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Won't Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia
From mid-1970 to early 1974, The Who undertook an amazing and peculiar journey in which they struggled to follow up Tommy with a yet bigger and better rock opera. One of those projects, Lifehouse, was never completed, though many of its songs formed the bulk of the classic 1971 album Who's Next. The other, Quadrophenia, was as down-to-earth as the multimedia Lifehouse was futuristic; issued as a double album in 1973, it eventually became esteemed as one of the Who's finest achievements, despite initial unfavourable comparisons to Tommy. Along the way, the group's visionary songwriter, Pete Townshend, battled conflicts within the band and their management, as well as struggling against the limits of the era's technology as a pioneering synthesizer user and a conceptualist trying to combine rock with film and theatre. The results included some of rock's most ambitious failures, and some of its most spectacular triumphs. In Won't Get Fooled The Who From Lifehouse To Quadrophenia, noted rock writer and historian Richie Unterberger documents this intriguing period in detail, drawing on many new interviews; obscure rare archive sources and recordings; and a vast knowledge of the music of the times. The result is a comprehensive, articulate history that sheds new light on the band's innovations and Pete Townshend's massive ambitions, some of which still seem ahead of their time in the early 21st century.
- GenresMusic
300 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2011
10 people are currently reading
68 people want to read
About the author
Richie Unterberger
29 books45 followersRichie Unterberger's book "The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film" details the incredible wealth of music the Beatles recorded that they did not release, as well as musical footage of the group that hasn't been made commercially available. His other books include "Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll," the two-volume 1960s folk-rock history "Turn! Turn! Turn!"/"Eight Miles High," and "The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience." He's also a frequent contributor to the All Music Guide and MOJO magazine, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area."
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 10, 2016
With so many biographies of bands and artists covering their entire careers, I've developed a particular passion for books that look at more defined parts of that career. This one such book that examines The Who at what is undoubtedly the height of their powers but which was equally fraught and challenging for all concerned.
Of course, this means that issues are investigated at a depth which perhaps make it geek territory but I'm happily guilty as charged in this instance.
It's anazing to read at more than 40 years remove some of the self-critical comments about Who's Next which is one of the great rock albums but which Townshend in particular has always felt ambivalent towards. Likewise on the challenges of performing Quadrophenia live when this has been a terrific live showcase in recent years.
All in all, a vital book for a Who/Townshend afficianado, but geek central for everyone else.
Of course, this means that issues are investigated at a depth which perhaps make it geek territory but I'm happily guilty as charged in this instance.
It's anazing to read at more than 40 years remove some of the self-critical comments about Who's Next which is one of the great rock albums but which Townshend in particular has always felt ambivalent towards. Likewise on the challenges of performing Quadrophenia live when this has been a terrific live showcase in recent years.
All in all, a vital book for a Who/Townshend afficianado, but geek central for everyone else.
October 15, 2017
I love all things Who, but I found this a little boring at times. I guess there is a level of detail about their career beyond which even I don't really care. It was well researched, though.
June 13, 2017
As a Who fan you'll love this behind the scenes look into the band's high point and what really went down. Mod or rocker, you can't deny the influence of the Who.
March 7, 2016
This was a very well written/well researched account on a very fascinating era of a very fascinating band. The Who have been my second favorite for over 20 years, and I love learning more about the Tommy/Quadrophenia albums, which is solely what this book focused on (with a lot of talk of that little album, Who's Next, which is probably only the best rock album ever recorded).
If you are a fan of the Who, this will only make you a more rabid one.
If you are a fan of the Who, this will only make you a more rabid one.
August 3, 2016
WGFA delivers on exactly what its title promises: a blow-by-blow account of The Who during the 3-year period between Tommy and just after the release of Quadrophenia. It's enjoyable for what it is. I kind of wished that I was in grad school and had just finished a huge paper, my dissertation or something, and rewarded myself by getting to finally read this. This is non-essential reading of the highest order. It doesn't really draw any larger conclusions or tie in to much else in the rock world; this is a straight-ahead, deeply reported story of how Who's Next and Quadrophenia came to be.
I don't doubt that Unterberger is a fan, but he doesn't read like one. Most of the book is compiled from news interviews, which in the world of The Who are innumerable. But the thoroughness sometimes works against itself: sources contradict themselves or are wildly confused about what's going on, to the point that a neatly laid-out chronology of events, which this is, has the effect of a big mess. This book seems to be less about the works themselves and more like a prosecutor's case that The Who's career plans were as chaotic offstage as they were on. Which is funny, fitting, and cool.
This is not a loving recap of how grand the genius was, and it doesn't favor mythical adjectives and verbs to describe those live shows. Not much idolizing Keith Moon's wackiness. There's plenty of that out there already. This is a cold-eyed look at the origination of the ideas and how they were executed. WGFA is of particular interest to anyone who's actually tried to record an album, because it shows the arduous process that The Who had to go through to do it themselves. Neither album came easy for them. Little ever had.
My respect for Townshend is altered a bit, deepened in some ways and reduced in others. This book makes a definitive case that the often-used canard that Lifehouse was too complicated to understand is bullshit. The reason "no one understood it" was because Pete was mostly pulling stuff out of his ass and, thus, constantly changed his mind. There never was a plan or concrete storyline. It's forgivable, after all, considering the immense pressure he was under to produce another opus and the time constraints under which he had to do so, but that doesn't change the fact that his metaphysical ambitions were totally, navel-gazingly unrealistic and haphazard. On the other hand, his technical ability is presented as comprehensive bordering on genius, more than I had realized. What he was able to accomplish in terms of home recording and synthesizer wizardry was the equivalent to a present-day musician programming his own recording suite and then emerging with a superlative piece of music, the likes of which no modern equivalents exist.
I also appreciate the ambivalent tone Unterberger takes on Quadrophenia. His thesis is that its entire existence has been defined to us by grandiosity: hyped from even before its recording as a masterpiece, hyped upon its release as a work of genius, and cited as a crowning achievement of the genre ever since. You start to get the sense that the album was actually kind of shitty from the way Unterberger writes about it. "A collection of good-to-great songs that maintains a too-even consistency between them," though, is truly kind of what it is. It's one of my favorite albums, but Quad's power is in its cinematic scope, not on the quality of its individual songs. It works because it expertly blends a palette of emotions. This is an effect not achieved over the course of a song or a few songs, but rather over a whole symphony with extended codas, evocative instrumental tracks, and contrasting scenes. In that way, it's sort of the conceptual opposite of Who's Next, an album with tightly-packed moments of pure enthralling rock. From the epic opening of Baba to the rock B section of "Behind Blue Eyes" to the scream of WGFA, these are each moments that individually engulf the entire idiom of rock music. Quadrophenia, on the other hand, weaves a complex pastiche of youth over the course of two discs, and nothing less. I think Unterberger suggests that the album is one of these things that you're not cool if you don't like, the way Dylan is to me. Well, I can accept that Quad is and always was a Rock Masterpiece—in other words, no one ever listened to Quad and said, hey, who's this cool new band. That's OK. The effect it had on me as a teenager attests to its irrefutable power nonetheless.
On that note, there is a certain genius in the way that a 28-year old Townshend was able to evoke the feeling of teenhood in language both plain and florid. Unterberger never really shows an appreciation for this, though, which figures based on this book's mechanical prose.
One last gripe on an overall fine book: Unterberger has a bad habit of disregarding the merit of music that didn't make the albums' final song lists. He's got a weird hangup on casting negative verdicts on songs in general, which I get because this type of history would suffer without some aesthetic grounding, but where does he get off saying that "Too Much of Anything" is clearly not up to the standards of the rest of the album? He takes for granted that "The Song is Over," to me a blemish on Who's Next, is a great song, seemingly only because it is actually on the record. This pattern repeats frequently when discussing demos and rarities. This should obviously file under differences of opinion, but I didn't like that his opinion seemed to be just based on what he'd heard a zillion times.
All in all enjoyable but recommended for hard-core fans only. Not only because the subject is so in-depth about a relatively obscure subject, but because die-hards are the ones most likely to have filled in this book's occasional shortcomings with other accounts.
I don't doubt that Unterberger is a fan, but he doesn't read like one. Most of the book is compiled from news interviews, which in the world of The Who are innumerable. But the thoroughness sometimes works against itself: sources contradict themselves or are wildly confused about what's going on, to the point that a neatly laid-out chronology of events, which this is, has the effect of a big mess. This book seems to be less about the works themselves and more like a prosecutor's case that The Who's career plans were as chaotic offstage as they were on. Which is funny, fitting, and cool.
This is not a loving recap of how grand the genius was, and it doesn't favor mythical adjectives and verbs to describe those live shows. Not much idolizing Keith Moon's wackiness. There's plenty of that out there already. This is a cold-eyed look at the origination of the ideas and how they were executed. WGFA is of particular interest to anyone who's actually tried to record an album, because it shows the arduous process that The Who had to go through to do it themselves. Neither album came easy for them. Little ever had.
My respect for Townshend is altered a bit, deepened in some ways and reduced in others. This book makes a definitive case that the often-used canard that Lifehouse was too complicated to understand is bullshit. The reason "no one understood it" was because Pete was mostly pulling stuff out of his ass and, thus, constantly changed his mind. There never was a plan or concrete storyline. It's forgivable, after all, considering the immense pressure he was under to produce another opus and the time constraints under which he had to do so, but that doesn't change the fact that his metaphysical ambitions were totally, navel-gazingly unrealistic and haphazard. On the other hand, his technical ability is presented as comprehensive bordering on genius, more than I had realized. What he was able to accomplish in terms of home recording and synthesizer wizardry was the equivalent to a present-day musician programming his own recording suite and then emerging with a superlative piece of music, the likes of which no modern equivalents exist.
I also appreciate the ambivalent tone Unterberger takes on Quadrophenia. His thesis is that its entire existence has been defined to us by grandiosity: hyped from even before its recording as a masterpiece, hyped upon its release as a work of genius, and cited as a crowning achievement of the genre ever since. You start to get the sense that the album was actually kind of shitty from the way Unterberger writes about it. "A collection of good-to-great songs that maintains a too-even consistency between them," though, is truly kind of what it is. It's one of my favorite albums, but Quad's power is in its cinematic scope, not on the quality of its individual songs. It works because it expertly blends a palette of emotions. This is an effect not achieved over the course of a song or a few songs, but rather over a whole symphony with extended codas, evocative instrumental tracks, and contrasting scenes. In that way, it's sort of the conceptual opposite of Who's Next, an album with tightly-packed moments of pure enthralling rock. From the epic opening of Baba to the rock B section of "Behind Blue Eyes" to the scream of WGFA, these are each moments that individually engulf the entire idiom of rock music. Quadrophenia, on the other hand, weaves a complex pastiche of youth over the course of two discs, and nothing less. I think Unterberger suggests that the album is one of these things that you're not cool if you don't like, the way Dylan is to me. Well, I can accept that Quad is and always was a Rock Masterpiece—in other words, no one ever listened to Quad and said, hey, who's this cool new band. That's OK. The effect it had on me as a teenager attests to its irrefutable power nonetheless.
On that note, there is a certain genius in the way that a 28-year old Townshend was able to evoke the feeling of teenhood in language both plain and florid. Unterberger never really shows an appreciation for this, though, which figures based on this book's mechanical prose.
One last gripe on an overall fine book: Unterberger has a bad habit of disregarding the merit of music that didn't make the albums' final song lists. He's got a weird hangup on casting negative verdicts on songs in general, which I get because this type of history would suffer without some aesthetic grounding, but where does he get off saying that "Too Much of Anything" is clearly not up to the standards of the rest of the album? He takes for granted that "The Song is Over," to me a blemish on Who's Next, is a great song, seemingly only because it is actually on the record. This pattern repeats frequently when discussing demos and rarities. This should obviously file under differences of opinion, but I didn't like that his opinion seemed to be just based on what he'd heard a zillion times.
All in all enjoyable but recommended for hard-core fans only. Not only because the subject is so in-depth about a relatively obscure subject, but because die-hards are the ones most likely to have filled in this book's occasional shortcomings with other accounts.
August 28, 2017
A history of The Who after Tommy. Detailed description of Lifehouse - Pete Townshend's failed attempt to combine music, movie, and concerts into a transformative multimedia experience. Even though nobody (especially the other band members) could understand the plot or much of anything else about project, most of the songs ended up on one of their greatest albums ever - Who's Next. Then Pete started working on his next project, based on memories of their early days playing for the English Mods - young, sharp-dressed, scooter riding kids from the coastal towns in England - as far as I can tell as an American born a generation later. The book goes into the development of the album Quadrophenia, its accompanying photo book, and the subsequent concert tours and movie. The book also goes a little into Pete's experimentation with synthesizers, and his association with the ARP synthesizer company.
October 26, 2018
Lifehouse, the tantalizing unrealized Who album that nearly broke Pete Townshend, examined in this fascinating book. Highly recommend for any Who fan out there.
August 30, 2014
This is a very engrossing account of what I regard as The Who's golden era. In the wake of "Tommy's global success around 1969/70 the band, especially Pete Townshend, were at a crossroads personally and artistically. The writer, a rock historian of some pedigree, examines what lay behind Townshend's "Lifehouse" rock opera concept, a visual musical and cinematic depiction of the spirituality and power behind rock music and how those around him found it all far too obtuse. Band politics and technological limitations at the time also meant that the project had to be shelved in favour of laying down the best Lifehouse compositions on a conventional album release in 1971 "Who's Next", arguably, alongside "Tommy", their finest work. The writer draws from his exceptionally well researched source material, contemporary interviews with the rock press and the band's recollections, to set out the whole fascinating story.
There are plenty of curiosities highlighted throughout, for example why "Pure and Easy" was not included on "Who's Next" even though its lyrics were central to the Lifehouse idea, a decision that Townshend appears now to regret, why "My Wife" ended up on the album when it bore no relation to LH and why Entwhistle didn't keep it for his (rather poorly received) solo album at the time. There are also some rather amusing Daltrey interview quotes. For example, when he was asked by Rolling Stone about "Who's Next" scaling back on LH "..Who's Next holds up much better [than Tommy] but nobody wanted to take it seriously because it was just nine songs and not some great thing about a bloody spastic".
The second half of the book covers the conception and delivery of Townshend's other career rock opera masterpiece "Quadrophenia" which also fell short of the band's high expectations. In a particularly interesting chapter the author recalls the rather mixed critical reaction at the time, partly because the British Mod storyline didn't translate that well for the US market and because the live shows were handicapped by technical problems in getting across Quad's more ambitious soundscapes. Indeed, towards the end of that particular tour only 4 Quad songs made it onto the live set, including the historic concert at Charlton Athletic in 1974.
All this happened when Townshend was drinking a lot of brandy, Moon had a hit a career high as a hell raiser and Daltrey was using his fists a lot backstage, on one celebrated occasion putting Townshend in hospital after a row. It was interesting to learn that Daltrey never liked the echo on Quad's vocal mix and believed that you could only listen properly to the album through headphones.
The book is sprinkled with quotes from those involved in the record who argued that it was devoid of catchy hooks, that the Mod story plot behind Townshend's songs was actually a bit flat and that it was more his solo album than one from The Who as a group (ie quite the opposite of "Tommy" on all three counts). I enjoyed Townshend's 1994 quote to Q magazine when he explained how he needed to put across some rather frail emotional concepts associated with Quad's central character "Jimmy" to a band with The Who's power and intensity "however poignantly I put the thing together, however direct, however right, however honest and true it was, I then had to hand it to this f**king war machine and it would be churned out like Wall's pork sausages".
There are plenty of curiosities highlighted throughout, for example why "Pure and Easy" was not included on "Who's Next" even though its lyrics were central to the Lifehouse idea, a decision that Townshend appears now to regret, why "My Wife" ended up on the album when it bore no relation to LH and why Entwhistle didn't keep it for his (rather poorly received) solo album at the time. There are also some rather amusing Daltrey interview quotes. For example, when he was asked by Rolling Stone about "Who's Next" scaling back on LH "..Who's Next holds up much better [than Tommy] but nobody wanted to take it seriously because it was just nine songs and not some great thing about a bloody spastic".
The second half of the book covers the conception and delivery of Townshend's other career rock opera masterpiece "Quadrophenia" which also fell short of the band's high expectations. In a particularly interesting chapter the author recalls the rather mixed critical reaction at the time, partly because the British Mod storyline didn't translate that well for the US market and because the live shows were handicapped by technical problems in getting across Quad's more ambitious soundscapes. Indeed, towards the end of that particular tour only 4 Quad songs made it onto the live set, including the historic concert at Charlton Athletic in 1974.
All this happened when Townshend was drinking a lot of brandy, Moon had a hit a career high as a hell raiser and Daltrey was using his fists a lot backstage, on one celebrated occasion putting Townshend in hospital after a row. It was interesting to learn that Daltrey never liked the echo on Quad's vocal mix and believed that you could only listen properly to the album through headphones.
The book is sprinkled with quotes from those involved in the record who argued that it was devoid of catchy hooks, that the Mod story plot behind Townshend's songs was actually a bit flat and that it was more his solo album than one from The Who as a group (ie quite the opposite of "Tommy" on all three counts). I enjoyed Townshend's 1994 quote to Q magazine when he explained how he needed to put across some rather frail emotional concepts associated with Quad's central character "Jimmy" to a band with The Who's power and intensity "however poignantly I put the thing together, however direct, however right, however honest and true it was, I then had to hand it to this f**king war machine and it would be churned out like Wall's pork sausages".
March 7, 2017
Good read but really for dedicated fans of the band only. And very detailed writing on the creation of two of the greatest albums of all time, "Who's Next" and "Quadrophenia."
September 27, 2015
You don't have to be a Who fan to read this, but it would probably help. I'm not sure a casual fan will appreciate it as much. There are a lot of recording details, that may put some off. I enoyed it for the most part, there were a few places where I was tempted to just skip ahead...I didn't, but I was tempted. I guess the story is in the details.
June 6, 2014
Excellent review of the Who's career from 1970-1973, when they finished two albums, one a double LP, and half finished at least one, possibly two others. A prolific period by any standard, this period saw some of the band's finest work.
August 6, 2016
Love the Who and this book covers the years following the successful Tommy album and deals with Townshend stuggle to come up with a follow up . The book covers all the writing process Andre ordinary session s in great detail , plus some nice photos
February 9, 2012
Very good detailed probably best for major fans
February 21, 2019
Fascinating read for a deep Who fan
I found the history and musical analysis throughout this book quite interesting and well articulated. I love the music of the Who, and after reading this, I appreciate it even more.
I found the history and musical analysis throughout this book quite interesting and well articulated. I love the music of the Who, and after reading this, I appreciate it even more.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews