Fragments

The Zoo Crew has got "Fragments" spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and if you have been riding with The Who since the old days, this one lands like a familiar engine note in a newer machine. It opens Endless Wire, the 2006 album that put Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey back in a studio with fresh songs for the first time since It's Hard in 1982. Twenty-four years is a long stretch between records. John Entwistle was gone by then, and Daltrey said the balance of the band shifted hard without him. Townshend put it plain: this was not the old Who, and they never claimed it would be. What they did claim was unfinished business, and "Fragments" is the door they chose to walk through.

Townshend did not sneak up on the past. In a Guitar World conversation around the album he said the similarity to "Baba O'Riley" was intentional. He wanted the opening of the record to evoke Who's Next, the album most people still call their best, and he wanted to challenge it, audaciously. That arpeggiating synth pattern is the handshake. Then the guitars come in the way only Townshend guitars come in, and Daltrey rides the top of it with a voice that has gotten deeper and darker without losing the bark. Rolling Stone heard the same echo and called the synthesizer vertigo a revisit of "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again." The Zoo Crew hears it the same way. It is not a copy. It is a dare.

The writing credit is shared with Lawrence Ball, a minimalist composer Townshend commissioned to build a system and software that could recreate what he calls Method music. That idea goes all the way back to Lifehouse, the lost rock opera from the early seventies whose scraps became much of Who's Next. Townshend returned to it on his solo album Psychoderelict, then again in the weblog novella The Boy Who Heard Music. In his own track notes he explained that "Fragments" is based on one of the first experiments with Ball. Method music was meant to be a portrait of a person, built from parameters and information, the kind of thing a wire network might someday hand back to anybody who asked. In the story inside Endless Wire, three kids in a band called the Glass Household score a hit, and that hit is "Fragments." Later in the mini-opera Wire & Glass, the short song "We Got a Hit" points straight back at it. There is also "Fragments of Fragments," a stripped instrumental meant to show the Method music with the rock clothes taken off.

The Who took the song out on the road as soon as the record was ready. It had its live premiere on September 12, 2006, and stayed in the set for the rest of that Endless Wire run, the first new material they played on those shows. Behind them the screens ran waves breaking on rocks. Art direction on the album came from Richard Evans, using pieces made with Visual Harmony software that Dave Snowdon and Lawrence Ball designed, so the same circle of people who built the Method idea also shaped how the package looked. Recorded at Townshend's home studio and at Eel Pie Oceanic between autumn 2002 and summer 2006, the album was produced by Townshend, with Daltrey's vocals produced by Bobby Pridden and Billy Nicholls. It reached number 9 in Britain and number 7 in the United States. In a 2010 fan interview on the band's site, Townshend looked back and said that by the time he got to Endless Wire he had a rich world of creativity, pain, and joy to draw on, and that friendship, drama, and trouble pulled him back into writing for the Who idea.

None of that happens without the long road that got these two to a microphone in the first place. Roger Daltrey, out of school and working construction, formed a west London band called the Detours in 1959. He pulled in John Entwistle, the Acton kid who could play bass and French horn and had already been knocking around with schoolmate Pete Townshend in a skiffle and jazz outfit. Townshend joined the Detours around 1961 or 1962, and for a while Daltrey was still the lead guitarist as well as the singer. They worked the ballrooms and the pubs, loud and rough, until another group with a similar name forced a change. Under manager Peter Meaden they tried a sharp mod image and a new name, the High Numbers, and cut "I'm the Face." It did not stick. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp took over, pushed Townshend to write, and settled the name on The Who. Drummer Doug Sandom, older and steadier, did not fit the new heat. Keith Moon, out of a surf band called the Beachcombers, sat in and never really left the stool. By 1965 "I Can't Explain" was a British hit, "My Generation" followed, and the four of them had a sound nobody else owned: Townshend's windmill guitar and smashed expectations, Entwistle's lead-bass lines, Moon's drumming like a drawer full of cutlery in a hurricane, and Daltrey out front turning the words into a challenge.

That is the band that later built Tommy, Quadrophenia, and Who's Next, and the same two survivors who opened Endless Wire with a song that admits where it came from. Townshend has said he stopped writing seriously for The Who around 1982 and let the band go in his heart, while Daltrey would not. "Fragments" is what it sounds like when the one who writes and the one who sings decide the wire is still live. If you want the album notes, the track list, and the rest of the story from the source, the band keeps it at The Who's official site. Their people are also on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Longtime fans keep a deep unofficial camp at thewho.net, and Entwistle's people gather in the John Entwistle Fan Page group. The Zoo Crew will keep spinning the deep cuts for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO. Turn it up. The fragments still fit.