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Anthem for wild youth
The sound of the young and the restless repackaged at
last. By Jon Savage

The Who 
My Generation (Universal)
The first legitimate CD release of The Who's
epoch-making debut album, plus 18 tracks cut with
their producer, Shel Talmy, in 1965 and early 1966.

RELEASED IN the first week of December 1965, The Who's
explosive long player climaxed an extraordinary pop
year: along with Rubber Soul and The Kink Kontroversy,
My Generation signalled the end of beat boom innocence
with increasingly complex material and an emerging
rock attitude. Coming off the sensationally successful
My Generation single, The Who were not just a pop
group but a national issue. Citing their "prolonged
and agonising cacophony", the maverick commentator
Christopher Booker thought they made "the death wish
stage" of "the 10-year English revolution" "clear and
explicit".

Conflict saturates this record: the emotional and
physical violence between the four young and unstable
members of a group in which everyone wanted to be the
front man; the unprecedented abrasiveness of their
sound; the violent arguments about musical direction
between Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, and the
tension between their managers, Kit Lambert and Chris
Stamp, and their producer, Shel Talmy. With reference
to the last, this reissue marks the settling of a
36-year dispute and makes available a cornerstone of
British rock.

For this one, you have to thank John Emery. After the
success of I Can't Explain, The Who went in to record
an album for their US company, Decca. Featuring only
one original (You're Going To Know Me, renamed Out In
The Street), the rest of the material featured R&B
covers: James Brown, Bo Diddley, Garnet Mimms, Martha
And The Vandellas, Eddie Holland. When nine tracks
were played for Emery at Beat Instrumental, he
criticised the unoriginal material and the projected
album was binned: only I'm A Man, I Don't Mind and
Please, Please, Please made the final cut.

Hearing the five shelved cuts on the bonus disc, you
know the decision was right. None of them are bad, but
The Who were facing the same problem as The Beatles
and The Rolling Stones: how to transcend reliance on
black American staples and write original, viable
material. The eight new Townshend songs that form the
core of this record mark a major shift in the group's
power balance and the emergence of British pop's most
acutely psychological teen writer.

In many ways My Generation is two records in one. The
early R&B material is well represented by the James
Brown covers (I Don't Mind and Please, Please, Please)
where Daltrey exhibits excellent taste and a good
grasp of tough, persuasive, even mature soul vocalese.
The B-side Shout And Shimmy, with all that west London
jive talking, is unintentionally hilarious, while the
reworking of I'm A Man is authoritative.

But it's My Generation that introduces the real Who.
As sensational as the perfectly distilled teenage
sentiment is the noise: Daltrey's stuttering, John
Entwistle's bass-as-lead, and Keith Moon's ecstatic
drumming. The rhythm section dominates much of the
album: with Entwistle's loud rumble at the bottom,
Moon could explode all over the kit, embellishing the
beat and providing a cue for many of Townshend's terse
solos. Nicky Hopkins' piano, sometimes distracting,
provides tonal depth.

Townshend's songs begin as pop ready-mades - the
dating rituals of Much Too Much, the bitching of It's
Not True - but their originality is quickly apparent:
in 1965 few would have dared to begin a song with
"your love is hard and fast". The hypnotic drone of
The Good's Gone is matched by a setting where the boy
complains about his girl's love being "rough", while
in Much Too Much it's simply "too heavy on me". This
ambiguity forces Daltrey to modify his gruff style
into something more supple and poignant: a power trade
with Townshend which enabled him to grow as one of
Britains most expressive pop/rock vocalists.

In the lyric of an apparently slight song like It's
Not True, you can detect the start of Townshend's
fascination with the plastic nature of masculine
identity. Things are not as they seem, whether in the
girl's lies or even the boy's braggadocio. The victim
of Much Too Much can flip into the unrepentant shit of
A Legal Matter, one of the all-time great songs about
the male fear of domesticity. These concerns peak in
The Kids Are Alright, a cautionary tale of two
adolescent lovers separated by parental hostility. The
boy has lost his love and his peers: in a final
gesture of solidarity to the group he is forced to
leave, he places his girl in their hands.

Remixed and boosted by 18 extra cuts, this package is
exemplary. Two cautions, however: the stereo mix
occasionally reveals master-tape faults and omits
familiar guitar figures on My Generation and A Legal
Matter. And the digital technology fails to preserve
the original's bizarre frequencies in an age when each
new sound was a selling point: there's nothing like
hearing all The Who's pre-'67 work on mono vinyl.
Still, this new edition makes accessible a record that
still sounds as immediate as it did in 1965.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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