THE WHO SELL OUT @ 55

 

Celebrating 55 years on the shelves this week is the third studio LP by The Who, The Who Sell Out, which was released on December 15th, 1967. While its high concept made it one of the band’s poorest selling albums, it remains a critical favorite to this day.

The initial plan for the album was to call it “Who’s Lily?” in reference to the single, Pictures of Lily, but band confidant, Richard Barnes, proposed the idea of doing parodies of commercial jingles, inspired by their cover of the Batman theme. It was a suggestion to which the band initially responded with derision, but the band’s management team, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, next suggested the idea of a concept album paying tribute to Britain’s pirate radio stations, a media outlet which was a vital cultural driver for the UK Mod movement. With recent court rulings making it illegal for most of these stations to broadcast, the tribute to the format became even more relevant. The concept neatly accommodated Barnes’ commercial jingle idea too, making them handy connecting pieces between the main songs. Titling it “The Who Sell Out” was an ironic reference to some of the actual legit commercial work the band had done recently.

The album began production in September of ’67 after completing an American tour, with work completed by the end of October. Mixing was done by Kit Lambert and Damon Lyon-Shaw intermittently throughout November. Musically, the album offered an array of psychedelic inspired pop songs with Pete Townsend showing off some Hendrix inspired guitar freakouts. Townsend was responsible for writing the bulk of the songs on the album, though bassist John Entwistle contributed three tracks and one was written by Speedy Keen, guest vocalist on that song. The majority of the connecting commercial jingles were created in the studio by Keith Moon and John Entwistle.

The cover for the album showed the four band members split between the front and back cover, each featured in a different advertisement relating to connecting jingles contained on the album. On the front is Pete Townsend applying Odorono brand deodorant from an oversized stick. Roger Daltrey is shown sitting in a bathtub full of Heinz baked beans (holding an oversized tin can of the same). Daltrey variously claimed that he had either caught pneumonia, the flu, or "the worst cold he’d ever had" after sitting for a prolonged period in the bathtub, as the beans had just come out of the fridge and were "freezing cold". On the back is Keith Moon applying Medac (an acne ointment) from an oversized tube to an oversized pimple. John Entwistle is shown in a leopard-skin Tarzan suit, squeezing a blonde model in a leopard-skin bikini with one arm and a teddy bear with the other (an ad for the Charles Atlas exercise course mentioned in one of the album's fake commercials).

Upon its release, with the Mod scene waning, the concept of the album seemed to miss the mark with the young record buying public, but the critics loved it and offered a great deal of praise for its sense of humor and the cleverness of the concept. Their poking fun at the commercial market ended up causing problems, however. The commercial references mixed real and fake products, which resulted in a slew of legal issues for the band, their management and the record label as various companies filed suit for misrepresentation of their products and unauthorized use of their intellectual property. Despite the legal issues and lackluster fan response, the album has, nonetheless, gone on to sustain a legacy as one of the groups best efforts.