10 Rock Albums That You Were Never Supposed To Hear
7. Who's Next - The Who
Who's Next has been heralded as the Who's true classic album. Whereas grand rock operas like Tommy and Quadrophenia might have been a bit tricky for some casual rock fans to latch onto, this packed all of the punch of those records without any of the storyline to worry about. Then again, this wasn't necessarily the record that Pete Townshend had in mind either.
Coming off of the road promoting Tommy, Townshend came back with the vision of writing a more dystopian version of his deaf, dumb, and blind protagonist entitled Lifehouse, which would take place in the future and center around finding the transcendental presence of music. For everyone that loved Tommy, this seemed like the almighty followup that everyone was looking for, so long as nothing catastrophic went wrong. Unfortunately, life doesn't always work like that.
As Townshend kept peddling away at one song after another, it became clear that he was trying to chase perfection that was never going to come. Almost suffering a mental breakdown in the middle of things, the Who eventually took the scraps of what was supposed to be Lifehouse and assemble it into Who's Next, with The Song is Over and Baba O'Riley being cornerstones for what would have been the followup rock opera. While Townshend was never quite able to fulfill his artistic goal, he was definitely onto something great if this could be considered table scraps.