WHO'S NEXT: The Who (1971)

2. Who’s Next—The Who (released July, 1971; first heard August, 1971)  On the cover, The Who have just had a piss at a monolith.  Who’s next? They saucily inquire.  We can make just about anything be that monolith, but I like to think of it as the view that The Who were not The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World, that The Stones held that coveted spot.  Maybe they did, but in 1971 I wasn’t convinced of that.  In 1971, when I got this record for my 12th birthday, The Who kicked everyone’s ass – or pissed on everyone, if you like – and that’s that.  I hadn’t graduated beyond AM radio at the time, and the song that leapt off the radio and colonized my little adolescent brain was “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – first in its shortened, single version, then in the long version that AM radio would occasionally play (making me have to get the album), with the long (in the land of 3 minute songs) Moog run that sounds like a keyboard solo from Kubrick’s (speaking of monoliths) HAL.  And the way that percolating sound is punctuated by Keith Moon bashing away, then Daltrey’s full-throated scream, and the lyrics, sounding tossed off but undeniably right in their wise-guy shrug: “I’ll  move myself and my family aside / if we happen to be left half-alive / I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky / for I know that the hypnotized never lie.”  Townshend and co. weren’t just pissing on things, they were giving things (like the counter-culture, to say nothing of the slavish material culture that had become the driving wheel of pop-rock, or, ok ok, had always been the driving wheel of pop-rock, only now, more so, and of course the infamous military-industrial complex) a rather enthusiastic finger.  “And the parting on the left is now the parting on the right / and the beards have all grown longer overnight.”  Not only a comment on fads and fashions, the “left,” “right” switch noted the passing from LBJ to Nixon (1968), and the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970) that would bequeath Thatcher to the Brits.  And the length of those radical beards must suggest all the thoughtful pondering that would no doubt give us much theory but little gain.

Then there were the other tracks that sometimes got airplay and which later became unshakeable staples of “Classic Rock” radio: “Baba O’Riley,” “Bargain,” occasionally “Behind Blue Eyes,” the latter a misanthropic ode that I just loved to maunder along with (despite the fact that I have brown eyes).  “No one knows what it’s like to feel these feelings / like I do, and I beg you / if my fist clenches crack it open / before I use it and lose my cool / and if I smile, tell me some bad news / before I laugh and act like a fool.”  It’s an anthem for wanting to be left alone, and offers the paradoxical glory of exulting in someone else’s version of what it’s like to be persecuted by one’s own uniqueness.  And that was something, I realize now, that drew me to a lot of the music that I loved in my teens and early twenties: the voicing of an “include me out” status, the sense that the singer had seen enough to know that motives were always questionable, that love would always fall short of ideal, that grand causes made for grand losses, that fellowship was usually in the name of something that would not endure, that sex, at its best, always required a bit of the blues, that the methods (and sometimes substances) you used to be “free” became traps in themselves, and being cool with all that was about the best you could hope for.

Pete Townshend, who gave us the inspiring story of the deaf, dumb and blind pinball phenomenon who gains a following only to be destroyed and denounced by his disciples/fans, clearly had a chip or two on his shoulder, but on this album he put his irked spirit to the test and churned out some of his best tunes, and the mighty Glyn Johns (all hail the “Glyn Johns method for recording drums”!) got it all on tape with that amazing crispness and layeredness that still takes my breath away at times – like the descending drumfalls at the close of “Bargain,” or the piano that suddenly comes plunking in at the end of “Song is Over.”  And “Baba” is one of those truly great opening blasts.  In fact I think a given of most of the albums on this “15” list will boast major opening songs and definitive closing songs (here it’s “Won’t Get Fooled”).  And don't forget silent John Entwhistle's harrowing hard rocker "My Wife." This album is what the early ‘70s should be remembered for and as, sez me.

The song is over
I'm left with only tears
I must remember
Even if it takes a million years.
--Peter Townshend, "The Song is Over"

HIGHWAY 61 REVISTED: Bob Dylan (1965)

1. Highway 61 Revisited--Bob Dylan (released August 1965, first heard spring 1970). At that point, 1970, all the Dylan I knew was on the first Greatest Hits album. The only song the two albums have in common is "Like a Rolling Stone," which had briefly become an object of fascination as I tried to get all the words just by listening to it over and over again. When my older brother brought this album into the house, he called me in, mainly to play "Desolation Row," a song he'd heard on late night FM radio and had been talking about since. First he played "Tombstone Blues," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." I wasn't even 11 yet, and I was getting tired. Dylan's music, by the early '70s, had been superseded, in aural presence and hooks and power chords, for anyone who had been listening, as we mostly did, to hard rock or pop-rock. This wasn't pop or rock, really. It was some weird hybrid derived from folk and it sounded (as indeed it was) designed for mono playback rather than stereo. Which is to say, it seemed pretty dated already. And yet.

Now it's forty years later and they're about to release the mono version on CD; I've bought this album on vinyl and on CD and on SACD, and I never tire of it. That datedness has come to be an immense part of its charm, partly because of the aura derived from the mid-60s as a time when mono music was still made. And that era boasts an aura, these days, in part because of the albums Dylan released then. Indeed, but for some notable exceptions, the AM radio music of the era isn't what matters, except as nostalgia. This album threw a wrench into what pop and rock'n'roll could be in the name of a hipster subculture I knew very little about when I was 10, but there it was, filling the room. And something changed. Because Dylan, on the cover, was so cleary not a rock star. And he wasn't a folksinger any more either. Whatever he was, he seemed to know it would be unprecedented for a lot of people.

Between '72 and '75, when Blood on the Tracks was released, I got to know most of the Dylan back catalogue and this album only increased its fascination. It so clearly was a definitive statement -- the rock songs on its predecesssor, Bringing It All Back Home, were mostly throwaways, and its dense and drugged-out successor, Blonde on Blonde, though it showed progress in making an entire album boast a dominant sound, lacked the sheer verbal brilliance of this album, haunting, comic, surreal, sneering. "Desolation Row" never fails to put me in a trance and somewhere in there -- among the indelible images, the clever phrases, the articulate guitar fills -- is that feeling I learned to call "poetry" though maybe that's a word too literary in connotation. Maybe it's better just to call it "the dream." Every song on this album takes me away, and from every one of them I could quote a line or two that does it for me. Sums up some state of mind or an attitude or a way of articulating one's status in a memorable, take no prisoners phrase. And for sheer delivery, this is still the Dylan album, the singing, as the liner notes say, "exercises in tonal breath control" that bend and rasp and enunciate as though, in the weird scenes Bob finds himself in, only diction can get you through.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
--Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"