By now, a nonopera by the Who is its own kind of concept album. While The Who by Numbers pretends to be a series of ten unconnected songs, it's really only a pose; there's not a story line here, but there are more important unities—lyrical themes, musical and production style, a sense of time and place.
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Tommy helped Peter Townshend sharpen a writing style that was already one of the most personal and interesting in rock. Because the Who is itself so stylized—alone among their early Sixties peers, they sound like no one else, neither Chicago bluesmen nor Memphis rockabillys—Townshend always had to seek themes and characters, as well as musical ideas, that were pure rock & roll. The tension between Keith Moon's wild drumming. Roger Daltrey's barely on-key vocals, Townshend's own limitations as a guitarist and the composer's skill and introspection made him one of the toughest, most compact writers in rock. Like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty and very, very few others, Townshend has a very specific idea of what rock & roll is about and what it's for. Everything he does—which is nearly everything the Who does—is informed by it.
The rock operas were Townshend's ultimate means of expressing his idea of rock and its place in the world, but the very notion was anathema to fans of "Substitute" and "My Generation." Even if those works garnered the Who a legion of new fans (many of whom, Townshend once wrote me, "think the name of the group's Tommy and that the opera's the Who"), the hardcore of old admirers fired so many charges of pretension and evisceration at Tommy that Townshend felt the need to retrench. The result was Who's Next, a blistering anticoncept work and a masterpiece. After Quadrophenia, a much more flawed work than Tommy, though in many ways a braver one, he has felt the need again.
But The Who by Numbers isn't what it seems. Without broadcasting it, in fact while denying it, Townshend has written a series of songs which hang together as well as separately. The time is somewhere in the middle of the night, the setting a disheveled room with a TV set that seems to show only rock programs. The protagonist is an aging, still successful rock star, staring drunkenly at the tube with a bottle of gin perched on his head, contemplating his career, his love for the music and his fear that it's all slipping away. Every song here, even the one non-Townshend composition, John Entwistle's "Success Story," fits in. Always a sort of musical practical joker, Townshend has now pulled the fastest one of all, disguising his best concept album as a mere ten-track throwaway.
The disguise in effective partly because it is mostly musical. Along with the story line, Townshend has thrown out the Arp synthesizer—which is supposed to be his instrument—after his success with it on Who's Next and th
This album is fantastic, it has an exquisite sense of humor (songs of the humbly homespun) and consummate musicianship. The cover, of course, is amazingly funny: deodorant, pimple cream, baked beans and the Charles Atlas course, each shot perfectly suited to the character of the person in the group. It's almost too English.
The first thing you are going to see are the commercial plugs and Radio London spots. They take various forms; the cover is the first. The others include segues between the songs which are either real singing house ads from Radio London, or the Who's versions of commercials for other products. Some of the songs themselves incorporate stories of products, for instance Peter Townshend's bitterly funny "Odorono." It is the tale of young chick singer who has a successful performance, meets the handsome man backstage where the following ensues: "But his expression changed,/She had seen,/As he went to kiss her face./It ended there, he claimed a late appointment,/She quickly turned to hide her disappointment./She ripped her glittering gown,/couldn't face another show, no,/Her deodorant had let her down/She should have used Odorono."
What makes the song so good—and the whole album so fantastic—is not the surface concept of incorporating commercials but the absolute musical mystery which is used to bring them off. The girl who should have used Odorono is obviously meant to be a laugh, but it is bittersweet laughter. The Who have caught the embarrassing reality of it, and reality is the essence of humor (as is more readily apparent with the Beatles in most everything they do.)
The opening song of the album, "Armenia City in the Sky,' is one of the best tracks on the album, and one which well illustrates why the Who are among the very best of the contemporary groups. First of all, they have such a firm grasp of the basics of rock and roll that they, like the Beatles, do not stumble when they move on to newer and more creative endeavors in rock and roll; they've learned their stuff and are thus practiced enough to come up with a wholly original instrumental sound.
Within that framework, the Who set various electronic miniatures, including passages of guitar feedback and distortions, variations on a theremin and a tonal puddle from an organ. These are not extended breaks completely outside the structure of the song (which is the mark of a group trying to be experimental with too little real substance,) but tight and intelligently thought out placements. And, there are the lyrics: "If you ever want to disappear, just take off and think of this: Armenia City in the Sky."
"Marianne With the Shakey Hands," has a Spanish beat and guitar strum. The barely-beneath-the-surface humor of the lyric and whole Who attitude is reflected stroke for stroke in the music.
"Tattoo" is one of those gems of guitar playing from Peter Townshend, one which shows flawless mastery of rock and roll chording. "Our
