Pete Townshend - Who Demos, Volume 6: 1971: Lifehouse

Since it's been sooo long since I last posted a Pete Townshend album of Who demos (I just checked, and it was in 2019 - yikes!), I'm posting two in one day.

This consists entirely of demos for his attempted rock opera "Lifehouse." I saw "attempted" because he scrapped what would have been a double album in 1971 and had the Who put out the single album "Who's Next" instead. It seems that nobody but Townshend really understood what the concept was about. Townshend returned to the project and put out versions decades later, but I must admit I still don't really understand. If you can see a story through all the songs below, please explain it to the rest of us!

Anyway, not all of these became Who songs, but the vast majority did. (I think the only exceptions are "Greyhound Girl," "Mary," and the variants on "Baba O'Riley," "Teenage Wasteland" and "Baba O'Riley [Instrumental].") The songs are generally from 1970 or 1971. However, two of them, "Join Together" and "The Relay," were written in 1972 when Townshend briefly made another attempt at finishing his Lifehouse project.

Normally, I wouldn't post this, because all the songs come from one source, the 2000 box set "Lifehouse Chronicles." But I'm making an exception because this is just one third of the box set, and I want to post all of his demos, not all of them except for this one project. I've put the songs in the same order the box set did, except that I didn't include four songs, because they were written much later in the 1970s: "Slip Kid," "Music Must Change," "Sister Disco," and "Who Are You." ("Slip Kid" might have been written in the 1971 time frame; I've heard conflicting accounts. But if so, he sure kept it a secret. Also, any connection to the Lifehouse concept is a total mystery to me.)

If anyone has a better suggestion for the song order, I'm all ears.

This album is an hour and 50 minutes long. In my opinion, nearly every song is a stone cold classic, and Townshend's demo versions are often as good as the Who versions, or at least close.

01 Teenage Wasteland (Pete Townshend)
02 Goin' Mobile (Pete Townshend)
03 Baba O'Riley (Pete Townshend)
04 Time Is Passing (Pete Townshend)
05 Love Ain't for Keeping (Pete Townshend)
06 Bargain (Pete Townshend)
07 Too Much of Anything (Pete Townshend)
08 Greyhound Girl (Pete Townshend)
09 Mary (Pete Townshend)
10 Behind Blue Eyes (Pete Townshend)
11 Baba O'Riley [Instrumental] (Pete Townshend)
12 I Don't Even Know Myself (Pete Townshend)
13 Put the Money Down (Pete Townshend)
14 Pure and Easy (Pete Townshend)
15 Getting in Tune (Pete Townshend)
16 Let's See Action [Nothing Is Everything] (Pete Townshend)
17 The Relay (Pete Townshend)
18 Join Together (Pete Townshend)
19 Won't Get Fooled Again (Pete Townshend)
20 Song Is Over (Pete Townshend)

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The cover photo is said to have been taken in Twickenham Studios in London in 1971.