REVIEW: The Who, The BBC Sessions (MCA)
- Chris Butler
The Who were - quite simply - the greatest band of the '60's British Beat era. On any given night, they could out-play, out-sing, out-noise, out-fight, out-fuck, out-think and out-drink any one of their contemporaries...yet they remained perpetual third-stringers behind the Beatles and the Stones...a frustrating position that despite all their brilliant efforts could only have been remedied by two successful plane crashes. And sadly, for evangelists like me, The BBC Sessions is probably the last chance the unconverted will get to 'get it'. Surely with the arrival of this disc the vault is finally empty of unreleased Who material?
The already-convinced will already have this stuff. The available Maximum BBC (Hiwatt) bootleg offers more tracks, un-tweaked audio, and is sequenced more or less chronologically which better documents The Who's evolution from a pretty good bar band playing James Brown and Motown covers to a thundering force of nature. MCA's official version scrambles this timeline, but is much more sonically exciting thanks to producer Jon Astley's audio reconstructions. As with all his other MCA/Who catalog rethinks, hard-core fans might again sniff at Astley's tidied-up vocals, guitars to the front/drums to the rear mixes (sacrilege!) and his proven knack for gelding the raw energy of the original masters (for example, A/B his polite remix of "So Sad About Us" with the spectacular original). But here these techniques work - heavy compression boosts the ambient room noise on the older cuts giving them a thrilling presence, and skillful eq'ing on the later songs brings out instrumental parts that were buried in the bootleg's analog muck.
Note that The BBC Sessions is not being plugged as strictly a "live" album. The older cuts ("Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere", "Leaving Here") are definitely "live" live, versus the later material's obviously reconstructed backing tracks complete with overdubs. Some of this sweetening sounds clunky (like the handclaps on "My Generation"), while the Hammond organ added to "Pictures of Lily" (!) is glorious. Other revelations are redone versions of album tracks rarely performed in concert - when stripped of their studio tricks, "Disguises", "Run Run Run" and "See My Way" are just sensational. Even the normally dumb "Happy Jack" is played with a fun earnestness that sounds more Who-ish than the original single ever did. And because this is The Who...nothing comes easy. Rumor has it that a legal challenge had been mounted over the release rights to any BBC master to prohibit this disc from seeing the light of day. I'm glad the release has happened; I'd like the legions of the uninitiated to hear what a brilliant band with a giant chip on its collective shoulder sounds like.
