FROM WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN: THE WHO FROM
LIFEHOUSE TO QUADROPHENIA
At the Record Plant: The Who's First Attempt to Record Lifehouse/Who's Next in New York,
March 1971
The Who had done a bit of recording in the US in 1967 and 1968, working
on some singles and Who Sell Out
tracks in New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles. These, however, had
been pit stops fit into the group's manic American tour schedules. When
they flew to New York in mid-March 1971, it marked the first occasion
on which they were traveling across the Atlantic with the intention of
recording much or even all of a complete album. This was Lambert's
idea, as he was co-producing an album at New York's Record Plant for
LaBelle with fellow British producer-manager Vicki Wickham (most famous
for managing Dusty Springfield and producing the mid 60s UK TV show Ready Steady Go!, on which The Who
had been frequently featured). The sessions were intended to last two
weeks, but in the event would barely stagger through a few days.
Though Lambert's role in The Who's recordings had
diminished since Tommy,
Townshend was eager to resume collaboration, partly in hopes that Kit
could be as much of a help to bringing Lifehouse to fruition as he had on Tommy. Perhaps some dissatisfaction
with the tracks cut at Townshend's home studio for the aborted 1970 LP
also played a part. As he told Sounds
early in January 1971, "Recently we've been recording at my own
studios, there I really did have control. I mean I was recording the
group, producing, writing and everything. When we finished it didn't
sound like The Who at all. It sounded like me, like one of my demos. So
we had to throw it in my demo tray and go back into the studios we
normally use."
If The Who hoped to get a superior sound than they'd
been able to achieve at Pete's home studio, or perhaps even than they
could get anywhere in the UK, the Record Plant was a good choice.
Though it had only been open for about a couple years, Jimi Hendrix had
instantly given it credibility by recording much of 1968's Electric Ladyland there. The Velvet
Underground had done many sessions there in 1969; John Lennon would
record some of his 1971 album Imagine
there as well. The Who would be the first band to use its new Studio
One, with engineer Jack Adams, according to Townshend's liner notes for
the CD deluxe edition reissue of Who's
Next, co-producing with Kit Lambert. (Pete also wrote that he'd
worked with Adams in New York before, though it's not clear when that
would have taken place; possibly it happened during the New York
sessions for The Who Sell Out.)
According to a Townshend ZigZag
interview, Lambert even told him they'd record in quadraphonic sound,
something to be attempted with more diligence for the album they'd make
a couple years later.
It's something of a miracle we're even able to hear
some Record Plant tracks on authorized CDs, though some first showed up
on the 1990 bootleg From Lifehouse
to Leeds. As Chris Charlesworth (who helped assemble the 1995 Who's Next reissue on which some
Record Plant cuts were first heard) told ICE, "We actually retrieved the
master tape from which that bootleg was made ... [at the time of the
recording], it was brought back to England and left at Olympic Studios;
I guess The Who played it once and just left it there. It stayed at
Olympic until there was a clear-out sometime in the early 80s, and it
was thrown in the rubbish. It was rescued from the garbage and ended up
being sold to the bootlegger, we don't quite know how.
"Late [in 1994], Pete asked me to try and retrieve
it, implying that he'd be willing to buy it back for a reasonable sum,
with no questions asked. I put the word out, and although it was a bit
of cloak and dagger, I got a call four months later from someone saying
he knew where it was, and all I had to do was send a messenger to this
address, and I'd get it back. So I got it back, and gave it back to The
Who. The bootleggers didn't even charge us."
Although Townshend described the Record Plant
sessions in the notes to the Who's
Next CD deluxe edition as "great fun," they weren't greatly
productive, major problems becoming immediately evident. If Pete could
take some cold comfort in these not being directly related to Lifehouse and his inability to
fully articulate its premise, they were if anything even more
detrimental to work on the band's next album, and even to the long-term
health of The Who themselves. First, Lambert was using heroin, impeding
his abilities to supervise the sessions from the get-go. In addition,
as Townshend frankly admitted in the CD deluxe edition liner notes,
Keith Moon was using hard drugs as well. Typically, Pete didn't exempt
himself from his share of blame either, remembering drinking bottle
after bottle of brandy.
Partying inside and outside the studio hadn't
stopped The Who or indeed other acts who'd used the Record Plant, such
as Hendrix, from laying down some classic tracks. In March 1971,
however, the chaos was apparently also spilling over to the control
room. "Jack Adams was one of the top engineers at the Record Plant,"
remembers Jimmy Robinson, who'd taken a job as a second engineer at the
studio after playing tenor sax with Buddy Miles's band. "He had done a
lot of big records, and he worked with LaBelle a lot. I worked with
Jack a few times. I used to call him Merlin, because he would like
disappear a lot during sessions. He would not come back for like an
hour, maybe two hours. A lot of times Jack would look over at me and
say, 'Uh, I gotta go out. I'll be right back,' or something like that.
'And you gotta take over.' One night that happened, I ended up like
finishing LaBelle for him, and we became really good friends."
In his days at the Record Plant, continues Robinson,
Adams "would like take a bottle of scotch and just go and sit in a
bathroom stall and drink half of it. He would literally say 'Jimmy,
take the board,' and then he would disappear. Somebody would start to
get pissed off, and go 'where's Jack?,' and they'd have to go find him.
He'd be like in the broom closet or in the fucking bathroom stall, the
door locked, passed out."
Another young engineer at the Record Plant was Jack
Douglas, later to work on Lennon's Imagine
and, almost a decade later, work as a producer on Lennon and Yoko Ono's
Double Fantasy LP. "Up till
then, I had only done some jingle dates and one record session with
Patti LaBelle during which I had set the console on fire by knocking
someone's beer into the transformers," he admitted in the June 1995
issue of Guitar Shop. In an
interview with Don Zulaica of LiveDaily.com, he remembered his work on
The Who's Record Plant sessions as his first engineering gig, also
intimating that Adams might not have been that into doing Who sessions
in the first place: "It was Jack Adams and myself. Jack was an R&B
engineer and I was his assistant. Jack was not into doing The Who. He
was into Aretha, just: 'God, let me out of here! Take over PLEASE.' And
the first thing they did was 'Won't Get Fooled Again' and my hair was
standing straight on end."
Remarked Douglas in Guitar Shop, "Kit Lambert was
technically listed as the producer, but it was clear that Pete was in
charge of the production. He could drive the band nuts with his
directions, but also really got them ripping when they tracked. He
would especially concentrate on whipping up Keith, because he realized
that the band actually took its energy cues from Keith. The energy
level was always so upthere that many of the solos on the
record were done in one pass during the tracking sessions. It really
kept the trio sound together."
Although it's been reported that sessions started on
March 15, perhaps no proper or at least complete takes were done that
day, as the seven tracks that were eventually released were all done
between Tuesday, March 16 and Thursday, March 18. 'Won't Get Fooled
Again' may well have been the first song they did, as Douglas
remembers, since the version issued as a bonus track on the deluxe
edition of Who's Next was cut
on the 16th. While this shows the band getting close indeed to the
arrangement used on the famous official version, there are important
differences that mark this as distinctly inferior to the one heard on Who's Next. The guitar work is
busier and a bit histrionic in its occasional squeals; Daltrey's lead
singing isn't supported by backup vocals; a
synthesizer-and-drum-dominated instrumental passage follows the "meet
the new boss, same as the old boss" declamation, disrupting the
momentum; and Roger's famous scream that precedes the line is absent.
The transitions between the verses, choruses, and instrumental breaks
are at times clumsy, as are some of Daltrey's improvised-sounding vocal
interjections. And the recording didn't use the synthesizer track from
Townshend's demo, a credible but ultimately not quite as penetrating
facsimile being created by playing an organ through a VCS3 live ¬–
an experiment initiated, interestingly, by Roger rather than Pete.
The other song from March 16 to eventually see the
light of day was in a couple respects the oddest Who recording to
emerge from the Who's Next/Lifehouse
sessions. The Motown oldie 'Baby Don't You Do It,' a 1964 hit for
Marvin Gaye, had been inserted into The Who's repertoire almost
immediately after its release, as the discovery of their acetate demo
from the period of the song (released on the CD version of Odds & Sods) proves. Why would
they be revisiting that of all songs at a time when they were
ostensibly working on a concept album to take place 20 years in the
future?
Townshend would reveal how it could have fit into Lifehouse nearly 30 years after the
Record Plant sessions in his Lifehouse
Chronicles notes, where he explains how the parents "going
mobile" in search of their runaway daughter would furtively listen to
old rock records as they toodled in their caravan. (In his 1989 Radio
One interview with Roger Scott, he described much the same scenario,
though curiously it was "two rock and roll guys" doing the driving and
listening, not a married couple.) What better oldie to revive for such
a scene than 'Baby Don't You Do It,' which The Who featured constantly
in their mid 60s live shows? (It's also worth bearing in mind that Tommy had actually included an
oldie of sorts in the band's adaptation of Mose Allison's arrangement
of bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson's 'Eyesight to the Blind'; another
Allison song, 'Young Man Blues,' was considered for Tommy as well, as was a version of
another blues song Allison covered, Mercy Dee Walton's 'One Room
Country Shack.')
Even odder was the recruitment of a guest session
musician for the track ¬– not to add keyboards, as The Who had done
off and on since 1965, but lead guitar. Nor was the guitarist, Leslie
West, a musician the average Who fan would expect to be the first guy
called to fulfill the role. But West, who'd recently become a star as
part of the US hard rock band Mountain, had encountered The Who as far
back as November 1967, when his band The Vagrants opened for a Who
concert at New York's Village Theater. Both The Who and Mountain played
Woodstock a couple years later, and West met Townshend and Moon in less
hectic surroundings at the Speakeasy club in London. Pete also admitted
to pinching some of West's licks "for the stage" in ZigZag.
"When Mountain finally went over there, Track
Records [The Who's UK label] was our agents, and they did pretty good
to get us started in England," West explains. "Kit Lambert had called
my manager, and then they called me and [asked] do I want to play
guitar with The Who on this album that they were doing. I don't even
know if they had the title yet. I said, 'Well, they have a guitar
player.' They said, 'Well, Pete didn't want to overdub, he wanted to do
it straight away.' And I said, 'Sure.'"
The very notion of The Who – a band already
featuring one of the greatest rock guitarists, and who had not only
functioned as a one-guitar power trio-with-vocalist their entire
recording career, but made it one of their trademarks – enlisting
another guitarist seems absurd. But as West amplifies, it seemed to fit
in with The Who's apparent desire, at these Record Plant sessions at
least, to record as quickly and in as "live" a manner as possible.
"From what I understood, he wanted to play rhythm, and he wanted me to
play lead, so they didn't have to overdub," Leslie elaborates. "We were
right in the same room, doing it without overdubbing. Roger was singing
at the same time in a little room; we had headphones on." West had
never even heard the original Marvin Gaye version.
The rendition by The Who on this date, however, was
quite different from both Gaye's and the demo they'd cut back in the
mid 60s, extending its length to more than eight minutes. West "just
went out there, listened to it, and started playing it. The way the
recording came out was great." They did give Leslie quite a bit of
space for extended blues-rock soloing, and Roger quite a bit of space
for vocal extemporizing during the lengthy, semi-jamming passages. But
the track wasn't used until it appeared as a bonus cut on the 1995 Who's Next CD reissue, although a
live December 1971 Who performance of the number in San Francisco would
be used as a non-LP B-side the following year.
As both 'Won't Get Fooled Again' and 'Baby Don't You
Do It' were recorded in Studio Two rather than Studio One, it's
possible both tracks were more intended as warm-ups (as Townshend
states in his notes to the deluxe edition) than serious stabs at cuts
for an official release. That impression's reinforced by the group's
decision to cut without overdubbing, Douglas confirming in his
interview with Don Zulaica that all the vocals were live as well.
Though it would have been a disastrously unsuitable A-side in 1971,
upon hearing 'Baby Don't You Do It' nearly 25 years later as the 1995 Who's Next CD edition was being
assembled, Pete even told reissue producer Jon Astley (as reported in ICE) "that could easily be a
single."
Much confusion lingers as to what else was recorded
at the Record Plant, and who played on the tracks that have surfaced.
Though West is only credited as a guitar player on 'Baby Don't You Do
It' for the Record Plant recordings that have gained official release,
he remembers being played demos of 'Won't Get Fooled Again' and 'Behind
Blue Eyes,' as well as working on 'Behind Blue Eyes' and possibly 'Baba
O'Riley' (no Record Plant version of which has ever circulated). And
while it's been reported that Mountain's Felix Pappalardi (also
renowned for having produced Cream) produced the March 16 recordings
(and Townshend remembered Pappalardi producing 'Won't Get Fooled Again'
in a December 1971 ZigZag
interview), West says Pappalardi wasn't involved.
According to Leslie, Felix was approached to
participate, Lambert asking West if Pappalardi played organ. The
ensuing confusion, however, reflected the disorganization of the
group's Record Plant sessions in general, as West had Pappalardi "come
down for the sessions, and it got a little hairy, 'cause Pete thought
they wanted him to play bass. John Entwistle came in and said, 'What's
this?' Felix said, 'My bass amps.' [Entwistle] says, 'I'm the bass
player in the fucking Who.' [Felix says], 'Well, make up your mind, I'm
a busy man.' He thought he was going to be in there to produce. It got
a little heated, and he left. What happened was, Kit Lambert thought he
was Felix Cavaliere from the Rascals, who did play organ. So it was
embarrassing to him. He didn't play anything."
Whatever amps the Mountain men brought into the
Record Plant, it's hard to imagine a louder in-studio tandem than
Townshend and West in early 1971. "I was using a very small Sunn
cabinet, with one 12-inch speaker, and a 50-watt Marshall," West told
Gibson.com. "Townshend was using his Hi-Watt amps, and he said to me
that he wanted to be the loudest. Afterwards he came over to me – I
guess he was a little embarrassed – and said, 'Can you hear yourself
okay?' I told him I could hear myself even if I was in Chicago."
Judging from the annotation on the Who's Next deluxe edition, at least
three tracks were started on March 17, with work continuing on two of
these the following day. 'Love Ain't for Keeping,' whose deluxe edition
version dates entirely from the 17th, is done in a considerably heavier
manner than the official Who's Next
re-recording. Even more notably, Townshend rather than Daltrey handles
the lead vocal, without any support from backup harmonies; it's double
the length of the version on the Who's Next LP, with much more extended
guitar soloing, which verges on the tedious on the lengthy rideout; and
there's a modulated synthesizer sweep throughout, though it's largely
relegated to the background. For all these reasons, it's markedly
inferior to the remake.
The Record Plant version of 'Behind Blue Eyes' is
more satisfying, though the opening verse has a fuller arrangement than
the re-recording on Who's Next
would. A celestial organ hovers over the folky guitar riff, and cymbal
sweeps and fuzzy hard rock guitar riffs occasionally punctuate the
calm. Al Kooper is credited with the organ on the Who's Next deluxe edition, and his
participation would have made sense, as he'd played organ on some of
the New York sessions for The Who
Sell Out back in 1967. However, according to Kooper, he does not
play on this track, or indeed on any of The Who's Record Plant
sessions.
'Pure and Easy,' still considered a core Lifehouse song at this point, was
also started on the 17th, and is executed pretty well, though the drums
largely drop out during the bridge. Too, the transitions between the
song's sections are less effectively dramatic, and the end hasn't fully
been worked out, disjointed handclapping continuing during the
concluding organ note. This too has an organ, and one still wonders who
was responsible, especially if it wasn't Kooper.
"As far as why New York musicians were used, I think
it was just going to be a jam," says Dennis Ferrante, who remembers
working as an assistant engineer on 'Behind Blue Eyes' and 'Won't Get
Fooled Again.' "They blended just fine with The Who. Jack was cool with
the guys, but I felt tension between the band and Kit."
Work on both 'Love Ain't for Keeping' and 'Behind
Blue Eyes' continued on March 18, and the Who's Next deluxe edition also
includes a version of 'Getting in Tune' (then still titled 'I'm in
Tune') recorded on that date. Both piano and organ are heard in this
arrangement, the piano perhaps contributed by Kenny Ascher, who'd later
play on several John Lennon albums; he's noted as a session musician
for the Record Plant recordings in Andy Neill and Matt Kent's Anyway Anyhow Anywhere Who
chronicle, though he's not credited in the deluxe edition notes. This
rendition lacks the call-response vocals so critical to some of the
choruses on the official Who's Next
LP, and is nearly two minutes longer, the difference being accounted
for by a way-too-long instrumental break. Lambert evidently enjoyed it,
however, as Townshend's deluxe edition liner notes recall Kit running
out holding a sign inscribed DON'T STOP! during a "kicking jam session"
at the end of the song. Lambert also changed the color of the studio
lighting as songs were recorded, literally (in Douglas's recollection
in Guitar Shop) diving across
the board during one Daltrey vocal overdub of 'Won't Get Fooled Again'
to reach the controls in time for Roger's climactic scream. "He made
it," Douglas remembered, "but he wound up with little indentations in
his face from the knobs in the monitor section."
Another memory Leslie West has of the sessions
indicates he might have been playing on 'Getting in Tune' as well, so
similar is it to Townshend's tale: "Kit Lambert was out of his fucking
mind, because we were doing one of the tracks, and it was going along
great. Kit comes out with a sign that says, 'Great work! Keep it up!'
He's putting it in front of our faces as we're playing. Pete stops the
session and called Kit a fucking twit for ruining the take. You know,
he's running around like a madman with a sign in front of everybody
while we're recording. I'd never seen anything like [it]."
There were some lighter moments amid the madness,
even if the line between the fun and the madness was getting ever
harder to distinguish, particularly when it came to the behavior of
their drummer. One evening they were visited by the legendary guitarist
Link Wray, whose 1958 hit single 'Rumble' was the first rock recording
to effectively use fuzz guitar. As Townshend wrote in 1974 in his liner
notes to The Link Wray Rumble,
"Keith Moon promptly took off all his clothes. He stayed naked until
people started to take notice, then when they became bored with his
studio streak he dressed as a wasp and buzzed around the studio. This
later inspired the [1972] B-side 'Waspman,' a tune we hereby dedicate
to Link Wray." Laughs Leslie West, "I remember Keith Moon playing on
this gigantic Hammond organ between takes; he was out there, and he
looked like Phantom of the Opera. I said to Pete, 'Well, he looks like
he's having a good time.' And Pete says, 'No mate, he's being deadly
serious.'" On a more serious note, West gave Townshend a Les Paul Jr.
guitar that Pete would play on some 1971 Who sessions.
If any more progress was made at the Record Plant
this week, however, nothing's emerged from The Who's archives to verify
it. Townshend's deluxe edition liner notes indicate sessions in Studio
One lasted for four days starting on March 17, but nothing's emerged
from either the 19th or the 20th, though documentation consulted by Jon
Astley (who mastered the Who's Next
deluxe edition) indicates that recording was also done on the 23rd.
While a version of 'Time Is Passing' first issued on the 1998 CD
edition of Odds & Sods is
attributed to the Record Plant sessions, this was likely recorded
slightly later in 1971 after the group's return to England, especially
as Anyway Anyhow Anywhere
doesn't list the song has having been cut in New York. Possibly work
was slowing or grinding to a halt amidst attempts to continue the album
at the Record Plant as the week progressed, and the combination of
personal problems and less-than-ideal production wore the band down.
When things came to a head, however, it wouldn't
happen at the Record Plant, but in Lambert's room in the Navarro Hotel
at Central Park South, where Townshend had called a group meeting.
Though not reported at the time, in hindsight the ensuing confrontation
between Lambert and Townshend did not just put another damper on the Lifehouse project, but also
permanently damaged the relationship between the two men. As Pete
walked into Kit's room, he heard his trusted co-manager raging against
the guitarist to Lambert's assistant, Anya Butler, quoting the outburst
as such in his notes to the Who's
Next deluxe edition: "Townshend has blocked me at every front. I
will not allow him to block me this time." So devastated was Pete at
hearing himself referred to this way – and not even by his first name,
but his last – that at some point during the meeting, he edged toward
the open window with thoughts of throwing himself to his death. Butler
guessed his intentions, took him by the arm, and dissuaded him. "That," Townshend told Revolver in 2000, "is when I gave
up on Lifehouse."
That's Townshend's version, anyway. Whether a hugely
successful musician with a growing family, who'd by his own written
admission just had some "great fun" at the Record Plant despite the
turmoil, was seriously considering suicide seems uncertain. It's also
odd that a fellow with such a thick-skinned persona would be so hurt by
Lambert referring to him by last name only – a slight he does seem to
have carried for decades, mentioning it in his Lifehouse Chronicles notes too. It
is certain that Pete took Kit's diminishing competence, perceived
attempts to obstruct the progression of Lifehouse, and general turn for the
worse quite personally, perhaps seeing it as the abdication of his
closest ally outside The Who – and, perhaps, closest ally of all. "Kit
was the only one who could really communicate to Pete what was good and
what was bad, and Pete would accept it," acknowledges Roger Daltrey in
the Classic Albums
documentary on Who's Next.
"He wouldn't accept anything otherwise."
Whether or not the intention was to record the
entirety of the Who's Next
album at the Record Plant, the sessions had to be considered a failure
for the most part. The group had
worked on what seemed like at least half an album of songs likely to
make the cut for whatever LP resulted, but none of them had yet
realized their full potential as studio recordings. Whether or not any
elements would be salvaged, at least as tracks upon which overdubs
could be done, was questionable. So was whether they'd provide the
foundation for anything else to do with Lifehouse, whether a film or
otherwise. Work would resume on the album soon enough, back in their
native London. But unsurprisingly, this time around, Kit Lambert
wouldn't be in the production seat.
