10 Legendary Rock Albums That Were Originally Very Different
2. Who's Next - The Who
Having a successful album can always be a bit of an albatross around an artist's neck half the time. Even though you might have a stone cold classic on your hands, the next question that enters your mind is how the hell you're going to be able to top it with the next record. When you're coming off one of the first rock operas though, the follow up should be impossible, but Pete Townshend actually sounded like he was going to go the distance on...Lifehouse.
Taking inspiration from the same disaffected elements of Tommy, The Who's next record was intended to be a similar grandiose story about finding yourself through music, set in a dystopian future where people tend to find the meaning of life through a musical note. It may have had the potential to be amazing, but explaining the concept to the rest of the band turned into absolute Hell for Pete, getting more and more convoluted before almost suffering from a nervous breakdown when trying to make it come to fruition.
Though Who's Next still remains one of the best albums the band ever put out, what you're hearing here are the fragments that were left over from the Lifehouse project, with Baba O Riley standing as a sort of overture and Won't Get Fooled Again being the moment where everything comes crashing down at the end. There's a sense of finality behind something like Tommy, but Lifehouse may have been the one concept from Townshend that was too big to put into just one album.