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| For my money, that's the one you're after... |
It’s fitting to talk about the demise of one maniacally-ambitious project in a post that will end by talking about the demise of several other projects, if the latter were only too ambitious for one man attempting to maximize the internet in order to make the voices in his head calm down. I’ll close with that.
Reviving the Bins Project with a chapter on the band who bundled their greatest hits onto the first cassette I ever bought felt fitting, centering, even a little poetic. When my mom took me to…Kmart(?) and offered to buy a cassette for me (which I don’t even remember asking for), I don’t recall seeing anything else but The Who’s Greatest Hits, the one with a Union Jack jacket on the cover. I have zero recollection of how 11-year-old me came to decide that a cassette by The Who was the one I just had to have. I do, however, remember my oldest sister asking me to record a live radio broadcast of a concert of theirs that she went to see in Indianapolis – one after The Who’s infamous concert in Cincinnati where 11 people got trampled to death. (So called, “festival seating” caused that, by the way, and not the band, but they still got banned from Cincinnati, because that’s how America’s municipalities roll, I guess.)
I started the predecessor site to this one, A Project of Self Indulgence, as a review/farewell to my record collection, which I figured I’d stop listening to once I got lost in the infinite wilds of streaming services like Spotify. It became clearer and clearer, as I worked through my catalog, that I knew very little about the music. Worse, I knew far, far less (far, far, far less) about the artists who made it all. And I think that’s why I cracked up and deleted it.
Reviving the Bins Project with a chapter on the band who bundled their greatest hits onto the first cassette I ever bought felt fitting, centering, even a little poetic. When my mom took me to…Kmart(?) and offered to buy a cassette for me (which I don’t even remember asking for), I don’t recall seeing anything else but The Who’s Greatest Hits, the one with a Union Jack jacket on the cover. I have zero recollection of how 11-year-old me came to decide that a cassette by The Who was the one I just had to have. I do, however, remember my oldest sister asking me to record a live radio broadcast of a concert of theirs that she went to see in Indianapolis – one after The Who’s infamous concert in Cincinnati where 11 people got trampled to death. (So called, “festival seating” caused that, by the way, and not the band, but they still got banned from Cincinnati, because that’s how America’s municipalities roll, I guess.)
I started the predecessor site to this one, A Project of Self Indulgence, as a review/farewell to my record collection, which I figured I’d stop listening to once I got lost in the infinite wilds of streaming services like Spotify. It became clearer and clearer, as I worked through my catalog, that I knew very little about the music. Worse, I knew far, far less (far, far, far less) about the artists who made it all. And I think that’s why I cracked up and deleted it.
I bring up all the above because that pattern started with how I consumed The Who. Greatest hits albums were all I ever listened to – whether the greatest hits album named above, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, or The Kids Are Alright, which, as it happens is a soundtrack to a documentary – so I’d never actually sat through an actual album by The Who, i.e., an original product put out for first-time consumption, and not something re-hashed. Well, Tommy excepted. I knew that album very well, even remember the look of the cover from lifting out of the stack of my sister’s records to play it just one more time.
I loved Tommy – and, musically, I still think it’s one hell of an album. I also remember seeing the movie at some point in high school (maybe even junior high), and how it all sounded wrong with other people singing the songs. A hard pass on Oliver Reed droning, Ann Margaret over-acting, or The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, just singing in character (“Uncle Ernie”) takes nothing more than ear test, but even world-caliber talent like Tina Turner (“The Acid Queen”) and Elton John (“Pinball Wizard”) couldn’t shake the studio album’s hold (even if I know now that Turner’s “The Acid Queen” is no-contest better). It hardly helped that the movie…kinda sucks. It starts with the performances, but the plot is straight-up fucking ridiculous – so ridiculous that I summarized it for a friend who had never seen just today. Oh, and I just realized how thoroughly problematic it was that Uncle Ernie returned to work at the “holiday camp” Tommy built for his cult of followers, people he encouraged to play pinball with their eyes and ears covered, and a cork in their mouth to attain…oof, I don’t know what you get outta that.
The larger point is that, I had a deeper falling out with The Who. Living where I did (Cintucky, as some people call Cincinnati), between songs like “Squeeze Box,” and how badly I decided people misread “We Don’t Get Fooled Again” sort of turned me against The Who (that said, watching Moon in the live show linked to right there shows what made him so good - e.g., endless fills; the man was a legit, textural maniac). They slowly became a meathead band, something for guys in muscle cars who drank bad beer and picked fights with strangers. People who beat up people like me, basically. After a solid 10 years of sneering at classic rock, a friend recommended a BBC Sessions compilation that had just come out (“just” being circa 2000). That contained a bunch of their early stuff that got lost in all the “Cintucky” bullshit – e.g., “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” “Leaving Here,” and, most importantly, “A Quick One (While He’s Away)” (the best production you'll ever hear on that track, btw) The day I listened to that BBC Sessions compilation was the day I recalled that my 11-year-old self was smarter about music than I’d been throughout my 20s…
…but I still didn’t know even one inch of dick about The Who. And that’s what I set out to change over the past month.
“The Who's major contributions to rock music include the development of the Marshall stack, large PA systems, use of the synthesizer, Entwistle and Moon's lead playing styles, Townshend's feedback and power chord guitar technique, and the development of the rock opera.”
At their worst, Wikipedia’s entry on a band are nothing but a dry recital of the albums put out and which festivals they’ve played and when. I lifted the quote above from Wikipedia’s page on The Who, and that provides one of the finest examples you’ll ever see of having the right person (or people) write a Wikipedia page. I mean, that thing is, awesome, full of great anecdotes like: their bassist, John Entwistle building his first bass upon discovering his fingers were “too large” for guitar strings, because he couldn't afford to buy one (or that he died of an overdose in his fucking 50s); that Pete Townshend picked up playing combined rhythm and lead guitar from a guy named Nick Green from Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, a band they looked up to; or that Roger Daltrey was a tyrant in the band’s early days who “assaulted” Keith Moon in the band’s earliest days (that said, that wasn’t the only assault, and certainly not the only one involving Moon); and just….Keith Moon in general, whether mayhem with cherry bombs, otherwise destroyed hotel rooms, and his long decline and later tragi-stupid death. The Who were goddamn wild, rock stars in the fullest sense of the world, exploding drum kits and busted ear-drums, and all. Related, this is fantastic:
“After a gig in Flint, Michigan on Moon's 21st birthday on 23 August 1967, the entourage caused $24,000 of damage at the hotel, and Moon knocked out one of his front teeth. Daltrey later said that the tour brought the band closer…”
To loop back to Tommy, that got buried in critical acclaim on its release in 1969 (fun quote: “Surely the Who are now the band against which all others are to be judged”). Set aside the fact that, to this day (especially after listening to it today), I still hear it as people singing just ridiculous shit over really good music, The Who released a project as wildly ambitious as a rock opera just five years into their official existence, and maybe eight years after their formation into the “original” band. (By which I mean, the Entwistle, Townshend, Daltrey and Moon set-up; also, Doug Sandom might have the saddest bio of anyone in rock ever; see his audition with The Beachcombers, also, Moon’s old band).
Tommy wasn’t The Who’s last concept album; they released the decidedly more coherent, compelling, and relatable Quadrophenia in 1973 (and the main character, Jimmy, contains a facet of each member of The Who within himself), an ode to the mod culture in which they came up (very briefly, as the High Numbers; and they were The Who prior to that). Quadrophenia has its faults - it's a rock opera, for one, but a lot of those songs repeat (especially the echoing, "Real Me"), but all of that is forgiven for having the flat-out incredible, and personal favorites, "5:15" and "Drowned," along with some excellent back-ups. As it turns out, Pete Townshend – who, after Daltrey’s early dominance of the band, became its primary creative vehicle – had a crack at an epic rock opera/piece of madness in between those two albums, a project he called Lifehouse.
“Things deteriorated until Townshend had a nervous breakdown and abandoned Lifehouse.”
Lifehouse did not go well. For starters, it involved holding a venue hostage for an extended period of time in order to find the “right vibrations.” Second, it involved an impossible number of moving parts – e.g., an regular, repeating audience made up of people profiled “from the individual’s astrological chart to his hobbies, even physical appearance.” In Townshend's original vision, the whole thing would eventually evolve into a transcendental musical experience where some people from the audience would mingle with The Who on stage, live, while everyone else would “dance themselves into oblivion.” The whole thing would resolve with that collective population and/or energy finding “the perfect chord,” and incalculable bliss. And all this would be captured on film and distributed much like Tommy (also, the movie/concert was almost titled "Bobby"). If this is what you’re trying to do, yes, a nervous breakdown will reliably follow therefrom. All the same, no one can reasonably argue that either The Who, or Townshend in particular, lacked for ambition. For anyone curious, but too lazy to dick around with the links, here’s a synopsis of Lifehouse’s plot:
“It’s a fantasy set at a time when rock ’n’ roll didn’t exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. In a way they lived as if they were in television programmes. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who’d kept rock ‘n’ roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle.”
Lifehouse both never came out, but also came out, in musical form, in 1971, and in 1993 as a reimagined concept album called Psychoderelict. The songs Townshend composed for Lifehouse showed up on Who’s Next, and later compilations – and you can see on which compilations, and how he wanted to plot them out on his envisioned Lifehouse album. My only thoughts there are, what did “Teenage Wasteland” originally sound like, and what would it be like to hear “Baba O’Reilly” two songs later as a separate, and it took reading the Wikipedia entry on Lifehouse to understand what the hell those guys were on about with “Relay,” “Join Together,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “The Song Is Over” (aka, Townshend’s proposed fourth side for the Lifehouse double album). Seriously, read the synopsis, listen to those in order, and you'll get it.
In the interest of time, and because there are (undoubtedly) whole goddamn books dedicated to The Who, I’ll be cutting off here and without mentioning some major details – e.g., pop art, the mod movement, and Meher Baba (and if you think he didn’t matter, how about this: “The synthesizer intro to "Baba O'Riley" was programmed based on Meher Baba's vital stats…”). There’s a ton out there, in other words.
On a happier, less frustrated note, I finally listened to The Who’s albums, and near as I could get to when they were put out. For the past couple weeks, I listened to everything from My Generation, the band’s first full length album, to 1981’s well past it, Face Dances (which, for all its faults, still boasts the incredible ode to sloppy aging, “You Better You Bet” and “Another Tricky Day,” plus the Entwistle track “The Quiet One”). For what it’s worth, I’d dub the pop-art heavy The Who Sell Out, the band’s pivot point between their early mod days and their days of concept albums and the loudest damn concerts in human history (I have to believe to that point; I mean, surely, someone has topped 120 decibels just to do it). That’s where “I Can See for Miles” entered the pop mainstream, but I found myself partial to “Armenia City in the Sky,” “Odorono,” “Sunrise,” and “I Can’t Reach You.” Also, dig the pirate radio/commercial parody spoofs, because that’s where the pop art stuff comes in.
As much as I love some of the later stuff – especially, the cream of the material slated for Lifehouse across various compilations – I’m a stout early-canon man. A lot of my favorites dropped as singles – “Pictures of Lily,” especially (which I only knew after Meaty Beaty, etc.), “Substitute,” “I’m a Boy,” “Leaving Here,” and “See My Way,” every one of which I heard through that BBC Sessions compilation. When it comes to directing interested parties to The Who’s pre- and post-The Who Sell Out phases, I’d push people toward A Quick One for the pre- era, and Who’s Next for the post. In keeping with the “early-canon” claim above, I’d take A Quick One to a desert island, but, even after you take “Baba O’Riley” and even “Behind Blue Eyes” off the table, Who’s Next still boasts “Bargain,” "My Wife” and, the classic of The Who classics (which feels…different now that I know where it came from) “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
With all the above out of the way, it is with massive regret that I announce that I just can’t go in depth on band’s like this, at least not while keeping up with other projects and, you know, life. When I relaunched, I had dreams of keeping up with three projects – the One-Hit Wonder project, the New to Me stuff, and the Bins Project stuff as well. And, no, there’s no way in hell I can do that. I tried to concoct multiple, time-folding schedules, which, surprisingly didn’t work out (see “time-folding”). As such, I’ll be going back to weekly playlists, ideally/hopefully punctuated by monthly playlists. What the first couple months have taught me is that giving myself more time only means diving into increasingly long and twisted rabbit holes that lead to nothing good or, worse, worth reading.
Anyway, the current plan is to return to posting on all three projects – e.g., One-Hit No More, New to Me (X 2) and the Bins Project – only in one weekly post that contains all three. I’ll confine whatever I write into a bare-bones history, fact-pattern of each band, plus one outstanding anecdote, and, ideally, the review of one or, at most, two albums. We’ll see how that goes, obviously.
To close out the actual post, The Who were an awesome goddamn band. Musically compelling, capable of being revolutionary (“Anywhere, Anyway, Anyhow” got cut out for pick sliding, fer crissakes) and, in their moment, a pop-culture-warping phenomenon. Maybe starting with them changed my own musical trajectory.
“It’s a fantasy set at a time when rock ’n’ roll didn’t exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. In a way they lived as if they were in television programmes. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who’d kept rock ‘n’ roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle.”
Lifehouse both never came out, but also came out, in musical form, in 1971, and in 1993 as a reimagined concept album called Psychoderelict. The songs Townshend composed for Lifehouse showed up on Who’s Next, and later compilations – and you can see on which compilations, and how he wanted to plot them out on his envisioned Lifehouse album. My only thoughts there are, what did “Teenage Wasteland” originally sound like, and what would it be like to hear “Baba O’Reilly” two songs later as a separate, and it took reading the Wikipedia entry on Lifehouse to understand what the hell those guys were on about with “Relay,” “Join Together,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “The Song Is Over” (aka, Townshend’s proposed fourth side for the Lifehouse double album). Seriously, read the synopsis, listen to those in order, and you'll get it.
In the interest of time, and because there are (undoubtedly) whole goddamn books dedicated to The Who, I’ll be cutting off here and without mentioning some major details – e.g., pop art, the mod movement, and Meher Baba (and if you think he didn’t matter, how about this: “The synthesizer intro to "Baba O'Riley" was programmed based on Meher Baba's vital stats…”). There’s a ton out there, in other words.
On a happier, less frustrated note, I finally listened to The Who’s albums, and near as I could get to when they were put out. For the past couple weeks, I listened to everything from My Generation, the band’s first full length album, to 1981’s well past it, Face Dances (which, for all its faults, still boasts the incredible ode to sloppy aging, “You Better You Bet” and “Another Tricky Day,” plus the Entwistle track “The Quiet One”). For what it’s worth, I’d dub the pop-art heavy The Who Sell Out, the band’s pivot point between their early mod days and their days of concept albums and the loudest damn concerts in human history (I have to believe to that point; I mean, surely, someone has topped 120 decibels just to do it). That’s where “I Can See for Miles” entered the pop mainstream, but I found myself partial to “Armenia City in the Sky,” “Odorono,” “Sunrise,” and “I Can’t Reach You.” Also, dig the pirate radio/commercial parody spoofs, because that’s where the pop art stuff comes in.
As much as I love some of the later stuff – especially, the cream of the material slated for Lifehouse across various compilations – I’m a stout early-canon man. A lot of my favorites dropped as singles – “Pictures of Lily,” especially (which I only knew after Meaty Beaty, etc.), “Substitute,” “I’m a Boy,” “Leaving Here,” and “See My Way,” every one of which I heard through that BBC Sessions compilation. When it comes to directing interested parties to The Who’s pre- and post-The Who Sell Out phases, I’d push people toward A Quick One for the pre- era, and Who’s Next for the post. In keeping with the “early-canon” claim above, I’d take A Quick One to a desert island, but, even after you take “Baba O’Riley” and even “Behind Blue Eyes” off the table, Who’s Next still boasts “Bargain,” "My Wife” and, the classic of The Who classics (which feels…different now that I know where it came from) “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
With all the above out of the way, it is with massive regret that I announce that I just can’t go in depth on band’s like this, at least not while keeping up with other projects and, you know, life. When I relaunched, I had dreams of keeping up with three projects – the One-Hit Wonder project, the New to Me stuff, and the Bins Project stuff as well. And, no, there’s no way in hell I can do that. I tried to concoct multiple, time-folding schedules, which, surprisingly didn’t work out (see “time-folding”). As such, I’ll be going back to weekly playlists, ideally/hopefully punctuated by monthly playlists. What the first couple months have taught me is that giving myself more time only means diving into increasingly long and twisted rabbit holes that lead to nothing good or, worse, worth reading.
Anyway, the current plan is to return to posting on all three projects – e.g., One-Hit No More, New to Me (X 2) and the Bins Project – only in one weekly post that contains all three. I’ll confine whatever I write into a bare-bones history, fact-pattern of each band, plus one outstanding anecdote, and, ideally, the review of one or, at most, two albums. We’ll see how that goes, obviously.
To close out the actual post, The Who were an awesome goddamn band. Musically compelling, capable of being revolutionary (“Anywhere, Anyway, Anyhow” got cut out for pick sliding, fer crissakes) and, in their moment, a pop-culture-warping phenomenon. Maybe starting with them changed my own musical trajectory.
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