THE WHO ALBUM BY ALBUM by Dante DiCarlo

In the manner of Revolution In The Head, Ian McDonald’s acclaimed book analysing the music of The Beatles, Dante DiCarlo attempts something along similar lines for The Who, and while his writing style falls somewhat short of McDonald, this is a workmanlike effort at evaluating The Who’s 14 studio albums, track by track, 168 songs in all. It helps that DiCarlo is a guitarist himself, thus enabling him to analyse the songs from a musician’s standpoint, recording which keys Pete Townshend plays in, D being his preference as anyone who’s ever essayed ‘Substitute’ surely knows, and chord progressions. 

To a certain extent this book renders my own Complete Guide To The Music Of The Who (1994 & 2004, the update written with Ed Hanel) redundant, though DiCarlo omits live albums and compilations, thus disregarding those singles (like ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, ‘Substitute’ and a handful of others) that appear only on collections of hits, tracks on the Ready Steady Who EP and ‘bonus’ tracks that have appeared on certain compilations and reissues. Most, however, get a mention in the text that prefaces each LP, especially those that somehow align with Townshend’s various musical concepts. My Who music guide was one in a series of 46 books designed in the shape of CD cases and, through necessity, was considerably more concise than Album By Album, even it did include live LPs and compilations, of which there are now too many to count. Album By Album contains far more detail, not just in the scrutiny of the actual songs but in the background essays that introduce each LP. 

So, beginning with ‘Out In The Street’ from My Generation (1965) and ending about 200 pages later with ‘She Rocked My World’ from WHO (2019) we get the low down on The Who’s recorded oeuvre, most of it positive though DiCarlo doesn’t shy away from critical assessments, mostly, as might be expected, on tracks from the post-Moon LPs. Those songs that might be regarded as landmarks in the group’s career – ‘My Generation’, ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, for example – get the five-star treatment, with up to three pages of worthwhile analysis.  

        DiCarlo was born in 1983 and thus missed out on The Who’s classic period and with this in mind he’s written a book aimed at newer fans of The Who, by which I mean those who’ve picked up on the group after Keith left us in 1978 and possibly also John Entwistle in 2002. For such Who fans this is a valuable guide to their legacy and to the way their long career has panned out. Older fans won’t find much here that they don’t already know if they’ve paid attention along the way and read all the books but DiCarlo has done his research well and produced an accurate, interesting summary of the group’s output. 

Of course, 168 songs (plus maybe a dozen or so that don’t make the book) in what is now a 60-year career is by no means prolific. The Beatles recorded 213 songs, 188 of which they wrote themselves, in eight years, a work-rate that exposes The Who as shiftless slackers. But that doesn’t consider The Who’s brilliance as a live act, which is what really attracted me to them towards the end of the 1960s, turned me into a rabid fan during the 1970s and has kept me banging on about them for years. This, for me, is where their true greatness lies. Perhaps, therefore, a follow-up book might consider their live legacy, contrasting and comparing all their many concert releases, even though the songs they perform haven’t changed that much over the last 40 years. 

Album By Album contains 16 pages of colour photos, many taken by the author, the vast majority from the new millennium. It’s 220 pages long with a useful index and costs £25 (£19.85 on Amazon).