The Who have released the Super Deluxe Edition of Who’s Next / Life House, which hit the stores on 15 September, 2023!
The monster sized box set celebrates the 52nd anniversary of the release of Who's Next, which originally came out in August 1971. It's packed full of incredible music that thoroughly covers the period between 1970 – 1972, which was a real peak period in The Who’s career, and for classic rock in general. This amazing release takes us on a journey through the developmental process of how Pete Townshend’s original vision of Life House turned into the powerfully stripped down Who’s Next, one of the greatest rock albums of all time.
The 11 disc set includes a freshly remastered version of the original Who’s Next album, Pete Townshend’s Life House Demos, Record Plant New York Sessions, Olympic Sound Studios London Sessions, Singles and Sessions from 1970 - 1972, Live at the Young Vic London, Live at the Civic Auditorium San Francisco, plus a Blu-ray audio disc with DTS 5.1 and Dolby Atmos mixes by Steven Wilson of Who's Next and 14 bonus tracks.
Other goodies in the box set include the beautifully illustrated Life House graphic novel with a story based on Pete’s original Life House writings, plus a 100-page book with great photos, and extensive articles and liner notes for each CD written by Pete Townshend, Matt Kent and Andy Neill. There's also a memorabilia folder that contains cool replicas of Who merchandise from 1971, including a signed band photo, UK tour and Rainbow Theatre programmes, posters from Fillmore North, Denver Coliseum, Rainbow Theatre, and a pin badge set.
It’s an impressive collection and a must have for all Who fans!
Pete Townshend recently went on a media blitz of radio, magazine and newspaper interviews to help promote this release. His conversations provided a lot of great insight about the history of Life House. Here's a few excerpts from those interviews to help explain what this box set is all about.
The Story of Life House
The journey of Life House began in 1970, when Pete Townshend came up with his next grand concept to follow the huge success of Tommy. He envisioned a multi-media project that would be released as a film as well as an album, and developed a script set in the dystopian future, where the population lived in environmental life experience suits connected to a grid to protect them from extreme pollution following an ecological disaster.
Pete said in an interview on BBC Sound of the 70's, "When I was at art school, I landed in a really radical art school course with a guy called Roy Ascott, who’s only 10 years older than me. He was a bit of a mind bender. He was the one who foresaw so much of the technological advances that we see today. When The Who started, I was intending to go back to art college. By around 1970, post Tommy, I was looking for a big project that would replace it. One of the things that popped up was that I go back to the things I learned at art college about the possibility of computers coming, of virtual reality coming. I was at art college in 1961 by the way, so those guys that were teaching me were very far seeing. So I looked around, looked at The Who’s audience, looked at what we were trying to achieve spiritually and congregationally, and that’s how it all came about.
In an interview with Billy Sloan on BBC Scotland, Pete said, "When I got to work with Life House, I sort of skipped from this obsession of the past, of the obsession with being the post war generation, you know – My Generation, why don’t you all F-off, and all of that stuff – to looking into the future. And when I looked into the future, what I saw was quite scary. I’m imaginative of course, but a lot of what I saw was based on talking to musicians, philosophers, psychologists. It was an obsession with the future, with the frailty of the planet, but also the frailty of the individual who was perhaps looking for spiritual answers. So, where would they find them, and would music be the answer? As a musician and as a romantic about the power of music, I’m a great believer in the power of music. I committed it all to paper, and Life House is what all came out of it.
Pete discussed the story of Life House in his introduction to the box set, “I framed Life House as a portentous polemic about the coming of a nation beaten down by climate issues and pollution. In a sci-fi setting an opportunist and autocratic government enforce a national lock-down in which every person is hooked up to an entertainment grid, provided with solace, food, peace, and spiritual succour. The population could enjoy this Grid safe at home, using virtual reality experience suits. Life experience programmes would be provided by a co-opted entertainment industry and piped down tubes and wires to every home. Music is discovered to be a very real distraction to the subjugation of the population in suits. Slowly it is removed from the programming. Rebels and renegades who refuse to be compliant ride around in crude converted buses and vans, listening to rock ‘n’ roll. It is the rebels who begin to hear rumours of the “Life House,” a place somewhere in London where live music is being performed, and an outlandish experiment was taking place.”
“[The grid] was like a forerunner of virtual reality and Netflix,” Pete told BBC Sound of the 70’s. “It was a complete lifestyle substitution, not so much to subjugate the population but to keep them safe. The original plan was to give them almost like space suits which they would sit, lay, sleep, and get up occasionally to do a bit of exercise. But they would be entertained. What actually started to happen was the speed at which the occupants consumed the programs that were being delivered to them started to get faster and faster. And the outcome was they started to advance spiritually much quicker than they would had they been living normal lives. The government started to get frightened about that and decided to first make a kind of spectacle out of it, but secondly keep people in their experience suits for as long as possible. The one difference between my vision and reality is, in reality this is all wireless. In my vision it was all down tubes and wires. So people were fed down tubes, their waste products were taken away by tubes, there were wires to send them their lifetimes which were made by computers. I didn’t have any sense that WIFI was coming."
Pete told BBC Scotland, “The idea for people being brainwashed by entertainment and the consequent sense of experience you get from overkill exposure to deep dark entertainment would change who you are. I think we get that today. But we didn’t get it then. The idea then that I was talking about was feeding people lifetimes of experience down into experience suits into which we would be forced to go and live in order to survive because air quality was so foul in the fiction. But there were two barrels to the script. The first barrel was the fiction, the story, the movie, and the second barrel was I wanted to create real authentic rock and roll events with a real authentic rock and roll band like The Who, which would be featured in the fictional movie. I think today, mixing documentary images with fiction would be something we see quite a lot. It was ambitious, but it was tricky to understand."
“It’s interesting to look at the relevance of certain nuances about the story," Pete said in a recent interview with Uncut, "There’s the predictive stuff, but Life House was really about the effects of climate change and pollution. One of the things that’s so interesting about the box set coming out now – and the conversations that may or may not take place – is that it’s not about the internet or the grid or the experience suits or virtual reality, as much as the fact that it was inspired by: ‘How we can fix this?’”
“People thought I’d gone mad," Pete told the Times. "There were plans for a new type of movie, funded by Universal, in which fiction and real life would intertwine, and nobody understood what I was saying. Meanwhile, the band wanted to get back on the road, make some money and shag some girls, and then I heard that Kit wasn’t coming back from New York. Finally we found out that Universal were dropping the deal [for the film]. By this point I had spent a lot of my own money, so I was exhausted, broke and spent a week walking around, thinking, ‘This is the best work I have ever done and it has all gone to shit.’”
Pete has resurrected the story of Life House a few times over the years, including a second script written in 1976 and later a script that was adapted by Jeff Young for BBC Radio Drama in 1999, that was also included in the Lifehouse Chronicles box set in 2000 and released as a book.
Graphic from Life House: The Graphic Novel
Life House: The Graphic Novel
The latest recreation of the Life House story comes in the form of a fantastic new graphic novel that is included in the Life House box set. The impressive 172 page book was co-created by Pete Townshend and Jeff Krelitz, who began working on it back in 2019. The story is based on Pete’s early Life House scripts, and is co-written by James Harvey and David Hine. The artwork is by James Harvey and Max Prentis, and the Inks are done by Mick Gray. The book was edited by Hannah Means-Shannon. It’s a really beautiful graphic novel, with a great story. The artwork is stunning. Everyone who worked on this project did a fantastic job!
Pete discussed the project in a statement to the press in 2019, "A graphic novel based on my very first 1970 concept for The Who’s abandoned Lifehouse project is perhaps the most exciting creative development in my long career. Lifehouse always had a strong and important visual story that was never even touched on. Even by 1971 when Lifehouse was written, it had to be treated as a film script, which was entirely beyond my skill set, and beyond the financial scope of The Who. If I had completed my art studies, instead of staying with The Who, I might have made my own graphic novels. I am excited then, with huge anticipation, that at last Lifehouse can be realized visually, and as a story – part science fiction, part spiritual allegory."
“There’s a graphic novel being done and it’s quite extraordinary," Pete told Uncut in 2021. "It’s based on the two early film scripts that I wrote, both of which have been dissed, mulled over and chucked aside by loads of filmmakers. So this graphic novel, called Lifehouse, completely and totally vindicates me as a dramatist [laughing]. It’s clear, it’s fun and it works. Because it’ll come out in the 50th anniversary year of Who’s Next, it’s a chance to look at that project again.”
In a recent press statement for the graphic novel, Pete said, “Life House has always needed a story that makes sense but without the egos of new creatives who think they can ‘fix’ what was wrong with my first draft. The graphic novel is built around that first draft written prior to recording sessions and workshops at the Young Vic in 1971. A second draft with some good ideas from Roger in 1976 added some cohesion and more exciting collateral which really suits the comic format. The art is beautiful and dense, colourful of course and engaging. The artists and their team have made an amazing and hugely collectible piece that adds depth and clarity to an otherwise complex story. I’m delighted with the comic. Life House is reborn!”
Pete told Billy Sloan in a recent interview on BBC radio Scotland, "A couple of things about this is special to me. One is the fact that we were able to include the graphic novel, which I’ve been working on for a couple of years, to give some sense of cohesion to the back story of Life House. I wrote a film script which was a bit naive, but it told a story. And I wrote the songs around that story. But the story went into the vaults and never really came out. So the graphic novel, some people may call it a comic, actually tells the story. It’s a colourful, lighthearted, quite comedic in some ways, carefully structured version of the story. Which really helps to give a solid background to what I set out to try and achieve. Because so much of that was experimental kind of work shop stuff. Now I can conduct experiments, but most of all I think there’s a possibility that Life House one day may be a movie or a TV series."
The Life House graphic novel will also be released by Image Comics in December 2023.
Tower Records is selling 1,000 exclusive limited editions of the graphic novel that are signed by Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey. These are on sale now for $1,000 on the Tower Records website.
Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey sign graphic novels for Tower Records.
Pete Townshend's Life House Demos 1970 - 1971
To get his Life House story into a musical form, Pete recorded high quality demos in his home studio in order to present his fully formed new songs to The Who. He first began experimenting with synthesizers while recording these demos, and the revolutionary sounds he was able to produce using the EMS VCS3 and ARP 2500 synthesizers and Lowrey Berkshire organ became the central soundscape behind Life House. Pete’s goal was to push the rock art form to a new level of experience. If he was able to succeed, Life House would have likely been the best work of his career. All the music that came out of it is fantastic!
Pete discussed his demos on BBC Scotland, "The main fun that I had was going back to the demos, because these recordings I did for the songs to present to The Who, I took tremendous care of. I was always pretty lackadaisical about demos because I knew they would never be published, except on occasions like this of course. But it was a real thrill to go back and hold the tapes in my hand, and open them up, and it all came back.
My interest in synthesisers was really at two levels. One was I really liked the fact that they could create new textures and sounds to replace the absence of orchestral textures and sounds in rock music, and also you could control it yourself. But also the idea of it being something that could be computer controlled, which of course is true today. Because then it could be used to reflect human emotions, human condition, human DNA, all kinds of stuff that would make electronic music more personally viable."
“I had a small room, a couple of limiters and a tape machine," Pete told Uncut. "I was able to do submixing quite a lot, so I could pretty much cover the bases. I didn’t necessarily need to be a virtuoso or to be that musically adept, I could work miracles with tape machines. The demos are me luxuriating in that studio quality equipment. My studio at home was as good as Abbey Road, technically. Certainly as good as Olympic, but it just didn’t have the space. People talk about it being a black art, but it was a fucking piece of cake. Yeah, it’s a discovery. You often find stuff by accident, usually from technical issues. That’s what happened with Baba O’Riley, which I didn’t intend. That was a found piece, playing chords on a Lowrey organ with a little bit of VCS3 synthesiser, wavering the sound a little bit. I’d been using tape delay but I stopped, because it was muddying up the thing. So I was just sitting there going: ‘Fuck!’ I knew I had something special from the very first moment that I found that sound. It was just instant, it felt like a miracle.”
Pete recording demos in his home studio. Photo: Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty
Pete's wonderful demo recordings are the heart and soul of Life House, and are much gentler versions of the songs that ultimately turned into the epic anthemic band versions released on Who’s Next. Pete’s beautiful singing and instrumentation shows just how talented he is as a musician. These songs demonstrate his creative genius as a songwriter and arranger, and Pete’s excellent home production work sounds fresh and vibrant still today. His demos have all been spruced up in a fabulous new remix for this release, and sound amazing! Many of the demos have been released before, mostly on the 2000 Lifehouse Chronicles box set, but there are a few alternate mixes that are new, and also a really lovely song called ‘Finally, Over’ that has not been released before.
Here's the track list for all the demos included in the box set.
Teenage Wasteland (Demo)*
Too Much (Demo) *
Going Mobile (Demo)*
There’s A Fortune in Those Hills (Demo)*
Love Ain’t For Keeping (Demo)*
Bargain (Demo)*
Greyhound Girl (Demo)*
Mary (Alternate Mix) (Demo)**
Behind Blue Eyes (Demo)*
Time Is Passing (Demo)*
Finally, Over (Demo)**
Baba O’Riley (Original Demo)**
Pure And Easy (Home Studio Mix) (Demo)*
Getting In Tune (Alternate Mix) (Demo)**
Nothing Is Everything (Let’s See Action) (Demo)*
Won’t Get Fooled Again (Demo)*
Baba O’Riley (Demo)*
Song Is Over (2021 Remix) (Demo)**
Pure And Easy (Olympic Studios Mix) (Demo)**
Mary (Original Mix) (Demo)*
Baba O’Riley (First Editing Demo)**
Song Is Over (Original Demo)*
* Previously released with new remix
** Previously unreleased tracks
Live at the Young Vic, London 1971
In early 1971, The Who held a series of concerts at the Young Vic Theatre in Waterloo, London, which were meant to be an interactive experience with the audience and filmed as part of the Life House project. The idea was to have the same set of people attend shows for a few months, so songs could be composed for them by feeding their personal data into a computer, and using tapes and synthesizers. Pete and Bobby Pridden set up a quadraphonic sound system and developed a tape system and hardware for their musical experiments. The new theatre was quite small for The Who, providing an intimate setting for the planned project.
Pete worked with Young Vic theatre director Frank Dunlop to help get his Life House vision off the ground, but gave up on the idea after a few performances. He was promised a large budget for his film from Universal Pictures to help fund the experiments, which never materialized. His grand plans for audience interaction were reduced to just playing regular concerts to small invited audiences, and random people off the street.
“Nobody came," Pete told the Times. "The Who were selling out arenas, headlining Isle of Wight, and nobody came apart from a few 13-year-old boys skiving off school. The idea was to make both the audience and band members an important part of the songwriting process by using myself as a computer into which their personal information would be fed, in a similar way to how algorithms work today. But nothing happened. We ended up playing a few songs.”
Pete told BBC Scotland, "I was hoping that there would be individuals who would commit to the idea of becoming volunteers to be a part of the musical process of being reflected in a sense by electronic music, patterns, themes, around which we could compose songs. So we would compose songs on the spot based on electronic music which would be done in a work shop in the back room at the Young Vic. What actually happened was that we did it in the middle of the day, it wasn’t announced, and most of the people that came were just young teenage kids who actually didn’t know who The Who were. There were no volunteers. I was one of the founders of the Young Vic. I was involved with Laurence Olivier and a whole bunch of people involved. I was one of the early patrons of it, so it was a natural shoo-in for me to ask Frank if we could do our workshop there. But Frank didn’t really understand what I was trying to do there either."
“We got the deal on the basis of my script, through Ned Tanen at Universal," Pete told Uncut. "I had a meeting with Pete Kameron, who was looking after contractual stuff, and pitched it. He got up, shook hands and said, ‘You can go ahead. I’ll allow you a ceiling of $2 million, until you’ve got a revised script.’ I went straight to Frank Dunlop [head of the Young Vic]. The workshops were about filming live music, and doing music sketches based on anybody that showed up. Any volunteers that stuck with it as participants in the experiment, which was to feature in the film just as a way to have the band’s presence in there. One of the things that I wanted to do was to record multi-speaker sound and also use it in concert. I was trying to introduce synthesisers onto the stage. Of course, I hit the first wall, which is that if you want to set up an analogue synthesiser of the old school, you need an hour to get the sound sorted out, then another hour for another sound. We had no presets. I never realised that we wouldn’t be working in the workshop song by song. There would be this expectation that we were going to do a fucking concert. You’d go in and there are people milling about, waiting for us. So we ended up doing concerts, playing fucking Eddie Cochran songs. After about the third week at the Young Vic I took Chris Stamp aside and said, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening with the Universal money?’ I didn’t know this at the time. But Kit had gone straight in, a week after the meeting that Pete Kameron had with Ned Tanen and said: ‘Pete’s mad! What we’re actually doing is making a movie of Tommy and this is supposed to be a spin-off from it.’ That was upsetting. I thought, ‘Fuck, I did that work.’ I felt deceived, in a sense. The irony was that I felt Kit was going to save me in the end, when we went over to New York. I remember being very happy when Kit said he’d found this great new studio – ‘Come over and record the music!’ – because the possibility was that we’d finish the project.”
Unfortunately, while the vision of the Young Vic shows were meant to tie in with the planned movie, the sessions were never filmed, but they did stage a show in April that was recorded by Andy Johns (producer Glyn Johns brother) using the Rolling Stones mobile studio. The show took place after The Who had returned from recording in New York, during the period they were recording with Glyn Johns at Olympic Studio in London.
While a full blown Life House concert from 1971 would be the ultimate dream for die hard fans, it’s still very fun listening to early Who performances of Pete’s wonderful songs from that project while they were still a work in progress. The recordings do capture some of their magic from that period, especially on the new Life House songs.
The box set feature 18 tracks from the 26 April 1971 Young Vic show, many of which were previously released on the 2003 Who’s Next Deluxe Edition. The new box set recordings of the Young Vic show have been freshly remixed, with a couple of unreleased recordings of Pinball Wizard and See Me, Feel Me. Only half of the tracks from the show are actually from Life House, which backs up Pete’s statements of how these Life House workshops turned into basic Who shows performed for tiny audiences.
Here's the Live at Young Vic track list:
Love Ain’t for Keeping*
Pure And Easy*
Young Man Blues*
Time Is Passing*
Behind Blue Eyes*
I Don’t Even Know Myself*
Too Much of Anything*
Getting In Tune*
Bargain*
Pinball Wizard**
See Me, Feel Me**
Baby Don’t You Do It*
Water*
My Generation*
(I’m A) Road Runner*
Naked Eye*
Bony Moronie*
Won’t Get Fooled Again*
* Previously released with new remix
** Previously unreleased tracks
Record Plant, New York Sessions, March 1971
After performing the new Life House material at a few Young Vic shows, The Who headed to New York to record at the Record Plant in March 1971. The sessions were produced by The Who’s manager Kit Lambert and engineered by Felix Pappalardi and Jack Adams. Session musicians were brought in to play piano and organ, and Leslie West from Mountain recorded lead guitar on some of the songs. The Record Plant sessions went pretty well, but Kit was acting erratic and was strung out on drugs, so the sessions ended early and The Who returned to London.
Pete told Uncut, “With Life House, we ended up in this position where we had all this weight, all this expectation, the money removed and the main producing partner had fucked off to New York to produce Patti LaBelle, but he was using heroin. I realised, “Fuck, this is really serious. We’ve got nothing.” The recordings that we did with Kit in New York were substandard.”
"I shouldn’t really blame Kit Lambert, our manager in the early days, who was so important to me," Pete told BBC Scotland. "He helped me to become a really good song writer, he was a great supporter and mentor of me musically, emotionally, artistically, on every level. But he had a personal collapse of his own. He was supposed to be recording us, he was suppose to be producing us, and he was actually also obsessed with making a movie of Tommy which he wanted to direct himself, and undermined everything I was trying to do. He was in New York and I was in London. So I just ended up literally climbing the walls and kind of giving up. I brought in the well known record producer Glyn Johns to do a regular album, and the album went out and did very well. It’s gone down in history as probably being the most important albums The Who have ever done. Songs like Behind Blue Eyes, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Baba O’Riley, Song Is Over, these are really fantastic songs. I’m so proud of them. But we were hoping for something much bigger."
The Record Plant CD includes 7 newly remixed tracks from those sessions, including a previously unreleased version of Baby Don’t You Do It, which was recorded as an early warm up session and was not part of the Life House story. It’s fun to hear different recordings of the classic songs from Who’s Next, and the back talk through the microphones with Pete and Kit Lambert are a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. Love Ain’t for Keeping with Pete on lead vocals really rocks out from these sessions and sound great with Leslie West playing lead guitar.
Here are the tracks that are included.
Don’t Do It (aka Baby Don’t You Do It) [Take 2, Unedited, March 16, 1971]**
Won’t Get Fooled Again [Take 13, March 16, 1971]*
Behind Blue Eyes (Version 1) [Take 15, March 16, 1971]**
Love Ain’t For Keeping [Take 14, March 17, 1971]*
The Note (aka Pure and Easy) [Take 21, March 17, 1971]*
I’m In Tune (aka Getting in Tune) [Take 6, March 18, 1971*
Behind Blue Eyes (Version 2) [Take 10, March 18, 1971}*
* Previously released with new remix
** Previously unreleased tracks
Who's Next - The Original Album
After The Who returned home from New York, Glyn Johns who was brought in to help finish recording the album. He suggested they start over completely with new recordings with him as producer. Recording sessions for the album took place at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes, London between April and June 1971. They had recorded enough tracks to put together a double album, and Pete attempted to sequence the songs in an order that would tell the Life House story. He met with Glyn Johns and tried to explain the story, but Glyn failed to understand the concept and suggested they scrap Life House completely and just put together a standard Who album instead, sequencing the songs in a way that worked best musically rather than try to fit a storyline. They dropped half of the songs, added a song by John Entwistle, and released a single album which became Who’s Next. Pete’s dream of Life House came to an end.
Pete told BBC Scotland, "I did want to make a double album. I’d written a double album worth of demos, and I was still writing songs. But Glyn wanted to do a single album, and when he put the tracks together and assembled it, it was clear that this was the right thing to do. It was also kind of an angelic message to me. You know, Glyn is an extraordinary acoustic studio engineer. He produces magic. When he presented me with a single album I thought, ‘this is a great record!’ To be honest, although Kit Lambert was fabulous for me as a song writer, he was not a great audiophile record producer. Glyn has made some of the best sounding records ever. He’s certainly the premiere UK recording engineer. He holds the crucible for the UK. The sessions at Olympic were very disciplined. We had very good demos to work with. We knocked off the songs really quite quickly. I think we did the whole record in 2 weeks."
Here's the track list for the Who's Next album.
Baba O’Riley
Bargain
Love Ain’t For Keeping
My Wife
The Song Is Over
Getting In Tune
Going Mobile
Behind Blue Eyes
Won’t Get Fooled Again
Olympic Sound Studios, London Sessions 1970 - 1972
The Olympic Studios CD contains tracks from the sessions that were left off of Who’s Next. These are all freshly remixed and the majority are previously unreleased versions and mixes. Not all the songs recorded at Olympic were specifically written for Life House, and there are a couple of John Entwistle tracks included. It’s a wonderful collection of songs recorded during a peak era of the band.
Here are the tracks that are included.
Pure And Easy*
I Don’t Know Myself [B-side with Unreleased Count-in]
Time Is Passing [Stereo Mix]**
Too Much of Anything [Original 1971 Vocal]**
Naked Eye [1971 Remake]**
Bargain (Early Mix)**
Love Ain’t For Keeping (Unedited Mix)**
My Wife (Unedited Mix)**
Getting In Tune (Take 1 with Jam)**
Going Mobile (Alternate Mix)**
Song Is Over (Backing Track) [with Nicky Hopkins]**
When I Was a Boy**
Let’s See Action (Unedited Mix)**
Relay (Unedited Mix) [Alternate Vocal]**
Put The Money Down [Remix with Original Vocal]*
Join Together [Unedited Remix]**
* Previously released with new remix
** Previously unreleased tracks
Singles and Sessions 1970 - 1972
This CD gathers up a selection of songs that were recorded at various studios or released as singles during the period between Tommy and Quadrophenia from 1970 to 1972. These include sessions recorded at IBC Sound Recordings London in 1970, Pete’s Eel Pie Sound Studio Twickenham in 1970, and Olympic Sound Studios London 1972.
Here is the list of tracks.
The Seeker (Original Single Mix)
Here For More [Original Single Mix]
Heaven And Hell [New Stereo Mix]**
Water [Eel Pie Sound Studio – New Unedited Mix]**
I Don’t Know Myself [Eel Pie Sound Studio – New Unedited Mix]**
Naked Eye [Eel Pie Sound Studio – New Unedited Mix]**
Postcard [Eel Pie Sound Studio – Original 1970 Mix]**
Now I’m A Farmer [Eel Pie Sound Studio – New Remix]**
The Seeker (Unedited Version)**
Water (IBC Version)**
I Don’t Know Myself (IBC Version)**
Let’s See Action (Original Single Mix)
When I Was a Boy (Original Single Mix)
Join Together (Original Single Mix)
Relay (Original Single Mix)
Waspman (Original Single Mix)
Long Live Rock (Original Olympic Mix)
* Previously released with new remix
** Previously unreleased tracks
Live at the Civic Auditorium, San Francisco 1971
The Who played a series of shows in the US in 1971, when they integrated some of the new Life House songs into their set. The songs Baba O'Riley, Behind Blue Eyes, Bargain, and Won't Get Fooled Again became instant staples in The Who's live show, and are still regularly performed today. Included in the box set is a show they performed in San Francisco in December 1971.
Here's the list of tracks.
Introduction**
I Can’t Explain*
Substitute*
Summertime Blues**
My Wife*
Baba O’Riley**
Behind Blue Eyes*
Bargain*
Won’t Get Fooled Again**
Baby Don’t You Do It*
Magic Bus**
Introduction To Tommy**
Overture**
Amazing Journey**
Sparks**
Pinball Wizard**
See Me Feel Me**
My Generation**
Naked Eye*
Going Down*
* Previously released with new remix
** Previously unreleased tracks
Here are a couple of great interviews Pete did with Billy Sloan at BBC Radio Scotland and Justin Richmond at Broken Record!
To learn more about Who's Next / Life House, please visit our extensive Lifehouse history page that was published in 2021 for the 50th anniversary!
