The Who - The Who Sell Out - Double Album Alternate Version (1967)

"The Who Sell Out" is one of the greatest albums of all time. Rolling Stone magazine ranks it #113 on its list of top 500 albums of all time, and also calls it the best concept album of all time. But what's amazing yet frustrating for me is that it works just as well as a double album. A deluxe version of the album was released decades later, but that just threw some bonus tracks on a second disc without much apparent thought to track order and theme. Plus, some key tracks from the time period were missed, most especially the hit song "Pictures of Lily."

I normally don't want to use this blog to simply post an album that's already widely available. But in this case, I'm including both the original album and a second album. I also break with tradition by sticking songs right into the existing order of songs on the original album.

There's a good reason for this second idea. In Dave Marsh's 1983 book "Before I Get Old - The Story of the Who", Marsh argued that while the album is great overall, the pop art/commercial theme of the album fizzled out before the middle of the second side, after the song "Medac." He wrote, "For the rest of the side, the concept disappeared." Then he quoted a review of the album by Nik Cohn back in 1967, which noted the same thing, and said, "The problem is that the idea hasn't been carried right the way through; it has only been half-heartedly sketched in."

Marsh and Cohn are right. From the start of the album through "Medac," there are mock commercials between virtually every song, and some of the songs are commercial in nature as well, like "Medac," "Heinz Baked Beans," and "Odorono." But then, for the last four songs, it's as if that concept is forgotten entirely.

So I fixed this by putting more mock commercials between all those songs (and also adding "Rael 2" and the end to complete "Rael 1). This may seem jarring if you've listen to the album countless times without them there, but please give it a chance and let it grow on you.

Then I continued the concept for an entire second album. The original album was 39 minutes long. Adding some commericals and "Rael 2" to it made it 43 minutes long. I was very pleased to discover that, after gathering all the quality material I could, I was able to make a solid second album, that's also 43 minutes long. And just like the first album, there are commercials between every single song.

I'm amazed at how well it all worked out. I feel like this was how the album was meant to be the whole time. Back in 1967, the Who couldn't realistically put out a double album - that idea didn't really catch on in the rock world until after the success of the Beatles' "White Album" in 1968. But after all these years, we can fulfill a larger double album vision, because the group left so many great stray tracks around, including lots of mock commercials.

As I usually do while reconstructing albums, I like to gather up all the quality tracks from a certain time, if I can. So I included some songs the Who did in 1967 that weren't included on the deluxe edition of the album.

In doing my best to continue the album's concept, I made some edits to existing songs. The commercial "Great Shakes" was an actual commercial the band got paid for around the time, and there's a talkover section in the middle of it that sounds too much like really trying to sell a product rather than the parody feeling of their other commercials. So I seamlessly edited that out. I did the exact same thing to another real commercial the band did, for "Sunn Equipment," removing the talkover section. 

Also, I took part of an early version of "Relax" on the deluxe edition and edited it to be a mellow coda to finish the album. I thought it was nice having that song from the first album briefly come back on the second album, in the same way that "Odorono" makes a brief return.

Furthermore, I sometimes cut down the seconds of silence at the ends of some songs, if that went on for five seconds or longer. The idea for the album was to pretend to be a pirate radio station, and one thing such a radio station would try hard to avoid was more than a few seconds of "dead air." I also made all the little mock commercials their own tracks. (Please don't listen to this on a music player that automatically inserts a couple of seconds of silence between every song, because there often is no silence at all between some tracks.)

Sometimes things come together in a really satisfying way. This is one of those times for me. As I mentioned already, I'm amazed at how well this all fits together. For instance, I wound up with the exact number of mock commercials that allowed me to have one between every single song on both albums. I strongly encourage you to give this a listen!

UPDATE: In early 2021, a "super deluxe" edition of "The Who Sell Out" was officially released. For my purposes with this album, the content was largely the same, but there were some extra little bits here and there that I could use. So, on May 5, 2021, I made some minor changes across both albums.

Also, it turns out that some of the mock radio commercials were real commercials or radio station announcements that the Who simply used whole hog, much like sampling in rap music. For instance, the little snippet of a female voice singing "It's smooth sailing, with the highly successful sound of wonderful Radio London" was a real bit of audio played on Radio London around that time. The Who even got sued for using some of these bits without permission, but apparently nothing ever came of the lawsuits.

Anyway, given those precedents, I found some other real commercials and/or radio station announcements from the time that fit the general album vibe, and I sprinkled those in here and there. Some of them tout "Radio London," or use its nickname "Big L." If you look at the mp3 tags, those are the ones mentioned as being officially unreleased. By using those, I was able to replace some other little bits that were somewhat repetitive such getting rid of a second version of the "John Mason's Cars" commercial and the second version of the "Premier Drums" commercial.

Oh, also, I looked at some Internet forums and found that Who fans generally felt the versions of the songs on this latest super deluxe edition sound better than on previous editions. So I replaced all the songs I could with the latest versions. That meant replacing nearly all the songs, except for a few that came from other releases only, like the "BBC Sessions" or "Odds and Sods." 

I also used alternate versions of "The Last Time" and "Under My Thumb" from the super deluxe box set. To me, they sound exactly the same as the previous versions, except they're a little bit longer, so they come to proper ends instead of fading out. Plus, they're in stereo instead of mono. The only songs left in mono, I think, are "Pictures of Lily" and "Doctor, Doctor." If you know of good stereo versions of those, please let me know so I can replace them.

Album 1:

01 Monday to Sunday (Who)
02 Armenia City in the Sky (Who)
03 Wonderful Radio London (Who)
04 Heinz Baked Beans (Who)
05 More Music (Who)
06 Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand (Who)
07 Premier Drums (Who)
08 Odorono (Who)
09 Smooth Sailing with Radio London (Who)
10 Tattoo (Who)
11 Church of Your Choice (Who)
12 Our Love Was (Who)
13 Pussycat - Speakeasy - Rotosound Strings (Who)
14 I Can See for Miles (Who)
15 Charles Atlas (Who)
16 I Can't Reach You (Who)
17 Choir Big L (Who)
18 Medac (Who)
19 Radio 1 [Happy Jack] (Who)
20 Relax (Who)
21 Radio London News (Who)
22 Great Shakes [Edit] (Who)
23 Silas Stingy (Who)
24 Bag O'Nails [Edit] (Who)
25 Sunrise (Who)
26 Things Go Better with Coke (Who)
27 Rael (Who)
28 Rael Naive (Who)
29 Track Records (Who)

NOTE: Unfortunately, the link had to be removed due to a copyright issue. Sorry.

Album 2:

01 Wonderful Radio London [Have You Heard] (Who)
02 Pictures of Lily (Who)
03 John Mason Cars (Who)
04 Radio 1 [Boris the Spider] (Who)
05 Doctor, Doctor (Who)
06 Big L Action (Who)
07 The Last Time (Who)
08 Top Gear (Who)
09 My Way (Who)
10 News Bulletin (Who)
11 Jaguar (Who)
12 Coke After Coke (Who)
13 Early Morning Cold Taxi (Who)
14 Radio One Jingle [My Generation] (Who)
15 Someone's Coming (Who)
16 Pearl Perm Shampoo (Who)
17 Summertime Blues (Who)
18 Odorono [Final Chorus] (Who)
19 Big L Happy Difference (Who)
20 Sodding About [Signal 30] [Instrumental] (Who)
21 Sunn Equipment [Edit] (Who)
22 Girl's Eyes (Who)
23 Big Fry Bars (Who)
24 Under My Thumb (Who)
25 Music - Wonderful Big L (Who)
26 Glittering Girl (Who)
27 Toffee Glees (Who)
28 In the Hall of the Mountain King [Instrumental] (Who)
29 You're Hearing Things [Radio London] (Who)
30 Relax [Coda] (Who)

NOTE: Unfortunately, the link had to be removed due to a copyright issue. Sorry.

The art works out great as well. The original album had a back cover that was essentially a second front cover. So one can just imagine that the group released two albums at once, and this second picture was the cover for the second album. I made some minor edits to the second picture to remove a few minor things that betray it isn't an album cover, such as a record company logo which wasn't on the first picture.

Note also that when I updated the album in May 2021, I updated the artwork too. The images are exactly same, but it turns out I'd used badly miscolored versions. I replaced them with better versions.