Who fans are in for a treat on April 22nd at 9 p.m. ET when the band livestreams the premiere of its Classic Albums documentary, The Who Sell Out. The doc will be available to stream on demand via nugs.net, the nugs.net YouTube page and The Who YouTube page through Sunday, April 25th at 6 pm ET.
1967's The Who Sell Out included the band's sole Top 10 hit — “I Can See For Miles” — along as the instant concert staple, “Tattoo,” along with such fan favorites as “I Can't Reach You,” “Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand,” “Sunrise,” “Relax,” and “Our Love Was.”
Coming on April 23rd is the “Super-Deluxe Edition” of The Who Sell Out in a massive box set, with a total of 112 tracks over five discs. The collection includes never-before-heard outtakes and Pete Townshend demos — along with a heaping dose of replica memorabilia from the era.
The livestream's official announcement read in part:
The documentary explores their groundbreaking record in detail, including a deep dive into the original multi-track recordings, (along with a) visual representation of the album’s concept as a pirate radio broadcast, coupled with extremely rare archival footage, new interviews with Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and a host of others including John Entwistle and Keith Moon in archive.
The episode will also cover why 1967 was a pivotal year in popular culture by examining the era’s art, music and social influences, and how The Who Sell Out encapsulated that time but still sounds as fresh and vital as it did upon its release over 50 years ago.
In the recent Who documentary Sensation: The Story Of 'Tommy,' Pete Townshend shed light on how he played into the interest of the burgeoning counter culture to help drive Tommy into the blockbuster it eventually became: “We’d had a very strange time. We’d had a terrific two-year run of hit singles in the UK, and I’d kind of run out of steam, I’d just written myself out. The final song that I wrote for the Who’s single was, that was successful, was ‘I Can See For Miles,’ and after that, I felt I had nowhere to go. But I felt if we could achieve anything — If I could achieve anything — if it had a spiritual subtext, it would straddle the word of pop from which we’d come and this new hippie world, which seemed to be about new age values, and well, we all know what hippies stood for.”
