Had The Who's "Lifehouse" been released, would it have been better or worse than "Who's Next"?

Tomatoes, potatoes, stew, eggplants...
Potatoes, tomatoes...gourds............................

 

This book is the best Who book I have read, the amount of detail is amazing and he covers this fascinating period and to me their two greatest albums with information I never knew and that's after 30+ years of fanatic fandom for The Who and Pete. Well worth reading.

 

I really liked Too Late The Hero as well.

 

In my opinion, Who’s Next, lean and mean, is already their greatest achievement, and at least in the discussion for greatest album of all time. Lifehouse would also have been a great album, but the individual songs would have been heard in the context of a larger concept album. I’m not sure that would have helped or not.

 

Some people like to skip and shuffle. I've always liked albums. I really like a musical experience that I can be immersed in for an extended period of time. I took Who's Next with me yesterday while I was traveling and listened to it three times. It is a lean and mean piece of perfection. I really wouldn't change it. Albums like Who's Next, Let It Bleed, Aja, Wish You Were Here offer this big, wide, immersive feeling that I just love to slide into.

As a Who fan, I typically look to Quadrophenia as the epitome of their output but I know that most rock fans might see it as being too long or overstuffed, but to me there aren't very many double albums that can give me that immersive experience like Quadrophenia can. I also think that this is why, as I got older, I started branching out into Jazz and Classical music, looking for these immersive, musical experiences.

 

I haven’t heard all of Lifehouse so I won’t vote, however, Pure and Easy alone would make it a better album.

 

It would have been worse. Who's Next works because it's a 1LP and has good flow and no fillers. This would not be the case had it been a double album. I do like a lot of double albums but 1LPs are better because it's easier to remove all the filler. I'm glad this project never happened becuase then we wouldn't have Quadrophenia which is a great double album.

 

The songs are great, but the question here is whether Lifehouse would have been better than Who's Next. An album can be sunk by thinks like poor sequencing or song selection. Given that Pete was a hot mess at the time, is it completely unthinkable that, left to his own devices, he would have assembled a lesser album?

I'm not saying it wouldn't still have been good, just that the service to the narrative - or at least whatever narrative he was able to cobble together - would probably have made the finished product weaker. In the meanwhile, it's not like the amazing Lifehouse songs we've all heard are via bootleg only. Both Pete and The Who have been pretty forthcoming with studio out-takes and demos, so we're not exactly the poorer for an album like Who's Next existing.

 

I might get thrashed but London Calling is perfect the way it is, but Exile on Main St. would be a much better single LP.
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I also think Who's Next is perfect the way it is. 9 great tracks with no real weak moments on it. I find it much easier to digest than the two studio double albums that surround it, as great as they are.

 

Given it wasn't and this is completely speculation driven by personal opinion I say worse. That is what the coin I flipped indicated and I'm going with that.

 

The amazing thing about this material is how little filler there is. 16 of these songs sequenced properly could be just as tight as the 9 we got. Though that actually brings up a different question: Would a 2 LP Who's Next have been better than Who's Next? Question for another day...

 

a 2LP Who's Next would differ from LH mostly in excluding a song or two, the sequencing, and *maybe* adding When I Was a Boy to the mix, so pretty close to the thread!

 

I've read a few comments saying a Lifehouse double album would have somehow affected the making of Quadrophenia. Is Quadrophenia the same (or close to the same) "concept" as Lifehouse but with different songs? Like if Lifehouse had been recorded and released as a double album, would Quuadrophenia not have been a double concept album at all, and would have just been a standard rock album instead? Has Townsend ever said anything about that, or is it just conjecture?

* You certainly won't get any argument about that from me. Where's the Exile On Main Street, single-album appreciation thread?

 

beep beep!

 

I voted "better", but obviously not because Who's Next is lacking in any way. I just think that the addition of a second record's worth of music that is just as good as (and in some cases, better than) what made WN would result in a better album. I'm not basing this on anything having to do with the Lifehouse story, which would have been very difficult to get across with the music alone regardless of the release format, but simply the quality of the music.

As a minor quibble with the track list in the link, I have always understood that "Baby Don't You Do It" and "When I Was A Boy" were both intended for Lifehouse. Thus, I would add both cuts to the track list shown, plus possibly some of the instrumental synthesizer pieces that were eventually released on Townshend's The Lifehouse Chronicles box set. I'm not sure about "Greyhound Girl" -- I didn't think that was from the same time period, so that one could be removed.

I would also add "Naked Eye" and "Water" to the configuration.

 

It's conjecture. I've never read anything suggesting the two efforts are in any way related. The only similarity is that the music was written at a time when Pete was thinking conceptually in terms of output.

It could be the case that Townshend was more determined to have Quad be a double after getting no support from his band and management on Lifehouse, but I've never heard him say or even suggest that.

I'm a huge Who fan, and I like Quad, but that album was a failure. It's primary purpose was to be the new stage show for The Who and usher Tommy into the dustbin as the group's main live performance piece, and that didn't happen. I've heard Pete say that a few times.

The Quad love on this Forum many times, in my opinion, is histrionic and effusive. But perhaps the same tags could be applied to me for my belief that Lifehouse is the single biggest missed opportunity in the history of rock 'n' roll, and that Tommy beats Quad six ways to Sunday.

 

I strongly agree with your former statement.

I vehemently disagree with your latter statement.

 

If it were more like Tommy and less like Who's Next then it would have been worse. I do like Quadrophenia, though.

 

Quadrophenia is much more musically interesting and satisfying to me than is Tommy. Better story, too.

 

That's OK. Look, I saw them do Quadrophenia twice, the first with Ox and the second in 2013. Neither show was truly satisfying, and Roger was having very real trouble with his voice on the Oakland stop of the '13 tour. He blamed it on pot smoke from the audience, but I wasn't buying it, although I love Roger.

Meanwhile, every other Who show I saw, including the '89 Who-Orchestra Tour, was better than the Quad tours I saw. Plus, the extended Tommy sequence that they were playing on their last tour was awesome, even all these years later, and both being far from their prime years. That kind of sums it up for me.

 

I just do not agree with this. The whole gangs thing--Mods v. Rockers, was a very English phenomenon. It never resonated with me in the least. There are universal teenage issues in Quad, e,g., peer pressure, concern with physical appearance, struggling with your parents, trying to fit in, etc. But they're all thrown into this sort of desperate and violent relief I didn't identify with. Jimmy was a really messed up kid and his parents were terrible to him. I'd flip through the album sized picture book in the gatefold while listening and think, "Man, glad I'm not you."

Meanwhile, Tommy is a grand and definitive statement on the late 60s, and even the hangover and abandonment of sorts that followed that era. I think it captured the zeitgeist of its times. I don't think you can say that about Quadrophenia, unless you grew up in working-class Brighton or whatever during the time it's set.

Musically, Quad grates on me by side four. The musical themes in Quad are repeated way too often, and they're not that fantastic to begin with. And there's a lot of synths and keyboards. And you hear those keyboard parts over and over and over. It's got some great songs. I think "The Real Me" might be Moon's finest hour. But I think Townshend went overboard with the musical cohesiveness, as it becomes annoyingly homogenous and, for me, grating, by side 4. We get to "Love Reign O'er Me" and I'm like finally. It's a slog getting there.

 

I do get that the Mods/Rockers thing was very "British." But that's somehow less involving or likely than a both deaf and dumb kid who can play pinball well? But more than any of that is the just the music. When I hear Tommy, I can get with the Underture and with Pinball Wizard, but that's about it. I just don't like the songs very much. They don't move me musically at all. Who's Next on the other hand . . .

 

I just edited my post you replied to, to get into the music aspect of why I like Tommy more.

 

Absolutely. Not only did I not like Tommy, I'll never understand why it is considered by some to be superior to Quadrophenia. Personally I found the Tommy "story" pretty incoherent and I found I just did not care about the Tommy character. And that's not even taking into consideration the music on the album, or the (IMO) sh-tty production of the thing.

Which was precisely how I felt the first and only time I played Tommy in its entirety. Hey, different strokes and all that. S'all good

 

Better, easily.

Several of the songs -- including "Pure and Easy", "Time Is Passing", "Let's See Action" -- are as good/even better than some of the ones released on Who's Next. I do agree Lifehouse lacked that wit like Tommy had, maybe "My Wife" could have been worked into the story somehow?

Obviously several of the songs turned up over the next few years -- mainly on Odds and Sods or singles -- but they could have released a follow-up to Who's Next in 1972 featuring the leftover tracks that would have been just as good.