No question mark because “Who Are You” is a statement of spiritual-sociological fact — you / we / all of us are The Who.
Or we were, at least, when Who’s Next popped on 8.18.78. My early impoverished-desperation-and-existential-anxiety NYC period had begun when I was moved into in my Sullivan Street cockroach apartment (my color TV was was a 28-incher, if that) while working at the Spring Street bar and grill.
Over the last four or five days I’ve gotten completely buried in this 37-year-old album. One of the seven discs contains Glyn Johns‘ original mix, which was rejected by John Entwistle because it didn’t have enough bottom.
Posted nine years ago (3.15.17) by “Ferrari”:
Who Are You was doomed from the get-go. Some of the problems faced during recording included…
(1) Keith Moon‘s deteriorating drumming skills + worsening drug abuse. Pete Townshend told him “Get your shit together. Otherwise you’re out.”
(2) Roger Daltrey clocks Glyn Johns over a rough mix (never a good sign). Daltrey: “I had a punch-up with Johns, mainly because he put strings on John’s Entwistle’s ‘Had Enough.’ I thought, ‘fucking hell, strings on a Who track?’ When I heard it, it was just slushy strings and I don’t like slushy strings. I don’t mind orchestras. I like them triumphant. There’s things you can do with strings that can be really good and exciting but what he’d done on this I didn’t like. He said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘Don’t like it much.’ And he went up the fucking wall. So I think he smacked me and I smacked him and that’s how we were in those days.”
(3) Townshend cuts his hand, delaying recording. Keyboardist Rabbit Bundrick breaks his arm.
(4) Johns leaves during the recording to produce a Joan Armatrading album; Jon Astley takes over.
When it was time to mix, The Who didn’t trust Astley’s mixing abilities because at the time he was just an engineer with no producing or mixing credits, so they asked Glyn to come back and mix the LP, which he did at Olympic. But that Glyn Johns mix was rejected. The Who then asked Astley to mix the LP, which he did at CTS (with John Entwistle present). The Astley mix was accepted and Astley was then asked to master the LP in NYC.