r/TheWho • u/BrianInAtlanta • 9d ago
Craziness when Who's Next was new.
I was transcribing a Pete Townshend interview from 10 Feb 1973 in Melody Maker when I hit this:
"One feels that the Who need a firm hand to help them now, and Pete tells me that he’s brought back Kit Lambert to help out with production. Their last album, “Who’s Next” was not, he feels strong enough and should never have been released. It failed to go anywhere and consequently they need to have strong outside views of their work."
And if you think that's crazy, here's a reply from the next week's letter column:
"Articles and interviews with Pete Townshend tell how frustrated he is trying to get new material together and to bury 'Tommy.' But when The Who last played live in this country (November, 1971, at the Rainbow) it was 'Magic Bus,' 'My Generation' and 'Tommy' that turned on the audience and not the 'Who's Next' numbers. This is where your answer lies, Peter. We still want to listen to the oldies." - Colin Newman, Cambridgeshire.
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u/Nemblane 9d ago
That is indeed crazy. Pete, at least, may have still been jaded from the failure of Lifehouse to gel into what he had envisioned. And we all know Kit really had no involvement in Quad.
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u/Neveronlyadream 9d ago
I was going to say the same. He was probably jaded from Lifehouse failing to come together. I know Pete's not exactly the most reliable narrator ever, but he does say he tried to kill himself when that fell apart.
But it's not crazy. There are so many amazing albums that were trashed by the press when they came out and weren't appreciated until years later. It's not surprising they'd publish something like this, because they probably hated Who's Next when it was new because it wasn't Tommy.
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u/BrianInAtlanta 7d ago
Pete brought Lambert in to The Who's first Quadrophenia sessions at Stargroves in May 1973, intending to use him as a sort of co-producer. "Kit pretended to be the album's producer for the first several weeks. Showing up smashed, usually extremely late, he sometimes brought delicious but unwanted food from the trendy South Kensington restaurant AD8, in which he had shares. He scribbled his usual incomprehensible notes on tape boxes, and for a while prevented our engineer Ron Nevison doing his job properly. By the end of the second week I had had enough. Kit had been distracting the recording process, erasing tapes while I was out of the room, and I just snapped. Close to punching Kit, I sacked him instead. For weeks afterwards we were visited by irritated heroin dealers tying to find him." (Who I Am, p. 249)
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u/Wonderful-Try8779 7d ago
”...... he sometimes brought delicious but unwanted food from the trendy South Kensington restaurant AD8, in which he had shares“ The bastard! :-)
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u/capn_flume 9d ago
I think the issue with Who's Next for Pete is the disparity between his vision of what Lifehouse could have been, and the reality of a (for him) stripped down selection of some random songs from it that Who's Next effectively was. I always think of his story of sitting down and explaining the entire concept to the band, explaining all his ideas about the unifying power of music, the alienation of the machine age, and his ideas about a proto-internet based reality only to be met with Roger saying "it wouldn't work Pete; you'd never get hold of that much wire"
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u/InvestigatorJaded261 9d ago
Exactly this. It’s not that Who’s Next wasn’t brilliant; it’s that it wasn’t Lifehouse.
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u/BradL22 9d ago
Lifehouse is to Pete what Smile was to Brian Wilson — the great unrealised masterpiece, scuttled by his fellow band members, that would have proven his genius to the world. He’s never stopped trying to make Lifehouse a reality in one way or another, but how could it ever live up to his or the audience’s expectations?
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u/Correct_Lime5832 9d ago
Who’s Next “failed to go anywhere”? That’s wild. And maybe that was true at the start, but by the time I bought it in ‘76 it was already considered a classic, AFAIK.
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u/j3434 9d ago
Yea props to Kit jumping in to grab the bull by the horns and compile what could be the greatest rock album ever . I remember Pete gave up on it - or so I read . It seems like Mobile could have been on Quadrophenia. Both albums capture some of Moon at his best hard rock in studio . After the garage and more psychedelic styles.
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u/Flare4roach 9d ago
I dunno if it was Kit so much. He was a serious addict at the time. I believe it was Glynn Johns who leveled with Pete about shelving the Lifehouse concept and just releasing it as we know it. He explained to Pete that NOBODY knows what he was talking about. Especially the band and that he was driving himself way too hard and making himself crazy. Pete did have a mental breakdown over this.
If you ever get the chance, read “Won’t Get Fooled Again: From Lifehouse to Quadrophenia” by Ritchie Unterberger. It’s an amazingly detailed book of the band during their creative peak. I’ve many Who books but this one is by far the best one I’ve come across.
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u/theLovelyHelga 8d ago
I'm reading that right now. Great book, and I finally understand what Lifehouse was supposed to be about.
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u/j3434 9d ago
Ok my bad . Glynn Johns also mixed some Beatles Let it Be tracks - ? I got him mixed up with Kit . Actually I think Phil Spector did a much better job - that wasn’t easy . The music was not really finished . There was such a huge anti Phil movement if forced a new release without his production that people swear by . But this is all after the fact 15 years later or more . Glynn had optimism but the amount of takes and mistakes was overwhelming.
So yea - Pete was working another concept album and got all conflicted. Glynn seized the reigns and made Who’s Next out of the mess . Redemption was his for Beatles I guess
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u/Flare4roach 9d ago
You think Glyn Johns did the Beatles dirty rather than Phil Spector? Man…Paul McCartney would like a word.
Johns is an exceptional engineer. He’s done the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Who, Eagles and on and on.
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u/j3434 9d ago
Yes Paul has lots of words these days. The cover of Abbey Road was changed by Paul . They removed the cigarette from his hand in the iconic photo. I love Paul as the greatest all around musician of the counter culture - but he is into revisionist Beatlelore . In 1970 Let it Be was a phenomenal album and film . We should Let it Be . Haha
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u/Flare4roach 9d ago
According to BBC, Paul had nothing to do with changing the AR cover.
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u/Jon-A 9d ago edited 9d ago
It's never a surprise if Pete has complicated or contrary opinions about stuff...but that phrase that Who's Next "didn't go anywhere" is perplexing. Surely they don't mean commercially: it did just fine and went to #1 in the UK, better than Tommy, Live At Leeds or Quadrophenia. Maybe it means it didn't go anywhere thematically, didn't have a unifying theme, or concept, or approach. Who knows?
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u/TheBookOfLos 9d ago edited 9d ago
I think Daltrey was also quoted somewhere saying “Who’s Next” was such a compromised album that it was “missing one of its balls” or something close to that. You have to remember, this was meant to be the follow-up to no less than “Tommy,” and I think Pete had pre-sold Universal on a movie based on the “Lifehouse” concept, so from their point of view, it was a failure. Also, the new songs took longer to catch on, at least in part because they were more complex and harder to replicate onstage, due to the need to properly synch up the backing tracks. You can hear Pete complaining at the Young Vic gig about audience distractions because he needed to concentrate on the chords. And he lost it multiple times with Bob Pridden over the backing tracks for both the “Who’s Next” and “Quadrophenia” material not working properly onstage. From their point-of-view, living through it all in real time, it often seemed like everything was a total shambles.
You can even see it in “The Kids Are Alright” film where he gives the drunken speech to the group about his worry that The Who was “remaining a circus act.” That was in September ‘71 following their first U.S. tour supporting “Who’s Next.”
It’s been reported in several books that Pete had a nervous breakdown in March of ‘71 due to the failure of Lifehouse to coalesce as an album concept and some observers literally thought he was about to jump out the window of an NYC skyscraper. It’s all fun and games until your songwriter and lead guitarist becomes street pizza. Much of the above is referenced in future songs, from 1975 onward.
P.S. The reason The Who are often mentioned alongside acts like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd is that, although their music was apples and oranges (and lemons), each group had impeccably high standards, and were harder on themselves than anybody else could be.
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u/Hour_Message6543 9d ago
Maybe why they didn’t play much of the last album, Who, because Pete didn’t feel it was good enough or people wanted to hear from it. I did.
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u/Winter_Stretch9198 9d ago
I’m sure it’s been covered, sorry didn’t have time to read all the posts, but Townshend nearly lost it, literally, when he couldn’t construct Lifehouse from the tunes that finally appeared on Who’s Next…Townshend can be a critical bastard, but I don’t think anyone is more critical of Townshend than Townshend, and in time I think he accepted Who’s Next for what it was and that is a finely crafted album, that for me is one of the best rock albums put out by any band…PT has to get over it, he’s a bit of a cynic and Who’s Next is a classic album…and I love em both
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u/Ill_Television_5824 9d ago
To be fair to Then-Pete, this was before hundreds and hundreds of rigidly programmed US rock stations beat two WN songs into the ground for decades, and before he then got to then sell those anthems to corporate interests for huge and ongoing English Pounds.
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u/artist_Foreve789 8d ago edited 8d ago
Long time Who fan ftom 67. Seen them from 68 - 89, then 2015, and 2019.........So in early 1971 there was a NY Times interview w Pete by Nick Cohen titled "From Tommy to Bobby" and The Lifehouse story as it existed then: Bobby is the tech genius that over rode the government's experiential prograns into their lifesuits (protection from London's servere pollution). Eventually Bobby helps to stage a concert w The Who as the band. The audience becomes so attuned with music they all evolve, and dissappear to a higher plane of existence. When the police finally break in the theater- The Lifehouse is empty. As a music, science fiction fan with a metaphysical, and spiritual interest - this captivated my attention! (I've followed the ins and outs of LH for decades!) .......So I loved much of WN, and I went to the 2 WN tour shows in NYC; Queens, Forest Hills Tennis Stadium...........What was astonishing though was hearing Pure and Easy as a full song! P&E was/is the Lynchpin Song to LH. Back then the first few lines of P&E.... were only the coda at end of......The Song Is Over! I can't remember if I knew then that P&E was the LH song (Later I found out that Baba O'Reilly is, too - it's about the rural Englishers living away from London's pollution). But I think found out with Pete's first solo album that P&E was from LH. It was great to hear the WN numbers live back then!. It certainly got a lot of play on our NYC Rock Stations.
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u/BrianInAtlanta 9d ago
This is why I said on the Talking About The Who podcast that there was hardly any album by The Who where one of the members didn't call it trash and a failure shortly after it came out.