Getting in Tune

You are tuned to The Zoo, the place where album rock still gets the needle time it earned, and right now the turntable is set down on side two of Who's Next. The track is “Getting in Tune,” written by Pete Townshend and cut by The Who for the record that came out of the wreckage of Lifehouse. If you have been living with this album since the summer of 1971, you already know the sequence: Baba O'Riley opens the door, Bargain and Love Ain't for Keeping keep the pressure up, John Entwistle's My Wife lands the punch line, The Song Is Over closes side one like a curtain, and then the stylus drops into this one. Four minutes and fifty seconds of piano, bass, voice, and a band that knew exactly when to hold back and exactly when to let the roof go. That is the cut. Stay with it.

The Who were four working-class kids out of Shepherd's Bush and Acton who decided the British beat boom was too polite. Roger Daltrey had been fronting a skiffle and R&B outfit called the Detours. Pete Townshend and John Entwistle came in from the same west London circuit, Entwistle already the horn player and the bass player who treated the instrument like a lead guitar. Keith Moon arrived from a semi-pro group called the Beachcombers and promptly made every other drummer in London sound like he was keeping time for a waltz. They became the High Numbers for a minute under mod manager Pete Meaden, then The Who, and by the end of 1965 My Generation had turned feedback, a stutter, and a smashed guitar into a chart record. Tommy, the 1969 rock opera, made them international. Who's Next, released in Britain on Track Records in the first days of August 1971 and in the States on Decca about two weeks later, made them undeniable. It hit number one at home, the only time a Who studio album did that, and number four on the American album chart. The cover, shot by Ethan Russell on a slag heap near Easington Colliery, with the band caught mid-stream against a concrete monolith and a sky that designer John Kosh punched up for drama, is still the photograph people mean when they say 1971.

“Getting in Tune” started life inside Lifehouse, the science-fiction rock opera Townshend meant as the follow-up to Tommy. The plot, such as it was, involved a future in which music had been banned, a guru figure trying to gather an audience whose personal musical signatures could set them free, and a government that wanted the experiment shut down. Townshend demoed the songs at home on acoustic guitar, Lowrey organ, and early synthesizers, then tried to workshop them in front of a real crowd at the Young Vic in London in February 1971. One of the songs they played there was still called “I'm in Tune.” The audience treated the residency like a regular Who gig. The story did not land. Sessions at the Record Plant in New York with Kit Lambert producing went sideways. Townshend, already deep into the teachings of the Indian mystic Meher Baba and exhausted by the scale of what he was trying to build, came apart. Manager Kit Lambert and the band pulled what they could out of the tapes. Engineer and associate producer Glyn Johns, who had already been in the room, sequenced a single album that did not need a plot. Eight of the nine songs had been written for Lifehouse. The ninth was Entwistle's My Wife. Johns has said the only rule left was whether the record flowed. It did.

The master you are hearing was cut at Olympic Studios in Barnes on June 7, 1971, with the band producing and Johns at the desk. An earlier Record Plant take survived and later turned up on the deluxe editions, looser and more tentative. The Olympic version is the one that counts. Nicky Hopkins, the session pianist who had already graced records by the Stones, the Beatles, and the Kinks, sits in on grand piano, the same chair he occupies on The Song Is Over. Daltrey takes the lead vocal. Townshend plays guitar and answers him on the chorus. Entwistle threads bass lines that behave like a second melody. Moon waits, then arrives in double time for the gospel rave-up at the end, fills stacked on fills, almost losing the beat on purpose because the piano is pounding and the vocal is already gone. The arrangement is a lesson in dynamics. It opens nearly as a ballad, Hopkins and Entwistle carrying the room, Daltrey crooning the first confession. It widens. It holds on two chords while the voices trade the title line. Then it lifts, and the fade is the sound of four musicians and one hired gun refusing to stop while the tape is still rolling.

The lyric is Townshend arguing with himself in public, which is what he was best at. The singer admits he is singing the note because it fits the chord. He cannot pretend there is any hidden meaning in the things he is saying. That is the rock-star mask talking, the man who has already written a generation's anthem and a full opera and is tired of being asked to mean something every time he opens his mouth. Then the turn comes. He is getting in tune to the straight and narrow. He has got it all in his head. Nothing more needs to be said. He is just banging on the old piano. Robert Christgau later wrote that the straight-and-narrow line was the real theme of the whole album. The Meher Baba influence is in there, the idea that music could be a discipline rather than a costume, but the song never preaches. It just tightens. Townshend put a version on his solo set The Lifehouse Chronicles years afterward, proof that the piece still belonged to the abandoned opera even after Johns had set it free.

It did not become a single. Baba O'Riley, Bargain, Behind Blue Eyes, and Won't Get Fooled Again took the airplay, and Going Mobile took the car-radio slot. “Getting in Tune” stayed an album track, which on this record is not a demotion. Rolling Stone, ranking the fifty greatest Who songs in 2016, put it at number eight. It slipped onto the soundtrack of Jerry Maguire in the 1990s and reminded a new audience that side two of Who's Next was not just the long closer. Live, the band almost never returned to it after those Young Vic nights. A performance from the Royal Albert Hall in 2000 or so made the 2003 live album, and that was the exception that proved the rule. Some songs are built for the room. This one was built for the record, for Hopkins's left hand, for the way Daltrey leans into a line he did not write and makes it sound like a vow.

That is the short biography, and it is not short because the life was not. The Who outlasted Moon, who died in 1978, and Entwistle, who died in 2002, and they outlasted the mod uniform, the opera, the synthesizer experiments, and every farewell tour that turned out not to be the last one. Daltrey still sings like a man who has to convince the back row. Townshend still writes like a man cross-examining his own generation. What they left on Who's Next is the argument settled in the studio: nine songs, no plot required, a concrete monolith on the sleeve, and a side-two opener that starts by confessing it has nothing to say and ends by saying it anyway, in tune. The Zoo keeps the deep cuts in the stack on purpose. The hits will find you. This one asks you to sit with the piano until Moon decides the prayer meeting is over.

The Who are still the greatest rock and roll band that ever walked out of west London, and the official door is open at thewho.com. Their Facebook page is facebook.com/thewho, the Instagram is @officialthewho, and the X account is @TheWho. Longtime fans still keep the lights on at the unofficial archive thewho.net. And you are listening on The Zoo, listener-supported, commercial-free, album-rock radio that still believes a four-minute-and-fifty-second side-two track can carry a whole hour. “Getting in Tune.” The Who. Who's Next. Getting in tune to the straight and narrow, right here.