On the turntable this Sunday...Who's Next

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 3× platinum by the RIAA.

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 synthesizer to create musical tracks.[14] It was widely believed that inputting the vital statistics of Meher Baba into a synthesizer 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 The Who's 1969 project, Tommy) allowed the band to concentrate on maximizing 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.

The album was immediately recognized 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 synthesizers.

Townshend used the early synthesizers 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 "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 artwork 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.

Who's Next has been named one of the best albums of all time by VH1 (#13) and Rolling Stone (#28 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time). 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 favorites 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. The album was selected as the 32nd-best of all time by Mojo in January 1996. In 2011, Classic Rock Review named Who's Next its album of the year for 1971.

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

Side one 

No. Title Length 

1. "Baba O'Riley"   5:08

2. "Bargain"   5:34

3. "Love Ain't for Keeping"   2:10

4. "My Wife" (John Entwistle) 3:41

5. "The Song Is Over"   6:14

Side two 

No. Title Length 

6. "Getting in Tune"   4:50

7. "Going Mobile"   3:42

8. "Behind Blue Eyes"   3:42

9. "Won't Get Fooled Again"   8:32

1995 reissue bonus tracks 

No. Title Length 

10. "Pure and Easy" (Original Version) 4:22

11. "Baby Don't You Do It" (Holland-Dozier-Holland) 5:15

12. "Naked Eye" (Live at the Young Vic 26/4/71) 5:31

13. "Water" (Live at the Young Vic 26/4/71) 6:26

14. "Too Much of Anything"   4:25

15. "I Don't Even Know Myself"   4:56

16. "Behind Blue Eyes" (Original Version) 3:25

2003 Deluxe Edition

The first disc of the Deluxe Edition contains the nine tracks from the original album, followed by six outtakes, of which "Getting in Tune" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" were previously unreleased. Each of the six outtakes were recorded during sessions at the Record Plant in New York in March 1971; the group abandoned this material and re-recorded five of the six tracks again in England later in the year.