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The Who is a British rock band. They were noted for the dynamism of their live performances and for their thoughtful music, including Tommy, one of the first rock operas. While not a heavy metal band themselves, their distorted guitars, epic songwriting, and over-the-top stage show were an influence on the genre. Missing image The_who.jpg The cover of The Who's Ultimate Collection. From left to right: Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, and John Entwistle.
HistoryIn its earliest days, prior to Keith Moon joining, the band was known as The Detours and played mostly rhythm and blues. They eventually changed their name to The Who and Keith joined soon after, making the classic line-up complete. For a short period, under the management of Peter Meaden, they changed their name to The High Numbers during which time they released a mostly unsuccessful single under that name, designed to appeal to their mostly mod fans. When "Zoot Suit/I'm The Face" failed to chart, they quickly reverted back to The Who. The rest, as they say, is history. They became one of the most popular bands among the British Mods, a social movement of the early 60s who rejected the "greaser" music favored by the Rockers. From the beginning, The Who drew attention because all three instrumentalists, guitarist Pete Townshend, bassist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon played, in effect, lead parts, yielding music at once more cacophonous and sophisticated than standard-issue rock tracks. The Who were natural showmen: Singer Roger Daltrey (a former sheet metal worker), was a dynamic front man, twirling his microphone on the end of its cord while Townshend played chords on his guitar with great windmill -like sweeps of his arms, and the maniacal Moon bashed and crashed like no drummer ever before him. Through it all, Entwistle stood still, seemingly bored by the whole thing, and played intricate, poweful, innovative bass lines. At the end of their live performances in their first years, the band would sometimes smash their instruments and explode smoke bombs, signalling that they had given the audience all they had. (They were also notorious for treating their hotel rooms and dressing rooms the same way.) Missing image JohnEntwistle.jpg John Entwistle, bassist The band soon crystallized around Townshend as the primary songwriter (though Entwistle would also make the occasional contribution). Townshend was at the center of the band's tensions, as he strove to write challenging and thoughtful music, while Daltrey preferred energetic and macho material (Daltrey would occasionally refuse to sing a Townshend composition and Townshend would thus sing it himself), while Moon was a fan of American surf music. The Who's first hit single was the Kinks-like "I Can't Explain" in 1965, but they vaulted to fame with their album, My Generation. The album included such mod anthems as "The Kids are Alright" and the title track "My Generation", which contained the famous line, "Hope I die before I get old". Another early favorite, showing Townshend's way with words, was "Substitute", which included the line, "I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth." The hit single "Pictures Of Lily", a tribute to masturbation, was possibly one of the most accomplished of all European contributions to psychedelic music. The Who's shows have often had an extraordinary decibel output. For a period of time during the 1970s, they were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the loudest rock band in the world, though other bands have since taken the title. Townshend's partial deafness is well documented; popular legend has it that the members of the band suffered permanent hearing loss and tinnitus from their loud concerts, though Townshend maintains that the true cause was listening to the music at high volume through headphones. One story also claims that Townshend's hearing loss was the result of standing too close to an explosive Moon had placed in his drum kit and detonated at the conclusion of a performance on the Smothers Brothers variety show. Although they had great success as a singles band, the Who, or more properly their leader Townshend, had their sights set higher, and over the years their music became more complex and their lyrics more provocative and involving. Townshend also wanted to treat the Who's albums as unified works, rather than collections of unconnected songs. The first sign of this ambition came in their albums The Who Sell Out, which played like an all-Who playlist from an offshore radio station (The Who completed the effect by adding actual jingles and their own commercials); and A Quick One, which included the extended, multi-themed song "A Quick One, While He's Away". Tommy, the first commercially successful rock opera, followed. Meher Baba's spiritual teachings influenced Peter Townshend's songwriting after about 1968. He is credited as Avatar on the Tommy album. Townshend then attempted an even more ambitious concept album, the Lifehouse project. Although the intended album was never released (the work was finally released by the BBC as a radio play in 2000), the Who included some of the project's best songs in Who's Next, which would become their most successful album. Who's Next was followed by the Who's final rock opera, Quadrophenia (which was based on the story of the Mods and Rockers, particularly riots between the two factions at Brighton). Other later albums were more personal, and Townshend eventually transferred this personal style to his solo albums. In 1978 the band released Who Are You, a move away from epic rock opera and towards a more radio-friendly sound. The release of the album was overshadowed by the accidental drug overdose death of Keith Moon. Moon was replaced by Kenney Jones. The following year was nearly as harrowing: On December 3, 1979 in Cincinnati, Ohio, a stampede for seats at Riverfront Coliseum during a Who concert killed eleven fans. Band members were not made aware of the deaths until after the show, and they were reportedly devastated. The band would release two more studio albums in the early 1980s, and in 1982 embarked on the first in a series of farewell tours. The band stopped recording new material and settled into intermittent forays on the "nostalgia tour circuit" as Townshend focused on solo projects such as The Iron Man and Psychoderelict, a forerunner to the eventual release of the radio work Lifehouse. Their best-known reunion tour occurred in 1989. Just before the outset of a tour in the summer of 2002, John Entwistle was found dead. A coroner's investigation revealed that while not technically an overdose, the modest amount of cocaine was indeed implicated in what amounted to a simple heart attack, given years of prior cocaine use. After a brief delay, this tour commenced with bassist Pino Palladino filling in for Entwistle.Missing image KeithMoon.jpg Keith Moon, drummer In 2004 they released two new songs and 2005 is gearing up to be a big year for the band, it is expected that they will release their first new album in 22 years in the spring of '05. In September of that year, Q magazine named The Who as one of the "50 Bands To See Before You Die". Structured discographyThe Who's discography is very messy for several reasons, including the early use of different labels in Britain and America, the labels' habits of releasing collected materal as if it were a studio album, very long delays in the release of some material, and remastered CD releases that made changes far beyond the customary addition of bonus tracks. This discography is designed to give a fairly detailed overview of The Who's corpus without excessive distractions. It is something of a simplification despite its apparent complexity; visit the links for more details on specific albums. Studio albums
Missing image RogerDaltrey.jpg Roger Daltrey, lead singer
Period collectionsNotwithstanding their renown as a concept-album band, The Who had an active life as a singles band at least until 1972, when the single "Join Together" made the charts but was never released as part of an album. Their singles and various unreleased materials were occasionally collected and released as albums even while the band was still active, sometimes as stopgaps for years when no album was on the horizon. The resulting albums are distinguished from the "Late Collections" (below) because they are collections of singles and other unreleased material of the relevant period rather than "greatest hits" or late "kitchen sink" collections. The material tends to be very good, and these albums are often thought of as Classic Who Albums along with the regular studio albums.
Live albums
Other albumsFilmsMissing image PeteTownsend.jpg Pete Townshend, lead guitarist & vocalist
Other appearances
Roger Daltrey also had a minor career in film and television, unrelated to his work with The Who, notably a role as Franz Liszt in Ken Russell's Lisztomania. Who Songs in popular cultureOriginal recordings of the Who's music were used intermittently in various contexts unrelated to the band, starting with the use of a track from Tommy in a March of Dimes television commercial during in the 1970s. However, starting in the late 1990s there was a marked increase in the rate of such usage, summarized below. Movie soundtracks
Television shows
Commercials
Many Who fans consider the commercialization of these songs to be a crass sell out on Pete Townshend's part, especially the use of the originally spiritual "Bargain" to sell SUVs. External links
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