Happy 45th Anniversary to The Who’s seventh studio album The Who By Numbers, originally released October 3, 1975.
It’s impossible for me to talk about The Who By Numbers without first talking about Quadrophenia (1973).
Quadrophenia is my all-time favorite album (and I hope we’ve all marked our calendars for 2023, when Albumism will let me write a 6,000-word tribute for its 50th anniversary). It is a massive, sprawling thing, the conclusion of a career-defining experimental streak that had begun with The Who Sell Out (1967) and would prove to be the band’s legacy.
While most of the albums in The Who’s experimental streak offer brilliant songs, production, and sequencing, Townshend’s goal of elevating rock & roll to high art often comes at the expense of visceral meaning. Tommy (1969), for example, is somewhat weighed down by its philosophy, while Lifehouse was so ambitious that it never made it past the studio.
Quadrophenia went in both directions at once. Its main character has a legitimate developmental arc and a problem to solve, and his failures are nothing short of heartbreaking. For all of its bluster and highwire theatrics, Quadrophenia is an album that you feel.
But that feeling is still created through fiction, a persona. It’s the story of Jimmy. No matter how good it is or how meaningful its songs are, Quadrophenia will always be a piece of craftwork, the same way a good novel is.
This is where The Who By Numbers, an aggressively first-person album, comes in. The main thrust is that the rock & roll lifestyle might be exciting on TV, but in reality, it flattens relationships and is full of loneliness. While the theme has some striking similarities to Quadrophenia (both even contain songs that involve counting one’s friends), the difference is that the setting is no longer fictional—it’s all playing out in Townshend’s head. This immediacy is the album’s greatest strength when you consider it in the context of all of the artifice that had characterized the band’s recent output.
With nowhere to hide, Townshend offers his most evocative lyrics. Take for example “Like a woman in childbirth / grown ugly in a flash / I’ve seen magic and pain / now I’m recycling trash” from “They Are All In Love,” or the parade of metaphors about smallness and isolation that make up “Imagine a Man.”
The darkest track comes early, in the form of the Townshend-sung “However Much I Booze.” Negativity is everywhere; he fights himself (“It’s clear to all my friends I habitually lie / I just bring them down) but also questions the effects of sharing these feelings with an audience: “You at home can easily decide what’s right / by glancing very briefly at the songs I write.” You can tell in this lyric that sharing this side of himself with listeners is frightening. We’ve never gotten this kind of vulnerability from The Who.
Compare this to “Doctor Jimmy,” the Quadrophenia track with the heaviest emphasis on drug use, in which Jimmy gets incredibly violent when under the influence. Maybe “Doctor Jimmy” is a representation of Townshend, or someone he once knew. We don’t know. But the narrative fictionalizes Jimmy’s behavior enough that the connection to Townshend remains speculative if it’s made at all. “However Much I Booze” makes no such attempts to obfuscate. The drug song is not new territory for Townshend, but the forthright drug song is.
This lyrical break coincides with a musical one. Certain things are missing. No longer are we subject to large swaths of guitar feedback or synthesizers, those trappings of The Who’s earlier mission to push rock music to its limits. Townshend even plays a ukulele on “Blue, Red, And Grey.” You can’t smash a ukulele. I mean, you can, but it doesn’t have quite the same effect as ramming an SG through a Marshall stack.
“In A Hand Or Face,” the album closer, is a good example of what this musical shift means in the context of the band’s history. Recall what has filled the closer slot on previous Who records: the titanic “Love Reign O’er Me” from Quadrophenia, the massive “Won’t Get Fooled Again” from Who’s Next (1971), and the multipart “We’re Not Gonna Take It” from Tommy. By comparison, “In A Hand Or Face” is a stripped-down piece. It’s a steady midtempo song, in a comfortable part of Daltrey’s range, with no extra instrumentation, in a standard verse-chorus format. The most musically ambitious moment is Entwistle matching Moon’s pulsing fill after the second chorus—which is actually pretty standard fare for those two.
But “In A Hand Or Face” works. The Who By Numbers doesn’t need a massive closer—narratively, grandiosity would have made no sense at all. What the album does need was some kind of answer to the implicit question underneath the record, which is “Is Pete OK?”
The “I am going ‘round and ‘round,” refrain implies that he’s not. The music does just enough to recreate Townshend’s recursive thinking while avoiding sentimentality. It’s a bummer, but it’s the only ending that could suit this album.
This lyrical and musical departure means that The Who By Numbers stands alone in The Who’s repertoire. No other album is like it – everything before it is either from that experimental era or the very early Maximum R&B days. Every album after it is either unfocused or doesn’t have the original lineup. This is the only time that The Who drop the pretenses and tell us how they feel, while still operating at the height of their musical powers.
This, then, gives us two strange truths:
The Who By Numbers is The Who’s most ambitious album. I’m defining “ambitious” here in a deliberately narrow and annoying way: a work that is seemingly difficult to achieve with the tools that you have. Townshend’s greatest tool was cloaking deeply felt emotional and philosophical truths in concept. Abandoning that structure was a massive aesthetic and commercial risk that very easily could have fallen on its face.
Even though it stares at its subject relentlessly, The Who By Numbers is also easier to listen to. An album like Quadrophenia, or even Who’s Next, is an event. It asks quite a lot of you. It seeks to Make Waves and Change The Face Of Rock. The Who By Numbers, in dropping all of its pretenses, becomes a Saturday afternoon rock & roll record. It’s got good songs that are fun to sing along to. At first glance, even looking at the cover art that John Entwistle drew himself, one wouldn’t think that they were looking at a massive aesthetic risk.
Which isn’t to say that The Who By Numbers is the band’s masterpiece or that it’s even in my top three Who albums. But it is a fascinating part of The Who’s turn away from progressive rock (before progressive rock even existed as a codified genre), a gesture toward the kind of second act their career could have had if Moon had survived. We’ll never get to hear those records, but I like to imagine a version of The Who that’s as forthright as they are virtuosic.
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