BY NUMBERS

"The Who By Numbers" is absolutely the most deep and reflective album by The Who. Sadly, at the time, the audience reaction to the album was pretty cold, due to its expectations for something more aggressive and nearer to what "Who's Next" had been.

The release is not apparently a concept album, anyway the evident theme behind it all is the deep sort of personal desolation, felt by Pete Townshend at the time, an undeniable sense of frustration for having been the spokesman of a generation since 1965, now finding himself as a middle aged man, torned between the need to grow up personally and artistically and carrying on with the tipical rock n roll adolescential clichè to please his audience.

Signs of this problem are evident in tracks like "However Much I Booze", in which Townshend's lyrics deals with how his usual habit to drown his problem in gin and brandy doesn't work help him no more in hiding from the world; musically it's very interesting the contrast between the happy music and the desperate lyrics.

The difficulty in trusting other people once a person is sucked into the showbiz machine emerges in "How Many Friends", one of the most sincerely poignant tracks ever by The Who, in which Pete asks himself "How Many Friends have I really got? / well you can count them on one hand", structuring the plot of the song as an analysys of three figures who approach him: a fan, a woman and his manager.

There is little uplifting in this work: other sad songs are "Red Blue And Grey" and "Imagine a man", while "Success Story", written by John Entwistle, deals with the same middle-age crisis in the life of a musician, as I told before, but in a ironic way, with cynicism and sarcasm. The most recognizable song is the funny song called "Squeeze Box", the only relaxed and truly positive number on the album.

Musically speaking "The Who By Numbers" is not a masterpiece as "Who's Next" or "Quadrophenia", but it's surely a great album, now powerful, now poignant, now desperate, now powerful, now fragile.

A great album.