Celebrated with an elaborate new box set, their 1967 pop-art experiment remains the band’s dark-horse favorite, when they were scrappy enough to laugh at themselves but strong enough to write the music that would define their career.
The Who’s early catalog offers a crash course in what to look for in any worthy classic rock discography: the cinematic song cycle, the tour-de-force live album, the music-as-healing-force-of-the-universe masterpiece, the mythologically overambitious lost album, the rarities comp that rivals the greatest hits set. It is a fitting legacy for Pete Townshend, their guitarist and primary songwriter, who was not only making up the rules as he went along but also coining the terminology, from “power-pop” to “rock opera.” From the beginning, he was one of the genre’s first practitioners-slash-scholars, a self-aware believer in his own myth.
He was also among the first artists to strike gold from a total lack of inspiration. Exhausted and frazzled from a tour with Herman’s Hermits in summer 1967, he surveyed the material that he and his bandmates—drummer Keith Moon, vocalist Roger Daltrey, and bassist John Entwistle—had amassed while the label grew increasingly impatient awaiting their third album. There was “Pictures of Lily,” a recent single he considered placing as the centerpiece. (He even had the title to go with it: Who’s Lily.) There was “I Can See for Miles,” a sweeping anthem he imagined would be their next big hit. And then there was… some other stuff: a cover of “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” an instrumental called “Sodding About,” a story-song that slowly revealed itself to be a deodorant ad...
Rewind the tape—that’s it! Pad out the tracklist with a few radio jingles, arrange some product placements for the cover art, and we’ll call it The Who Sell Out. Cobbled together by their manager Kit Lambert, the pop-art experiment was released in December 1967, just months after the BBC introduced Radio One to replace pirate stations like Radio London. As a result, the concept also worked as a loving tribute to the institutions where the Who first found an audience. Even if the radio-broadcast structure mostly crumbles after side one, the songs form another landmark in the Who’s catalog: the moment before 1969’s Tommy solidified their place in rock history, when they were scrappy enough to laugh at themselves but strong enough to write the music that would define their career.
The dark-horse favorite in their catalog, The Who Sell Out is the latest recipient of a Super Deluxe Edition, spanning five discs, two 7" singles, and a book of essays and ephemera. The first two discs are your basic mono and stereo versions of the album, tacked with familiar addendum from previous reissues. The third disc is a collection of related studio material: outtakes, alternate versions, isolated elements. The fourth set guides us through the music that arrived as they began working on the record that would become Tommy. The 17-month gap between these albums was fruitful, and some of the material here, written before Tommy’s narrative was developed, was actually due for release on its own (working title: Who’s for Tennis?). The best and most essential part is the fifth disc: Townshend’s solo demos, scratchy and awkward, like a novelty private press album by someone with far too many ideas to capture on tape, on his own.
The good news is that it all holds up. Minus the eternal “I Can See for Miles,” none of these songs found a permanent home on classic rock radio and so they belong entirely to this album, unburdened by decades of overplay. Maybe that is why The Who Sell Out remains such a charming, even surprising, record: It is the one that feels most relevant to the Who’s influence on ’90s indie rock—bands like Yo La Tengo and Guided by Voices who learned from its collage-like flow, classic songcraft, and smart, surrealist humor. From the psychedelic opener “Armenia City in the Sky” to the operatic mini-suite “Rael,” the Who would never again sound so lighthearted and playful.
As evidenced by the bonus material—attempts at hit singles next to earnest anti-smoking ads, repeated efforts to capture the ringing chaos of their live show alongside in-joke studio concoctions—the Who were desperately searching for their next move. Even the album proper is something of a mixed bag, with Townshend taking an uncharacteristic amount of lead vocals, and guest writer Speedy Keen singing alongside Daltrey in “Armenia City in the Sky.” In other words, they were a band in transition. And while songs like “Dogs” and “Faith in Something Bigger” on the post-Sell Out disc suggest more ambitious work to come, Townshend’s original demos offer the clearest insight: His solo arrangement of the harmonies in “I Can See for Miles” and the frantic jangle of his guitar in “Glow Girl” showcase a musician coming into focus, testing the limits of his equipment, pushing toward the future.
In his liner notes, Townshend is humble about this period in the band’s history, describing the Sell Out concept as a gimmick to distract from a “rather pathetic selection of tracks.” This box sometimes affirms his position: Mostly comprising recordings that fans have known for ages (a live set would have been appreciated, even if most of these songs never became staples of their set), it results in multiple takes of the same song sequenced beside each other, sometimes giving the feeling of a data dump more than a carefully curated listening experience. Of course, the jokes about cashing in have always been part of The Who Sell Out, even when these guys were in their early 20s, already seeming burnt out and older. The magic is that they were able to flip their exhaustion into something so full of life. When Townshend first heard the album front-to-back, he remembers laughing out loud, “partly with joy, partly in awe.” Separated into its core elements, more than half a century later, it can still elicit the same response.
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