| Who's Next | ||||
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| Released | 2 August 1971 (1971-8-2)[1] | |||
| Recorded | April–June 1971 | |||
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| Genre | ||||
| Length | 43:39 | |||
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| Producer |
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| The Who chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Who's Next | ||||
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Who's Next is the fifth studio album by the English rock bandthe Who, released on 2 August 1971, byTrack Records in the United Kingdom andDecca Records in the United States. It developed from the abortedLifehouse project, a multi-mediarock opera conceived by the group's guitaristPete Townshend as a follow-up to the band's 1969 albumTommy. The project was cancelled owing to its complexity and to conflicts withKit Lambert, the band's manager, but the group salvaged some of the songs, without the connecting story elements, to release as their next album. Eight of the nine songs onWho's Next were fromLifehouse, with the lone exception being theJohn Entwistle-penned "My Wife". Ultimately, the remainingLifehouse tracks would all be released on other albums throughout the next decade.
The Who recordedWho's Next with assistance from recording engineerGlyn Johns. After producing the song "Won't Get Fooled Again" in theRolling Stones Mobile Studio, they relocated toOlympic Studios to record and mix most of the album's remaining songs. They made prominent use ofsynthesizer on the album, particularly on "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley", which were both released assingles. The cover photo was shot byEthan Russell; it made reference to themonolith in the 1968 film2001: A Space Odyssey, as it featured the band standing by a concrete piling protruding from aslag heap in South Yorkshire, apparently having urinated against it.
The album was an immediate critical and commercial success and has since been viewed by many critics as the Who's best album, as well as one of the greatest albums of all time. It has been reissued onCD several times, often with additional songs originally intended forLifehouse included as bonus tracks.Who's Next was ranked number 77 onRolling Stone's 2020 edition of its "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list.
By 1970, the Who had obtained significant critical and commercial success, but they had started to become detached from their original audience. Themod movement had vanished, and the original followers fromShepherd's Bush had grown up and acquired jobs and families. The group had started to drift apart from managerKit Lambert, owing to his preoccupation with his label,Track Records.[8] They had been touring since the release ofTommy the previous May, with a set that contained most of that album, but realised that millions had now seen their live performances, andPete Townshend in particular recognised that they needed to do something new.[9] A single, "The Seeker", and a live album,Live at Leeds, were released in 1970,[10] and an EP of new material ("Water", "Naked Eye", "I Don't Even Know Myself", "Postcard", and "Now I'm a Farmer") was recorded, but not released, as the band felt it would not be a satisfactory follow-up toTommy.[11]
Instead, the group tackled a project calledLifehouse. This evolved from a series of columns Townshend wrote forMelody Maker in August 1970, in which he discussed the importance of rock music, and in particular what the audience could do.[12] Of all the group, he was the most keen to use music as a communication device, and wanted to branch out into other media, including film, to get away from the traditional album/tour cycle.[13] Townshend has variously describedLifehouse as a futuristicrock opera, a live-recordedconcept album and as the music for a scripted film project.[14] The basic plot was outlined in an interview Townshend gave toDisc and Music Echo on 24 October 1970.[15]Lifehouse is set in the near future in a society in which music is banned and most of the population live indoors in government-controlled "experience suits". A rebel, Bobby, broadcasts rock music into the suits, allowing people to remove them and become more enlightened. Some elements accurately describe future technology; for example, The Grid resemblesthe internet and "grid sleep" resemblesvirtual reality.[16]
The group held a press conference on 13 January 1971, explaining that they would be giving a series of concerts at theYoung Vic theatre, where they would develop the fictional elements of the proposed film along with the audience.[16] AfterKeith Moon had completed his work on the film200 Motels, the group performed their first Young Vic concert on 15 February. The show included a new quadrophonicpublic address system which cost £30,000; the audience was mainly invited from various organisations, such as youth clubs, with only a few tickets on sale to the general public.[17]
After the initial concerts, at Lambert's suggestion the group flew to New York to make studio recordings atRecord Plant Studios. They were joined by guestsAl Kooper onHammond organ,Ken Ascher on piano, andLeslie West on guitar. Townshend used a 1957Gretsch guitar, given to him byJoe Walsh, during the session; it went on to become his main guitar for studio recording.[18] Lambert's participation in the recording was minimal, and he proved to be unable to mix the final recordings.[3] He had started taking hard drugs, while Townshend was drinking brandy regularly.[19] After returning to Britain, engineerGlyn Johns made safety copies of the Record Plant material, but decided it would be better to re-record the album from scratch atOlympic Sound Studios inBarnes.[3]
The group gave two more concerts at the Young Vic on 25 and 26 April, which were recorded on theRolling Stones Mobile Studio byAndy Johns, but Townshend grew disillusioned withLifehouse and further shows were cancelled.[20] Audiences at the Young Vic gigs were not interested in interacting with the group to create new material, but simply wanted the Who to play "My Generation" and smash a guitar.[21] The project proved to be intractable on several levels, and caused stress within the band, as well as a major falling-out between Townshend and Lambert. Years later, in the liner notes to the remastered CD, Townshend wrote that the failure of the project led him to the verge of anervous breakdown.[22] At the time,Roger Daltrey said the Who "were never nearer to breaking up".[23]
Although theLifehouse concept was abandoned, scraps of the project remained in the final album, including the use of synthesizers and computers.[24] An early concept forLifehouse featured the feeding of personal data from audience members into the controller of an earlyanalogue synthesizer to create a "universal chord" that would have ended the proposed film.[25] AbandoningLifehouse gave the group extra freedom, owing to the absence of an overriding musical theme or storyline (which had been present inTommy). This allowed the band to concentrate on maximising the impact of individual tracks and providing a unifying sound for them.[26]
Townshend continued to develop the concepts of theLifehouse project, revisiting them in later albums, including a 6-CD set,The Lifehouse Chronicles, in 1999.[27] In 2007, he launched a (now defunct) website calledThe Lifehouse Method to accept personal input from applicants that would be turned into musical portraits.[28]
The first session for what becameWho's Next was atMick Jagger's house,Stargroves, at the start of April 1971, using the Rolling Stones Mobile. The backing track of "Won't Get Fooled Again" was recorded there[3] before the band decided to relocate recording to Olympic at Johns' suggestion;[29] the first session there was on 9 April, attempting a basic take of "Bargain".[20] The bulk of the sessions occurred during May, when the group recorded "Time Is Passing", "Pure and Easy", "Love Ain't for Keeping" (which had been reworked from a rock track into an acoustic arrangement), "Behind Blue Eyes", "The Song Is Over", "Let's See Action" and "Baba O'Riley".Nicky Hopkins guested on piano, whileDave Arbus was invited by Moon to play violin on "Baba O'Riley".John Entwistle's "My Wife" was added to the album very late in the sessions, having been originally intended for a solo album.[23]
In contrast to the Record Plant and Young Vic sessions, recording with Johns went well, as he was primarily concerned with creating a good sound, whereas Lambert had always been more preoccupied with the group's image; Townshend recalled: "we were just getting astounded at the sounds Glyn was producing".[23] Townshend used early synthesizers and modified keyboard sounds in several modes, including as adrone effect on several songs, notably "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again",[30] but also "Bargain", "Going Mobile", and "The Song Is Over". The synthesizer was used as an integral part of the sound, as opposed to providing gloss, as was the case on other artists' albums up to that point.[31] Moon's drumming has a distinctly different style from earlier albums, being more formal and less reliant on long drum fills—partly owing to the synthesizer backing, but also due to the no-nonsense production techniques of Johns, who insisted on a good recording performance that used flamboyance only when truly necessary.[32] Johns was instrumental in convincing the Who that they should simply put a single-disc studio album out, believing the songs to be excellent. The group gave him free rein to assemble an album of whatever songs he wanted, in any order.[30] Despite Johns' key contributions, he only received an "associate producer" credit on the finished album,[23] though he maintained he acted mainly in an engineering capacity and based most of the arrangements on Townshend's original demos.[33]
The album opened with "Baba O'Riley", featuring piano and synthesizer-processedLowrey organ by Townshend. The song's title pays homage to Townshend's guru,Meher Baba, andminimalist composerTerry Riley, and it is informally known as "Teenage Wasteland", in reference to a line in the lyrics.[34] The organ track came from a longer demo by Townshend, portions of which were later included on a Baba tribute albumI Am,[35] that was edited down for the final recording. Townshend later said this part had "two or three thousand edits to it".[36] The opening lyrics to the next track, "Bargain" ("I'd gladly lose me to find you") came from a phrase used by Baba.[34] Entwistle wrote "My Wife" after having an argument with his wife, exaggerating the conflict in the lyrics. The track features several overdubbed brass instruments recorded in a single half-hour session.[37] "Pure and Easy", a key track fromLifehouse, did not make the final track selection, but the opening line was included as a coda to "The Song is Over".[34]
"Behind Blue Eyes" featured three-part harmony by Daltrey, Townshend, and Entwistle and was written for the main antagonist inLifehouse, Jumbo. Moon, uncharacteristically, did not appear on the first half of the track, which was later described by Who biographerDave Marsh as "the longest time Keith Moon was still in his entire life."[35] The closing track, "Won't Get Fooled Again", was critical of revolutions. Townshend explained: "a revolution is only a revolution in the long run and a lot of people are going to get hurt".[34] The song features the Lowrey organ fed through anARP synthesizer, which came from Townshend's original demo and was re-used for the finished track.[29]
The front cover of the album is a photograph, taken on 4 July 1971 on the way from Sheffield to Leicester, of the band apparently having just collectively urinated on a large concrete piling protruding from aslag heap.[38] The idea to shoot the picture came from Entwistle and Moon discussingStanley Kubrick and the film2001: A Space Odyssey.[39] According to photographerEthan Russell, only Townshend actually urinated against the piling, so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect. The sky in the background was added later byJohn Kosh, who was the art director, to give the image what Russell called "this other worldly quality."[40] The rear cover shows the band backstage atDe Montfort Hall,Leicester, amid a cluttered mess of furniture.[41] In 2003, the television channelVH1 named the cover ofWho's Next one of the greatest album covers of all time.[42]
Other suggestions for the cover included the group urinating against aMarshall Stack and an overweight nude woman with the Who's faces in place of her genitalia.[41] An alternative cover featuring Moon dressed in blacklingerie and a brown wig and holding a whip was later used as part of the inside art of the 1995 and 2003 CD releases of the album. Some of the photographs taken during these sessions were also used as part of Decca's United States promotion of the album.[43]
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The lead single from the album, "Won't Get Fooled Again" (edited down to three and a half minutes), was released ahead of the album on 25 June 1971 in the UK and in July in the US; it reached #9 and #15 in the charts of the respective countries.[44] The album was released on 2 August in the US and on 27 August in the UK. It became the only album by the Who to top the UK charts.[45]
The Who started touring the US just before the album was released.[46] They used theLifehouse PA, though soundmanBob Pridden found the technical requirements of the equipment to be over-complicated.[47] The set list was revamped, and, while it included a smaller selection of numbers fromTommy, several songs from the new album, such as "My Wife", "Baba O'Riley", and "Won't Get Fooled Again", became live favourites. The latter two songs involved the band playing to abacking track containing the synthesizer parts.[48] The tour moved to the UK in September, including a show atThe Oval inKennington in front of 35,000 fans and the opening gig at theRainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, before going back to the US, ending inSeattle on 15 December. The group then took eight months off touring, the longest break of their career at that point.[49]
Several songs recorded at theWho's Next sessions, but not included on the album, were later released as singles or on compilations. "Let's See Action" was released as a single in 1971,[26] while "Pure and Easy" and "Too Much of Anything" were released onOdds & Sods,[26] and "Time is Passing" was added to the 1998 CD version of that album.[50] The longest version of the cover "Baby Don't You Do It" from the sessions that is currently available is on the 2003 deluxe edition ofWho's Next.[51]
The album has been re-issued and remastered several times using tapes from different sessions. The master tapes for the Olympic sessions are believed to be lost, asVirgin Records threw out a substantial number of old recordings when they purchased the studio in the 1980s.[52] Video game publisherHarmonix wanted to releaseWho's Next as downloadable, playable content for themusic video game seriesRock Band, but were unable to do so due to their inability to find the originalmultitrack recordings. Instead, a compilation of Who songs dubbedThe Best of The Who, which includes three of the album's songs ("Behind Blue Eyes", "Baba O'Riley", and "Going Mobile") was released as downloadable content.[53] The 16-track tapes for "Won't Get Fooled Again" and the 8-track tapes for the other material, except for "Bargain" and "Getting in Tune", have since been discovered.[52]
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |  [54] |
| Christgau's Record Guide | A[55] |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | [56] |
| Mojo |  [57] |
| MusicHound Rock | 5/5[58] |
| Q | [59] |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | [6] |
| Tom Hull – on the Web | A+[60] |
| The Village Voice | A+[61] |
Reviewing forThe Village Voice in 1971, music criticRobert Christgau calledWho's Next "the best hard rock album in years" and said that, while their previous recordings were marred by a thin sound, the group now "achieves the same resonant immediacy in the studio that it does live".[61] Billy Walker fromSounds highlighted the songs "Baba O'Riley", "My Wife", and "The Song Is Over", and wrote: "After the unique brilliance ofTommy something special had to be thought out and the fact that they settled for a straight-forward album rather than an extension of their rock opera, says much for their courage and inventiveness."[62]Rolling Stone magazine'sJohn Mendelsohn felt that, despite some amount of seriousness and artificiality, the album's brand of rock and roll is "intelligently-conceived, superbly-performed, brilliantly-produced, and sometimes even exciting".[63] At the end of 1971, the record was voted the best album of the year in thePazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics published byThe Village Voice.[64]
Retrospectively,Who's Next has often been viewed as the Who's best album.[59] In a review forAllMusic,Stephen Thomas Erlewine said its music was more genuine thanTommy or the abortedLifehouse project because "those were art – [Who's Next], even with its pretensions, is rock & roll."[54]BBC Music's Chris Roberts cited it as the band's best record and "one of those carved-in-stone landmarks that therock canon doesn't allow you to bad-mouth."[65]Mojo claimed its sophisticated music andhook-laden songs featured innovative use of rock synthesizers that did not weaken the Who's characteristic "power-quartet attack".[57] InThe Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1998),Colin Larkin said the album raised the standards for both hard rock and the Who, whose "sense ofdynamics" was highlighted by thecontrast between their powerful playing and acounterpoint produced at times by acoustic guitars and synthesizerobbligatos.[56] Christgau, on the other hand, was less enthusiastic about the record during the 1980s, when the Who became what he felt was "the worst kind of art-rock band", writing thatWho's Next revealed itself to be less tasteful in retrospect because of Daltrey's histrionic singing and "all that synth noodling".[66]
In 2003,Rolling Stone ranked it 28th on its list ofthe 500 greatest albums of all time;[67] it maintained this rank on the 2012 edition of the list,[68] and was ranked 77th on the 2020 edition.[69] It appeared at number 15 onPitchfork Media's 2004 list of the 100 best records from the 1970s,[70] and was included in the book1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2005).[71] TheClassic AlbumsBBC documentary series aired an episode onWho's Next, initially on radio in 1989, and then on television in 1998,[72] which was released in 2006 on DVD asClassic Albums: The Who – Who's Next.[73] That year, it was chosen byTime as one of the 100 best albums of all time.[74] In 2007, the album was inducted into theGrammy Hall of Fame for "lasting qualitative or historical significance".[75] It was voted number 48 in the 3rd Edition ofColin Larkin'sAll Time Top 1000 Albums.[76]
All tracks are written byPete Townshend, except "My Wife" byJohn Entwistle
| No. | Title | Lead vocal | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Baba O'Riley" |
| 5:08 |
| 2. | "Bargain" |
| 5:34 |
| 3. | "Love Ain't for Keeping" | Daltrey | 2:10 |
| 4. | "My Wife" | Entwistle | 3:41 |
| 5. | "The Song Is Over" |
| 6:14 |
| Total length: | 22:47 | ||
| No. | Title | Lead vocal | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Getting in Tune" | Daltrey | 4:50 |
| 2. | "Going Mobile" | Townshend | 3:42 |
| 3. | "Behind Blue Eyes" | Daltrey | 3:42 |
| 4. | "Won't Get Fooled Again" | Daltrey | 8:32 |
| Total length: | 20:46 | ||
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Pure And Easy" | 4:19 |
| 2. | "Baby Don't You Do It" | 5:13 |
| 3. | "Naked Eye" | 5:22 |
| 4. | "Too Much Of Anything" | 4:24 |
| 5. | "I Don't Even Know Myself" | 4:54 |
| 6. | "Behind Blue Eyes" | 3:25 |
The Who
Additional musicians
Production
| Chart (1971) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| Australian Albums (Kent Music Report)[78] | 3 |
| Canada Top Albums/CDs (RPM)[79] | 5 |
| Danish Albums (Hitlisten)[80] | 3 |
| Dutch Albums (Album Top 100)[81] | 2 |
| Finnish Albums (Suomen virallinen lista)[82] | 9 |
| German Albums (Offizielle Top 100)[83] | 18 |
| Norwegian Albums (VG-lista)[84] | 6 |
| UK Albums (OCC)[85] | 1 |
| USBillboard 200[86] | 4 |
| Chart (2013) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| Italian Albums (FIMI)[87] | 100 |
| Chart (2014) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| USBillboardTop Pop Catalog[88] | 7 |
| Chart (2020) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| Belgian Albums (Ultratop Wallonia)[89] | 156 |
| Chart (2023) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| Austrian Albums (Ö3 Austria)[90] | 38 |
| Belgian Albums (Ultratop Flanders)[91] | 173 |
| Belgian Albums (Ultratop Wallonia)[92] | 30 |
| German Albums (Offizielle Top 100)[93] | 14 |
| Japanese Albums (Oricon)[94] | 35 |
| Japanese Hot Albums (Billboard Japan)[95] | 46 |
| Spanish Albums (PROMUSICAE)[96] | 77 |
| Swedish Physical Albums (Sverigetopplistan)[97] | 5 |
| Swiss Albums (Schweizer Hitparade)[98] | 39 |
| Region | Certification | Certified units/sales |
|---|---|---|
| Italy (FIMI)[99] | Platinum | 50,000‡ |
| United Kingdom (BPI)[100] release of 1993 | Platinum | 300,000‡ |
| United States (RIAA)[101] | 3× Platinum | 3,000,000^ |
^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. | ||
...Who's Next is paradoxically also the first record on which an arena-rock band sounds downright Wembley Stadium–large.
WHO'S NEXT is The Who's most polished album, its hook-ridden songs pioneering the use of rock synthesizers without diluting the power-quartet attack that had defined the group since the mid-60s...
Considered by many to be the band's best, 1971's WHO'S NEXT was their only Number 1 album...
Quotations from Wikiquote
Data from Wikidata
