Following up on the littering of hits found on My Generation is no small feat. The Who are up to the task though, with the Roger Daltrey-fronted group making quick work of their follow-up to an era-defining debut album. A Quick One is as its title suggests. A half-hour blast with the band who were feeling for a new sound while also relying on the good faith banked by the success of My Generation. A fine line to walk, but The Who succeeds because they not only subvert expectations, but prod those who were expecting more of the same rock and roll. They’re, of course, offering the fundamentals of rock and roll with A Quick One but the band does well to trial a few new genres. Slowed rock noise on Run, Run, Run contrasts the call to arms in the title with a sluggish but breezy-sounding first track. Not enough to get your mind racing and a stripped-back sound to the band which they would soon build back up in the songs to follow.
Compare the rather plain-sailing Run, Run, Run with those deeper, shocking vocal moments on Boris the Spider and you get the feeling The Who are unsure of where to go next. A Quick One is a transitional album. The band would bring about some sweeping changes on follow-up album, The Who Sell Out, but they needed to get whatever A Quick One is out of their system. It verges on art rock at times, with the “creepy crawly” repetition of Boris the Spider light but nice. Boris the Spider will hardly convince of the band’s ability to capture the feel of the times but it’s a nice stop-off with a side to The Who rarely featured after this point. They had a knack for the out-there sentiment, the commentaries which just don’t need to make sense. Borderline surrealist at times and with a heavier focus on Keith Moon’s drumming on I Need You, even the more straightforward songs have a jagged thrill to them.
Whiskey Man is pretty forgettable work but at least it’s sandwiched between the fascinating I Need You and the usual rock and roll thrills of Heat Wave. The latter feels like a play-up of early work from The Beatles with all the talk of new romance and summery thrills. Throw that out of the way for another Moon highlight, a vibrant and extremely fun instrumental break with Cobwebs and Strange, and it becomes even clearer The Who are throwing what they can at A Quick One to temper expectations and not have themselves assigned to one broad genre. An “everything thrown into the studio, including the kitchen sink” album, and it works. Erratic work is the point of A Quick One, and the band pulls it off convincingly enough. Catchy pieces of essential rock with 1960s influence on them, that’s what A Quick One is.
But crucial to that sound is what comes at the end of the album. Erratic A Quick One may be, that’s the whole point. The Who duck around genre labels and throw themselves in the deep end of just about every contemporary creative around at the time, and they come out the other end with some bizarre songs. But bizarre is, ultimately, a starting point for a whole new idea, be it the thematic thrills the band would work on in the years to come or the reimagination of classic tracks which featured on their touring cycle decades later. A Quick One, While He’s Away is a mash-up of ideas equivalent in theory to the medley of Abbey Road, though very far from the quality set by The Beatles. Nonetheless, it serves as a stomping ground for unfinished ideas and possible pieces of work, songs that could have been. The Who ditch the compact My Generation sound and present a fascinating range of genre thrills on this second album.
