“Who’s Next”

Tue, 19 Feb 2002 21:00:00 +0000

In 1982, I was 12 years old and in the seventh grade. I played trombone in the Indian Trail Junior High Band, so I could read music and could reasonably discern what was a "good" band song (lots of drums, lots of blaring loud trombone parts) and what was a "bad" band song (heavy on clarinets, lots of pianissimo trombone parts or -- worse yet -- lots of rests).

By that order of deduction, I reasoned that most of the music on the radio in 1982 -- at least the music that my 9-volt, battery-powered radio could pick up from the faraway radio signals of Chicago -- sucked. For every decent "Jack and Diane" there were many "Up Where We Belongs," for every OK "Tainted Love" there were 10 maudlin "Open Arms," for every J. Geils Band there were 15 Quarterflashes.

But hold that top-30 ditty. I was about to discover the bloody Who, a band whose members fought constantly, it seemed, onstage and offstage, and whose music vacillated between banal teenage angst and sophisticated adult angst. And the album I was on the verge of discovering, by way of public library checkouts and worn, borrowed eight-tracks, was "Who's Next," released more than a decade earlier, in 1971. It's an album that should have been a failure on many levels. On song after song, it blatantly mutes, deletes or ignores the Who's most combustible musical qualities and replaces them with elements that seem superfluous, or even grievously mistaken. Yet because of this album-long, stereotype-defying, musical running of red lights, "Who's Next" has remained a brain-blowing masterpiece of sonic joy.

Salon.com > Dave Wilson

“Who’s Next”