An Album, A Monolith.

 

And not one you can piss on. Not one bit.

What an album this is. 

See, a couple of weeeks ago, Babs asked over at her place what our favorite albums of 1971 were, and I hesitated between my all-time favorite Rolling Stones record Sticky Fingers and The Who's Who's Next. I cast my vote for Sticky Fingers, but now I claim that it's been a fraudulent election and a BIG STEAL by SOME VERY NASTY PEOPLE and that indeed the real winner is Who's Next. (Is the dead animal glued on my head still stuck like it should? Is my body still having a magnificent orange glow? Oh, sorry, I'm getting distracted again, as is my habit. Oh, SQUIRREL...)

Sticky Fingers is a really great album, but if we're being honest it has a couple of weak spots like the jam section of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", and personally speaking, "Sister Morphine" never did much for me.. .Ain't no such thing as slow spots on Who's Next. "Love Ain't For Keeping" is slowish and has some truly horrid early 70s lines ("lay down my darling, love ain't for keeping"...not a great pick-up line), but it's only two minutes long and the acoustic interlude works really nicely. . Some might claim that the long album-closing version a bit too long to be as powerful as the single edit, but it would still blow most other songs out of the water, either way. Monolith, baby, monolith. 

Who's Next is imperial, unimpeachable. You can not fuck with this album. It's the only Who album where there is nothing to throw, no 'yeah, but what about'-isms to be had. Whichever song you think is the weakest here, it is still a pretty good song. Ain't no so-so or bad ones on here. Nine tracks of pure rock'n'roll. The Who were never louder or more powerful. You want to show a young person what rock'n'roll is and why it mattered, play them this album. Even Millenials might only know The Who for contributing title songs to a TV series franchise and Horatio Caine pun-and-sun(glasses) memes. But play them this and maybe they understand. 

Show me a better opening track than "Baba O'Riley". I mean, I'm sure there might be some, but I can't think of many right now. The buiding synth arpeggios which get more urgent, before finally the piano enters at around the forty second mark and then the band joins in at around the one minute mark. They sure knew how to build a song back in the day. Keith Moon might have drummed more ferociously on other tracks, but I like how his drums come in here and demand respect. I love the interplay between the synth arpeggios and the violin and Moon's drums who seem to egg each other on, push each other forwards, quickerv and quicker. I never really got the cult of Moon, but his drum rolls on Who's Next are something to behold.  

And, you know, Roger Daltrey. For the first years of The Who, he was kind of the weak link of the band, while Townshend, Entwistle and Moon caused an unholy ruckus behind him. But here he and his voice take center stage and it's glorious. Hang some respect on my name!, every yowl seems to say. If Robert Plant was a golden god, then Roger Daltrey was a silver seraphim. 

Who's Next. A Monument. a Monolith. One of the greatest rock records of all time.

I don't need to fight to prove I'm right. 

The attached album is nothing fancy, the 1995 remaster with bonus tracks. Who's Next stays as is, because see above. I mean you could make a really good argument that "Pure And Easy" should have been on the album, but what do you kick off? So now it leads the bonus track program, which I have slightly reprogrammed to go with the Lifehouse studio outtakes first, then the Young Vic outtakes, their okay cover of "Baby Don't You Do It" and finally the original version of "Behind Blue Eyes".