Happy 55th Anniversary to The Who’s second studio album A Quick One, originally released December 9, 1966.

The inarguable beating heart of The Who’s discography is the run from The Who Sell Out (1967) through The Who By Numbers (1975). Across five albums—including Tommy (1969), Who’s Next (1971), and Quadrophenia (1973)—the group built an inimitable sound while pushing rock & roll to its aesthetic and conceptual limits. This is the thing that they’re known for, and rightfully so.

The album that comes just before that incredible run – the album that we’re celebrating today —is pretty often forgotten. It isn’t their barnstorming debut, it isn’t part of their iconic period, and it’s not part of their tragic decline. It’s just… there. A Quick One (1966) both foreshadows the band’s illustrious career and represents an alternate universe where they fizzle out on novelties and competent but not world-changing music.

Unlike The Who Sings My Generation (1965), A Quick One finds the songwriting burden distributed throughout the band. This experiment might be the reason that this is not the band’s strongest record; some of the non-Pete Townshend tracks (particularly Keith Moon’s “I Need You” and John Entwistle’s two songs) could carry some more heft. (Let’s be honest, “Boris the Spider” is fun, but Entwistle did much better later on.) Still, stretching the band’s sound away from Maximum R&B through this songwriting experiment helped set the stage for later work.

Speaking of experiments: “A Quick One While He’s Away” is a monster. It’s the one standout from A Quick One, the song that we can definitively say had a meaningful influence on The Who’s direction. A nine-minute track comprised of several shorter songs, the narrative experimentations that defined the band got a trial run here. Townshend found rock music capable of delivering something narrative and cerebral. You can also sense Townshend’s talents for combining seemingly disparate movements together, which would be perfected on Quadrophenia, in the abrupt-yet-satisfying transitions of “A Quick One While He’s Away.”

Of course, the definitive version of the song is not the recording on A Quick One, but rather the unhinged reading from The Kids Are Alright (1979), recorded in 1968 at the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. Still, the studio version represents a massive leap forward for Townshend and a stepping stone toward the band’s career-defining experiments.

There are two other shining lights on A Quick One: The first is “So Sad About Us,” a rollicking song that doesn’t sag momentum-wise like a lot of tracks elsewhere on the album. Here, The Who lean into that “Maximum R&B” sound that made them distinct from other blue-eyed soul acts like The Rolling Stones.

The song’s peak is a daring key change in the final seconds of the bridge, which creates massive tension right before a resolution in a final, joyous chorus. There’s not a lot of joy in The Who’s catalogue and finding it on a song called “So Sad About Us” makes it unpredictable and exhilarating. Criminally underrated, this track deserves to be thought of as one of the group’s early masterpieces, along with “I Can’t Explain” and “I Can See For Miles.”

The other crowning achievement is Keith Moon. We know that Moon is a standout drummer with an unreplicable style, but the somewhat unremarkable settings of A Quick One let us see his one-man-orchestra in sharp relief.

On the Moon-composed “Cobwebs and Strange,” a carnivalesque and wholly unserious romp, Moon trades off with the rest of the band, demonstrating that his instrument has just as much melodic power as the rest of the group’s, as long as you are willing to look for it. The track gives a panoramic view of Moon’s talent and lets us appreciate how the band’s sound was built around it.

On “Don’t Look Away,” Moon establishes a traditional pattern for just long enough for you to have a sense of gravity, then promptly abandons it in favor of his “throw the drumkit down the stairs” sound. In the lead-out from the bridge, he perplexingly hits a crash symbol one beat early, spending the last beat thundering on the toms instead. In doing this, he inverts a traditional build-up format and somehow sends us into the verse with more momentum than we would have had otherwise.

A Quick One also finds The Who tapping into their sense of humor—“Whiskey Man,” “Boris the Spider,” and “A Quick One While He’s Away” find the group moving away from the hard-nosed Maximum R&B sound of The Who Sings My Generation. They would need this sense of humor desperately to crack The Who Sell Out (which only exists if your singer is willing to take a photo in a bathtub full of beans).

So, while A Quick One is not the most rewarding listen (it is definitely the original-lineup LP that I return to the least often), there are seeds here that laid the groundwork for the rest of the band’s career.

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