The Who
first began in 1963. In their early days the band was known as The Detours. Like many of their British peers, the group was heavily influenced by American blues and country music, initially playing mostly rhythm and blues. The Detours changed their name to "The Who" in 1964 and, with the arrival of Keith Moon that year, their line-up was complete. However, for a short period during 1964, under the management of Peter Meaden, they changed their name to The High Numbers, during which time they released "Zoot Suit/I'm The Face", a single designed to appeal to their mostly mod fans. When it failed to chart, the band fired Meaden and quickly reverted to The Who. They became one of the most popular bands among the British mods, a 1960s subculture involving cutting-edge fashions, scooters and music genres such as rhythm and blues, soul, and beat music.
The band crystallised around Townshend as the primary songwriter and creative force (though Entwistle would also make notable songwriting contributions). Townshend was at the centre of the band's tensions, as he strove to write challenging and thoughtful music, while Daltrey preferred energetic and macho material (Daltrey would occasionally refuse to sing a Townshend composition and Townshend would thus sing it himself). Moon, not really a songwriter (although he contributed a handful of songs in the 60s), was a fan of American surf music.
The Who's first hit was the 1965 "I Can't Explain", influenced by the early Kinks hits (with whom they shared American producer Shel Talmy). This hit was followed by "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere", which was the only song credited as being composed in a joint effort by Townshend and Daltrey, though Townshend implied Daltrey assisted in songwriting without credit in the liner notes to Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy. Their debut album My Generation ("The Who Sings My Generation" in the US) was released the same year. The album included such mod anthems as "The Kids Are Alright" and the title track "My Generation", which contained the famous lines "Hope I die before I get old", and "Why don't you all f-f-fade away." Subsequent hits – the 1966 single "I'm a Boy", about a young boy dressed as a young girl, "Happy Jack" about a mentally disturbed young man, and 1967's "Pictures of Lily", a tribute to masturbation, all show Townshend's growing use of stories of sexual tension and teenage angst. More hits followed, including "I Can See for Miles" and "Magic Bus".
Although they had success as a singles band, Townshend had more ambitious goals. He wanted to treat The Who's albums as unified works, rather than collections of unconnected songs. Although Townshend later said that the song "I'm A Boy" was from a projected opus, the first sign of this ambition came in their album A Quick One (1966), which included the storytelling medley "A Quick One While He's Away", which they later referred to as a "mini opera". A Quick One was followed by The Who Sell Out (1967), a concept album which played like an offshore radio station, complete with humorous jingles and commercials, and which also included a mini rock opera, called "Rael" (whose closing theme ended up on "Tommy"), , as well as The Who's biggest USA single, "I Can See for Miles". The Who famously destroyed their equipment onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival that year and subsequently repeated the routine on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour with literally explosive results as Keith Moon detonated his drum kit. These early efforts resulted in Pete Townshend being the subject of the first Rolling Stone interview. Townshend revealed in that interview that he was working on a full-length rock opera. This was Tommy (1969), the first commercially successful rock opera and a major landmark in modern music.
Around this time the spiritual teachings of India's Meher Baba began to influence Townshend's songwriting, an influence that continued for many years. Baba is credited as "Avatar" on the Tommy album. In addition to its commercial success, Tommy also became a critical smash, with Life Magazine saying, "...for sheer power, invention and brilliance of performance, Tommy outstrips anything which has ever come out of a recording studio,"[4] and Melody Maker declaring, "Surely The Who are now the band against which all others are to be judged."
The Who performed much of Tommy at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival later that year. That performance, and the ensuing film, catapulted The Who to superstar status in the USA.
[edit] Leeds to Time Magazine (1970s)
In 1970 The Who released Live at Leeds, which is thought by many to be the best live rock album of all time.[5] Also in 1970, The Who began work on a studio album that was never released. At the Isle of Wight Festival in August, Daltrey introduced "I Don't Even Know Myself" as "off the new album, which we're sort of half-way through". But within a few weeks of that concert Townshend wrote "Pure and Easy", a song which he later described as the "central pivot" of what became an ambitious concept album / performance art project called Lifehouse, distracting him and the band from work on the album in progress.
Lifehouse was never completed in its intended form (although it was reconstructed as a radio play for the BBC in 2000, and most of the material was released on a 6-CD album from Pete Townshend's website shortly after). Meanwhile, in March of 1971, the band began recording the available Lifehouse material with Kit Lambert in New York, and then restarted the sessions with Glyn Johns in April. Selections from the material, along with one unrelated song by Entwistle, were released as a traditional studio album, Who's Next, which became their most successful album among both critics and fans, but which effectively terminated the Lifehouse project. Other Lifehouse songs were released as non-album-track singles and on various albums over the years, such as Odds and Sods and Townshend's solo album Who Came First. Who's Next reached #4 in the USA pop charts and #1 in the UK. Two singles from the album, "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again", are often cited as pioneering examples of synthesizer use in rock music; ironically, both tracks' distinctive keyboard sounds were actually generated in real time by a Lowrey organ [1] (though in the case of "Won't Get Fooled Again", the organ's output was processed through the filters of a VCS3 synthesizer). However, synthesizers can be found elsewhere on the album, playing a prominent role in "Bargain", "Going Mobile", and "The Song is Over".
Who's Next was followed by Quadrophenia (1973), a work in the rock opera vein, but which can also be seen as something of an autobiographical or social history piece about early 1960s adolescent life and conflict in London. The story is about a youth named Jimmy, his struggle for self-esteem, his conflicts with his family and others, and his mental illness.[6] His personal story is set against a backdrop of the clashes between Mods and Rockers in the early 1960s in the UK, particularly the riots between the two factions at Brighton.
The band's later albums contained songs of more personal content for Townshend, and he eventually transferred this personal style to his solo albums, as seen on the album Empty Glass. 1975's The Who by Numbers had several introspective songs in this vein, lightened by the crowd-pleasing "Squeeze Box," another hit single. Nevertheless, some rock critics considered By Numbers to have been Townshend's "suicide note."[7] A movie version of Tommy was released that year. It was directed by Ken Russell, starred Roger Daltrey in the title role and earned Pete Townshend an academy award nomination for Best Original Score. In 1976 The Who played a concert at Charlton Athletic Football Ground which was listed for over a decade in the Guinness Book of World Records as the loudest concert ever.[4]
In 1978, the band released Who Are You, a move away from epic rock opera and towards a more radio-friendly sound, though it did contain one song from a never-completed rock opera by John Entwistle. The release of the album was overshadowed by the death of Keith Moon in his sleep after a prescription-drug overdose, only a few hours after a party held by Paul McCartney. Two ironies about the last album include the cover, which shows Moon sitting in a chair with the words "not to be taken away," and the song "The Music Must Change", which has no drum track. Kenney Jones, of The Small Faces and The Faces, joined the band as Moon's successor. In 1979, The Who returned to the stage with well-received concerts at the Rainbow Theatre in London, at the Cannes Film Festival in France and at Madison Square Garden in New York City. By the late fall, the band had agreed to undertake a small tour of the United States. Sadly, this tour was marred by tragedy: on December 3, 1979 in Cincinnati, Ohio, a crush for seats at Riverfront Coliseum before The Who's concert resulted in the deaths of eleven fans. The band was not told of the deaths until after the show because civic authorities feared more crowd control problems would arise if the concert was cancelled. The band members were reportedly devastated by this event. Also in 1979, The Who released a documentary film called The Kids Are Alright and a film version of Quadrophenia, the latter becoming a huge box office hit in the UK and the former capturing many of the band's most scintillating moments on stage over the years. In December, The Who became only the third band, after the Beatles and the Band, to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine. The accompanying article, written by Jay Cocks, was overwhelmingly positive with respect to The Who, their members, and their place in rock music, saying that The Who had "outpaced, outlasted, outlived and outclassed" all of their rock band contemporaries.
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