Pete Townshend always had great pretensions. Striving to be rock’s version of Verdi, he penned two rock operas (Tommy and Quadrophenia). Tommy combines a flash or two of musical brilliance with peculiar views on enlightenment and a twisted, overwrought narrative (even Entwistle admitted he didn’t know what the fuck it was about). At the center of the story is a thoroughly loathsome main character who fails to garner any sympathy despite his status as a victim of child abuse. Quadrophenia is better but suffers from amateur pop psychoanalysis based on a misinterpretation of schizophrenia as “split-personality syndrome” (Dissociative Identity Disorder is another thing entirely). Townsend used “quadro” because he wanted to capitalize on the dead-on-arrival emergence of quadrophonic sound and the fact that The Who consisted of four band members. When the structure of your lead character’s personality is based on how many people are in your group, your libretto is on pretty flimsy ground.

Between the two less-than-perfect opuses, Townsend worked on a multimedia project entitled Lifehouse with an equally twisted premise. The combination of logistical complexity and a confused vision put Townsend on the edge of a nervous breakdown and the band on the verge of a breakup. The project was canceled.

When you fail, the best thing you can do is learn from the experience and let it go, and that’s exactly what The Who did. They took the best pieces from Lifehouse, added a few more numbers, gave free rein to engineer Glyn Johns to create the best sound possible (novel thought!) and the result was Who’s Next, one of the truly great recordings in rock ‘n’ roll history and certainly the best thing The Who ever did.

There are few opening tracks that command your attention as completely as “Baba O’Riley,” with its mesmerizing synthetic pattern (courtesy of a Lowrie home organ), majestic rhythm, and crashing power chords. The title is a melding of the names of two of Townsend’s mentors, but that information is only relevant if you’re playing Trivial Pursuit. What is more important is Townsend’s claim that the subject matter of the song is the teenage population attending the Woodstock festival. While the claim is only partially supported by the lyrics themselves, there’s no doubt that the closing verse describes a scene that bears more than a passing resemblance to the muddy madness of Woodstock. Instead of seeing Woodstock as the grand festival of peace, love and happiness, Townsend saw it for what it was: a bunch of wiped-out imbeciles doing their absolute best to achieve permanent brain damage through psychedelic experimentation:

Teenage wasteland, it’s only teenage wasteland
Teenage wasteland, oh yeah
Teenage wasteland
They’re all wasted!

The lyrics are enhanced a millionfold by Roger Daltrey’s commanding delivery. I’ve always considered Daltrey one of the greatest lead singers in rock because of his exceptional interpretive ability. It’s not easy finding the right tone, phrasing and emotional level for a song written by someone else, especially when the person who wrote the lyrics is standing next to you in the studio waiting for you to fuck things up. As thousands of crappy covers of Beatles songs have proven, song interpretation is a challenging art all by itself, and Daltrey’s diverse performances on Who’s Next verify his mastery of the craft.

In “Baba O’Riley,” two moments stand out for me. The first is the delivery of the line, “I don’t need to be forgiven,” which he delivers with slightly more intensity, following it with the self-affirming repeated utterances of “yeah.” It sounds as if he’s been trying to express something inside for years and has finally found the right words—a joyful and liberating experience. The second is the way he delivers the catchphrase “teenage wasteland” immediately after the synthesizer passage. He could have chosen to scream those words; instead, he holds back and delivers them in an almost sweet, plaintive voice. The scream will come later with the disgust expressed in “They’re all wasted!” but here it’s like he’s shaking his head in sadness as he watches his generation united in mutually assured self-destruction.

Tough song to follow! “Bargain” was a pretty good choice for that role, as it shifts tonal gears and allows Daltrey the opportunity to grind out the vocals. Townshend’s guitar licks are excellent and Keith Moon stays focused enough for a few minutes to provide the appropriate thump. Townsend claims this is about losing one’s ego and giving oneself over to one’s guru, yeah, yeah, yeah. If he’s telling the truth, the man doesn’t need a guru—he needs therapy:

I’d pay any price just to get you
I’d work all my life and I will
To win you I’d stand naked, stoned and stabbed

The rest of the lyrics are classic love song masochism, so I call bullshit on Townsend . . . but I still like the song anyway.

“Love Ain’t for Keeping” is a nice break from the intensity of the first two songs and makes for a nice lead-in to Entwistle’s humorous ode to the spouse, “My Wife.” Entwistle couldn’t sing worth shit, but his low-key sincerity works here. Side 1 ends with “The Song is Over,” featuring alternating Townsend-Daltrey vocals. This is probably the most pretentious song on the album, and the line “I’ll sing my song to the wide open spaces” always calls up images of Julie Andrews shattering eardrums in The Sound of Music.

Happily flipping the disc, “Getting in Tune” is one of the strongest arrangements on the record, highlighted by John Entwistle’s delightfully melodic and lively bass counterpoint. Pompous ass Robert Christgau pronounced the lines, “I’m singing this note ’cause it fits in well with the chords I’m playing/I can’t pretend there’s any meaning here or in the things I’m saying” the “real theme” of Who’s Next, a classic example of a critic looking for a tidbit in an album to justify a pre-conceived notion. To me, those lines reflect a phase in the development of a song that many songwriters have experienced: you have a lovely melody and need some words but all you’re capable of in the moment is gibberish. McCartney’s “Yesterday” began life as “Scrambled Eggs,” so the phenomenon is not unusual. Sometimes the gibberish stays in a song because you’ve accidentally stumbled onto a string of words that happen to work (“the movement you need is on your shoulder” in “Hey Jude,” for example). Townsend is describing the process of “getting in tune” with oneself in the process of creation, a theme that appears nowhere else on Who’s Next.

I think there is a much stronger theme in Who’s Next . . . but I’ll get to that later.

“Going Mobile” is another Entwistle bass masterpiece surrounded by a song that describes the joys of living in a mobile home. What the fuck? The only people who can really relate to this song are old farts puttering around in their Winnebagos, a demographic that would not become The Who’s target audience for forty or so years. Perhaps Townsend was a visionary after all! Silly premise aside, it’s a bouncy little number, thanks to the rhythm section of Entwistle and Moon.

“Behind Blue Eyes,” is the dramatic monologue of an anti-social character where Daltrey displays better acting skills than he revealed in any of his film efforts. The character is a loser, and the dynamic of a loser is a self-fulfilling, other-validating cycle:

No one knows what it’s like
To be the bad man, to be the sad man
Behind blue eyes
No one knows what it’s like
To be hated, to be fated
To telling only lies
But my dreams, they aren’t as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance that’s never free

Our anti-hero yearns for empathy, feels he doesn’t deserve empathy and projects his bitterness onto those who fail to empathize, triggering a repulsion in others that reinforces the negative self-image. He is a victim; he is the cause of his victimization—a human paradox. Daltrey manages to capture the deep sadness, the desperate wish for recognition of his common humanity and his barely-under-the-surface anger that comes out in bursts (“And I blame YOU!”).

The arrangement is a masterpiece in itself, and a gorgeous piece of engineering. In the quiet segment, the acoustic guitar is perfectly placed in the far right channel, providing a soothing background throughout. Entwistle’s bass is placed on the opposite channel, though slightly closer to the center—a perfect placement that captures the subtle bottom and the supporting melody. Daltrey’s voice is placed slightly off-center with the harmonies slightly below his voice, which has the interesting effect of further highlighting the isolation of the acoustic guitar, which forms the foundation in the absence of a complete rhythm section. The tones are crystal clear and clean, with just the right amount of echo and reverb to enhance the sound without compromising the intimacy. The build to the bash section is perfect, and Keith Moon balances his typical freneticism with enough discipline so that the transition back to quiet is smooth and clean. “Behind Blue Eyes” is The Who at their best, a piece where everyone gets to show their talents in a clearly collaborative effort.

Who’s Next ends with a generational anthem of greater depth and insight than the regrettable cheekiness of “My Generation,” the majestic “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Musically and thematically linked to “Baba O’Riley,” the song exposes the astonishingly naïve idealism driving the various and sundry calls for revolution that sprung up with predictable regularity during the 1960s and early 70s. Like “Baba O’Riley,” the song opens synthetically, with a Lowrie TBO-1 patched fed into a synthesizer, again creating a mesmerizing, tantalizing introduction.

The narrator is a prototypical member of the new generation with a more nuanced perspective of the situation than most of his peers. Sure, he’d love things to change, but from the start, he casts serious doubt on the results of his generation’s change efforts:

We’ll be fighting in the streets with our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

The radicals of this period (and any other period you care to name) were characterized by dogmatic thought and a strong desire to weed out the heretics . . . “to sit in judgment of all wrong.” So while the narrator is open to a new world order, history tells him to balance hope with skepticism:

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again

In addition to the dig, “Smile and grin at the change all around,” the narrator takes a second swipe at the mass conformity of non-conformist hippies in the brilliant line, “Though I know that the hypnotized never lie.” Our hero also realizes that all the noise, all the demonstrations and all the slogans have changed very little except the superficial and fashionable:

There’s nothing in the street looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

The music up to this point has been The Who at their rocking best with strong contributions all around. The band takes a minute or so to have a good solid jam, then Daltrey returns with the final verse and chorus. At this point, it appears we’ve run out of lyrics with three minutes left to go! What now?

Now they’re going to take this sucker to a whole ‘nother level.

The band launches into another jam, this one with more bottom and more frenetic thumping from Keith Moon. The synthesizer is placed in deep background for several bars, gradually asserting its presence as the band plays out the string. The absolute stillness surrounding the synth pattern heightens our sense of anticipation—then suddenly the melodic pattern collapses into a single, quickly-repeated note communicating tremendous urgency. Keith Moon drops in with a series of stuttering rolls in rhythmic counterpoint to the synth pattern, all building up to the greatest fucking scream in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Baseline rhythm restored, Daltrey delivers the clincher, a powerful couplet that says it all:

Meet the new boss:
Same as the old boss.

There are very few moments in rock history as thrilling as the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and it gives me the chills every time I hear it.

While Tommy seems terribly dated, Who’s Next retains its freshness forty-five years after its release. This is The Who at their best, coming together after a period of deep frustration and letting it rip. And despite its origin as something pieced together from the rubble, Who’s Next winds up having a stronger unifying theme than either Tommy or Quadrophenia, captured in a pithy, punchy phrase:

“Get fucking real, people!”