the Who: when did you get off the Magic Bus?

I guess I'm still on it. Endless Wire wasn't a very good album but it was still weird enough to be interesting.

I said after Face dances. "You Better You Bet" wasn't too bad.

oh crap. i should have put an option for "i never got off the magic bus!" i know that's where i'm at.

Well, I saw them in '89 and they were a million times better than their opener (Living Colour!).

I really think they should get Paul and Ringo to be their new rhythm section. The Whootles would have the best back catalog of any band in history. Plus it would be funny to watch Ringo play those Moon beats!

Option 6 is the closest for me. They lost it somewhere along either "The Who By Numbers" or "Who Are You?"

I don't love their early 70s stuff quite as much as "The Who Sellout", but they are still great albums, and there's no way that I am getting off the bus because "Who's Next" doesn't sound as wonderfully 1967 as "...Sellout" did.

Pleasant Pains OTM about "You Better You Bet" though.

xpost to Nate

'The Whootles' LOL

who are you. specifically "sister disco" yuck. and they were like my favorite old-guy band up to that point.

who by numbers was spotty but I saw them live on that tour and OMG just as LOUD & good as you'd hope.

classic stage patter at that concert. after opening w/ "Can't Explain" Pete says "Hallo Detroit" then comes back and says laughingly "ah oops sorry that was last nite Hallo Cincinnati..."

Tommy. Pretentious twaddle.

To the Who's credit, you could assemble a completely credible and enjoyable Greatest Hits by taking one track from each studio album. In being the least prolific of the first wave UK bands, they've got the least amount of chaff. Even when he was overly ponderous, there's a lot of effort and emotion and desire to grow in Townshend's songwriting. But what pains me is how they went from being among the funniest bands of the era to one of the gravest. A lot of what may seem bizarrely pretentious about Tommy (deaf dumb and blind agility, reincarnation, child molesting) was probably intended to be outrageous in a Peter Sellars or Cook/Moore sort of way. At least when the album was being sketched out. But by Who's Next, they tipped from making pop art to trying to make art art. And there's only one amusing song, "My Wife". I wish, like the Kinks, they'd stayed more silly.

After Face Dances (perhaps a liberal estimate).

I like Tommy; never understood why it always seems to get panned. I actually like it more than Quadrophenia (heresy, I know).

"Tommy" is spotty and even embarrassing at times, but it does have some great moments. And at least it's interesting, unlike the insufferable canonical bore that is "Who's Next."

As much as I like "Eminence Front" and parts of Endless Wire, I'm voting for #7, since I kind of wish that they'd gone the classy route that Zep (more or less) did, and acknowledged how important the drummer was and that it'd never be the same band without him.

i should have put an option for "i never got off the magic bus!" i know that's where i'm at.

Same here. Hell, sometimes I think I prefer Endless Wire to By Numbers.

For much of my life, I considered Tommy to be my favorite album ever. But then again, I also love 2112 and The Wall. Anything with an overture tends to grab me. I didn't even realize that people thought Quadrophenia was a better album. It really lacks the amazing number of great songs...

(Even has a huge prog/metal/concept fan though, I have always loathed Operation: Mindcrime.)

In being the least prolific of the first wave UK bands, they've got the least amount of chaff.

If you put together all the unreleased studio stuff, singles and b-sides, their studio output is right up there with the Kinks and the Stones. And the Who toured far more than those bands.

I pretty much like their entire career with Keith, HOWEVER:

They should have ditched Daltrey after Tommy.
Who's Next is the most overrated rock album ever. It's good, but...
I can't stand Live at Leeds.

If nothing else, they deserve credit for writing My Generation, so that Melt-Banana could then play it properly.

I don't care.

I waaaantit, I waaaantit, I waaaYOU CAINT HAVE ITantit,

xpost- those are pretty big exceptions

They should have ditched Daltrey after Tommy.

I used to hate Daltrey, all that macho bluster crowding out Pete's sensitivity. Then one day I was listening to Mingus in Europe -- his 1964 band with Dolphy, Byard, Richmond, sometimes Coles, and Clifford Jordan -- and I realized, Roger Daltrey is the Clifford Jordan of the Who! He has that huge, unignorable presence, he knows exactly when to get out of the way (unlike his bleat-scatting/scat-bleating contemporary Robert Plant), his is the voice of frustrated determination more than Pete's ever could be, and he makes everything sound bigger. And so far, no one's come close to sounding like him.

When I saw them in '89, he saying "hope I die before I get older".

I liked that.

It's hilarious how Daltrey turned into a sci-fi tv actor with recurring roles on Highlander. That's big bonus points with me.

Major turning point was Moon's death, obv, which must have happened sometime around 1974, given the lifeless percussive performances on the post-Quadrophenia albums. But I can still enjoy isolated songs on those LPs as tuneful prog-rock without the rock. Townshend could do great things with synths and Entwistle was always worth listening to. So I guess Moon's death is the closest thing to a pinpoint.

who's next was the last thing they ever did

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Man, for me, The Who is the '60s band who put out an amazing number of blindingly brilliant songs, and yet they don't have a single album that I ever want to listen to all the way through, aside from Live at Leeds. I own an assload of their albums, since about everything through Who Are You has at least a tune or two that I consider indispensable, but Christ, when they start bleating about being behind blue eyes, I just want them to shut the fuck up. I wish I was able to see 'em live during their heyday, because that's the magic bus I'd want to be on.

#6, even though I saw them live with the Ox in 2000 and it was amazing.

Like the early stuff, but haven't listened Tommy and I never will.

Yes, always best to keep an open mind on these matters

I still think they were OK up to around the mid 70s, but they still never managed to do anything better than "The Who Sellout". Their one and only psych-pop album

Geir and I agree. Tommy's where I stop caring too much.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Hey, should have packed it in after face dances and it's hard was an embarrassment are the same.

poll top 3 basically otm

i thought they sounded tired on Who By Numbers...and Who's Next and Quad aside were a singles band for me...

and i give them You Better You Bet as a one-off...

interesting that no one picked cincinnati. pete himself said that he wished he'd split the band immediately after that tragedy. he also said that by numbers was supposed to be their last album, but the lack of an answer to the question "what would keith moon do without the Who?" basically forced him into making who are you.

and as great as "you better you bet" is, "daily records" is a far more poignant reflection of who/where/why they were at that moment. musically, it points a possible way-forward for the new lineup in a way that no other jones-era tracks did.

I can see why Pete would feel that way, but I don't think there's any real reason the band should've called it quits aftert he Cincinnati tragedy, which wasn't their fault and could've happened to any popular band and had nothing to do with whether their best days were behind them (compared to Moon's death, which had a huge effect on the nature of the band itself and was only a few months prior). if they had stopped after Cincinnati, it would be kind of an arbitrary way to end things.

poll top 3 basically otm

No. "Tommy", "Who's Next" and "Quadrophenia" were all great. Even though "The Who Sellout" was better.

I love Sellout