Review ("The Greats"): The Who - My Generation (1965)

Tracks: 1) Out In The Street; 2) I Don’t Mind; 3) The Good’s Gone; 4) La-La-La-Lies; 5) Much Too Much; 6) My Generation; 7) The Kids Are Alright; 8) Please, Please, Please; 9) It’s Not True; 10) I’m A Man; 11) A Legal Matter; 12) The Ox.

REVIEW

Like any other hard-working rhythm’n’blues outfit on the early 1960s’ UK scene, The Who (formerly The Detours, also temporarily The High Numbers for a few ridiculous months in 1964) started out as a cover band, with the same predilection for American blues, R&B, soul, and Motown-style pop as most of their contemporaries. And it is quite likely that, had they continued to be master-minded by lead vocalist Roger Daltrey, as it was around 1962–63, they would have stayed exactly that way through the years and decades (one look at Roger’s fairly dismal line of solo albums, starting from the mid-1970s, would be enough to confirm that). Fortunately for the world at large, as it typically happens, in the battle between brawn and intelligence, as represented respectively by the two outstanding alumni of Acton County Grammar School — Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend — intelligence would sooner or later gain the upper hand, and the Roger Daltrey-led «Detours» (with the name itself seemingly kowtowing to Duane Eddy across the Atlantic), became the Townshend-led «The Who», certainly the artsiest and most pretentious name for a rock and roll band dragging around in 1964. These days, we sort of take it for granted, but just imagine the balls required to call yourself something like that in an era when grammatical articles were still strictly forbidden to determine interrogative pronouns, at least in the world of pop entertainment.

And yes, pretentious is precisely the right word to use when embarking on the difficult mission of explaining what it is that really makes The Who The Who, and why, in spite of all the obvious and reasonable objections, that particular «it» was so utterly awesome from the very beginning. Pete Townshend — as represented by his public image, his guitar playing, and his songwriting — came at the tail end of the «early British Invasion»; if we do not count the band’s very first single credited to The High Numbers (to which I shall briefly return later), the public learned of Townshend’s existence through ‘I Can’t Explain’, released in early 1965, by which time The Beatles were reigning supreme and the front rows of their court were already swarming with creative acts such as The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Yardbirds, The Zombies, The Hollies, The Kinks (one band of very particular interest for us here), and tons of lesser acts offering what might seem like an insurmountable heap of competition for Johnnie-come-latelys. For a new band to appear at this time — a new pop band, not yet armed with the mind-blowing gimmickry of psychedelic or symphonic sounds — and make a serious impression on the general public would require something extra. And for Pete Townshend, that something extra was not really the chords he used in his songwriting, nor the feedback he extracted from his guitar, nor the windmill-playing posing that worked so effectively on the band’s early photos from live performances. That something extra was self-awareness.

If you look back at all the great pop singles released by British Invasion artists around 1963–64 — and there are a lot of them — it doesn’t take much to understand that all these guys were delivering music that, while certainly stemming from previous influences, both from overseas and homebrewn ones, sounded like nothing ever done before. From ‘She Loves You’ to ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’ to ‘For Your Love’ to ‘She’s Not There’ to ‘You Really Got Me’, these were fantastic new sounds, amplifying familiar emotions to unprecedented climactic heights. The catch, however, was that all these songs, on a formal objective level at least, never really pretended to be anything substantially different from the kind of pop music heard on the radio in the previous decade, or even the decades before that. The sound — the guitar tones, the production details, the volume, the energy, and, occasionally, the unusual choice of chords, too — was fresh and new, but the messages encoded within, as represented by the lyrics and the general musical vibe, did not stray far away from those already well known through years of jump blues, rockabilly, R&B, folk, and even crooners. One could go ga-ga over the bleeding feedback intro in ‘I Feel Fine’, but it was still a song about how baby’s good to me you know. One could be astounded at the new crunchy hard rock tone of the guitar riff of ‘You Really Got Me’, but it was still just a loud rocker with a promise of orgasmic release, much like a classic Elvis or Gene Vincent track. One could be baffled by the unconventional, jazz-laced melodic structure of ‘She’s Not There’, but it was still a familiar lament over lost love. Yes, you could relisten to it twenty times and get the sense of a very special kind of mystery buried in between the lines, but if there was a mystery, it was implied. Not stated directly in yer face.

The exclusiveness and uniqueness of The Who as a band, and of Pete Townshend as their leader — I specifically say uniqueness, not greatness, because this precise aspect is the one that causes either love or hatred for the band, depending on personal preferences — is that The Who were the very first band, or, at least, the very first successful band to throw that statement back at you. «Fuck it», Pete Townshend almost literally seems to say from the earliest steps of his recorded career, «we’re artists. We do not entertain, we make serious art, and we’re not afraid to come out and say it directly on our records. We’re a pop band by definition, but we claim that we have to be taken as seriously as Coltrane, as Miles Davis, as Shostakovich, as the minimalists, as James Joyce, as the nuclear bomb. We may not be the only ‘thinking man’s pop band’ on the scene, but we shall be that one band which will explicitly remind our audiences that we are with every step we take. And if our arrogance gets in the way of our musicianship or songwriting — not that we plan for it to, but who knows? — well, too bad for the songwriting. We make art, and our art is arrogance.»

To be fair, this mini-manifesto is something that I have just invented on the spot, though many of its points actually summarize real interviews given out by Pete in the early days of The Who’s popularity (as well as all the subsequent ones). But if you want objective arguments, well, just look around the first couple of the band’s albums and count just how many simplistic boy-meets-girl type of pop compositions you meet there — zero, that’s how many (that is, if you only count Townshend-written material). Not even Ray Davies, Pete’s chief songwriting influence in those days, could boast such a record, what with the bulk of his early output still presented in fairly conventional ways (it was not until Face To Face, The Kinks’ fourth LP, that Ray would finally break free of such conventions). True, The Who did appear on the scene later than almost any other representative of «modern rock’s first (pre-psychedelic) wave» — but it was almost as if they did this on purpose, so they could just skip the lightweight silliness of the ‘She Loves You’ era and start off right on the self-awareness level of Highway 61 Revisited and Rubber Soul.

It is, in fact, amusingly symbolic that even that first forgotten single which they released in July 1964 as The High Numbers, while still under the management of «Mod God» Peter Meaden — and a whole month before Ray Davies could show them the way with ‘You Really Got Me’ — already reflects a very specific, very subtle level of haughty arrogance, even if Pete Townshend had nothing to do with the songwriting. This was made at the height of the band’s early flirtation period with the Mod movement and it literally consisted of two covers of songs by American artists (‘Misery’ by The Dynamics and ‘Got Love If You Want It’ by Slim Harpo, the latter incidentally also directly covered by The Kinks on their self-titled debut) with new lyrics from Meaden, centered around Mod trends and fashions: ‘Misery’ became ‘Zoot Suit’ ("I’m the snappiest dresser right down to my inch wide tie"), and ‘Got Love’ became ‘I’m The Face’ ("All the others are third class tickets by me, baby, is that clear"), giving Meaden a chance to claim full songwriting credits for the recordings.

There is nothing particularly special about these recordings; despite the full classic Who line-up already functioning at this point (with Keith Moon and all), they do not sound much like classic Who and, in fact, it is not even clear how much of the sound is carried by the band members themselves and how much of it comes courtesy of session musicians (lead guitar on either is definitely not Pete Townshend, too smooth and fluent for him — Pete never took the likes of Chet Atkins as his role model; drums could be Moon, but could just as well be the drummer from The Shadows or somebody like him). And, of course, it was fairly typical of bands at the time to put a couple of overseas covers on their first single, be it Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ — but how many of them would dare to wipe out the original lyrics and replace them with some sort of trendy contemporary fashion culture statement? As it happens, the very first lyrical line to be officially released on a Who record is "I’m the hippiest number in town and I’ll tell you why". A bit more self-confidence here than in "love, love me do, you know I love you", isn’t there?

But in reality, the band actually lacked self-confidence at this point, given that they actually surrendered into the hands of Meaden for a while, hoping for the «Mod God» to put them on their feet in a devilishly competitive environment. It did not work: Meaden could neither write good songs for them nor help them find their own sound, and The Who’s association with the Mod culture actually began to weaken already by the time they hooked up with Shel Talmy and released their real first single. Allegedly, they chose to align themselves with Mod values precisely because the Mods acted as a superficially «intellectualized» counterbalance to the gruff ’n’ dirty low-class «rockers» — the problem being that there is very often a large gap between «intellectualized» and «intelligent», and, as any connoisseur of the Quadrophenia franchise knows all too well, the numbers of people on the former side of the gap were vastly superior to those on the latter. For that reason alone, it is not difficult to understand why the sole undoubtable piece of evidence for The Who’s one-time Mod alliance remains as this technically fun, but inconsequential single from their «High Numbers» days. (I bet they didn’t even ride any scooters back in the day; the first photo of Pete on a scooter I ever saw has him being... 64 years old!).

But if The Who weren’t really Mods, and if they weren’t rockers, who were they? Well, that was probably just the question eating away at Pete Townshend’s brain when, under pressure from the band’s new management — Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp — he sat down to write his first song: "got a feeling inside / it’s a certain kind / I feel hot and cold / down in my soul". What makes ‘I Can’t Explain’ such a fascinating experience is that it is a song full of contradictions. People are still arguing about who played on it (Jimmy Page was definitely in the studio as a session musician, but the degree of his actual contribution is hotly debated), but questions about the song’s conception are even more befuddling than those about its realization. For one thing, is it a love song? The lyrics in the bridge — "I think it’s love / Try to say it to you / When I feel blue" — seem to technically confirm that, but nothing else does, and Pete himself has stated that the words may have been influenced by producer Shel Talmy, who wanted the band’s first single to stay closer to the popular formula of the teenage love song; in reality, though, it was more about the general inability to verbally express and rationalize irrational feelings, something that we all (hopefully) go through at one time or another. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the first song­writing experience of a 19-year old Peter Townshend. What other 19-year old rock’n’roller back in 1964 had the same kind of a first songwriting experience?

For another thing, ‘I Can’t Explain’ is always talked about as an imitation of The Kinks — the ‘You Really Got Me’ approach to guitar riffage — and while this is objectively true (Pete did listen to The Kinks and Shel did ask him to play the song à la Davies brothers), the final vibe of the song feels nothing whatsoever like ‘You Really Got Me’ or ‘All Day And All Of The Night’. The latter were rough, menacing, «caveman»-style declarations of hormonal lust (with maybe a touch of subtle, sensitive vulnerability hiding behind the gruff façade — after all, Ray Davies was never a true dirty punk at heart); ‘I Can’t Explain’ is much more of a declaration of intellectual swagger, as its higher-pitched, cleaner-produced riff is anything but threatening. Instead, it kind of matches the meaning of the lyrics, because it is difficult for me to explain what exactly the melody and groove of ‘I Can’t Explain’ manages to awaken inside of me. Is it rage and frustration? Or is it some sort of triumphant realization of myself as a thinking, feeling, acting human being? As in most of The Who’s best songs, there is an unresolved mystery within their first single that still keeps it fresh and enticing after all those years.

I do have to say, though, that my absolute favorite version of the song is not the original studio recording, but rather the live performance of it (crappy sound quality, audience screaming and all) on the Shindig! show, the one that would, luckily for us all, survive into the soundtrack of the Kids Are Alright movie. While still preserving the fast tempo and sonic brightness of the original, it is notably snappier and more aggressive on the TV stage, with Roger in particular giving a more sneering, teeth-grinding reading and most importantly, with Keith Moon at his absolute best — notice how the camera, typically supposed to be resting on the frontman or, at most, the lead guitarist, keeps coming back to the young drummer and his amazing lightning show as if drawn to it by the proverbial unseen powers. No other Who performance, I think, better illustrates the classic «role reversal» this band invented — with the guitar essentially keeping time and the drums providing main dynamic melodic content. If you ever wanted to complain about Keith Moon in the classic Live At Leeds years of live Who greatness (1969–70) — all that incessant thrashing about on every song — I would disagree with you, but I would be able to understand the nature of the complaint. But here, the amount of generated thunderous chaos from Keith’s kit is directly proportional to the level of perfectly choreographed self-discipline — he feels in total control over every beat, alternating thunderous fills with steadier patterns like an experienced ballet dancer, flying about with dexterity and grace rather than just total furious abandon. Unfortunately, examples of such perfection from the man are scarcer than hen’s teeth: on the original studio recordings from the early years he played with too much modesty, and live recordings from The Who do not really become plentiful until the late Sixties.

Ironically, the Kinks connection ended up being even more pronounced on the B-side of the single — all because Shel Talmy, the producer, had this ridiculous, but efficient practice of leeching up onto his artists’ royalties by saddling them with recording his own compositions, and ‘Bald Headed Woman’ was one of those songs that he had already successfully fed to the Kinks (for their self-titled debut) and now landed on the Who. The real «kink» here was, of course, that Shel Talmy had nothing whatsoever to do with the writing of ‘Bald Headed Woman’, a traditional folk-blues tune he must have heard from one of Harry Belafonte’s or Odetta’s records — but since few people in the UK knew of that fact, and since, what with the song being labeled «traditional» and all, nobody would come forward to claim the rights, Talmy had all the power to do exactly what he wanted with it. Anyway, The Who’s recording ended up being marginally better, courtesy of Jimmy Page’s fuzz effect on the rhythm guitar and Keith Moon’s inborn ability to raise ruckus, but overall it was one of those things that eventually led to the rupture between the band and their narcissistic producer.

No compromises whatsoever would be made, however, for the band’s second single. ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ is one of those rare Who songs where Townshend shares songwriting credits with Daltrey, and while I have no idea what part of the melody or lyrics Roger may be responsible for, I can sort of understand the symbolic value of this credit. ‘I Can’t Explain’ is a song that could have just as easily and convincingly been sung by Pete; but for the brash, cocky declaration of its follow-up one absolutely requires a loud, all-out powerful delivery from the likes of Roger. It is here, for the first time, that the unique magic of The Who is demonstrated to perfection: Pete writes bombastic, overdriven anthems for which God has not given him the proper lungs, and Roger, who cannot write a catchy or meaningful song to save his life, acts as Pete’s obedient, but well-understanding mouthpiece. Imagine Pete, with his thin little wheeze, shouting out the "nothing gets in my way / not even locked doors" bridge section — the effect would be more SNL-style comedy than anything else. With Roger at the mike, it’s far easier to suspend the disbelief, even if at this point Mr. Daltrey has not yet fully awakened his vocal tract, and still sounds more like a snotty adolescent than a «real man»... but that, on the other hand, is sort of understood.

Words can hardly express just how revolutionary that song was upon release — a commercial single A-side that is not a love song, but rather a brash declaration of total personal freedom? Who else wrote such stuff at the time? The Kinks would not get their own ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ until a year later. The Rolling Stones put out their own ‘I’m Free’ half a year later, and you could easily call that song a pale shadow of The Who’s bombastic manifesto. To land the final nail into everybody else’s coffins, Townshend did not play a proper guitar solo in the middle of the song — instead, he lets it descend into the utmost chaos of feedback and dissonance, happily asissted by Keith creating his own sea of drumming madness. Here we see not so much the influence of garage-style rock’n’rollers, but that of free-form jazz, to which Pete was probably listening much more at the time than anything else (the Mod association strikes again). And while Townshend’s guitar wildness naturally seems timid and cautionary today, after we’ve lived through Hendrix and early Floyd and subsequent decades of evolution, what still keeps the song going is the incredible melodicity of the chaos he creates: all the power chords and feedbacks and delays and what-not feel like an integral part of the overall thing, not jarring in the least — an art at which he’d get better with each subsequent year for the rest of the decade, culminating in the monumental distorted soundscapes of meaningful chaos on Live At Leeds.

On an important side note, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ is also the first Who song in history which is helped to completion through the talents of Nicky Hopkins, the quiet genius of session piano playing. In fact, I believe that for most people this would probably be the first ever song to hear the classic Nicky Hopkins sound at all (technically, I believe his first notable appearance was on Cyril Davies And His Rhythm And Blues All Stars’ ‘Country Line Special’ in 1963, but how many people have actually heard that particular little jam, good as it is?). Nicky was a masterful chameleon, somehow able to always attune his recognizable signature licks to the specific styles of bands or artists he was playing for, be it Ray Davies, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, or George Harrison — and when playing for The Who, he could with equal effect convey the sensitive vulnerability inside Pete Townshend’s soul (on such later tunes as ‘The Song Is Over’ or ‘Getting In Tune’) or, as he does here, the rambunctious aggressive passion. During the instrumental break here, he emerges as the third equi-privileged partner in the Moon / Townshend joint offensive, playing what feels like a classic Fats Waller-ish virtuoso set of barrel­house piano runs, but filtered through the sieve of an avantgarde mindset — perfectly complementing the technophile explosions of Townshend’s experimental approach to guitar playing. The piano is so essential here that it might actually be the main reason why The Who so rarely performed the song live in those early days — it just doesn’t sound right without Nicky’s «brutally gentle» ivory waves forming a pillow for all the feedback rattle.

On a less important (but still important) side note, the original B-side to ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ was a superb initial demonstration of why The Who simply had to rely on Pete Townshend’s original songwriting — frankly put, there were few, if any, first-to-second-tier bands in the early British Invasion period who sucked worse at covering other people’s material. The Beatles, the Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Moody Blues — all these guys could understand and bottle the essence of their favorite artists, sometimes tightening up the original sound and sometimes failing to improve on it, but they all managed to respect the source material while at the same time giving us a good reason or two to listen to their own versions as well. With The Who, things were different. Pete Townshend did love James Brown, Motown, and various other brands of Americana, but even more than that he loved himself, as did his three soul brothers in the band — and just about any Who cover of somebody else is an attempt to steal somebody else’s musical skeleton and turn it into a Who song. A few times it worked — well enough to make songs like ‘Young Man Blues’ and ‘Summertime Blues’ into immortal staples of the band’s classic live repertoire — but more often than not, it really didn’t.

Case in point: this particular B-side, a cover of ‘Daddy Rolling Stone’, Otis Blackwell’s slow blues number from 1953 which The Who, of course, learned not from the original but from the relatively more popular R&B rearrangement by poorly remembered performer Derek Martin. Martin’s version, sung with a sleazy flair and flanked with admiring backing vocals from an exuberant girl choir, is a classic example of politically incorrect, theatrically exaggerated masculine flair, not to mention quite catchy and toe-tappy. The Who play this light, fleeting groove with hundred-pound lead balls chained to their feet, with Roger unable to capture the swagger of a professional R&B singer and the backing male harmonies sounding deprived of all meaning. It’s not bad as such — the groove still works in its own way — but it’s simply not a very efficient attempt at injecting the «Who-virus» into a completely innocent victim.

Mostly, though, covers like ‘Daddy Rolling Stone’ work poorly not in and out of themselves, but in the context of Pete Townshend’s artistic persona, which, with songs like ‘I Can’t Explain’ and ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, emerges before us full-grown, without any preliminary period of naïve infancy. Already at this point, covering Derek Martin or James Brown feels like a weird anachronism for The Who — think, say, the Beatles putting a belated cover of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in the middle of Revolver or something like that. Every time I listen to those early covers, I can almost hear Pete’s telepathic presence in my head: «I love these guys, I sure do, but do I really want to be doing this? I’m not really sure I want to be doing this. I already got enough of my own thing to do without being obliged to do this». At least when they did those stretched-out live performances of ‘The Hall Of The Mountain King’ or ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, they could quickly turn them into their own thing, forging out that live Who magic over extended instrumental grooves. But on these records, there’s no place to stretch out — you don’t have enough time to shake off the chains of Derek Martin, and few things are more ridiculous in the pop world of the 1960s than a Pete Townshend shackled in the chains of a Derek Martin.

Fortunately, he would only stay shackled on the B-sides of his singles (the trend continues with ‘Shout And Shimmy’, a lively but once again unnecessary take on James Brown as the B-side of ‘My Generation’ — although this one at least offers Keith a great chance of showcasing his unbelievable stamina, and it is even better witnessed on another excerpt from a Shindig! performance preserved for the Kids Are Alright movie). The A-sides throughout 1965 continued to be reserved for the long-nosed social statements. ‘I Can’t Explain’ was the confused awakening from the egg; on ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ the ambitious young dragonling spreads out his wings, hoping to overshadow the world. With ‘My Generation’, the surprised dragonling learns that, somehow, those wings are pinned down to the ground by his elders — he is not alone in this world, and all those other people aren’t going to move out of the way of the young one so easily.

‘My Generation’ has never been in any top 10 of my favorite Who songs (other than maybe the «Top 10 John Entwistle bass performances», of which it is an unquestionable proud member), mainly for the reason that I am always on the watchout for a good balance between Pete Townshend as a music composer and as a «social messenger», and in my intuitive opinion, ‘My Generation’ is seriously skewed toward the latter. I mean, the title alone is a dead giveaway. You could almost imagine this hallucinatory Conference of the Greats: «‘Mr. Lennon, how do you feel about fans and critics calling you the voice of your generation?’ — John: ‘Cheeky! Give us a kiss’ — ‘Mr. Jagger, is it a great responsibility being the spokesman for your generation?’ — Mick: ‘Oh, I hope they don’t mistake us for a rock’n’roll band, you know’ — ‘Mr. Dylan, people are really looking up to you as a poetic beacon for your generation, what can you say about that?’ — Bob: ‘Beacon? That’s a funny word to use. What rhymes with beacon? Deacon? Somebody should write a song called ‘Deacon Beacon’ and dedicate it to Frank Lloyd Wright and his twenty Siamese cats’ — long pause — another long pause — thin whiny voice from the back of the hall: ‘so... did somebody say MY GENERATION?..’»

It’s funny to think that ‘My Generation’ actually started life as a slow blues — the early incarnation of the song would later resurface in the band’s mid-1970s live performances as ‘My Generation Blues’, where it had a basic pattern not unlike the Rolling Stones’ ‘Off The Hook’ from the previous year (which, in its own turn, was a vocal reinvention of Little Walter’s instrumental ‘Off The Wall’ from a decade back), or, as can be heard from a surviving Townshend demo, traces of the classic chuggin’ ‘Can I Get A Witness’ groove. Deconstructed to the core, it shows how much a young Pete actually was in the grip of «traditional» cross-Atlantic R&B — but then you hear the final product, and the one thought that comes to mind is «where the hell did that come from?» The speed, the heaviness, the metallic bass undertones, the odd stuttering delivery of the lines, the lyrics that feel like a naïve political manifesto — heck, they are a a naïve political manifesto — these are all transformations that certainly go deeper than just a brand new coat of paint on the old vehicle.

Lyrics-wise, it might be one of the most straightforward sets Pete ever wrote; he himself has mentioned that the sentiment was inspired by Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’ (a song that The Who would themselves go on to popularize way beyond its original limits), and although the 30-year old Allison wrote about the troubles of the underprivileged adolescents with much more subtlety and humor than the 20-year old Townshend, Pete’s bluntness and crudeness feels very adequate to the song’s mad drive. Ironically, as much as ‘My Generation’ could strive to be an absolutely timeless anthem for the young ones (boomers or zoomers, they always feel themselves oppressed by the older ones, regardless of the time period), it seems to have «aged poorly», as they say, due to the infamous line "hope I die before I get old" — which, at the time of its writing and recording, was most certainly to be understood literally: youth was the one certified golden value that separated the boomer from the boomer’s parents, and loss of youth was considered the equivalent of loss of life. This is one sentiment that seems to have not transitioned too well into the 21st century with its safety concerns. (Anecdotally, teen pop icon Hilary Duff, when covering the song back in 2004, changed the lyric to "hope I don’t die before I get old" — the only culturally memorable detail about this otherwise abysmal take on a classic).

Of course, this stupid panic reflects little other than (a) a total lack of historical perspective and (b) a complete inability to advance from literal to figurative understanding, because the written line has pretty much evolved together with the very concept of ‘youth’ itself — these days (and in a lot of ways, we all have to thank the boomer generation for that), ‘youth’ is far more about attitudes and state of minds than it is about actual physical age; I know quite a few examples of 20-year olds who are actually much ‘older’ than octogenarians like Pete Townshend or Keith Richards. Laughing at the line, or feeling indignant about it, does not change the fact that it remains true in a very fundamental sense. In fact, I’d say it has aged better than the «stuttering» gimmick, which probably helped increase the song’s popularity at the time but starts to get on your nerves with repeated listens — its chief advantage, I think, is helping the young hooligans to sneak in a faint shade of the F-word: "why don’t you all f-f-f-f-f-... fade away?" is actually far more straightforward with its intentions than any incoherent bit of profanity one might or might not decipher in the classic Kingsmen version of ‘Louie Louie’. Another tiny, but nagging complaint is that I’ve always found the "this is my generation, it’s my generation baby" chorus to be very lazily written — it’s really just a slogan, not a proper melodic conclusion to the snappy verses, and it always left me wanting more. (Admittedly, from ‘I Can See For Miles’, to ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, to ‘Love Reign O’er Me’, Pete Townshend would become the master of sloganeering one-line choruses, but this one doesn’t even have an outstanding melodic phrase or riff to go along with it. Lazy!).

From a sheer musical standpoint, though, the one thing that ‘My Generation’ did best was announce the arrival of John Entwistle and the redefinition of the role of the bass guitar in popular music. You can barely hear John on the original studio version of ‘I Can’t Explain’, and while he is more prominent on ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, even on that song he comes through as «just» a first-rate, reliable, steady anchorman. With ‘My Generation’, however, a song based on the stop-and-start approach, John gets his first real chance to demonstrate his amazing prowess — and while his bass lines would certainly gain in complexity and virtuosity over years and years of practice, his sheer genius of handling his instrument would never really shine in brighter colors than it already does on this song.

People often talk of Entwistle as the «consummate musician» within The Who, the «solid rock» serving as a reliable foundation for the groove, playing all those technically impeccable lines while giving his bandmates ample room for their infectious musical hooliganry. This, I think, has a lot to do with John’s stage (and offstage) image — standing immovably, never even changing his unperturbed facial expression, just the «thunderfingers» flying all over the fretboard, while everything else goes to hell all around him. In reality, though, I don’t think The Who’s proverbial chemistry would have been all that proverbial if it were really this way — Entwistle, the «serious professional» musician, leading on a band of barely disciplined punks treasuring aggression and showmanship over practice and discipline. It seems closer to the truth to recognize that Entwistle’s speed, complexity, and almost inhuman fluency with his instrument — no matter how many notes he plays per second, they always feel a perfectly natural part of the song rather than a narcissistic hyperbole — are just as much an expression of his own rebellious, deeply passionate nature as Pete’s windmills, Roger’s roar, and Keith’s «permanent fills»; he simply does not need to jump around, mug, or throw on a hell of a lot of distortion and feedback to express it, and ‘My Generation’ is ample proof of that.

Everybody’s jaw is usually left on the floor by the time the bass solo comes in — not only is the song typically listed as one of the first rock’n’roll numbers to have a bass solo, but it also happens to have one of the best bass solos of all time — but in fact, John’s supernatural sound envelops the song starting from the fifth second, as he alone is allowed to continue playing along with Roger’s stuttering when the drums and guitar briefly stop. It’s a darkly aggressive sound, but at the same time brimming with self-assured coolness, and, most importantly, with maturity — without the Entwistle touch, ‘My Generation’ would have remained just a cocky DIY declaration of cheeky young punks; the bass lines, however, would probably make even the snobbiest of contemporary avantgarde jazz musicians to sit up and take notice (if only on the level of «what’s this solid cat doing playing bass in a crappy band like this one?»). The simple truth is, when you think about it, is that nobody, nobody ever had played the bass that particular way before. Nobody. Not in the pop market, not in the jazz market, not in rockabilly, not in surf-rock, nowhere. Everything we now know about bass guitar virtuosity literally starts here, with this one guy doing these smooth-as-hell fretboard runs as nonchalantly as a professional chef slicing up his sushi.

In concert, as we know, ‘My Generation’ would originally serve as the bombastic outro to the Who show, culminating in the glorious sacrifice of Pete’s guitar (and, on occasion, Keith’s drums) to the voracious God Of Pop Art — but later on, in the Tommy / Live At Leeds era the song would undergo a more surprising metamorphosis, turning into a short powerful intro to lengthy improvised rounds of stage jamming, as if Pete and the band suddenly decided that a braggadoccio statement like this one would be better used to promote not their generation’s destructive instincts, but rather their creative ones, like, «see, here’s what my generation is actually capable of!» Still later on, unfortunately, as it happened with many Who songs, it became simply more of a nostalgic millstone around the band’s neck — in fact, after Townshend’s spiritual breakdown with Lifehouse, I don’t think I ever heard or saw any live performance of ‘My Generation’ that would have me suspend the necessary disbelief. It’s weird, because its full life cycle from the studio original to the classic destructive performances at Monterey and the Smothers Brothers show to the 15-minute long epic performance on Live At Leeds is immortal enough to potentially inspire any new listener in the 21st century. But who would be capable of once again making it sound good in the 21st century? Green Day? Foo Fighters?.. Whatever. Without a proper self-destructive vibe to it, ‘My Generation’ is useless, and that’s a vibe young people do not supply today any more, for better or worse. (Leave it to the presidents of Russia and the US, maybe they’d make a good duo).

In any case, it was difficult for a song like ‘My Generation’ not to chart in the explosive days of the fall of 1965, and it did handsomely outsell both previous singles, though the coveted #1 spot on the charts still remained out of reach: the single stalled at #2, unable to outdo the impact of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ — a song that was, ironically, dealing with much the same generational matters, but in a more lightweight and humorous fashion. Still, given that one might have expected the furious and heavy sound of ‘My Generation’, with its lengthy noise-drenched coda, to be way too much even for some of the more adventurous young listeners at the moment, #2 was still a stunning commercial achievement in that brief period of time when even Frank Zappa believed that pop music could, perhaps, be capable of awakening people’s dormant intellectual potential. (On a side note, this commercial success also happened to save Roger’s butt, as he was fired from The Who for continuously bullying his mates soon after ‘My Generation’ was recorded — then, in a compromise that forever clipped his dominant wings, hastily re-admitted to the band once the latest single began to take off. Proving once again that the royalty check is mightier than the publicity photo).

With The Who finally becoming, if not yet superstars, then at least one of the trendiest items on the pop market, it was time for their first LP — rush time, to be precise: ‘My Generation’ was released on October 29, registered on the charts the following week, with The Who zipping into IBC Studio A on November 10 and 12 to produce six new tracks, supplementing them with extra stuff lying around since April of the same year, and putting the resulting LP out on December 3, right in time for the Christmas season and everything. With the April and October/November recordings interspersed with each other, the end product feels a bit like those bastardized Beatles albums where one half comes from Help! and the other from Rubber Soul, despite the tremendous gap in the «artistic awakening» levels — this is one of the reasons why Pete himself has always been dismissive of the album, though another, more important, one might be that it became the only Who record to be completely produced by Shel Talmy, with whom they never managed to establish a positive working relation and who would soon become the chief source of their financial struggles throughout the decade.

Anyway, the April ’65 tracks here are unquestionably the weakest of the bunch — which does not make them altogether bad, because the overall sound of the «hungry young Who» is always a joy to hear, even when they’re giddily butchering the likes of James Brown and Bo Diddley. But nobody is going to list ‘Out In The Street’, chosen to be the album opener, as their favorite Who song, right? The roll-in-the-rut introduction is exactly the same as the one for ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ — not so surprising considering both songs were recorded on the same day — and the stuttering groove, which I cannot exactly identify, just feels nicked from some piece of American R&B without much polish. Also, it’s a macho stalking song ("hey listen woman / you just can’t throw me / I won’t stand it / if you don’t know me") that Pete probably wrote to tickle Roger’s fancy or something. I think it’s the only song in their catalog with that vibe — but it doesn’t really work, because for all of his attempted macho posturing, Daltrey’s natural, God-given talent is for courteous romance, not for lustful sexual prowling. I do like all the tasty feedback bits in the song (Pete gets highly experimental during the «solo break», if you can call it that), but on the whole it’s an experiment that leads to a dead end.

The other three early recordings are all covers, two by James Brown (‘I Don’t Mind’ and ‘Please Please Please’) and one by Bo Diddley (‘I’m A Man’). The latter is done more close to the original than the contemporary Yardbirds cover (slow tempo, classic ‘Hoochie Coochie’ ka-chunk ka-chunk groove, etc.), but, once again, Roger’s attempt to portray a wild beast on the prowl falls rather flat — he does his best to generate a deep, gurgling, growling black man’s growl and you can almost sense his eyes bursting out of their sockets due to all the strain, but it is still not very convincing. Curiously, the main star on the cover ends up to be Nicky Hopkins, whose expansive piano playing overshadows even Pete’s feedback. Meanwhile, Keith Moon seems bored — that tempo is just too slow for him, it’s almost like, «hey, I didn’t exactly dye my hair ginger to get stuck here playing this slow 12-bar blues thing for the rest of my life!».

The two James Brown songs they chose are fairly romantic, but even so, Roger Daltrey copying James Brown, as you might imagine even without directly sating your curiosity, is not the best idea in the world. The arrangements, close enough to the original versions by the Famous Flames, do not play to The Who’s principal strengths; John and Pete’s backing vocals are thin; and Roger certainly lacks the brash, all-out-in-yer-face theatrical flair that Brown carried to its extreme. Like I said — from the very beginning, The Who were not carved out to re-transmit or even amplify anybody else’s vision but their own, and these covers chiefly remain as historical curios, amusing in their own way but ultimately a dead end which, luckily for us all, the band would never try to bulldoze through in the future.

Jump ahead six months to October and November of 1965, though, and the progress is astonishing — very much in league with my current way of thinking that there is no better period than the late summer / early fall of 1965 to which the phrase «the popular music world has changed beyond repair» would be more suitably applicable. There would be no more pointless covers, no simplistic statements of machistic self-empowerment, no generic pop ballads, no routine filler. There would, instead, be the proper opening of the floodgates, with Pete Townshend growing into a confident, self-assured song­writer who could churn out serious material at the same rate as Lennon/McCartney or Ray Davies, and, at that particular point, at an even higher rate than Jagger/Richards.

For starters, the same recording session that yielded ‘My Generation’ also yielded a song that, in my opinion, is heads and tails above it in both musical and lyrical respects: ‘The Kids Are Alright’. Unlike ‘My Generation’, which is about as straight­forward (and, subsequently, as clichéd) as it gets, ‘The Kids Are Alright’ is a bit of a mystery, still subject to a variety of lyrical interpretations. Since the listener’s attention is chiefly drawn to the title and chorus, people often take the song to be sort of a «party anthem», a little something Pete had come up with to suck up to his Mod friends — "I don’t mind other guys dancing with my girl", as in, hey, look at all those cool cats and all, you can even entrust your girl to these guys and they’ll return her back to you more or less undamaged, is this best buddy heaven or what? But then you start taking in more of the lyrics and you begin to understand that the key points, rather, are "I know sometimes I must get out in the light" and "I know if I don’t, I’ll go out of my mind" — so, all right, these would look like the confessions of a neophyte family man who still has this mad urge to socialize, but then... "better leave her behind with the kids, they’re all right?" So is it that he actually has to "get away" from the party? In the end, the song breaks and inverts all possible stereotypes — it’s not the romance that splits the protagonist away from his buddies (a common enough theme in traditional balladry), it’s something entirely different. Conversely, his girl is the one who belongs with his buddies. Come to think of it, it’s a bit of a Pierre Besuchov situation here. Maybe Pete’s been trudging along a volume of War And Peace in his spare time?

Music-wise, the song is just as much of an enigma. Its main jangly melody, for the first time in Who history, is quite clearly influenced by The Byrds — if that lilting folk-rock sound infected even the Beatles, why wouldn’t it infect The Who? — and so are the dreamy vocal harmonies; but then the instrumental break seems like an attempt to somehow squeeze this Byrds vibe into the kick-ass rambunctious skeleton of «classic Who», with metallic resonance from barrages of power chords and Keith helping Pete to get the best out of this crazy crescendo. In a way, ‘The Kids Are Alright’ is more quintessential «folk-rock» than any Byrds song from that period ever was, because it is a song that, in fully equal proportions, respects the «folk» roots of its main melody and the «rock» aspect of its energetic power (certainly the Byrds never «rocked» that hard in 1965) — but how does that even fit in with the song’s weird message? Leave it to Pete Townshend to come up with such songs that feel like happy, glorious, joyful anthems on the outside but are full of unresolved confusion once you begin overthinking them (a not always recommendable strategy with Townshend’s compositions, I must say).

Unfortunately, in between the forgettable James Brown covers and the towering achievements of ‘My Generation’ and ‘The Kids Are Alright’ the world at large has all but forgotten that the November sessions yielded six more original tracks for the album — all of them worth mentioning, enjoying, and savoring. Not as impactful as Townshend’s prime line of single material, this «LP fodder» is the result of competent, intelligent, intriguing songwriting, and it’s rather a shame that none of these songs ended up in The Who’s regular live set. Some of them might be still a tad too derivative of other artists — but on the other hand, I sometimes find myself pining for such derivativeness instead of settling for the «mature Townshend style» of inventive, but predictable hard rock riffs and power chords; in other words, there’s a lot to be said for those periods when a great artist is still «searching for himself» rather than already found himself once and for all.

Of course, our young and promising Serious Artist is way too Serious to write straightforward love songs. For Pete Townshend, love’s a bitch, as demonstrated by the love’s-a-bitch trilogy of ‘The Good’s Gone’, ‘La-La-La Lies’, and ‘Much Too Much’. The former is the heaviest of the three, starting off with a neatly picked droning Eastern-ish line (might the Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’ have been an inspiration?) which, unfortunately, does not quite manage to survive the transition into the main verse — but no matter, what with Daltrey’s unexpectedly low and world-weary voice taking away the attention anyway: "I know when I’ve had enough... when I think your love is rough". There’s not a lot of lyrics to the song, but what few there are deal with the «fading love» issue in a surprisingly believable and adult manner. It’s not a song about cheating — that, again, would be too primitive — it’s simply one about the feeling running out, a situation in which, I believe, the real Pete Townshend would not find himself until much, much later. With the droning melody and Daltrey’s drawling, snarling vocals all over this thing, it’s frickin’ nasty — I’m sure if Lou Reed ever did a review of this album, he’d name it as a highlight, heck, I could even totally see The Velvet Underground covering it on a good day. Definitely not the regular way people were describing break-ups in pop music back in 1965.

‘La-La-La Lies’ is comparatively slight and melodically quite similar to Martha & The Vandellas’ ‘Heatwave’, which the band would eventually cover directly — also, lyrics-wise it’s basically just a slightly more twisted take on Paul McCartney’s ‘Another Girl’: "I’ve got my girl and together we’re strong / To laugh at you and prove you wrong". Still, slight as it is, the combined punch of Keith’s non-stop tom-toms rolling all over the empty spaces with Nicky Hopkins’ rippling piano, overshadowing any guitar activity on the song, make it sonically special. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was the first song Pete ever wrote, but if it was, well, it’s definitely better than the first song Paul McCartney ever wrote. On a funny trivia note, the abandoned Shel Talmy felt so desperate by the end of 1966 that he took the decision to issue the song as a single, and they say it even charted... in Sweden, that is. Weird that Talmy, a veteran producer and essentially the creator of the classic Kinks sound, could be so misguided about The Who.

Finally, ‘Much Too Much’ is the little brother of ‘The Good’s Gone’ — shorter, less dark and depressive in tone, but with very much the same message: love = pressure + sacrifice = waste of time. Again, Roger sings this in a clenched-teeth, world-weary voice as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders, while Pete assembles his poetic credentials by rhyming heavy with levy and bevy (submitted for Mr. Zimmerman’s approval), and by writing "your love is hard and fast / your love will always last" as if it were a bad thing (no, really!). But if you don’t want to appreciate the word-smithery, just allow yourself to get lost in the groove. Keith is pounding on all cylinders, Nicky is developing his own little sonata in the background, and Pete simply got the coolest electric guitar sound of 1965 going on — smooth, ringing, melodic, and harshly ass-kicking at the same time. Absolutely nothing like the band’s stage sound — but that’s a Who trademark that would be kept forever and forever, as the heaviness of the sound would always be a «clean» kind of heaviness on the studio records.

Two more songs have a bit of a comic flair to them, set to comparatively similar fast grooves and getting us entangled a bit in affairs of the real world rather than just a mess of abstract feelings. ‘It’s Not True’ acts out a vibe that would later become typical of John Entwistle contributions — this is Pete’s rant against malicious rumors, a catchy and funny little vaudeville number for which Roger might not be the best type of vocalist (his sense of humor always left a lot to be desired), but it’s still cute all the same. Better known — particularly because it was also released as a single by Shel — is ‘A Legal Matter’, on which Pete takes lead vocals himself, either because Roger (who, unlike Pete, was actually going through real marital problems at the time) found it uncomfortable or because Pete wanted to somehow demarcate his ability to sing lead on the LP, which, after all, he had every right to do. I love the shrill, glassy tone on the song’s lead riff, but do not quite appreciate how completely the verse melody rips off ‘The Last Time’ by the Stones — on the other hand, it is interesting to compare the two: Mick’s "you don’t try very hard to please me / with what you know it should be easy" literally means that he’s dumping his woman because she refuses to go down on him (or, well, something like that), whereas Pete’s "I told you why I changed my mind / I got bored by playing with time" implies that he’s dumping her, well, just because he got bored. "Better leave her behind with the kids, they’re alright" and all that jazz.

Finally, for all those who got sick hearing about Pete Townshend’s woman problems (because being happy with your woman is so goddamn bourgeois, right Pete?), we have four minutes of ‘The Ox’, for which the singers just shut up and let the instruments do the talking — or, rather, the pounding, the mooing, the bellowing, and the caterwauling. On this instrumental jam, dedicated to John Entwistle (‘The Ox’ was his nickname), the band formally rips off The Surfaris (‘Wipeout’ and especially ‘Waikiki Run’), but takes its production cues from the likes of Link Wray and his famous heavy brand of instrumentals, amplifying all the ingredients to match state-of-the-art standards. Again, the star of the show is Keith, who turns the song into one single, uninterrupted tom-tom fill for its entire duration, flailing away with metronomic precision — he basically copies Mel Taylor of The Ventures, but plays with more volume and aggression. Meanwhile, Nicky is doing his «barrelhouse Bach» runs in the background, while Pete is testing out various levels of distortion to get a mad-bull-lost-his-way effect from the instrument. (Ironically, the least audible instrument on the finished track is the bass, though I’m sure many might have mistaken the deep fuzzy tone on Pete’s riffage for the bass — particularly because John himself would eventually borrow that tone on occasion).

While ‘The Ox’, strictly speaking, is not «atonal» or «chaotic», its inclusion on the record was a pretty brave move all the same — as Pete himself acknowledges, this is the closest they got to replicating the band’s contemporary live sound in the studio, and that live sound was all about power and aggression, not melody and harmony. The greatest irony, of course, is that while the song feels like a naughty, punkish «deconstruction» of the comparatively clean, professional, and melodic sound of the leading instrumental groups of the time, it is quite transparently an intellectual deconstruction — played as if the band is on the verge of falling apart and dropping dead all the time, but because such is the band’s symbolic intention, not because the band lacks the competence to be squeaky-clean professional.

As is the entire album. I could, if I so desired, call My Generation the nastiest record of 1965, but it’s a special brand of artistically crafted white-collar nastiness, far less naturally nasty than, say, Downliners Sect, or even the angry young Them. Of course, the album does have a soul — the heart is always the starting point of any Pete Townshend composition, bless him — but the specific sound in which that soul is clothed is highly theatrical and symbolic, much like the ritual of destruction that the band had instituted that same year. Is it «pretentious»? By all means, yes, more so than anything else released for the pop market in 1965. Is it a problem? By all means, no, because «pretentious» only fails when you fail to back the pretense with substance. Here, though, substance is in abundance, and on top of that you got Keith Moon, whose main contribution to the world of Art was a thirteen-year period of self-immolation and that period starts right here; the guy may have been crazy, but he was definitely not bluffing.

On a technical note, My Generation has had a long and painful history. In the US, the album did not come out until 1966, with a different, inferior cover (The Who looking lost and confused against Big Ben in the background — just so all you poor Yankees knew who you were dealing with) and with the much newer composition ‘Circles’ replacing the cover of ‘I’m A Man’ (not a particularly bad decision, actually). This version, renamed The Who Sings My Generation, pretty much became the default one, and for a long time was also the only one available in CD format — until 2002, when Shel Talmy himself supervised the issue of a 2-CD deluxe edition with a ton of bonus tracks (none of which, with the obvious exception of ‘I Can’t Explain’, are essential for anybody but completists). This is the one I have, but apparently, true fans will now want to get the 2016 Brunswick 5-CD release with separate stereo and mono mixes, twice as many bonus tracks (also in stereo and mono mixes), and an extra CD of Townshend demos for the album, which might well be worth hunting for — as evidenced by the Scoop series of albums, a full collection of Townshend demos for The Who could actually count as an entire extra, separate artistic career from a parallel universe, legitimately enjoyable on its own.

One might quibble that, perhaps, a 5-CD deluxe edition is just a bit too much honor for a record that isn’t Sgt. Pepper, but even if the LP itself is not the most consistently great set of songs The Who would ever release, there can hardly be any debate about 1965 being the most consistently great year for The Who as an artistic phenomenon. It was in 1965, after all, that we learned about the existence of Keith Moon; about how it was possible to play bass guitar the way it was played on ‘My Generation’; about how there could be a pop band getting by without crafting any sentimental love ballads whatsoever; about windmilling the guitar and then smashing it against an amp; about the possibility of masking your F-words on record through the art of creative stutter; and about a whole lot of other minor things, too numerous to mention. With My Generation, the latest and greatest band of the early British Invasion makes its triumphant entrance — and in doing so, helps set up the stage for a quick transition to an entirely new era of music-making. So yeah... a deluxe 5-CD edition with a coffee table book and a Shel Talmy voodoo doll seems right on the money, provided you have not already spent it all on the deluxe 10-CD edition of Who’s Next (worth every penny, by the way, but let’s not run too far ahead).

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Who