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• The who best songs full#

But I was willing to risk criminal prosecution for The (no need to Guess) Who. If you’re already confused, remember this: I never stole any cassettes by The Guess Who. This song is one of the original six, and it was popularized originally by The Guess Who, the Canadian band best known for the AOR standard “American Woman,” which kind of sounds like The Who circa Live At Leeds. Though the original six-song edition makes a more succinct but no less convincing case for greatness. I remain ride or die for the 1995 reissue version of Leeds, which expands to 14 tracks. In fact, I once wrote that Live At Leeds is “not only the best live rock ‘n’ roll album ever, but the best rock album period.” (I don’t remember this, exactly, but the quote is immortalized on Wikipedia so it must be true.)

The who best songs full#

But it was too difficult to shoplift at a Best Buy or Sam Goody.) A full 30 years later, these are two of my favorite albums of all time. (Actually, I do regret that it was an independent establishment that probably could have used the $6 or $7 I cheated them out of. I am not proud of this, but I also don’t regret it. So, I schemed to steal cassette copies of Who’s Next and Live At Leeds from a local record store. I first heard them on the local classic rock station - the same half-dozen or so songs over and over but they were good songs. I became a Who fan in the midst of my middle-school shoplifting phase. A pack of killers who are stuck with each together until they reach the promised land. It’s the same dynamic that existed between Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Listen to “The Ox,” an instrumental from their debut album The Who Sings My Generation, and you can hear that this energy was there from the beginning. They might not have liked each other but they needed each other. The members of The Who were cursed to be musical soul mates without actually being friends. If Daltrey comes off as hectoring, it’s because he has to scream in order to be heard over this unholy din. Townshend’s guitar swerves with Moon’s drums, and Entwistle fills the space between them. But over many listens the unique alchemy on display is revealed. Listen to any Who song and initially it doesn’t seem like they’re playing with each other as much as against each other, four alphas waged in a brutal Battle Royale for sonic supremacy. You can hear this in the very racket that they make as musicians - Townshend’s revved-up guitar, Roger Daltrey’s macho vocals, John Entwistle’s titanically busy bass, and Keith Moon’s “a thousand drunks in a bar fight to the death”-style drums. On the other hand, The Who is very much a four-headed monster, in which each member acts as a crucial component of the group identity while always remaining a steadfast individual. You are never not aware of Townshend’s point of view, except when John Entwistle is singing about spiders or furious spouses or futuristic clones. But even at its most bombastic, The Who’s music always feels personal and even confessional. This auteur aspect is what separates The Who from all of their arena-filling ’60s and ’70s rock peers - Jimmy Page was the auteur in Led Zeppelin, but he built that band to be a wall between himself and the outside world. On one hand, The Who is very much a vehicle for an auteur, Pete Townshend, to flex his ambitions, express his deepest neuroses, and embody everything he loves and despises about rock ‘n’ roll. Let’s start with the contradiction at the heart of this band. It’s only a list of songs by one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands of all time! Along the way, I’ll try to answer the question about why this band has such strong hold on the people who love them.ĭon’t cry. This month is the 50th anniversary of Who’s Next, the band’s most successful studio LP, responsible for spawning radio classics like “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Behind Blue Eyes.” In recognition of this landmark, I am ranking my 50 favorite Who songs.

But why? Together, we are going to try to figure this out.

I fell in love with The Who when I was 13, and I still love them now. “The Who don’t necessarily captivate the whole teenage generation - as each batch comes up every year - but we certainly hit a percentage of them, and we hold them.”Įven now, 41 years later, these words ring true. People who get into The Who when they’re 13, 14, 15, 16, never stop being fans,” The Who’s Pete Townshend once rhapsodized to the critic Greil Marcus in 1980. “But always, always, there is a very, very strong grab - a deep, instant grab - which lasts… forever.