Who's Next was named the best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual critics' poll published by The Village Voice.^[27] It has since been named one of the best albums of all time by VH1 (#13) and Rolling Stone (#28 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time^[28]). The album appeared at number 15 on Pitchfork Media's top 100 albums of the 1970s.^[29] The album is also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.^[30]

In 2006, the album was chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time.^[31] In 2007 it was also inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "historical, artistic and significant" value. In 1999 it was the subject of a Classic Albums documentary produced by Eagle Rock Entertainment which has aired on VH1 and BBC among others, entitled Classic Albums: The Who - Who's Next. The album was selected as the 32nd-best of all time by Mojo in January 1996.^{[citation needed]}

Track listing

Bonus tracks

2003 Deluxe Edition

The first disc of the Deluxe Edition contains the nine tracks from the original album containing the original mix, followed by six outtakes, of which "Getting in Tune" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" were previously unreleased. Each of the six outtakes was recorded during sessions at the Record Plant in New York in March 1971; the group abandoned this material and re-recorded five of the six tracks again in England later in the year.

The tracks on the second disc were recorded live at the Young Vic Theatre, London, on 26 April 1971. All of the tracks were previously unreleased except for "Water" and "Naked Eye". Songs played but not included are "Pinball Wizard", "Bony Moronie", "See Me Feel Me/Listening to You" and "Baby Don't You Do It". (NOTE: The live performance of "Bony Moronie" is available on The Who's 1994 boxset Thirty Years of Maximum R&B).

Personnel

The Who

• Roger Daltrey – lead and backing vocals, production, harmonica on "I Don't Even Know Myself"
• John Entwistle – bass guitar, backing vocals, brass, production, lead vocals and piano on "My Wife"
• Keith Moon – drums, percussion, production
• Pete Townshend – guitars, organ, VCS3 and ARP synthesiser, backing vocals, production, piano on "Baba O'Riley", lead vocals on "Going Mobile" and the original version of "Love Ain't for Keeping", co-lead vocals on "Baba O'Riley", "Bargain", and "The Song Is Over"

Additional musicians

• Dave Arbus – violin on "Baba O'Riley"
• Nicky Hopkins – piano on "The Song Is Over" and "Getting in Tune"
• Al Kooper – organ on alternate version of "Behind Blue Eyes"^[32]
• Leslie West – lead guitar on "Baby, Don't You Do It"^[32]

Technical personnel

• Glyn Johns – production, engineering, and mixing
• Pete Kameron – executive production
• John Kosh – album design
• Kit Lambert – executive production
• Ethan Russell – photography
• Chris Stamp – executive production

Sales chart performance

Album

Singles

Sales certifications

References

• DVD The Who: Who's Next, Eagle Vision (Classic albums series), 2005.

External links

Find more about Who's Next at Wikipedia's sister projects
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Database entry Q729387 on Wikidata

• Who's Next liner notes – Song-by-song liner notes for the album
• Guitar tablature
• Who's Next at Discogs (list of releases)

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