Pete Townshend: Lifehouse Elements

After creating 1969's Tommy, a concept album featuring a messianic deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard, The Who's Pete Townshend decided he needed to be more ambitious. The next step was supposed to be Lifehouse, a multimedia extravaganza incorporating live performances, a film, a double-album, and heaven knows what else. Set in a post-apocalyptic future dominated by virtual reality and an Internet-like network—but ultimately redeemed by the music of The Who—it today sounds nearly as prescient as it does pretentious. Through no lack of effort, Lifehouse never materialized, eventually emerging as the semi-conceptual Who's Next. Heavy on then-new synthesizer technology and featuring several songs that stretched well past the five-minute mark, it as much as Tommy indicated a split from the band's past, proving in the process to be one of The Who's most memorable albums. Townshend never really let go of Lifehouse, however. As songs from Smile did for The Beach Boys, bits of the abandoned project surfaced through the years, on subsequent Who albums and on Townshend's 1993 Psychoderelict. Lifehouse itself, however, seemed lost until last year, when Townshend announced its completion, broadcast it on BBC as a radio play, and released through his web site (how's that for irony) a six-disc set featuring recordings from every stage of the project. The more widely available single-disc Lifehouse Elements provides a sample of that mammoth work, but will likely be either too much or not enough for those intrigued by the project. Dominated by songs recorded at one time or another by The Who, it's also overshadowed by them. Do listeners need an anemic orchestral version of "Baba O'Riley" Does "Who Are You" need a rap interlude Worse still, Elements provides no recording information, a huge oversight for a disc featuring material spanning the past 30 years. Who fanatics will probably be better off shelling out for the full set, while everyone else should just give Who's Next another spin. For a taste of Townshend and company before ambition overwhelmed them, don't miss The BBC Sessions. As successful, or at least as intriguing, as some of the band's experiments turned out, most of The Who's greatest work took the form of inimitably punchy rock songs, the sound of ecstasy, anger, and teen angst in collision. BBC collects scorching live-in-studio versions of many of The Who's best and several covers ("Good Lovin'," "Dancing In The Street," "Shakin' All Over") that deliver on concert posters' promise of "maximum R&B." Though the band eventually exhausted itself trying to provide it, it's hard to conceive of anything better.