On the demos, we hear Townshend experimenting with primitive synthesizers and sound loops, exploring how a rock band might use them as a rhythm - a relatively new concept at the time that evolved rapidly over the following decade and is now a foundation of most forms of popular music. (See the full tracklist below.)įans will find much to be transfixed by here. The answer: Just about everything the band recorded during this era, with 155 tracks including multiple singles, stray tracks and previously unreleased studio outtakes (and some hilarious banter) Townshend’ elaborate demos, including several songs that haven’t seen official release and two full concert recordings: One of the failed “Life House” experiments from April of 1971, and a fiery, more standard San Francisco show from eight months later, at the end of the album’s tour cycle. Lyrical references to songs, notes, tunes, chords, singing and instruments abound.īut anyone reading this far already knows that - the question is what one might be getting for the $299.99 the deluxe-uber-ultra-whatever boxed set costs. There’s little question that it’s one of the greatest albums of the 1970s and even the entire rock era, and some of its best songs retain elements of the “Life House” storyline: “Baba O’Riley” and “Going Mobile” are from the perspective of rebels living away from the Grid “Song Is Over” was intended as the closing, after the band and the audience transcend this mortal coil and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is not actually the glorious, triumphant rebel song that it sounds like, but is rather about disillusionment with revolution. Exhausted and angry, he abandoned the larger concept and instead agreed to take some of the dozens of songs he’d written and make a “normal” album, which became “Who’s Next.” However, he grew increasingly frustrated as his bandmates and associates failed to grasp the concept to his satisfaction, and grew even more frustrated when several attempts to stage concerts like the one in the story - where they threw open the doors of a theater in London and played for whoever wandered in - unsurprisingly failed to achieve the spiritual connection he’d hoped for. Townshend plunged into the project with typical obsessiveness and even began writing a companion film. The story ends at a concert where they succeed in this spiritual fusion, and the band and audience connect and disappear to some version of heaven… or something like that (it’s explained at length in this set’s liner notes). He cooked up a plot set in a future totalitarian society, where people were connected and controlled via a sort of pre-internet called “The Grid” - except for some rebellious musicians who, through their performance, were able to tap into those magical notes and melodies and connect spiritually with their audience (approximations of those melodies underpin such “Who’s Next” classic songs as “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”). “Life House” was conceived as a follow-up to Townshend’s previous opus, “Tommy.” Steeped in Eastern religion via his guru Meher Baba, Townshend attempted to marry the musical and spiritual ambitions of the late ‘60s into a project that (to vastly oversimplify) revolved around the concept that a human being’s spirit could be articulated in a musical note or series of notes. It’s everything obsessives could have hoped for, and then some - it covers the entire 1970-72 period, including tracks from an abandoned EP and a second aborted album, an even less-realized 1972 concept outing called “Rock Is Dead” that eventually morphed into Who mastermind Pete Townshend’s next masterwork, “Quadrophenia.” And after 52 years, perhaps the greatest mythological album of the rock era - the Who’s aborted project “Life House,” from which the 1971 classic “Who’s Next” emerged - is finally getting its true day in the sun, in the form of a massive 10-CD box with a giant, fact-and-photo-filled book that takes at least six of those CDs to read.
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