My Generation (The Who, 1965)

Overall, the Who catalog is pretty straightforward, but for some reason the first album, My Generation (later re-released as The Who Sings My Generation) is a bit of a mess to negotiate. It seems like no matter what version you have, you are probably missing something. Add to the mess the inability of Decca to properly name one of the tracks ("Circles"), causing massive confusion all around. You would think the "Deluxe Edition" I have would finally resolve this, but of course stuff is still left out. I think I saw a list somewhere with all the omissions, so I doubt my observations are complete, but the casualties here are the stereo versions of the two singles spawned from the album. Only the rarer mono editions are presented. That's the real issue with this edition - in it's attempt to scoop together all the associated scraps of recordings that made up the early Who sessions, they ended up omitting some of the most obvious ones. For example, there's an awesome different version of "Leaving Here", while the "canon" version remains trapped on Odds and Sods. So don't throw out that old "greatest hits" package just because you have the deluxe versions of these albums!

For those not well versed in the story of the Who, this is really the only album that captures the Who is all of their R&B glory, which future albums would overlay with mod-pop, psych, opera, and hard rock. It is the only album with a substantial amount of cover material (mostly in the bonus tracks), though like the rest of the albums, Pete Townshend is the principal writer. This version captures all album tracks from both releases, so "I'm a Man" and "Circles" are both here. As earlier mentioned, "Circles" was mislabeled "Instant Party", which wasn't just a random humorous mistake, since there actually is a silly bonus track called "Instant Party Mixture" which has absolutely no connection to "Circles". There are a huge number of bonus tracks (around 17 or so), many of which are "alternate", "extended", "instrumental", or "a capella" versions of the regular album tracks.

One of the reasons this album is different from all of the others is because of the upheaval that immediately followed. Unlike the Kinks, who suffered through over four albums, the Who broke with producer Shel Talmy soon after the release of the album. This resulted in a noticeably increased independent spirit on future albums, though Kit Lambert could present challenges of his own (look for that in a future review of A Quick One, if that happens).

This is the first time the Who has appeared here and it serves as a reminder I need to keep collecting. I sort of stalled out after Who's Next. It's almost like a different band on each album, but they somehow have managed to keep going after all these years.