Original subtitles

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN"]

PETE TOWNSHEND: The story that lay behind this batch of songs

that led to The Who's next album was

supposed to be probably the most ambitious concept that I'd--

that I'd worked on ever.

ROGER DALTREY: We wanted the feeling

that the audience were as important as the group

to what is coming out of the music.

And to be fair, I think the proof is there that actually

that part of it actually worked.

Because the record is certainly, I think,

the best work we ever made.

CHRIS STAMP: I think it's a fabulous album.

You know, I think it's-- it's-- it will stand the test of time.

I mean, it's a great pity that it wasn't as fantastic

as it was intended to be.

Pete's guitar.

Bass.

The madman.

Roger.

(SINGING) We don't get fooled again.

Don't get fooled again.

The change, it had to come, we knew it all along.

We were liberated from the fold, that's all.

The world looks just the same, and history ain't changed.

Because the banners, they are flown in--

KEITH ALTHAM: Who's Next is a great album

because The Who were at the peak of their powers.

Daltrey's voice was just beginning

to sort of reach its maximum range and power of depth.

Entwhistle was a prodigious musical talent anyway.

Moon was at his very best.

Townshend was at his most arrogant, inspirational

with his songwriting.

(SINGING) We don't get fooled again.

Don't get fooled again.

DAVE MARSH: To me, that's the best group of songs

that he ever had.

Their only big misses, there are some of the best

things he ever wrote there.

There are ideas in the songs that are important ideas,

and that echo before and after for him.

IRISH JACK: He is probably the only writer who writes as--

as a Who fan.

That's the background to his writing.

He writes as a fan.

And this is--

I mean, this is one of the amazing things

about Pete Townshend.

He is a mirror of his own audience.

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "I CAN'T EXPLAIN"]

(SINGING) Got a feeling inside, can't explain.

Certain kind, can't explain.

ROGER DALTREY: We used to be one of the guys

from the audience on the stage doing it.

And I think, again, that really is down to the kind

of songs Pete used to write.

He had a way of communicating with those guys

and making them feel that it was them out there doing it.

IRISH JACK: The Who were not a band

for a girl with an engagement ring on her finger.

I mean, they were not a band to be screamed at.

This is the thing about a band like The

Who, they were very, very much a guy's band.

JOHN ENTWHISTLE: One of the guys that were

standing in the front row--

all we could see were fellas, right?

We always told ourselves that all

the females were at the back where we couldn't see.

CHRIS STAMP: They were very tough guys, you know.

They very much knew what they wanted to do,

they all had like very individual opinions.

They all had their absolute sort of taste in music.

But they were all very, you know, open, you know, to ideas.

ROGER DALTREY: Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp

were very valuable to us at the time.

I mean, the group was kind of--

people don't realize this--

was really six members.

Lambert and Stamp behind the scenes

were incredibly valuable to us, especially to Pete.

Pete's relationship with Kit was one of--

they really did feed off each other.

Kit would spark up ideas in Pete,

and Kit was the only one who could really communicate

to Pete what was good and what was bad,

and Pete would accept it.

He wouldn't accept anything off of us.

PETE TOWNSHEND: But what he used to do

is he used to accentuate the positive.

He just used to find the good stuff.

And I'd say, well, what about this?

And he said, let's come to that later.

He was just brilliant.

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "MY GENERATION"]

(SINGING) People try to put us down--

Talking about my generation--

Just because we get around.

Talking about my generation.

Things they do look awful cold--

Talking about my generation.

I hope I die before I get old.

Talking about my generation.

CHRIS STAMP: Kit and Pete would discuss in detail and long

into the night the structure and what you did and did

not put into a pop song.

But what Pete had as a voice was--

was a mod kid.

PETE TOWNSHEND: We were into the idea

that the audience was the people to serve.

So I suppose I lost that audience,

I lost touch with The Who's mod audience.

And I decided that what I actually had to do

is I had to write something for me.

And where I was at the time was I was in a very strange place.

I'd-- I had a couple of acid and hated it.

Everybody else in the world was wearing funny clothes,

and blowing their heads off, and wearing flares

with flowers in their hair.

And I felt very out of step with it.

But I was interested in the mysticism.

I was interested in the spiritual side of it.

So I thought, maybe I could try to do

is to marry the pop single with this idea

of this mystical journey.

And that's when I started to work on Tommy.

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "TOMMY CAN YOU HEAR ME?"]

(SINGING) Tommy can you hear me?

Can you feel me near you?

Tommy can you see me?

Can I help to cheer you?

Ooh, Tommy, Tommy.

PETE TOWNSHEND: I wasn't aware of the minefield

that I was getting into when I-- when I playfully

called this piece that I was working on a rock opera,

but Kit Lambert was just fantastic.

He-- he kind of took me the other way, though.

He used to say things things like I'd say,

are you sure it's OK to call this a rock opera?

And he'd go, he'd say, well, yeah of course it is.

And I'd say, well, the story's a bit dodgy at the moment.

He'd go, yeah, but all opera's got stupid story.

And I realized later actually that some of his ambitions,

of course, were to usurp the musical establishment.

Most of the drive for Tommy was

from Kit Lambert, because his father was

the composer Constant Lambert.

And Kit was always pushing Pete's [inaudible]..

But Kit loved pop music and he loved the three minute single.

But he was determined to make the music of a rock band

more important than a three-- he was always saying,

this music's much more important than people realize.

It's not just a throwaway thing.

He knew back then that it was going to still survive today.

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "PINBALL WIZARD"]

(SINGING) Ever since I was a young boy,

I played the silver ball.

From Soho down to Brighton, I must have played them all.

But I ain't seen nothing like him in any amusement hall.

That deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.

JOHN ENTWHISTLE: Tommy-- we finally found out that there's

a lot of money coming in and we thought,

whoa, I guess we've made it.

We always had an idea that Tommy was going to mean something.

You know, we'd liked the album, and we knew it was

going to be kind of important.

But the audiences just starting getting bigger and bigger.

You know, every time we did a tour,

we'd have to play bigger places.

KEITH ALTHAM: Tommy really kind of,

I suppose, set a target for the Who, and it created

an enormous interest not because it was a rock opera

and it had a new concept about it,

it created an awful lot of interest.

And then Townshend had another project

in mind to follow that, of course,

which was the Lifehouse.

PETE TOWNSHEND: How could I make my--

my-- the subject of this new piece, this Lifehouse piece--

I want the story to be about music,

I want it to be about the future,

I want it to be about hope and vision,

but it's got to be rooted in reality.

Got to look at the possible problems.

How could I make my character effectively deaf,

dumb, and blind without doing it again, you know?

And I thought, I know what I'll do.

I'll make him live in the future and I'll put him in a suit.

And he will be in the suit, and he won't live real life,

he'll live pretend life.

He'll live spoon-fed life.

He will live-- live couch potato life.

He'll live the life that filmmakers,

storytellers, advertisers, you know,

political manipulators, and--

and brainwashers want him to live.

And thus he'll be effectively deaf, dumb, and blind

to his spiritual potential, which is his freedom

to congregate with other human beings,

interact with other human beings,

and live what we now call life.

CHRIS STAMP: It wasn't an idea that I--

you know, can clearly remember everyone sort of,

like, thinking yeah about.

But at the same time, no one-- no one-- sort of

felt that way about Tommy.

You know, it just began.

So we thought we would begin the process

because this-- this-- this-- this-- this whole

Who thing was very much, you know, a group process.

You know, the group, this is how ideas grew.

You know, we-- we had to begin.

ROGER DALTREY: From there, I think Pete, you know,

came up with a kind of basic script,

which was like a film script which didn't make any sense.

None of us could grasp it.

But it had some good ideas in it about--

I think from what I can remember,

the one idea that I picked up on was the fact

that if we ever do find the meaning of life,

it will be a musical note.

And I thought, yeah, that's a great-- that--

that in itself is a great idea for some kind of musical story.

PETE TOWNSHEND: There once was a note pure and easy, playing so

free like a breath rippling by.

That was where the story of Lifehouse was told.

(SINGING) There once was a note pure and easy, playing so free

like a breath rippling by.

The note is eternal.

I hear it, it sees me.

Forever we blend as forever we die.

I listened and I heard music in a word, and words

when you played your guitar.

The noise that I was hearing was a million people cheering,

and a child flew past me riding in a star.

As people assemble, civilization is trying

to find a new way to die.

Pete said he was trying to work on a musical, which would

be kind of revolutionary and preach

the way to go for everybody, especially

the youth of the country.

And I said, well, come on, use the Young Vic free

because it's like an incredible circus

and had a wonderful acoustic.

Use it free and do a series of attempts

at working on this musical.

PETE TOWNSHEND: I intended to film both live action,

and then later to spin in, you know, a normal movie,

and cut the live action into the movie in a way

that the live action served the story.

And the setting for the fiction was the Young Vic.

This was the first time we had the chance to sit in a room

or in a theater, learn the songs as a band,

hear what they felt like to play them live,

see what reaction we got off an audience,

and the whole thing started to feed back.

[music - the who, "bargain"]

(SINGING) I call that a bargain, the best I ever had.

The best I ever had.

It always worried me that I couldn't grasp fully

what the impact of Lifehouse was because of my job

as The Who's press agent.

And I felt like I should make an effort

to understand and comprehend this very complex idea.

And I thought a lot less bad about it

when I realized so many other people who were exceptionally

brighter than I was on papers and things

couldn't grasp it either.

Was Lifehouse some attempt to try to create utopia

and really, you know, get everybody to live at the Young

Vic and have utopia right there on the ground, or, you know,

was it just an excuse to stay up late and do crazy things with--

with this--

all this great equipment you've got, or what was it?

Beats me.

From what I understand, we were supposed

to take over the Young Vic, and the audience is supposed

to be there on vid with us.

Wow, I didn't quite actually get it.

And in practice it didn't work, because we brought

in a bunch of people from the street,

the [inaudible] hope for the [inaudible]..

It kind of fouled at that point.

I think what happened was that his coworkers did not

think it was getting anywhere.

And so I think Pete lost heart.

When I tried to articulate to people what it was that--

that may happen, what was going on,

it probably sounded very confused.

And I think a lot of people were very concerned for me.

And eventually that concern turned out to be justified,

because I did start to come apart at the seams.

You know, I started to realize that there were very

few people around me that--

that understood what was going on.

And there was a lack of conviction

even within the band.

There was great support for me, but there

was a lack of conviction in our ability to make a movie.

The idea itself wasn't going anywhere.

And we weren't tackling Pete's songs,

we weren't tackling the storyline.

So Kit's idea as their producer was

to move to the most sophisticated recording studios

to try and record these songs in this new very

sophisticated way-- you know, with like 12 tracks, 16

track, and et cetera.

And he knew about the record plant in New York,

he'd actually worked there a few times.

And so the band flew over to New York

to record some tracks in the record plant.

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "GETTING IN TUNE"]

(SINGING) I'm singing this note because it fits in well

with the chords I'm playing.

I can't pretend there's any meaning here or in the things

I'm saying, but I'm in tune, right in tune.

I'm in tune, and I'm gonna tune right in on you.

Right in on you.

Right in on you.

I think probably that what Kit envisioned doing

was the same as he had done with Tommy

of trying to get more and more into Pete's idea

and working it out that way.

Yeah, I mean I-- you know, when we finished--

when we finished the recording in New York,

which we had to stop because it turned out that

Kit Lambert was doing smack.

And-- and I was very, very straight at the time.

I used to drink a bit, but I was very, very straight.

I hadn't used drugs since '67, and I had

certainly never used narcotics.

So I-- and I was very worried, because it

looked to me like Keith was get involved in it.

I was desperately worried that Keith would, you know,

become a junkie.

And also New York is--

you know, it's the hedonistic town, right?

So everyone was getting more loaded.

The more halcyon hallucinogenic days

have passed on now to be more sort of neurotic narcotic days.

And there's the night life of New York,

the after hours bars, the clubs, the sex, the everything.

It's just a little bit more un-intimate

for sitting down and getting seriously,

you know, creative as a group of people.

So the recordings didn't really work in the record plant.

So what happened was Pete and the group

just felt uncomfortable and went home.

We all had a meeting a few weeks later--

the band, and the management, and Pete and I--

to discuss where to go from there.

And the general consensus was that the movie

script wasn't as forthcoming--

I mean, no one really got it.

No one quite understood it like Pete did, I didn't think.

And I suggested that-- that we should go ahead and make

a record of the songs, because the songs they

sang for it were just amazing.

And we went into the studio in England.

I think it would have been about May--

May, June 1971.

And recorded the songs for Who's Next.

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "BABA O'RILEY"]

This is not a loop.

This-- this actually is-- is played.

It actually does make the changes of the song.

A lot of people think maybe it's a loop, but it isn't it all.

Piano comes in in a second, thundering in.

There it is.

I recorded the rest of the band in stereo with the piano live.

And they'll come thundering in in a second.

Moon will come hurtling in like a herd of buffalo.

There he is.

Brilliant.

And then it sort of joins with the vocal, with Roger.

PETE TOWNSHEND: John was a lead guitar bass player.

You know, he was one of the first bass players

to depart from that boom, boom, boom boom boom boom boom boom.

Essentially, as a musician, he was quite capable, having

become a lead guitar player.

He's developed this incredible style of playing.

(SINGING) I get my back into my living.

I don't need to be forgiven.

Pete's live guitar comes in here.

(SINGING) Don't cry, don't raise your eye.

It's only teenage wasteland.

Sally, take my hand, we'll travel south cross land.

Put out the fire and don't look past my shoulder.

Who's Next had enough of the Lifehouse ideas that if you had

been a Who fan enough to have followed

with Pete had been claiming he was trying to do, that you'd--

you'd know that this ridiculous thing with Roger singing

about teenage wasteland and standing out

in the middle of a field trying to create it

must've come from that project, right?

And-- and incidentally, it's only ridiculous when I say it.

It's not ridiculous at all when he sings it.

(SINGING) It's only teenage wasteland.

Teenage wasteland, oh yeah, it's only teenage wasteland.

They're all wasted!

For me, you know, that notion of teenage wasteland

is about waste.

It's not about getting wasted, it's about waste.

It's about wasted life, wasted opportunity, wasted years.

And I take full responsibility for the fact

that my generation complained about this state of the planet

and did nothing to change it.

Dave Arbus coming up on violin.

I was friendly with Keith Moon,

who used to turn up and sit in with the band I was with.

Used to be-- when they were doing this album he said,

do you fancy coming and playing on a track?

And I said sure.

And it all went very smoothly.

ROGER DALTREY: In the early days it

is impossible doing this stuff live because we

had to play with tapes.

And Keith had to strap headphones to his head.

Sound-wise, it was incredibly useful to have

the extra dimension of the synthesizer on a tape.

But performance-wise, it was incredibly inhibiting

because you could never break away from it.

You had to sit with that tape, otherwise you were stuffed,

which we quite often were.

Used to get quite painful, didn't it, Bob?

You're in the hands of a tape machine now, machines go wrong.

And when they go wrong, it doesn't matter

whose fault it is, everyone looks at the person that's

next to it.

And even up until-- and still to this day

when we do that on the road, my heart goes into my mouth

when I hit that button.

The night before I'm looking at it thinking,

are you going to work?

I don't trust machines, they go wrong.

Bob got the blame, got the tape

recorder thrown at him many a time,

especially when the tape broke.

It was fun, fun days.

The whole thing about this album

is the two tracks "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again"

used the synthesizer in a completely different way

than anyone had ever used one before, where

it actually provides a rhythm.

I mean, it's not just a sound, but it's a rhythm, as well.

To the best of my knowledge, it's the first time anybody had

used a synthesizer like this.

First of all, nobody I knew, anyway, knew how to work them.

I mean, they were really difficult to program and get

any kind of sound out of.

BOB PRIDDEN: When I did the sound for "Won't Get Fooled

Again," I didn't have this bit.

This was a bit I got during the demos.

And so by the time I'd finished the demos,

I knew how to work it.

But what I did have is a much simpler synthesizer

very much like this one.

The one that I actually had you can see in the photographs.

It was this organ with the EMS synthesizer on the top of it.

That was the rig that I used.

And basically what I did was took the output of the organ,

put it through a filter which is what they

call a sort of sample and hold.

You get these random voltages coming out in a voltage sweep,

just a simple kind of synthesizer,

a normal standard sound which a lot of people

will be familiar with.

I suppose I was just sitting there playing this for hour

after hour, you know, just kind of getting into it, really.

Very, very simple chords, obviously.

You know, it was kind of naively simple.

But on the other hand, the end result is extraordinarily

harmonically complex.

Giving myself a 32 bar, then playing through the chords.

And then I-- I did the acoustic guitar.

I hope.

(SINGING) And the morals that they worship will be gone.

The men who spurred us on sit in judgement of all wrong.

they decide and the shotgun sings the song.

Pete's [inaudible] were always fantastic

and were always a challenge.

Because it was very different--

I mean, very often I've listened to the song we were

about to cut like, how the hell am

I going to compete with that?

Really, really, brilliant things.

Really brilliant.

Obviously doesn't play drums like Keith Moon

and he doesn't play bass like John Entwhistle.

So by the time the band got hold of anything,

it became The Who instantly because

of the way those two play.

They took his stuff and did their thing to it.

My style was very, very not like Keith Moon's.

I mean, when I first started to play the drums,

I used to try to emulate Keith.

In the end I felt, fuck it, you know,

I don't actually really quite really want to play like that.

The drums were always very simple,

the bass was always very simple, very

sort of bassy and basic, no treble or twang on it,

anything like that.

And he'd basically leave it to the rest of us

to make the rest of the song.

This is the sound of the '70s bass guitar,

which I suppose really was the sound that the guy who played

bass in Led Zeppelin had been famous for inventing,

this sound.

Before he joined with Zeppelin he was a session

player, John Paul Jones.

And he used to play with a flat pick

and got this really clean sound.

And if you listen particularly to early Walker brothers

records and things like that, you

hear this incredible clean, tight sound, which I suppose

would come a little bit from the Beach

Boys early recordings from Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations.

Because Brian Wilson was a composer.

So played the bass to surface.

The basic arrangements, and sound ideas,

and whatever else came from Pete's [inaudible]

and the feel, pretty much.

So it made my job particularly easy.

I mean, I was much more of an engineer on their stuff

than anything, really.

I mean, my job was--

was to record it as simply, and easily, and smooth

a path as best I could.

But actual recording process as best I could.

And what's interesting here is what happens in the organ.

Remember I've done a backing track,

and the organ just suddenly becomes a solo.

There's no edits, it's just me playing.

You know, turns into this beautiful little kind of--

and that's something I could never have written on paper.

But very, very, very disciplined.

Here with the counterpoint in there, and you know,

bits of fugal stuff.

Just brilliant.

And I'm just playing, and I'm following the music.

I'm not writing it, I'm following it as I play,

you know.

And of course, Who fans would know this, because this was

the whole centerpiece of the Who show with the lasers,

and Roger looking like some kind of furry animal.

CHRIS STAMP: We were already now talking about just an album.

You know, Lifehouse can be forgotten.

I mean, Linzon has just--

John's just recorded a series of songs.

The fact was they didn't really need the story

to carry the songs as individual songs, which obviously

Pete couldn't quite see initially because he'd written

them as part of a story.

They illustrated part of the script.

And I regretted that Pure and Easy, for example,

wasn't on the record because that

was where the story was held.

You know, there once was a note.

"Going Mobile" I always thought

must have had something to do with the plot.

You know, and that was probably the closest thing to a program

number on the whole thing, you know,

it was just like you could sort of see them going off

on the Magical Mystery Tour.

These are the shots of the bus moving by or something.

"Going Mobile."

Brilliant.

Great example of The Who as a trio.

Daltrey's not on this.

Cut live.

Pete playing acoustic guitar and singing,

and John playing bass, Keith playing drums.

So this that you're hearing now now is completely live,

there's no overdubs yet.

And it's a-- it's a really brilliant example of the energy

of the band, I think.

Moon's just amazing, amazing.

And he's playing to an acoustic guitar and a vocal and a bass.

There's Pete's vocal mic, actually.

You can just hear the-- the acoustic guitar in it.

There's the acoustic guitar.

Here's John.

Everyone.

Brass synthesizer, overdubbed by Pete later.

Just a bit of color.

PETE TOWNSHEND: The story as it unfolded

was about the society who had been-- because of the vagaries

of the modern world, because of pollution being caused mainly

by people's needs to travel to be

somewhere else had been told, you can't do that anymore.

You have to stay where you are.

And people have got this lust for life,

and adventure, and color.

We're told, well actually, the best way to go to Bali

is to just get into your suit, we'll take you.

(SINGING) Keep me moving over 50.

Keep me grooving--

Synthesized guitar solo coming up with

a-- with a wah-wah pedal on it.

Here he comes.

Really unusual sound.

Yeah.

I didn't mind the synthesizers drone in the back,

but I didn't like it taking over as lead instrument when we had

this-- what I considered to be one of the best guitarists

in the world in the band.

Used to frustrate me a bit.

There are no lead guitar on this

originally, which he replaced with that, which was--

I don't know, I thought was very good.

But I'm-- I'm really glad he came out with the other sound.

Anyway, we didn't use that, we used this.

Who's Next is a record that was totally of its moment.

And when a record really freezes its moment like that,

it can survive vast changes in musical style.

[music - the who, "my wife"]

(SINGING) My life's in jeopardy,

murdered in cold blood is what I'm gonna be.

I ain't been home since Friday night

and now my wife is coming after me.

Give me police protection, going to buy a gun

so I can look after number one.

This track, My Wife, what it really

meant for the original Lifehouse,

it was a song that I had hanging around.

And the band asked me if I had any songs,

and this was the only one I'd had

left over from my solo album that I

was working on at the time.

(SINGING) Gonna buy a tank and an aeroplane.

When she catches up with me, won't be no time to explain.

She thinks I've been with another woman,

and that's enough to send her half insane.

Gonna buy a fast car, put on my lead boots

and take a long, long drive.

Brass.

And then on the end, we got your other vocal

comes in on the end.

And now at the moment, [inaudible]

get Pete's guitar feedback.

Now we're double tracked.

(SINGING) --catches up with me,

won't be no time to explain.

Double tracks on the last verse?

Yeah.

(SINGING) --with another woman, and that's enough

to send her half insane.

Gonna buy a fast car, put on my lead boots

And then Keith's drum [inaudible] now.

He sounds like he was double tracking.

PETE TOWNSHEND: Keith Moon we all know about.

Keith Moon's drumming was an expression of his personality,

and his ego, and his grandiosity,

and his ridiculousness, and his theatricality,

and his sense of humor.

A lot of what Keith did was incredibly funny.

You know, there wasn't a drum fill

that he did that didn't go--

[drum beat]

I mean, it was all-- that was all of them,

but just different variations of that played very, very fast.

You know, sometimes [drum beat] and then you fall on the floor.

GLYN JOHNS: I think that-- that his-- his image as somebody

being a little off the rails was something he promoted.

And it actually got him talked about the most drummers

in any band as a result, because he became a personality

with some predictability.

But if you talk to Who fans, I think you'll find

that they all thought he was--

he was a brilliant drummer.

And then obviously if you talk to musicians,

they would agree-- they would say the same thing.

And they would talk about his drumming ability

far more than the other episodes of his life.

A lot of people really, really, really

have never understood how important Keith's

drumming style was to The Who.

And I kind of pictorially describe it

as if you imagine Pete and John as two knitting needles,

and Keith was the ball of wool.

He would kind of keep it all together,

and with the vocals on top, it would produce a product.

You took Keith out of it, and it was just like--

JOHN ENTWHISTLE: If we played back our song in the studio,

if we put the drums up, we'd know

which song it was because he always played with the vocals.

He'd play along dead rhythm, and then he'd just go

[drum beat] in with the vocal, and it's-- it's true

genius what he's doing.

It's incredible.

Let's have a listen to this.

Listen to just Keith and the vocal.

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "BEHIND BLUE EYES"]

(SINGING) When my fist clenches, crack it open,

before I use it and lose my cool.

When I smile, tell me some bad news before I laugh

and act like a fool.

And he plays the break pretty straight.

(SINGING) If I swallow anything evil,

put your fingers down my throat.

And if I shiver, please give me a blanket.

Keep me warm, let me wear your coat.

Brilliant.

CHRIS STAMP: You know he was, in a sense,

the-- the soul of the band.

You know, he wasn't only this drummer,

he was this sort of wild sort of genius who beat the drums.

But he had all this other energy that he was transmitting

that the group needed.

Hey!

Ow!

[MUSIC - THE WHO, "BEHIND BLUE EYES"]

(SINGING) No one knows what it's

like to be the bad man, to be the sad man behind blue eyes.

No one knows what it's like--

Roger sings particularly well, I think, on this track.

But he does on the whole of this record.

It's a lot to do with the material.

He's really-- he really identified,

I think, with the songs particularly well.

(SINGING) But my dreams, they aren't

as empty as my conscience seems to be.

I have hours only lonely, my love

is vengeance that's never free.

I'll keep this vocal.

(SINGING) What can I do, dabbling in you.

This is all pretty straight as.

(SINGING) No one bites back as hard on their anger,

none of my pain and woe can show through.

Then this is where it starts to go--

(SINGING) But my dreams, they aren't

as empty as my conscience seems to be.

ROGER DALTREY: Behind Blue Eyes, for me, really speaks volumes,

you know.

When my fist clenches, crack it open.

You know, it just all made sense.

That's the only way we used to deal

with anything from the part of England that I grew up.

Everything was solved with a fight.

Whoever won the fight, that's way you win.

Simple as that.

But obviously, it didn't quite work that way in a band.

And they slung me up, the fighting.

And the band was everything.

It was my band, and it meant-- it was my whole life.

So I had two choices, give up the fighting

or give up the band.

that's not a choice whatsoever.

(SINGING) When my fist clenches, crack it open,

before I use it and lose my cool.

When I smile, tell me some bad news before I laugh

and act like a fool.

Just in the way that he can identify with it,

I too can identify with it.

I had to learn to control my anger.

I had to find a way to deal with my pain and my frustration.

You know, when I sing it my way, it's

a song about a whole different kind of frustration.

It's not about the repression of anger,

it's about the repression of love.

You know, it's about the perversion of love,

about love becoming vengeful.

(SINGING) If I swallow anything evil,

put your finger down my throat.

And if I shiver, won't you give me a blanket, keep me warm

and let me wear your coat.

Oh, yeah.

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man, to be

the sad man, behind blue eyes.

CHRIS STAMP: The songs reflect this striving,

to trying to sort of like make more of ourselves.

You know, to sort of become more conscious, more aware,

more complete as human beings.

And the songs are talking about at least

the seeking of doing that.

So they stand out on their own because they have that message.

But you know, they were part of a bigger message.

Maybe it was a crackpot idea, but it was--

it was beautiful, and it was powerful, and it was exciting.

And beauty, power, and excitement,

if that's not what the rock and roll dream is, then I didn't

understand it at all ever.

You know, it's like it just felt

like the one that got away.

It just felt so--

it felt to me like it was such a fantastic idea that it

just escaped me somehow.

If we hadn't not been given the chance to at least be

working for this kind of ethereal project

that Pete had in his mind that it was going to be this film,

it was going to be this, it was going to be that, we would have

just gone in the studio with demos

and just recorded the way other albums were recorded.

Whereas this album is a real, organic Who album,

and it's got much more of what the Who really all about, much

more of our stage presence.

Because we love-- we knew the songs well.

[MUSIC, THE WHO - "WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN"]

(SINGING) And the men who spurred us on

sit in judgement of all wrong.

They decide and the shotgun sings the song.

KEITH ALTHAM: As I look more at Lifehouse,

and particularly at Won't Get Fooled Again,

I realized the twist in the plot is this is not utopia,

this is dystopia.

This doesn't work, and people are

really paying a price for it.

And I think that may, in fact, have been part of why it was so

hard to pull off, this whole idea of leadership

is a very dangerous idea.

That trying to do this stuff had consequences.

That was a new thought back then.

It really was, the idea that, you know,

action had consequences.

People-- it was sort of supposed to have glorious results,

but not consequences.

You know, The Who were this sort of absolutely sort of like

out there, let's do it all, let's change--

let's change society, let's be part of-- let's really

move ahead here.

And then suddenly by the time you get to Who's Next,

you know, it's OK with them to be in the best studio in London

making the best technical record and going home

to sort of fabulous houses.

It isn't quite so much a problem.

You know, and I think Pete was talking about the betrayal that

happens.

You know, in our humanness--

you know, not like a political betrayal, but the betrayal

we made to ourselves.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" was not a defiant statement,

it was a plea.

It was a plea.

You know, please don't, you know, in this story,

please don't feel that because you've come to this concept,

because you've come to this place

that you've got an answer.

Please don't make me on the stage the new boss,

you know, because I'm just the same as the guy

who was up here before.

You know, you're in charge.

[MUSIC, THE WHO - "WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN"]

(SINGING) Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.