Who's Next

Who's Next is the fifth studio album by the English rock band the Who, released on 2 August 1971, by Track Records in the United Kingdom and by Decca Records in the United States. It developed from the aborted Lifehouse project, a multi-media rock opera conceived by the group's guitarist Pete Townshend as a follow-up to the band's 1969 album Tommy. The project was cancelled owing to its complexity and to conflicts with Kit 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 on Who's Next were from Lifehouse, with the lone exception being the John Entwistle-penned "My Wife". Ultimately, the remaining Lifehouse tracks would all be released on other albums or as standalone singles throughout the next decade.

The Who recorded Who's Next with assistance from recording engineer Glyn Johns. After producing the song "Won't Get Fooled Again" in the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, they relocated to Olympic Studios to record and mix most of the album's remaining songs. They made prominent use of synthesisers on the album, particularly on "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley", which were both released as singles. The cover photo was shot by Ethan Russell; it made reference to the monolith in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it featured the band standing by a concrete piling protruding from a slag 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 on CD several times, often with additional songs originally intended for Lifehouse included as bonus tracks. In 2020, Who's Next was ranked number 77 on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Background

By 1970, the Who had obtained significant critical and commercial success, but they had started to become detached from their original audience. The mod movement had vanished, and the original followers from Shepherd's Bush had grown up and acquired jobs and families. The group had started to drift apart from manager Kit Lambert, owing to his preoccupation with his label, Track Records. They had been touring since the release of Tommy the previous May, with a set that contained most of that album, but realised that millions had now seen their live performances, and Pete Townshend in particular recognised that they needed to do something new. A single, "The Seeker", and a live album, Live at Leeds, were released in 1970, 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 to Tommy.

Instead, the group tackled a project called Lifehouse. This evolved from a series of columns Townshend wrote for Melody Maker in August 1970, in which he discussed the importance of rock music, and in particular what the audience could do. 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. Townshend has variously described Lifehouse as a futuristic rock opera, a live-recorded concept album and as the music for a scripted film project. The basic plot was outlined in an interview Townshend gave to Disc and Music Echo on 24 October 1970. 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 resembles the internet and "grid sleep" resembles virtual reality.

The group held a press conference on 13 January 1971, explaining that they would be giving a series of concerts at the Young Vic theatre, where they would develop the fictional elements of the proposed film along with the audience. After Keith Moon had completed his work on the film 200 Motels, the group performed their first Young Vic concert on 15 February. The show included a new quadrophonic public 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.

After the initial concerts, at Lambert's suggestion the group flew to New York to make studio recordings at Record Plant Studios. They were joined by guests Al Kooper on Hammond organ, Ken Ascher on piano, and Leslie West on guitar. Townshend used a 1957 Gretsch guitar, given to him by Joe Walsh, during the session; it went on to become his main guitar for studio recording. Lambert's participation in the recording was minimal, and he proved to be unable to mix the final recordings. He had started taking hard drugs, while Townshend was drinking brandy regularly. After returning to Britain, engineer Glyn Johns made safety copies of the Record Plant material, but decided it would be better to re-record the album from scratch at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes.

The group gave two more concerts at the Young Vic on 25 and 26 April, which were recorded on the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio by Andy Johns, but Townshend grew disillusioned with Lifehouse and further shows were cancelled. 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. 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 a nervous breakdown. At the time, Roger Daltrey said the Who "were never nearer to breaking up".

Although the Lifehouse concept was abandoned, scraps of the project remained in the final album, including the use of synthesizers and computers. An early concept for Lifehouse featured the feeding of personal data from audience members into the controller of an early analogue synthesizer to create a "universal chord" that would have ended the proposed film. Abandoning Lifehouse gave the group extra freedom, owing to the absence of an overriding musical theme or storyline (which had been present in Tommy). This allowed the band to concentrate on maximising the impact of individual tracks and providing a unifying sound for them.

Townshend continued to develop the concepts of the Lifehouse project, revisiting them in later albums, including a 6-CD set, The Lifehouse Chronicles, in 1999. In 2007, he launched a (now defunct) website called The Lifehouse Method to accept personal input from applicants that would be turned into musical portraits.

Recording and production

The first session for what became Who's Next was at Mick 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 before the band decided to relocate recording to Olympic at Johns' suggestion; the first session there was on 9 April, attempting a basic take of "Bargain". 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, while Dave 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.

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". Townshend used early synthesizers and modified keyboard sounds in several modes, including as a drone effect on several songs, notably "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again", 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. 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. 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. Despite Johns' key contributions, he only received an "associate producer" credit on the finished album, though he maintained he acted mainly in an engineering capacity and based most of the arrangements on Townshend's original demos.