Wick's Review

Summary - Good 3.0

Who’s Next fans – and who’s not – will be delighted by this 50 minute documentary. More celebratory than insightful, it also suffers from a few omissions. However it’s all good when Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle marvel at how their benchmark album came into existence. Long Live Rock.

Baba O’Riley gets the most airtime, natch. However nothing is said about titular figure Terry Riley, the electronic music pioneer who inspired Townshend’s synthesizer intro.¹ Happily, Dave Arbus gets interviewed, the guy who played the kickass fiddle solo at the end. Oh well, “it’s only teenage wasteland.”

Behind Blue Eyes, My Wife, Pure and Easy and Won’t Get Fooled Again are the other cuts that get attention. Wait, Pure and Easy isn’t on Who’s Next. It came out of Townshend’s failed Lifehouse project, the genesis of Who’s Next, an exploration of which consumes the first quarter of the doc. More’s the pity.

For those of us who listened to Who’s Next incessantly back in the day, this doc makes for ideal viewing during an hour-long cardio session. With Netflix On Demand running on an iPad, the workout flies by.

¹ Being a titular figure doesn’t mean he has tits. It means he’s the Riley in Baba O’Riley.

Acting - Great 4.0

Pete Townshend finally seems at peace with himself, and so can lucidly discuss his tortured artistic past. Roger Daltrey is a delightfully wry presence – erudite and boyish notwithstanding his RockGod stature. John Entwistle had yet to checkout of the HardRock, so gets to describe how he created My Wife. Precious. The other three speak lovingly about Keith Moon, dead since the Seventies.

Others:

• Glyn Johns, the album’s engineer, flips between tracks within songs to show how it came together.
• Irish Jack, who also appears in Quadrophenia – The Complete Story, makes two interesting observations. First he points out that the Who always saw themselves as fans, which is why Townshend’s lyrics are often from a fan’s point of view. Thus he says they were always a guy’s band, even to the extent that they rarely had girls dancing down front as most hot bands did.
• Dave Marsh, the iconic rock critic.

Film - Good 3.0

Edge - Tame 1.0

Reality - Natural 1.0

The failure of Lifehouse begat Who’s Next. Consider it the whole wide creative cycle writ small. Well, can’t be small since Who’s Next sold like six million records. Megaplatinum results don’t change the underlying reality however.

More than just rockstars and artists, The Who are the ultimate mod creative unit. Maximum R&D even.

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