6. The WhoWho’s Next

I love British music, but I was never an Anglophile even when I lived there. I was able to take the piss out of people pretty easily. And being friends with people from New Order, and knowing Manchester, they were different kinds of people, so I always had that humour about it that my friends had. So I wasn’t reverential at all, but I loved the music. 

I loved this record, every song is great, ‘Baba O’Riley’, ‘Bargain’, ‘My Wife’, ‘The Song Is Over’… Come on! I mean I love Tommy, that was a great album. But everything is here, you know? I think I first heard this on a radio station in Boston, called WBCN, an alternative commercial radio station, and that’s where I would have heard Santana, Todd Rundgren, The Allman Brothers. Maybe The Temptations and Spinners would have been on WILD-AM, which was a Black station, even though WBCN played Black records. 

I saw The Who around this time. I started going to concerts in 69. I met John Entwistle once, and I talk about it in my book because I was with the guys from New Order, and we saw him in a hotel lobby and went over to him, and I talked to him about how my ears were ringing for a week after seeing them live in 71, and he pulled out two hearing aids and said, ‘well, this is what it did to me, you know!’ I once sampled the synthesiser from ‘Baba O’Riley’, it was probably the first time I had heard a synthesiser on a track.