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.
