THE WHO Guitar Legend PETE TOWNSHEND Shares Ups, Downs Leading To Who’s Next Album; InTheStudio Audio Interview
August 16, 2016, 8 years ago
North American syndicated rock radio show and website, InTheStudio: The Stories Behind History’s Greatest Rock Bands, celebrates the anniversary of one of rock’s finest albums of the ‘70s, The Who’s Who’s Next.
Few rock fans realize that immediately prior to the album Tommy’s 1969 release, the British quartet The Who were on the brink of breaking up. They were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and had yet to score a Top 10 hit in America. The album Tommy changed all that for The Who, and they spent the remainder of 1969 and most of 1970 touring the world while critics lauded composer Pete Townshend as a genius.
As 1970 waned, Townshend found himself no doubt encouraged by the universal acclaim he received for his rock opera Tommy. Townshend decided to do home demos for another audio/visual high concept piece in late 1970 entitled Lifehouse. Townshend shares with In The Studio host Redbeard the dilemma Tommy had put The Who in.
“Tommy was incredibly difficult to follow. It was huge, it kind of existed outside of The Who. It challenged The Who, it challenged what we were. It changed us, but didn’t tell us what to do next.” - Pete Townshend
What eventually came next was Who’s Next, an album produced by Glyn Johns that rose out of the ashes of the abandoned Lifehouse project while managing to deliver some of the most iconic Who songs of all time including, “Behind Blue Eyes”, “Bargain”, “Baba O’Riley” and the anthem for the ages, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
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