The Who – Who's Next

W1 = Doug Sax cut. Easily the best version of this !

This is one of the best sounding LPs that I own. It’s in my top ten .. in addition to it being a freakin amazing musical treasure !! Enough said :)

Being female I don’t think that I should be writing this review, though perhaps because I am, I bring a different perspective to this outing ... not because I don’t know or appreciate the music of The Who, but because first and foremost, The Who are a boy’s band. Despite the development of their playing, structure, and abilities, The Who never grew up. From the very beginning they seemed to be part of a boy's club, with a tree house in the backyard, a climbing rope that was pulled up and a sign scrawled and nailed to the tree that read, “NO GIRLS ALLOWED,” followed of course by the obligatory skull and crossed bones.

The Who sang about the angst of adolescence, the fear of their own bodies, the lust and repulsion of women, pimples, awkwardness, nose picking, farting, drinking, self loathing, arrogance, boy games, male issues, and all at ear splitting volume, designed to both show power and strength, but also to hold what they perceived as infringement, and parental oversight at bay. Even when they slowed numbers down, creating some of the world’s most beautiful ballads, they always had to do something insane at the end, or on the album cover that sort of said, “Well, I really didn’t mean it.” With all of this designed to keep the actual raw emotions from rising completely to the surface. Never before, and never again do I believe a band will better project the adolescent nature of being a boy and all things male.

There are many changes on this record from all of their previous outings, such as Tommy, which was so eloquently correct and processed that it was almost sterile, though magnificently wonderful in the same breath. Yet here, they seemed to be returning to the forgotten lessons of The Who Sell Out, a brilliant piece of pure rock and roll. And just what were these changes? It seems that the group needed to demonstrate themselves as serious artists, to side step the perceptions of gimmick mongering punks and make themselves a bit more accessible and a little less offensive. Yet (and I’m smiling here), they still had to create an album cover with a 2001 movie monolith, on which they’d just taken a piss.

Regardless of the dynamics of the group, or their personal visions, Who’s Next will rank for all time as one of the best rock and roll records ever created. The reasons are as varied as the , but it was what they all saw in each other, stepping into a moment of shared consciousness, that resulted in this body of work. Seldom will you hear a band play and express themselves in a manner that both pushes personal boundaries, but pushes the pre-conceived notions of the other by ing them rather than challenging them. The Who were a band constructed of four leads, no one was any stronger than anyone else, and without the power and grace of the individuals, the oneness of the whole would never have shone through.

This album is as relevant today as it was in the summer of 1971, and it will maintain that relevance fifty years from now. Yeah ... it's all Snakes, and Snails, and Puppy Dog Tails, and I love it.

*** The Fun Facts: The album's artwork shows a photograph, taken at Easington Colliery, of the band having just urinated on a large concrete piling protruding from a slag heap. The decision to shoot the picture came from Entwistle and Moon discussing Stanley Kubrick and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the band were unable to urinate so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect.

Other suggested options for the cover included the boys urinating against a Marshall Stack and an overweight nude woman with the Who's faces in place of her genitalia. Then there was the alternative cover featuring Keith Moon dressed in black lingerie and a brown wig holding a whip that was later used for the inside art for the 1995 and 2003 CD releases.

Review by Jenell Kesler

this was the first us pressing of whos next wich was originally released in august 1971 on decca records. within one year of this release decca records would be bought out by universal mca..................