Pete Townshend - Who Demos, Volume 3: 1967-1968

Back in 2019, I posted a "Volume 2" consisting of Pete Townshend demos of what would later be songs by the Who. I've found a bunch of additional demos, allowing me to split that album in two. "Volume 2" previously dealt with the years 1966 to 1968. Now it just deals with 1966, and this one is from 1967 and 1968. I had already posted an album of demos for the 1969 album "Tommy." That had been called "Volume 3," but it's been renamed to "Volume 4."

Thus, if you're interested in this kind of thing, I strongly you suggest you redownload "Volume 2" and what is now "Volume 4." I also plan to keep going with "Volume 5" and beyond.

The reason I have enough material for this is due to the release of a super deluxe edition of the Who's 1967 album "The Who Sell Out." That came out in 2021, but I'm only getting to it now. Although that is a Who release, it contained a bunch of Pete Townshend solo demos of songs slated for that album. I've used six of those here.

One more song came out on the official demo collection "Scoop" ("Melancholia") and another one came out on the similar demo collection "Another Scoop" ("Pictures of Lily"). That leaves four songs that are still officially unreleased: "Relax (Version 2)," "Rael, Parts 1-9," "Dogs," and  "Sensation (Early Demo)." That last one is a song from the Who's 1969 album "Tommy." But this demo was done in 1968, so it fits this time frame. And it's different than another demo of the same song on "Volume 4."

A version of the song "Rael" appeared on "The Who Sell Out," but this demo is significantly different, being three minutes long. The song is a strange one. Townshend summarized it in a 1967 interview: "It takes place in the year 1999 when China is breaking out and is about to take over the world. The hero, or at least, central character, loses his wife and decides to go live in this tiny country which is about to be overrun by the Chinese. The hero goes through hundreds of different situations and there is music for each. He goes out in a boat and gets shipwrecked, he has a bad nightmare, and so on."

This album is 42 minutes long.

By the way, I also have just redone all the links for all the other Pete Townshend albums I've posted. I fixed the volume balance and updated the mp3 tags to a new format. Many of the links were dead, but they're not any more. I also recently did the same for most Beck and Richard Thompson albums.

01 Relax [Version 2] (Pete Townshend)
02 Pictures of Lily (Pete Townshend)
03 Jaguar (Pete Townshend)
04 Odorono (Pete Townshend)
05 Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand (Pete Townshend)
06 I Can See for Miles (Pete Townshend)
07 Rael, Parts 1-9 (Pete Townshend)
08 Little Billy (Pete Townshend)
09 Dogs (Pete Townshend)
10 Melancholia (Pete Townshend)
11 Glow Girl (Pete Townshend)
12 Sensation [Early Demo] (Pete Townshend)

https://www.imagenetz.de/mTeii

The cover photo of Townshend is was taken in a recording studio in 1968. It was black and white originally, but I colorized it.