This fourth single-disc repackaging of the Who's hits is a definitive catalog item with decent liner notes, brilliantly remastered sound and 19 deathless Townshend gems from "I Can't... read more

This fourth single-disc repackaging of the Who's hits is a definitive catalog item with decent liner notes, brilliantly remastered sound and 19 deathless Townshend gems from "I Can't Explain" through "You Better You Bet." --Jeff Bateman (hide)

Half its members may be dead and its leader may be keeping a low profile, but the Who remains enormously popular. Devotees who haven't availed themselves of Jeff... read more

Half its members may be dead and its leader may be keeping a low profile, but the Who remains enormously popular. Devotees who haven't availed themselves of Jeff Stein's thrilling, self-mocking 1979 documentary about the group shouldn't wait another minute now that the film has been painstakingly--perhaps heroically--restored to its theatrical-release length from original elements. The sound is clearer than on previous video releases, images are once more crisp and color-rich, and adjustments in tape speed make the Who sound like themselves again, particularly in vintage television performances and filmed club dates from as far back as the band's sonically thrilling, early R&B period. Special features are, shall we say, extensive: 100 or so minutes of multiple-angle footage, an insightful interview with Roger Daltrey, a featurette about the film's restoration, and a mesmerizing, isolated John Entwistle audio track. --Tom Keogh (hide)

During a 1971 concert performance, a seemingly relieved Pete Townshend announced that the event would mark the last performance of the Who's landmark rock opera Tommy. To paraphrase... read more

During a 1971 concert performance, a seemingly relieved Pete Townshend announced that the event would mark the last performance of the Who's landmark rock opera Tommy. To paraphrase Adam West: "Poor, deluded boy." Over the ensuing decades, the mushrooming popularity of the Who's tour de force would inspire an all-stars-meet-the-London Symphony album (1972), a star-studded Ken Russell film epic/soundtrack (1975), a Broadway show (1992)--and become an enduring millstone around Townshend and the band's collective necks. But it was over-the-top auteur Russell who would give the morality tale of the deaf, dumb, and blind boy-cum-reluctant-messiah some of its most indelible pop-cultural iconography: Eric Clapton as High Priest; Acid Queen Tina Turner; Elton John in sky-high stack soles as the Pinball Wizard. The accompanying album is dutifully sprawling, a monument to Me Decade excess studded with loopy star turns (including the, er, "operatic" charms of Ann Margaret and Jack Nicholson), swelling choirs, and blustery synth fills. As he would later do to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, executive producer Robert Stigwood manages to turn one of rock's seminal achievements into something more artistically akin to the World Wrestling Federation, and every bit as musically subtle. It's no mean feat to virtually overwhelm the Who on their own record; Stigwood makes it sound like a vendetta. Still, it's an album so ambitiously bad it's but one William Shatner performance away from being a kitsch masterpiece. --Jerry McCulley (hide)

The success of Who's Next and its slate of classic-rock tracks has often obscured its true roots--Lifehouse, the unwieldy multi-media project that Pete Townshend originally concocted as the... read more

The success of Who's Next and its slate of classic-rock tracks has often obscured its true roots--Lifehouse, the unwieldy multi-media project that Pete Townshend originally concocted as the follow-up to Tommy. Variously informed by apocalyptic visions, sci-fi notions of interconnectivity that neatly presaged the internet and, of course, an unwavering conviction that rock & roll would save the world, the core tracks of the sprawling Lifehouse were recorded, cut, re-recorded and finally boiled down into a collection that seems to represent as much alienation ("Behind Blue Eyes") and overweening cynicism ("Won't Get Fooled Again") as it does liberation and unity. Aside from Townshend's own self-released, multi-disc meditation on the project, this expanded new edition is the most rewarding attempt to place Lifehouse and the over-exposed classic it spawned in their proper context. Six tracks from the album's original, but abandoned New York sessions flesh out the familiar material, with previously unreleased outtakes of "Getting in Tune" and a revealing, early arrangement of "Won't Get Fooled Again" warranting special note. The second disc documents one of Lifehouse's most quixotic elements with the first-time release of one of the series of concerts staged at London's Young Vic theater during the project's gestation, events during which band and audience would somehow mystically become One. Core tracks from the project are interspersed with typical hard-rocking Who fare of the time, resulting in a show whose focus and dynamics belied something very different from the arena-rock clichés that would eventually overwhelm them. --Jerry McCulley (hide)