The Who, Who Are You [Super Deluxe Edition]

★★

“We get hungover but we always survive it,” sings Roger Daltrey on “New Song,” the first song on Who Are You. Survival wasn’t in the cards for every member of the Who, of course. Keith Moon died of an accidental drug overdose on September 7, 1978, just a few weeks after Who Are You hit the stores.

Moon’s death catapulted the Who into chaos, but the new Super Deluxe Edition of Who Are You suggests the band was mired in uncertainty long before the drummer’s passing. Certainly, the album itself is jumbled and off-kilter, the sound of four musicians struggling to remember their common bond. That loss of identity stems from Pete Townshend, the band’s singer/songwriter and conceptualist, who grew tired of the band and himself somewhere in the middle of the 1970s. That aimlessness is evident throughout Who Are You, an album where he demands that the “Music Must Change” then spends a record seeking a “New Song,” only to wind up wondering who he exactly is.

Townshend is so sick of himself that he hands John Entwistle an unprecedented three songs on Who Are You. If Townshend has too much on his mind, all Entwistle wonders is if he truly brought a prostitute to “the height of ecstasy,” a riddle he continued to pursue into his final hours.