The Who By Numbers is Anything But

The Who By Numbers

The Who

1975

Enticed by the band’s rep for gate crashing, guitar smashing, drum bashing rock and roll, and perhaps even the record’s clever connect-the-dots cover art, The Who by Numbers was the first Who record I ever bought.  Like many albums I’ve purchased on a whim, it wasn’t at all what I expected.  I was immediately disappointed by the album’s lack of intensity, scope and grandeur. Where was this album’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or “Love Reign O’er Me” I wondered?  But being of limited means and in possession of a very exclusive (i.e. small) record collection at the time, I played both sides of the album from start to finish on many occasions in my early teens.

When you consider the records that preceded it – groundbreaking concept albums like Tommy and Quadrophenia, along with the epic Who’s Next, and the thundering Live at Leeds – The Who by Numbers was a remarkably restrained collection.  While there were a few hard rocking tracks, “Slip Kid”, “Success Story” and “In a Hand or Face” to name three, it lacked any true knockout punches. Still, the more I played it, the more I became hooked on the album’s haunting minor key chord progressions, sophisticated arrangements and understated performances, even if the lyrics couldn’t have possibly made sense to a 12-year old kid.  With The Who by Numbers, the band took a deliberate step backwards and inwards, rediscovering their knack for recording smaller songs about quirky characters.  Only this time, the character was Pete Townshend, himself.

Lyrically, The Who By Numbers is excruciatingly personal, confessional and melancholy.  At times, it’s flat-out embarrassing and you want nothing more than to cover your ears and stop Pete from over sharing.  Having  just turned 30, Townshend was wrestling with a variety of personal demons, most of which seemed to center around his age, his sexuality and his addiction to alcohol.  But beyond those, he was struggling with his own ego and just what it meant to mature as a musician in a business that valued youth above all else.

Though Townshend’s deepest insecurities are on full display throughout the record, at times they are contradicted and counterbalanced with songs that offer unexpected contrast and hope.  It’s hard to know which face to trust.   In “Dreaming from the Waist”, for example, Townshend attempts to understand and harness his sexual energy, often in shockingly graphic terms.  Like the act of sex itself, the song alternates between the rising tension of wanton desire and the deflated dismissal of his own needs in the choruses.

Townshend talks of having the “hots for the sluts in the well thumbed pages of a magazine,” and how he wants to “fly, drive, hump, and jump” like he does in his dreams.  But just as the first verse reaches its peak, it all comes crashing down with Townshend lamenting:

“I’m dreaming … from the waist on down
I’m dreaming … but I feel tired and bound
I’m dreaming … of a day when a cold shower helps my health
I’m dreaming … dreaming – of the day I can control myself.”

These were sad, tragic, but heroically honest admissions from Townshend.  Rarely before had a rock and roll star, one of our manmade demigods, admitted to such sexual confusion and disappointment.  Didn’t these guys always get what they wanted in the bedroom?

The flip side, of course, was “Squeeze Box”, a complete about-face and one of the most obvious sexual metaphors you’re likely to encounter this side of Spinal Tap.  I’m embarrassed to admit that when I first heard the song in 1975, and for some time afterwards, I really thought Townshend was singing about an accordion.  Chalk that up to innocence, but a closer look at the lyrics to this bawdy, banjo driven romp suggests otherwise.  How about this stanza from mid-song:

“Mama’s got a squeeze box
Daddy never sleeps at night
She goes in and out and in
And out and in and out and in and out
She’s playing all night”

Lacking in subtlety, the song is nevertheless one of the most hopeful celebrations of sex within the context of a committed relationship in the rock and roll canon.

Whereas “Dreaming from the Waist,” explored Townshend’s evolving perspective on sex,  “However Much I Booze” chronicled his growing dependence on alcohol.  Townshend is vague on the specific forces that drive him to drink, but implies here and in other songs that the issue is his age.  Unlike today, when artists like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Tom Waits have shown that it is possible to remain relevent well into adulthood, few musicians in the 70s had come to grips yet with exactly what it meant to be a rock star in your 30s and beyond.  Although he was only seven albums into his career, Townshend was drinking himself unconscious to avoid his fear of irrelevance when he sings:

“The children of the night, they all pass me by
Have to drench myself in brandy
In sleep I’ll hide
But however much I booze
There ain’t no way out”

Drinking to escape, and loathing himself for drinking, it seemed there really was no way out, but Townshend turns the tables again with one of the most beautiful and optimistic songs in his catalog, “The Red, Blue and Grey”.  Hardly recognizable as a Who song, Townshend sings and plays ukulele, accompanied only by what sounds like a small, uncredited orchestra.  Seemingly written for an unstaged theatrical production, it’s a hopeful, uplifting song and as beautiful as sunset.  Lyrically, this is Townshend putting a brave English face on his fears, instead adopting an “every day is a good day” philosophy when he sings:

“I dig every second
I can laugh in the snow and rain
I get a buzz from being cold and wet
The pleasure seems to balance out the pain.”

I was nearly 20 years younger than Townshend when I first heard The Who by Numbers.  As I write this review, I’m 20 years older than he was when he made the record.  The funny thing is, although I certainly have a better handle on Townshend’s lyrics than I did in 1975, the record doesn’t really sound or feel all that different to me today.  Could it be that neither the record, nor I have changed in all these years, or have we simply grown up together?  The songs Pete Townshend wrote for The Who by Numbers tackled big, universal themes in a small, personal way….and ran them through the gin-soaked filter of an aging Mod with no idea how much was still left for him to accomplish.  Perhaps it is only fitting that a record so obsessed with the passage of time presents such timeless music.

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