Album Reviews

Note: this is part 1 of a two part review. To access part 2, see "Recent Arrivals" on the musicangle.com home page

First, a few words for those who love the early Who but don’t know the complicated backstory. There is not and will probably never be a one-album Perfect Early-Who Best-Of. Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, from around 1970, came close musically: it came out after The Who got the rights back to their early singles and their first album from producer Shel Talmy, who also did the first Kinks hits. Therefore it included the wonderful “Can’t Explain,” “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere,” “My Generation,” “The Kids Are Alright,” and “A Legal Matter,” none of which are on the reissue here under review, Direct Hits.
(Peter Townshend, August 6, 1997 during The Who's "Quadrophenia" tour, at the Entertainment Centre, Camden, NJ. Photo credit: Steve Trager)

This is a semi-greatest hits collection that came out earlier, in ’68, drawn from the material that The Who had the rights to at that time. A mono original of this album would be next to impossible to find and would cost you big bucks, so the Classic, if good, should be a Best Buy. The Classic Records website states that there are five single sides here: actually there are at least nine (a couple of songs could be counted as singles or album tracks). Included are singles 4 through 9 (“Substitute,” “I’m a Boy,” “Happy Jack,” “Pictures of Lily,” “I Can See For Miles,” and “Dogs”): some of their B-sides, like “In the City,” “Doctor Doctor;’ and “Call Me Lightning;” the fluke pseudo-single “The Last Time;” the EP track “Bucket T;” and an alternate mix of “Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand,” an excellent Who Sell Out song whose four or five versions I can’t keep up with, though one of them was the flip side to “I Can See For Miles.” So this is not a “perfect early-Who best-of”… but it IS a superb snapshot of the “power-pop Who,” which is to say, more or less the founding of Power Pop.

As a proud Who fanatic, I have almost all this stuff on various grades, vintages and nationality of vinyl, for comparison purposes: a couple of decent early US Decca pressings of Meaty Beaty, a Brit Track of the same (with too much fake stereo on it), an Dutch Polydor import of Direct Hits (but it isn’t called that, it’s called Portrait of the Who -- !?), and, for a couple of these songs, a nice early US Decca of The Who Sell Out and a German Polydor of the same, which isn’t as good. I eagerly awaited this Classic Records release, for its promised intersection of (obviously) musical bliss and (hopefully) audiophile deliciousness. And specifically (and fortuitously), it’s some of the stuff that was on Meaty and is NOT on Direct Hits that needed the least sonic help anyway. For example, on my best early US pressing of Meaty, “Can’t Explain” and “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” (the first two singles) are amazingly punchy, fat and clean for 1965 (trouncing the sound of much of the early Stones, and ballsier if not as sophisticated as the Beatles’ sound of this period). “My Generation” and “Kids Are Alright” are rawer, but needless to say that’s not really a problem for such ferocious rockers. The stuff that really looked to benefit from this Classic reissue of Direct Hits was material like the churning “I’m a Boy,” the ringing “In the City”… and especially the magical “Pictures of Lily,” that naughty-lyric power-pop masterpiece loaded with rumbling bass, slapping drums, gushing but judiciously-placed high harmonies, rich descending chord patterns, and barking crunchy rhythm guitar… which somehow never quite SOUNDED up to snuff in any pressing (possible fake-stereo manipulation on Meaty), though its magnificence is such that one’s ear and brain filled in the missing good sound! Tune in later for the verdict on “Lily”’s sound here, but first let’s visit some of the more (undeservedly?) obscure tracks that somehow made it onto this bizarre, lovable collection.

“Dogs” is a neglected charmer that was a flop single in June of ’68, a ‘lost’ period for the Who in between the early mini-masterpieces and the soon-to-be-revealed Tommy. This remastering already begins to come in handy here, the epitome of “sound in the service of music.” Here’s why: this song is delightful to Who fans but could come off a bit precious to the uninitiated, having a certain hyper-Brit Monty Python in-joke quality to it (hell, the last words you hear are “lovely buttocks”!)… but much less so on this reissue, where the broken semi-Motown (yes, they are! Listen and think early Four Tops) rhythms of the verses are tumbled down the hill joyously by Enwistle’s thunderous bass in the descending singalong chorus, and it pulls you along one hell of a lot better here than on my thin Dutch Polydor (and maybe than on a Brit original, maybe not… but again, good freaking luck finding a clean one you can afford). “There was nothing in my life/ Bigger than beer…” And if this song still seems like a bit of a joke to you, just listen to Daltrey’s plaintive voice over the harmonies near the end: “Yes it’s you, little darlin,’ yes it’s you, little darlin’” … SO beautiful. I love Daltrey’s power vocals when he found and fully moved into his Rock Stud role by the the time of “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and I also love his innocent-badass feel on stuff like “My Generation” and the early soul covers. But some of his most gorgeous singing is on this middle-period stuff (including much of Tommy), where it can be hard to tell at first whether it’s his voice or Townshend’s. Those two definitely had a complicated love-hate-and-mutual-jealousy sort of relationship, and every critic and Who fan knows that’s where at least some of the creative tension, glory and achievement came from. But I think that’s true even more more specifically in the vocal department: Daltrey learned from, then assimilated and largely mastered much of what was good about Pete’s singing, though he didn’t use it too much after 1970, developing his own rich ballad voice for stuff like “Behind Blue Eyes.” Which is fine too, for it gave them two very different lead-vocal approaches. But on late-60s material like “Amazing Journey” from Tommy, “Tattoo” from The Who Sell Out, and “Dogs,” Daltrey’s singing communicates an innocence and an aching poignancy that he rarely achieved again. And while said innocence and poignancy would be merely sweet and lovely if it was Art Garfunkel, it’s special indeed when it’s Daltrey backed by the lurching beast of a band that was always waiting around the corner to back him up whenever needed, and sometimes when not!

“Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand” is a lovely song from Sell Out, and an electric version of it was the flip side of the American single release of “I Can See For Miles;” this “Mary Anne” sounds like a slightly different mix of the Sell Out performance. By the way, though a few more “pure singles” were issued, this is where The Who began to slowly ease away from the earlier Brit practice of “no singles from albums” which so frustrates and charms all fans of the early Beatles, Stones, Kinks and Who. Said practice, of course, means that a dream Best Singles LP (both in sound and song selection) of any of these groups would perhaps be their best early album, though such an LP often does not exist -- see the first paragraph of this review!

[ANGLOPHILE--AUDIOPHILE INTERLUDE: After years of searching, collecting, listening, savoring and rejecting, I like A Collection of Beatles Oldies on a good Brit pressing (Parlophone PCS7016) for the Beatles’ early singles; for the Stones, Rolled Gold (Brit Decca ROST ½, German Decca also good and easier to find); and Around and Around (very early Stones with AMAZING sound, HIGHLY recommended; German Decca 6.21392, I believe no Brit Decca exists; as an early Stones fan, you need this for the fab sound and also because it includes all the best songs from the two early EPs, few of which are on Rolled Gold). For the Kinks, it’s a bit tougher call. A reissue called A Compleat Collection (what an appropriately Oscar Wilde-effete title)(Compleat/Polygram CPL-2-2001) is cheap, pretty easy to find and surprisingly good-sounding, and the song selection is excellent, from the big early hits to buried classics like “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and the proto-metal “Sitting On My Sofa.” With an early U.S. pressing of The Kinks Greatest Hits (Reprise 6217—make sure it’s mono) you might squeeze out a micro-smidgen more youthful-master-tape vocal immediacy and sheer crunch, at a price in frequency and dynamic range and probably record condition. These are my two mainstays for early Kinks; Pye (original English label) releases are tough to find and don’t always sound so great. There’s a fantastic French early-best-of floating around out there (somebody made off with my copy): I believe it’s a French Pye, a double album with a close-up of the band clowning around on the front. If “Look For Me Baby” and “Sitting On My Sofa” are the first two songs on Side 1, that’s it : grab this one unhesitatingly, it sounds great. You also need either 20 Golden Greats (Ronco RPL 2031) or The Kink Kronicles (Reprise 2XS 6454) for the great mid-period non-hits like “Autumn Almanac,” “Days,” “Wonder Boy” et al. The former has the early hits too, and is pretty much loaded start to finish; the latter is a double LP, is all “mid-period” and later, has a lot of cool obscurities and a bit of dross, and includes a great John Mendelsohn essay. Finally, for the five non-vinyl fans who are reading this article, The Who – Then and Now (Geffen B0001836-02) has decent track selection and sound on CD.]

But back to our Who album. “Mary Anne” features lots of delicious acoustic guitar, shakers, wood blocks etc., making you feel as much like you’re in a benign alligator-less Amazonian jungle as Beck’s “Tropicalia,” but a less hip and more innocent one than Beck’s, where the greens are lighter in shade and the vocals are high Brit harmony rather than world-weary Bakersfield nasality. Another gently-naughty lyric (perhaps the I’ve-got-a-girlfriend twin of “Lily”?), the song is sung in falsetto and near-falsetto by what sounds like Peter in the solo parts, and Pete-John-Roger in the more-prevalent group sections. Not that I ever emphasize this stuff, but this is Audiophile Heaven of a sort, if a low-tech 1967 rock song can qualify (of course it can). All the acoustic beauty of early CSN, not recorded as well, but the music’s one hell of a lot more charming, less self-conscious and (to my ears) less dated! I slightly miss the stereo from The Who Sell Out, which is especially nice for the Acoustic Heaven; but the mono here has a nice punch and directness, giving a sort of Kingston Trio/ Brothers Four 1962 folk quality.

“Call Me Lightning” is a slight song that served as the B-side of “Dogs.” With its singalong Beach Boy-ish backing vocals (dum-dum-dum-durang!) and boastful I’m-a-stud lyrics, it betrays its origins as one of Pete’s first compositions, and its eventual late release in the summer of ’68 reinforces what a directionless period this was for The Who, soon to be remedied with a vengeance with Tommy. The song isn’t awful, just a bit bland; John’s bass solo is even a tad second-rate, with some sort of cheesy phase or vocoder effect watering it down from “My Generation”-style power.

“Doctor Doctor,” which was the flip side of the “Pictures of Lily” single, might seem a strange choice for a John Entwistle inclusion; “Boris the Spider” and “Whiskey Man,” from the second album (callled A Quick One in Britain and Happy Jack in the U.S.), are both better Entwistle songs. Perhaps the Talmy legal problems intruded again, though he did not produce that album: Who co-manager Kit Lambert did, and you can tell: Lambert knew nothing of production, and Townshend hadn’t mastered the studio yet, and that second LP is probably the worst-sounding they ever did, though I like it and enjoy it anyway! You gotta own it for the magnificent “So Sad About Us,” if nothing else. Even John’s slight but melodic “Someone’s Coming,” the flip of the UK “I Can See For Miles” single, or his morbid “Silas Stingy” from The Who Sell Out, might’ve been better for an Entwistle inclusion … but no doubt the intention, as stated, was to collect singles and not duplicate album tracks, and I’m nitpicking. “Doctor Doctor” has a frantic beat to go with its annoying vocals, its chords are interesting, and John and Keith, presented fat and potent here by Chris Bellman’s remastering, almost put it across with sheer nervous energy.

And then there’s Entwistle’s (and Moon’s in this case) other songwriting contribution, the delightful “In the City.” Moon’s Beach Boys fetish emerges here, but the Beach Boys never rocked like this. Only the bassist and drummer were in the studio for this piece, and Daltrey and Townshend are hardly missed as John plays reasonable rhythm guitar, buries it in the mix, and then pushes his bass and French horn hugely forward, spanked and prodded my Moon’s jolly drums. The mix is peculiar, the vocals slight, yet this is still one of the forgotten pleasures of the early Who catalog: great chords, sweet harmonies, and a sheer joy that’s hard to avoid. Ripe for a cover; the closest anyone came that I know of is Paul Weller and the Jam borrowing the title in theft/tribute! The Classic remastering is an unqualified success: the punch of the rhythm section that was hinted at on my Dutch pressing is fully realized, and the poorly-mixed chaos that caused the backing vocals (“In the city in the city in the city…”) to dominate the lead on my older pressing has somehow been partly remedied, without an actual remix. Good job!

Speaking of Keith Moon and the surf music, “Bucket T” is a Jan and Dean cover that’s, er, not the best thing here, though it’s sort of amusing and has a deceptive set-you-up charm, leading off the album as ridiculously inappropriately as it does! Moon sings lead (!!! How did that happen? Reeks of the severest band politics this side of Creedence’s “Mardi Gras,” or perhaps the aforementioned inclusion here of Entwistle’s “Doctor Doctor”!) Moon should NEVER have been singing lead or even harmony… speaking of which, the famous yell at the end of “Happy Jack” came about in the following way. Moon, always insecurely wanting to be included in everything, wished to join in and sing on that lovely-harmony song, but kept ruining the otherwise-pristine “fa-la-la-la-las.” He was banished to the control room, but kept popping his head up, making faces, cracking up the others and wrecking take after take. He was finally ordered to stay out of view; but after Pete, John and Roger finally got a good one down and while the tape was still rolling, Moon popped his head up, making a hilarious face. So that’s Townshend hollering “I sawr ya!” at the fade-out, to the everlasting delight and former mystification of all Who fans.) “Bucket T” was somehow a Number 1 single in Sweden , despite Moon’s out-of-tune vocals and Entwistle’s surprisingly-bad French horn (it’s fabulous on “Pictures of Lily,” “Whiskey Man” and all over Tommy, a major Secret Weapon of mid-period Who music). Perhaps the peace-obsessed Swedes thought there could be no nobler gesture than embracing something as lousy as this, though I don’t remember them having warred weith the Brits for several hundred years, if ever! Anyway, I suppose this “sounds good” on the Classic, a highly debatable virtue: it’s really a joke. It was originally on an EP called Ready Steady Who, which contained just one little masterpiece, the forgotten “Disguises” (covered by the aforementioned Jam). It should’ve been the Ready Steady Who tune included on this album: find it on iTunes, it’s a mini-classic.

And speaking of low points, The Who’s version of “The Last Time” flat-out sucks. In perhaps an early manifestation of Townshend’s touching and commendable Conscience of Rock role, the band recorded the song (and “Under My Thumb,” which isn’t included here and is just a tiny bit better) as a tribute/support gesture to the Stones, some of whom had just been hit with heavy jail time for possession of minute amounts of drugs. Trouble is, “The Last Time,” like its even-better immediate successor “Satisfaction, is driven and even dominated by Keith Richard’s huge twangy guitar riffage. Townshend (at this point and to some extent forever) was a noise-and-crunch rhythm specialist; his limp rendition of the main riff appears halfheartedly for a few seconds here and there, showing all the balls of America or Air Supply, then fades mercifully into the background, to be replaced by polite chords which mysteriously lack Pete’s trademark crunch. Even worse, Daltrey lacks Jagger’s lubricious, threatening feel for the ominous lyrics. And the harmonies are weak and/or absent. Worse still, Entwistle was on honeymoon, so Pete’s minimal bass playing offers no help. Other than Moon’s superb-as-usual drumming, this is pretty atrocious. At least the Classic issue delivers Moon’s onslaught at full potency, unlike my midrangey Dutch Polydor. I used to be incredulous that they’d put it out; with this pressing, I can see how they could’ve convinced thmeselves it sounded OK at five in the morning after a long session and too many beers. (By the way, to all true Who fans like Yours Truly, this piece of junk doesn’t count as a Who Single. “It was a cover,” we tell ourselves. So it doesn’t interrupt the numbering of the Real Singles.)

Okay, we’ve covered the lousy and the merely good. Now it’s time for the meat, the real reason to shell out the cash for this LP: Singles Number Four through Eight, in some ways the very heart of The Who (though that sweeping statement leaves out both “My Generation” on one end, and Tommy and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” on the other, and is therefore open to question!).

If forced to an impossibility at gunpoint, I might call “I Can See For Miles” the absolute greatest thing The Who ever did, though all votes for “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again “ will certainly be counted (as well as dark horses like “Go To the Mirror” and “Tattoo”). The version on the Dutch “Direct Hits” is lacking in bass and a bit murky. However, my early US Meaty Beaty and Who Sell Out both sound terrific on “I Can See For Miles.” Like “Mary Anne,” it is a song that benefits from stereo, yet this mono mix is a thrilling second opinion, and you can’t really imagine anything better while it’s going on, which is really the test, isn’t it? To nit-pick a bit, mastering engineer Bellman has subtly emphasized a particular EQ zone where lie the high harmony vocals and Townshend’s madly-bent drone lead (the high guitar note behind “miles and miles and miles and miles…”), and slightly toned down the region where Moon’s cymbal splash and splatter reign supreme (or the old mastering engineer did the opposite and Bellman made it flatter). This may be preferable to some, it may be “correct,” and it sounds more like what I’m used to from the radio, less like what I know from my early pressings. It’s not a huge deal: you can “hear what’s going on” a tad better, perhaps at slight cost to the manic excitement that only Moon mania brings. My favorite way to hear this song continues for now to be the end of Side One of Sell Out!>, where the Apollonian beauty of “Our Love Was, Is,” and the comic relief of the commercial for Rotosound Strings is DEMOLISHED by the demonic Dionysianism of that ominous low-E chord and Moon’s restless rumblings.

“I’m a Boy” is excellent here as well. There are two very different performances of this one floating around; this is the single, and clearly better. The other one is on Meaty Beaty, closes that album in fact; it isn’t bad at all, but is slower, more meditative and midtempo, less of a rocker; Daltrey sounds wistful rather than mad that they’re dressing him up as a girl! What’s up with that? (Don’t answer that question: the article’s already long enough without 1966/2006 sociological speculation!) The one edge the Meaty Beaty version of the song has is that long, interesting break in the middle, with harmony vocals and odd climbing chords that sound like a Tommy proto-outtake. But the version here is bursting with life; I knew its power from my Dutch LP, but now I can hear it for real, properly mastered and pressed, and it’s terrific. Short and fiery. I suppose you might do better with a mint original single, but that question answers itself. Where to find one, and anyway who wants to keep getting up and flipping singles? I feel I get very good sound by listening to quality vinyl, by God; I’m damned if I’ll listen to it in less than 18-minute chunks!

“Happy Jack” was the next single after “Boy,” and has much in common with it musically: classic Power Pop, with witty songwriting, great harmonies, lots of hooks rather than big solos, and, for these two songs anyway, a near-bubblegum accessibility of story. Keith Moon takes over “Happy Jack” to an extent that would be obnoxious with a lesser talent, but with Our Boy is pure bliss. And this pressing again delivers the goods, with Moon’s onslaught simply invading your listening room, and Entwistle’s twangy Rotosounds ringing out huge like piano strings, or (when muted as during the verses) shaking all plants and glasses not Superglued to the table!

“Pictures of Lily,” as I was hoping near the beginning of the review, is terrific here. The sound is VERY coherent and exciting: as I’ll state in a minute re: “Substitute,” the song “makes sense” in a way it never quite did before: I’ve been hearing and loving the brilliant songwriting and thrilling performance in chunks for 25-odd years, putting the pieces together with my brain without realizing I was having to do so, because it was so worth doing. Now here it is all laid out for me, presented on a silver platter! And it ROCKS! Sounds like a single, if that makes sense: crisp shiny mono, with clever and punchy playing, beautiful harmonies, tasty reverb and compression (not quite Shel Talmy magic, but you can’t have everything – they were learning production): it’s ALL here. Where, I ask you, is Pete Townshend’s rhythm guitar playing more exciting than in the breaks in “Pictures”? MAYBE on “Go To the Mirror,” or his grand entrance in “Baba O’Riley;” not many other places!

And speaking of “Substitute,” the ultimate compliment: I’ve never quite bought it as one of the Big Who Masterpieces. Now I do. It’s a single, by God, and here it sounds like one. Remove my head, John Entwistle, and hand it to me! Thank you. Seriously, this is another one (like “Lily”) where a so-so mastering presents the song to you in pieces, and asks your subconscious to put it back together before you can enjoy it. Great fun, but extra work. Unlike the diffuse sound of most copies of “Lily,” the potential problem here has always been sort of the opposite: the undoubtedly impressive-for-1966 balls of the “Substitute” rhythm track always sounded a tiny bit overkill and pointless: one loved hearing Moon and Entwistle pre-flexing their muscles for the many glories to come, yet it nonetheless felt like a light pop song with sturm-und-drang artificially grafted onto it. The impression of misguided power was reinforced by the famous parodic element: the pseudo-“19th Nervous Breakdown” lyrics confessing Townshend’s little-brother complex vis-à-vis the Stones, which again always made the song seem more like an interesting hodgepodge and less like the burst of frustration and power that everyone praised it as. (The Stones thing is reinforced by Keith’s quote of Charlie Watts’s “Get Off of My Cloud” beat before Entwistle’s bass solo.)

Well, they were all right and I was wrong. “Substitute” is great, is The Daltrey/ Entwistle Show, and is here proudly presented as such, with the two noisier members of the band (Peter and Keith) placing gorgeous little garnishes every which-where, but with John essentially presenting Roger’s story with a fat, confident Motownish floor like a combination tourguide/ 350-pound deep-voiced backing vocalist. Often in the Who, you can almost hear Entwistle sigh as he simplifies (well, no, but at least SOLIDIFIES and STRUCTURES) his part to back up Keith as the latter runs amok. Here, those roles are subtly and delightfully reversed, as John is 51% in charge: Keith never gives up, he keeps trying to drive through the Wall of John’s Bass and take over, but Entwistle smiles quietly, turns up a half-notch, and oxishly bulls on. As for Townshend, having written this masterpiece, he’s happy to simply provide the pedal-point riff (prominent in a couple of delightful breaks) and ring on in the background behind John. After all, it is Pete’s song! But it’s all their song, too, and as stated above, it’s Roger’s and John’s particularly, which is especially nice to hear and to know, in this marvelous new context, but also loving the Who so much and realizing that before this song, bass didn’t sound so fat and full, and didn’t grab so full a role for itself—thank you John—and also soon before this, Roger was on the verge of getting kicked out of the band for his belligerent loutishness and inability to find and embrace his role, and here he is putting across a Pete lyric of much power, poignancy, wit and subtletly, loaded with all the young-man blues of most great British Invasion music from the rawness of the Animals to the pristine beauty of the Zombies. His rough barking on “Can’t Explain” and “My Generation” are flawless of course, but this is perhaps Roger’s first great SINGING performance on record. Thank you for letting me hear it, Classic Records.

And also, bravo to you for remastering something PRIMARILY FOR ITS MUSICAL VALUES that could by no means be considered an “audiophile favorite,” but is so much more essential as music than any number of cheese “audiophile” reissues.” No doubt you’ll field a few silly complaints from people who don’t understand the limits of these master tapes. (Classic showed the same good attitude when they reissued the Munch “Saint-Saens Organ Symphony” [LSC-2341], which “has distortion on the master tape”… but hey Audio World, it’s the BEST PERFORMANCE of a great work, and sounds thrilling!)

A few words about the pedal point in “Substitute.” For non-musician readers, a “pedal point” is a drone bass , a bass note that stays steady while the chords change all around it, “tugging” against it. Whether you know what you’re hearing or not, your ear/brain want it to resolve. “Substitute” is the first rock song I know of to be built around this device; later instances abound. Punk fans may remember “Son of Sam,” from the Dead Boys’ We Have Come For Your Children. In the chorus, while Stiv Bators derangedly howls “I AM SON OF SAM,” the ominous chords rise and fall while Jeff Magnum’s bass stays stubbornly put… until the VERY LAST CHORUS, when he cuts loose and climbs all over said chords like a mad monkey, his ropey compressed tone commenting on the sick shrieks and sirens like low-pitched laughter. A moment of true tension release. On Jason and the Scorchers’ 1985 cowpunk masterpiece Lost and Found, a wonderful ballad/rocker called “Broken Whiskey Glass” milks a similar device. Each time the frantic momentum of the chorus collapses into a half-time section (“Here lies Jason…”), the chord changes are carried by Warner Hodges’s brilliant army of overdubbed guitars, while bassist Jeff Johnson hangs on a very low E (on “strangled by a love – that wouldn’t breathe”); then the second time Jason sings that line, Johnson’s bass climbs and slams and then descends with the guitars, to huge delayed-gratification impact.

And to enjoy a third and a fourth example of pedal point much closer to home: the chorus of “I Can See For Miles” is Pedal Point 101, as Entwistle bangs on a low E while guitars and vocal harmonies soar through magic rising chords. And switch that around backwards for “Won’t Get Fooled Again:” John Entwistle more-or-less (in his inimitable busy style, natch) follows Pete’s chords in the CHORUSES – but during the VERSES this time, he’s pedaling. Being John in 1971 now, he doesn’t just stay on one note; but he doesn’t follow the chords, he bases himself on a low A, dancing away and returning in regular runs up and down that have nothing to do with the “proper” chord sequence. (Joe Jackson’s hit “Steppin’ Out” similarly uses a pedal “riff” rather than a pedal “point,” with the keyboard playing that familiar unchanging “techno” bass melody under changing chords.) Back to “Won’t Get Fooled:” Entwistle finally yields and joins the acoustic guitar and keyboard that have been playing the chords all along (the electric guitar also joins in: it has been playing darting little riffs in the verses). It’s at the VERY END of the song, to explosive effect, right after “Meet the new boss…” (POW-POW!!!) “Same as the old boss!!” (POW-POW!!) Now THAT’S set-up and delivery!

Back on “Substitute,” Pete partly provides the pedal himself. The rhythm-guitar riff that opens the song and supports the choruses uses the chords D, A, and G against a continuing low D note on the guitar. Entwistle simply reinforces this when he enters, playing his own even lower D behind Pete’s part, only bursting into motion for the verses and bridges (and his bass solo of course, a very fat jolly one compared to the lean-and-snarling bass performance on the previous single “My Generation,” and here backed by Pete’s high ringing guitar sort of imitating vocal “ahh’s”). The only time we hear the main chordal riff in a “clean,” non-pedaled form is in Peter’s brief chordal solo 2/3 of the way through the song, where he enthusiastically plays a “normal” D-A-G-D progression, and then Entwistle comes pedaling in again on his D before Moon anchors/disrupts everything with a cathartic earthquake fill that has to be one of his most exciting moments on record. So in this song, the “release” from the pedal is not a different bass under those chorus chords as in some of the other songs mentioned, but simply those post-pedal moments when the song goes back into the verse and Entwistle can lurch into his fat Motown-style rumbling, underscoring Daltrey’s delivery of Townshend’s message of frustration and inability to either break out or surrender with a circular bass line that embodies striving through possible futility, going around in circles and wasting so much motion but exploding with endless potential, like an adolescent boy. Which is the point. Moon was 19 when this was recorded, the others just a year or three older. And The Who are the ultimate adolescent-boy music (many more male than female fans, ever notice?), at least until Led Zep came along. Speaking of which, listen to Entwistle’s angular blues riffing in the bridges (behind “I’m a substitute for another guy…”), and you don’t have to let your mind wander far to feel like that bass line could be from an outtake from “Led Zep I”! They really had it all, did the early Who.

There’ve been a lot of substitutes for The Who in the four decades since this stuff burst out, from the manic Moon-isms of the Pistols’ Paul Cook and the early Dash Rip Rock’s Fred leBlanc, to Thom York’s haunting Tommy-esque falsettos and haunting chords all over Amnesiac and other Radiohead delights. But it feels so good to get back to the originals, in some ways closer than ever before. I recommend this album, and all the other early Who you can get your hands on.