The Who: Who's Next - Orig 1st Press Japanese LP MINT-

$

134

 The Who

Original 1971 Japanese 1st Pressing with OBI and Gatefold Cover

Who's Next

Polydor    MP 2205

Record: MINT-
(One or two plays at most! No marks!)
Sleeve:MINT-
(Awesome!)

Actual Item Scans & Photos

Who's Next is the fifth studio album by English rock band The Who, released in August 1971. The album has origins in a rock opera conceived by Pete Townshend called Lifehouse. The ambitious, complex project did not come to fruition at the time and instead, many of the songs written for the project were compiled onto Who's Next as a collection of unrelated songs.Who's Next was a critical and commercial success when it was released, and has been certified 3x platinum by the RIAA.

 
The Lifehouse project
The album has its roots in the Lifehouse project, which Pete Townshend has variously described as intended to be a futuristic rock opera, a live-recorded concept album and as the music for a scripted film project. The project proved to be intractable on several levels and caused stress within the band as well as a major falling out between Townshend and The Who's producer Kit Lambert. Years later, in the liner notes to the remastered Who's Next CD, Townshend wrote that the failure of the project led him to the verge of a suicidal nervous breakdown.

After giving up on recording some of the Lifehouse tracks in New York, The Who went back into the studio with new producer Glyn Johns and started over. Although the Lifehouse concept was abandoned, scraps of the project remained present in the final album. The introductory line to "Pure and Easy", which Townshend has described as "the central pivot of Lifehouse", shows up in the closing bars of "The Song Is Over". An early concept for Lifehouse featured the feeding of personal data from audience members into the controller of an early analogue synthesiser to create musical tracks. It was widely believed that inputting the vital statistics of Meher Baba into a synthesiser generated the backing track on "Baba O'Riley", but in actuality it was Townshend playing a Lowrey organ. A primary result of the abandonment of the original project, however, was a newfound freedom; the very absence of an overriding musical theme or storyline (which had been the basis of several previous Who projects) allowed the band to concentrate on maximising the impact of individual tracks.

Although he gave up his original intentions for the Lifehouse project, Townshend continued to develop the concepts, revisiting them in later albums. In 2006 he opened a website called The Lifehouse Method to accept personal input from applicants which would be turned into musical portraits.

Arrangement and songs
The album was immediately recognised for its dynamic and unique sound. The album fortuitously fell at a time when great advances had been made in sound engineering over the previous decade, and also shortly after the widespread availability of synthesisers.

Townshend used the early synthesisers and modified keyboard sounds in several modes: as a drone effect on several songs, notably "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again", and as a playful noisemaker, sounding almost like a tea kettle whistle on "The Song Is Over". Townshend also used an envelope follower to modulate the spectrum of his guitar on "Going Mobile", giving it a distinctive squawking sound that degenerates into a bubbling noise at the end of the song.

The album opened with "Baba O'Riley", featuring piano by Townshend and a violin solo by Dave Arbus. The violin solo was drummer Keith Moon's idea. The song's title pays homage to Townshend's guru Meher Baba and influential minimalist composer Terry Riley (and is informally known by the line "Teenage Wasteland"). Other signature tracks include the rock ballad "Behind Blue Eyes", and the album's epic closing song, "Won't Get Fooled Again".

Cover art
The album cover shows a photograph, taken at Easington Colliery, of the band apparently having just urinated on a large concrete piling protruding from a slag heap. According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the members were unable to urinate, so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect. The photograph is often seen to be a reference to the monolith discovered on the moon in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had been released only about three years earlier. In 2003, the United States cable television channel VH1 named Who's Next's cover one of the greatest album covers of all time.

An earlier cover design had featured photographs of obese nude women and has been published elsewhere, but never actually appeared on the album. An alternative cover featured drummer Keith Moon dressed in black lingerie, holding a rope whip, and wearing a brown wig. Some of the photographs taken during these sessions were later used as part of Decca's United States promotion of the album.

Recording sessions
1970/71 – Demo sessions at the home studios of Pete Townshend and John Entwistle that produced two reels of songs.
January–March 1971 – Live recordings at the Young Vic (mobile Studio).
March 1971 – New York sessions at the Record Plant, Lifehouse songs recorded with Kit Lambert and Jack Adams at the desk. These sessions were abandoned, along with the Lifehouse concept.
26 April 1971 – Final Lifehouse concert which was recorded and later released (in part) on disc 2 of the Deluxe Edition of Who's Next
May 1971 – Recording at Stargroves Studio London, the sessions were abandoned.
May–June 1971 – Olympic Studios in Barnes produced by The Who with associate producer Glyn Johns. The Olympic sessions were used for the original vinyl LP album.

The album has now been re-issued in many countries and remastered several times using tapes from different sessions. The master tapes for the Olympic sessions are believed to be lost or destroyed. Video game publisher Harmonix had previously announced that Who's Next would be released as downloadable, playable content for the music video game series Rock Band. However, this never came to fruition, since it was discovered that many of the master tapes to the album were missing, as confirmed by Townshend. Instead, a compilation of Who songs dubbed "The Best of The Who," which includes three of the album's songs ("Behind Blue Eyes", "Baba O'Riley", and "Going Mobile"), was released as downloadable content, in lieu of the earlier-promised Who's Next album.

Accolades
Who's Next has been named one of the best albums of all time by VH1 (#13) and Rolling Stone (#28). Upon its release it was named the best album of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll. It was also ranked #3 in Guitar World's Greatest Classic Rock Albums list. Many of its nine tracks are perennial favourites on classic rock radio, especially "Baba O'Riley", "Bargain", "Behind Blue Eyes", and the closing track "Won't Get Fooled Again". The album appeared at number 15 on Pitchfork Media's top 100 albums of the 1970s. The album is also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2006, the album was chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2007 it was also inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "historical, artistic and significant" value. In 1999 it was the subject of a Classic Albums documentary produced by Eagle Rock Entertainment which has aired on VH1 and BBC among others entitled Classic Albums: The Who - Who's Next. Two songs from the album have been used in the CSI series.

Track listing
All songs written and composed by Pete Townshend, except where noted.

Side one
"Baba O'Riley" – 5:08
"Bargain" – 5:34
"Love Ain't for Keeping" – 2:10
"My Wife" (John Entwistle) – 3:41
"The Song Is Over" – 6:14
 
Side two
"Getting in Tune" – 4:50
"Going Mobile" – 3:42
"Behind Blue Eyes" – 3:42
"Won't Get Fooled Again" – 8:32

Personnel
The Who
Roger Daltrey – lead vocals, harmonica on "I Don't Even Know Myself"
Pete Townshend – guitars, organ, VCS3 and ARP synthesiser, backing vocals, piano on "Baba O'Riley", lead vocals on "Going Mobile" and the original version of "Love Ain't for Keeping", co-lead vocals on "Baba O'Riley", "Bargain" and "The Song Is Over"
John Entwistle – bass guitar, backing vocals, brass, lead vocals and piano on "My Wife"
Keith Moon – drums, percussion

Additional musicians
Nicky Hopkins – piano on "The Song Is Over" and "Getting in Tune"
Dave Arbus – violin on "Baba O'Riley"
Al Kooper – organ on alternate version of "Behind Blue Eyes"[19]
Leslie West – guitar on extended version of "Baby Don't You Do It"[19]

Production
Kit Lambert, Chris Stamp, Pete Kameron – executive producers
Produced By The Who & Glyn Johns
Recorded, Engineered & Mixed By Glyn Johnes
Photography – Ethan A. Russell
Design – John Kosh

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