Substitute you for my mum

At least I'll get my washing done.

And the essential redeeming humanity of 'Happy Jack' the bum who 'wasn't tall but he was a man' who is free and carefree and with whom the Who clearly identify as who but a moron wouldn't,

The kids would all sing--he would sing in the wrong key

They couldn't stop Jack nor the water's lapping

And they couldn't prevent Jack from being happy.

Magnificent lines are almost casually dropped every so often and one of the great pleasures of listening to the Who is that, as with Dylan and only a few others, one can enjoy listening to the words themselves and not just to the music.

But the most elusive, most important and most refreshingly vital aspect of the Who is their conception of the 'rock-opera'.

The first thing to realize is that many of the Who's songs are complete stories with something well-identified happening in the course of the song. Putting a story to music does not automatically make an opera. Only if the music has been molded to the story in such a way as to clothe its meanings and its actions in sound does one have an opera. The key concept here is that of giving each musical sound a sense as well. The Who have written several exploratory operettas in which their deliberate purpose has been to attempt to convey meaning through abstract sound. This is a considerable undertaking and it can only be successfully realized by talents of the stature of the Who. The integration of their music with the magically imaginative lyrics they habitually write takes all of Townshend's electronic jamming skill and all of the versatility and experience of Entwistle Daltrey and Moon, but they do it.

This total effect, the fusion of music to meaning crops up in all of their past work. In 'Pictures of Lily' Townshend tells the story of a small boy, probably himself, who is given a picture by his father to 'help him sleep at night'. Gradually the boy falls in love with the picture and one day goes to his father to ask about the girl Lily only to be told that she has been dead for years. There are several visionary musical breakthroughs in the song. It is a medium fast song but in the middle the drums suddenly fold and Daltrey sings very tenderly, "Lily oh Lily pictures of Lily" with no accompaniment. It is clear that this break and pause represents the boy falling in love, and in the very next verse he proclaims his love. Just after the interlude and before the song swings into gear again, Townshend plays an ominous sinister grating wail on his guitar, a sound that apears for the first and only time on the record here. This is a presentiment of what we are to learn next which is that his love is doomed and so the falling in love was a disastrous mistake.

Then afterwards when the boy is told of the impossibility of the love there is a frightful guitar burst by Townshend again conveying, as intended, to me that bitter and desperate feeling of being crushed in boyhood. Obviously this is not to say the sound on the guitar would have automatically reminded one, if suddenly heard, of childhood grief but simply that one must ask, given an assigned context, did the music fit it or not, which is the universal challenge of opera, and its universal glory when it succeeds.

The song 'Call Me Lightning' goes

See that girl smiling so bright

Dum Dum Dum Dolay

I'm going to show you why they call me lightning.