Purest: Never Mind the Bollocks
Rawest: Live at Leeds Complete
Most profound: Quadrophenia
But all time rock album? Easy.
Who’s Next
The followup to TOMMY was to be a huge cross-format experience, a sci-fi dystopia that to date is still resonant in our increasingly tech-centric culture. It was to be Pete Townshend’s masterwork, but no one could understand his lofty ideas and eventually the band were coerced to get in the studio and get some tracks down. The result was the purest, rawest, most profound and TOTAL rock album of them all. An Entwistle classic thrown in with eight of the most perfect performances from all four members on record across the board. 9 tracks perfectly balanced across two sides- balancing the light and dark, the rough and smooth, the yin and yang. The closing scream is primal rage and followed by perhaps the most lasting couplet in the history of rock and roll.
And the cover manages to invoke 2001 whilst challenging any and all challengers to take their best shot…that is after the band has urinated on a concrete slab/monolith.
Best experienced on the early US LP with the West Coast laquer cutting or its rare early UK counterpart. These are so incredible that it’s like hearing the songs for the first time.
Many great bands aren’t “rock bands” in that sense, but WN manages to run the gamut of the Who’s collective powers in spite of it not quite reaching the truly deep emotional/thematic depths of Quadrophenia.