Who

The generation of the High Numbers, later The Who, took shape around the mid-1960s. It was the era when Britain was in thrall to disenchanted beat music or the most electrified rhythm & blues. The Who, four young lads driven by primal fury and hormonal explosions, delighted in making music that went against every rule of the period — indeed, that punched those rules in the face: youthful, rebellious music, both musically and sociologically. The band was born from the union of four wildly different personalities: the intellectual Pete Townshend on guitar, the athletic suburban bully Roger Daltrey, the mild-mannered but charismatic John Entwistle on bass, and Keith Moon, the very definition of madness, on drums.

Their primal energy manifested as a sensually whirling charge toward a kind of rock utterly unlike anything else of the era; their rage against the system, against prevailing respectability, offered an escape from everyday greyness and a new way to elevate certain hidden adolescent dreams. This was music made and conceived for a young mind, one that was almost afraid of adulthood. The adult world is viewed with a gaze steeped in hatred and near-racial rebellion, because it's exactly the world the four of them were trying to escape.

Escaping adulthood — or to quote a line from "My Generation", dying before growing old — is nothing less than a modern lifestyle that foreshadowed the punk movement that would explode in all its seething, raucous clamor a decade later. The Who's early albums were a gut punch to the entire musical world and beyond. "My Generation" and "Sell Out" cemented their legend. The ambitious "Tommy" was the classic proof of maturity. But that's not the end of it, because the other concept album "Quadrophenia" was still to come, along with, two years earlier, this "Who's Next", which stands as testimony to the perfect balance the band had by then achieved.

It begins like a lit fuse with "Baba O'Riley". The track, dedicated to the Indian guru Meher Baba and to musician Terry Riley, takes shape through a minimalist introduction built on Townshend's synthesizer: an intro that is pure legend, a rotating sound chasing itself endlessly to create concentric circles of noise; an imperious drum break from Moon ushers in Daltrey's regal vocal, whose emphatic delivery sends the song soaring into rarefied skies marked by Townshend's brooding vocal turn. Another break, and the melody reaches its climax through a brief, perfectly judged guitar interlude; the breaks are precise and powerful — Moon is thunder, and Townshend is his lightning, his searing flashes of sound illuminating and watching over such beauty. The ending is a stroke of genius that still astonishes: a violin solo that begins timidly before setting sail into a stormy sea of furious rhythms.

The following "Bargain" is a deceptive song given its understated, acoustic-based opening. But that lasts only a few seconds: soon the sound surges into a burst of electricity. We're firmly in hard-rock territory here, with Moon's furious rolling and Townshend's full-armed "riffing"; the middle section is marked by a gentle interlude that leads into a tight near-solo from Moon. That power remains undiminished on "Love Ain't For Keeping", a semi-acoustic track marked by Townshend's background vocal calls. The Who's music, as this song confirms, never loses its high adrenaline content: the drums proceed at a slow but powerful pace, the bass digs incisively vigorous grooves beneath the surface, and overall the rhythm section moves in lockstep, creating that sense of sonic "heaviness".

On "My Wife", the guitar takes center stage, with raw, powerful chords; the rhythmic pattern is drum-driven, a showcase of how Moon was capable of sudden, rapid rolls — sometimes extended ones — without ever losing the thread of the song itself. It's a typically rock track, full of feeling, though it doesn't add anything particularly new to what came before. "The Song Is Over" opens with a timid piano introduction courtesy of the great Nicky Hopkins; over this graceful sonic carpet lies Townshend's nasal voice, singing somewhere between dreamy and melancholic; but it only takes a moment before the track catches fire in an explosion of energy, well supported by an ever-masterful Moon; the electric guitar is nicely mixed between full-on distortion and heavily filtered, very-70s tones. The middle section, the song's heart, folds back on itself, revisiting the rarefied opening atmosphere before moving briskly toward a crackling finale, in which background synthesizers immerse the song in a richness of sound steeped in multiple colors, at times faintly psychedelic.

"Getting In Tune" opens with a delicate piano intro over which Daltrey lavishes a vocal that recalls much of the atmosphere of "Tommy", especially that peculiar sense of "resurrection". It's a powerful, gripping anthem, a quintessential stadium track, punctuated by continuous tempo changes. At times the song reveals bluesy shades, but through a very "full-blooded" filter; the ending, on the other hand, is a stormy whirlwind in which every instrument is "wrung dry" and let loose in full freedom, creating the feel of a studio jam.

Joyful, disenchanted atmospheres mark "Going Mobile" instead: Townshend manages to enrich the melody with a vocal that's at times innocent, at times subtly ironic; the rhythm builds into a sublime, percussive inferno courtesy of Moon, while acoustic guitar intertwines with electric, the two coexisting beautifully. Townshend becomes stellar on "Behind Blue Eyes": stellar is that acoustic arpeggio of his, which projects the song among the most beautiful, aching ballads modern music has ever produced. Infinite tenderness runs fast and light beneath the skin, melancholy and emotion in Daltrey's "docile" voice, mirrored in the blue eyes of a muse so powerful as to inspire such an aching melody. The rest of the band, meanwhile, delivers wonderful, unexpected (until now) vocal harmonies, with backing vocals so angelic they'd wake every saint in heaven. The gentle, pastoral side of the Who.

Lunar synthesizer intros usher in a spectacular Moon on the album's closing track: "Won't Get Fooled Again". The vocal is a distillation of all that visceral, roguish swagger Daltrey is a master of; the rhythm is a tribal plunge into polyrhythms wildly and wonderfully balanced against each other. The guitar, in the central section, tears through with lacerating, deep-cutting runs. The bass is complicit in all that rhythm, painting pulsing lines that make the instrument itself seem on the verge of losing its "grip on reason", drifting away from the whole musical context only to skillfully rejoin it later. "Won't Get Fooled Again" is the Who's musical manifesto and the symbol of a legendary generation that dwells within these sounds, living on and revitalizing itself in every drum roll, every riff, every vocal flourish. The power of musicians and moments that are no more but will never die. Just set a CD or a record on the turntable, and the magic will play out again, endlessly.

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14/11/2006