Re: Quad/WBN

[Dave Elliott <dae@cbcosmos.att.com>]

Mike wrote:
> I agree that as I get older (I'm 32) WBN becomes more and more relevant. It
> was really the first Who LP that tried to face up to adulthood.

This seems to be a common thread of the posts on WBN, but I don't look at
this album this way.  It was written for the most part when Townshend was
approaching 30, and followed on the heels of the really rough Quad tour,
the middling commercial acceptance of Quad (which I think at the time
Townshend considered to be his masterpiece), and the exhausting work on the
Tommy movie.  Rather than facing up to adulthood, Townshend is plunging into
a full fledged "I'm turning 30 and I'm a failure" crisis.  Not only that,
but he saw himself becoming the person who he spit at in My Generation, and
it depressed the snot out of him.

In some ways WBN is a continuation of The Seeker ("I'm a really desperate
man") 5 years later.

Though there are glimpses of maturity in songs after WBN (Keep On Working,
Daily Records, Slit Skirts, and a couple of others), I think Pete is still
grappling with many of the same issues 20 years later at age 50.


> There's a sense of "owning up" to past failures and trying to move on into
> uncharted territory.

I'd have to disagree here.  WBN always gave me a sense of "I can't deal with
my life", rather than owning up to past failures.  Has Pete ever "owned up"
to anything?  To me that's akin to apologizing, and that doesn't seem to be
in his nature.


> (Also, the Who's playing as a whole really clicked on this LP.  I don't think
> Daltrey's sounded better or Entwistle's played better bass).

I agree to some extent, but this album was really where we saw Moon begin to
weaken.  In fact, I think that they used session drummers for some of the
songs.  On WBN Moon seemed to be emulating himself, rather than charting new
territory as he always had before.  It got a lot worse on Who Are You,
though.

All in all, I find WBN to be a very interesting album, and a fine work.  It
was Pete's first intensely personal writing, and showed a person struggling
to deal with his life, but with enough courage to admit it to the world.



Dave Elliott