The Who were not the first nor the biggest of the British Invasion bands that captured the imaginations of music lovers on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-’60s. But they were the loudest of them all, and thanks to guitarist and principal songwriter Pete Townshend, the most conceptually ambitious one as well.
With frontman Roger Daltrey belting out Townshend’s imaginative and emotionally vulnerable lyrics over the thunderous rhythm section of drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, the Who presented their fans with both substance and spectacle. On the road, the band would smash their instruments at the end of concerts and leave a string of demolished hotel rooms in their wake. In the studio, Townshend would create narratively sophisticated “rock operas” and experiment with fascinating synthesizer sounds to add texture to the band’s garage rock attack.
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Townshend and Daltrey have carried on with the Who after Moon’s death in 1978 and Entwistle’s in 2002, releasing the band’s 12th album, WHO, in 2019. They recently announced The Song is Over North American Farewell Tour, which will commence in August and September. It’s not the first time the Who have said goodbye—their first farewell tour was in 1982—but it’s increasingly likely, given Townshend and Daltrey’s age, that it really will be the last chance for American fans to see the band live.
Townshend, who famously wrote the words “I hope I die before I get old,” turned 80 on May 19, and the fact that he’s lived a long and productive life despite that lyric has been to the great benefit of rock and roll as an artform. Is the band’s best album the trailblazing rock opera Tommy, the pop art prank The Who Sells Out, or the arena rock workhorse Who’s Next?
13. Face Dances (1981)
The Who never released LPs as steadily as their peers—by the end of the ’70s they had just eight studio albums, while the Stones had 14 and the Kinks had 18. So it’s perplexing that Townshend decided to sign a solo contract in the early-’80s while also keeping the Who going after Moon’s death, cranking out two solo albums and two Who albums in the space of two and a half years. Quality was going to suffer when the songwriter spread himself that thin, and the album that really got the short shrift was Face Dances, which both critics and Daltrey compared unfavorably to Townshend’s 1980 album Empty Glass. Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones gives a solid effort in the impossible situation of taking Keith Moon’s place in the band, and Entwistle knew better than Townshend how to get the best out of Jones on “The Quiet One.” The defiant closing track “Another Tricky Day” outshines just about everything that preceded it, including the pleasantly banal lead single “You Better You Bet.”
12. It’s Hard (1982)
The thumping, ominous “Eminence Front” is by far the Who’s best and most enduring post-’70s track, nothing else even comes close. The rest of It’s Hard, however, is only a slight improvement on Face Dances. Jones in particular steps up, playing splashier and more creative fills on “It’s Your Turn” and the title track. “The generally broader, more politically minded lyrics of It’s Hard seem as straightforward as the evening news. Beyond that, however, Townshend’s renewed ties to the Who symbolize his rapprochement with the world after a period of exile in the wasteland,” wrote Parke Puterbaugh in the Rolling Stone review of the album.
11. WHO (2019)
“I don’t care, I know you’re gonna hate this song,” Daltrey snarls at the beginning of the Who’s most recent and likely final studio album. Townshend and Daltrey have nothing left to prove, but they still sound fiery and cantankerous on WHO. They’re backed by a variety of rhythm section players, including staples of the Who’s live lineup for the past two decades, Ringo Starr’s son Zak Starkey, and veteran bassist Pino Palladino, who plays with enough muscle and attitude to evoke Entwistle on “Detour.” WHO is a family affair for Townshend—his wife Rachel Fuller’s orchestral arrangement on “Hero Ground Zero” makes the song come alive, and his younger brother Simon Townshend wrote the stomp-clap acoustic song “Break the News.”
10. A Quick One (1966)
A Quick One is one of those experiments in creative democracy, like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Mardi Gras or Weezer’s Red Album, that mostly just proves why the band’s usual primary songwriter was its rightful creative leader. Daltrey and Moon’s rare excursions in songwriting are decent but unmemorable attempts to mimic Townshend’s sensibility, while Entwistle succeeds by playing a completely different game with the horror novelty song “Boris the Spider.” Townshend’s 9-minute mini-opera, the brilliant and uproarious “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” is a thrilling trial run for his future album-length narratives, and it towers over the rest of A Quick One. But even that song, more than almost any other Who track, was far better live, with superior versions on The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus and expanded reissues of Live at Leeds. If the Who were releasing two or three albums a year like other British invasion bands, A Quick One’s shortcomings would be understandable, but it’s a disappointing weak link in the Who’s quartet of ’60s albums.
9. Who Are You (1978)
The futuristic sound the Who made in the early ’70s still felt current enough at the end of the decade that the band quite successfully returned to the aesthetic of Who’s Next on Keith Moon’s swan song. The results are electrifying on Who Are You’s closing title track, one of the band’s signature symphonies of guitar bombast and exploratory synths. But the lead up to that climax is sometimes tedious as Townshend self-consciously wrestles with the band’s place in a shifting musical landscape on “New Song,” “Sister Disco,” and “Music Must Change.”
8. Endless Wire (2006)
The Who became an oldies act after they reunited in 1989, touring many times but almost never entering the studio, with Townshend pouring his creative energies into solo work and side projects. Perhaps it was Entwistle’s unexpected death in 2002 that spurred Townshend to put together the first Who album in 24 years, a poignant affirmation of his personal and creative brotherhood with Daltrey. The best track on Endless Wire, “Mike Post Theme,” is a surprising and amusing celebration of the composer of countless great TV theme songs, from Law & Order to The Rockford Files. “A handful of cuts form Townshend’s latest mini-opera, with the highlight ‘It’s Not Enough,’ a self-contained gem that proves the guitarist hasn’t lost his knack for pop precision,” wrote Mikael Wood in the SPIN review of Endless Wire.
7. Odds & Sods (1974)
In the ’60s, the Who’s labels occasionally cobbled together stopgap collections like Magic Bus: The Who on Tour and Direct Hits that mixed non-LP singles with recycled album tracks. But with Odds & Sods, the Who created arguably the first rarities compilation by a major band that plays well from front to back like a proper album. Entwistle was given the task of assembling a record to combat bootlegs of the Who’s unreleased songs, which is why an Entwistle song, “Postcard,” got to open an album and appear on the A-side of a single for once. But Entwistle also arranged great Townshend songs like “Pure and Easy” and “Naked Eye” into a satisfying sequence, with “I’m the Face,” the 1964 debut single the band released under the name the High Numbers, providing a key piece of the Who’s early history.
6. The Who by Numbers (1975)
After years of writing songs around big, concept-heavy narratives, Townshend scaled things down and wrote some of his most intimately personal songs for The Who By Numbers. It’s Daltrey’s favorite Who album, perhaps because it’s where he most fully becomes Townshend’s second voice, amplifying and dramatizing the guitarist’s anxieties and insecurities on songs like “In a Hand or a Face” and “However Much I Booze.” The album’s only hit is its shortest and flimsiest song, “Squeeze Box,” which may be why The Who By Numbers is the band’s most underestimated masterpiece today.
5. Tommy (1969)
After he got a taste for using the Who’s songs as storytelling vehicles with 1966’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away” and 1967’s “Rael (1 and 2),” Townshend’s ambitions blossomed into the band’s fourth album. Tommy almost single-handedly introduced the idea of a “rock opera” to pop culture, and is now a franchise unto itself, adapted into a 1975 film and several stage productions on and off Broadway. Townshend’s devotion to the operatic form, and the story of Tommy the deaf and blind pinball prodigy, means that Tommy keeps revisiting the same musical and lyrical motifs over and over, making it a bit repetitive and single-minded as an album. Like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Tommy is a landmark work that expanded everyone’s understanding of what a rock album could be, but that doesn’t mean it’s the band’s best record. Still, the power and emotion that the Who puts into songs like “Pinball Wizard” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It” makes it easy to understand why Tommy was a phenomenon that finally brought the band the level of commercial success they deserved.
4. Quadrophenia (1973)
The protagonist of Quadrophenia is Jimmy, a mod in the mid-’60s that Townshend based on several early fans of the Who, but the band is firmly in their ’70s arena rock mode for bombastic songs like “The Real Me” and “Love, Reign O’er Me.” With more sophisticated production, Quadrophenia is the Who’s most cinematic rock opera, with songs fitting together elegantly into a narrative arc with fewer of the meandering instrumental interludes that tied Tommy together. “The music is cluttered with horns and unnecessarily shrill, so that—despite its considerable melodic (and motivic, as they say) pizzazz—you don’t play it for fun. But if Townshend’s great virtue is compassion, this is his triumph,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of Quadrophenia.
3. My Generation (1965)
My Generation is the greatest debut album of the British Invasion, its title track a singular achievement that captures the spirit of rock ’n roll in three minutes as perfectly as any song in history. Nobody else was playing drums like Moon or bass like Entwistle in 1965, and the band’s “maximum R&B” cranked up the volume on two James Brown covers and one Bo Diddley tune along with nine originals that established Townshend as a giant among rock songwriters. Punk rock and heavy metal might have happened eventually if My Generation never existed, but it probably would’ve taken a lot longer for everyone else to make rock louder and faster without the Who’s blueprint.
2. The Who Sell Out (1967)
The Who Sell Out is both a cheeky pop art satire of the commercialization of rock music and a celebration of the offshore pirate radio stations like Radio London that helped make the mid-’60s such a remarkable and unique moment in British music and culture. During the summer of ’67 that the band toiled on the album, however, the U.K. Parliament passed the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act and forced Radio London off the air, making The Who Sell Out something of a real-time eulogy for the pirate radio era. The band composed fake radio jingles for real products to really flesh out the album’s concept, putting them in between great songs like “Tattoo” and the band’s only Top 10 hit in America, “I Can See For Miles.” But Townshend went above and beyond the call of duty on “Odorono,” creating a full-length song full of pathos and drama that happened to be about underarm deodorant.
1. Who’s Next (1971)
Townshend wanted to follow up Tommy with an even more ambitious rock opera, Lifehouse. But nobody else seemed to understand his futuristic narrative, or his aspirations to develop the album in a communal environment in a theater residency, integrating the audience’s lives into the songs. Townshend nearly had a nervous breakdown, and felt somewhat defeated when he consented to simply release nine songs written for the project as Who’s Next without all of the multimedia concepts he’d dreamed up for Lifehouse. Fortunately, they happened to be nine of the greatest songs the Who ever recorded, with co-producer Glyn Johns helping the band marry innovative analogue synthesizer programming to some of the most powerful hard rock ever put on record at the time. Townshend has revisited Lifehouse again and again, in a radio play, a graphic novel, and the 2000 Lifehouse Chronicles box set. But songs like “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Behind Blue Eyes” remain immortal anthems to millions of people who never worked out the story Townshend was trying to tell in the lyrics.
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