Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Pete Dialogue - Pete Townshend
2. I'm the Face
3. Here 'Tis
4. Zoot Suit
5. Leaving Here
6. I Can't Explain
7. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere
8. Daddy Rollin' Stone
9. My Generation
10. Kids Are Alright
11. Ox
12. Legal Matter
13. Pete Dialogue [Live] - Pete Townshend
14. Substitute
15. I'm a Boy
16. Disguises
17. Happy Jack Jingle
18. Happy Jack
19. Boris the Spider
20. So Sad About Us
21. Quick One, While He's Away
22. Pictures of Lily
23. Early Morning Cold Taxi
24. Coke 2
25. Last Time
26. I Can't Reach You
27. Girl's Eyes
28. Bag O'Nails
29. Call Me Lightning

Disc 2:

1. Rotosound Strings
2. I Can See for Miles
3. Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand
4. Armenia City in the Sky
5. Tattoo
6. Our Love Was
7. Rael 1
8. Rael 2
9. Track Records/Premier Drums
10. Sunrise
11. Russell Harty Dialogue
12. Jaguar
13. Melancholia
14. Fortune Teller
15. Magic Bus
16. Little Billy
17. Dogs
18. Overture
19. Acid Queen
20. Abbie Hoffman Incident [Live]
21. Underture [Live]
22. Pinball Wizard
23. I'm Free
24. See Me, Feel Me [Live]
25. Heaven and Hell
26. Pete Dialogue [Live]
27. Young Man Blues [Live]
28. Summertime Blues [Live]

Disc 3:

1. Shakin' All Over [Live]
2. Baba O'Riley
3. Bargain [Live]
4. Pure and Easy
5. Song Is Over
6. Studio Dialogue
7. Behind Blue Eyes
8. Won't Get Fooled Again
9. Seeker [Edit]
10. Bony Maronie [Live]
11. Let's See Action (Nothing Is Everything)
12. Join Together
13. Relay
14. Real Me
15. 5:15 [Single Mix]
16. Bell Boy
17. Love Reign O'Er Me

Disc 4:

1. Long Live Rock
2. Life with the Moons
3. Naked Eye [Live]
4. University Challenge
5. Slip Kid
6. Poetry Cornered
7. Dreaming from the Waist [Live]
8. Blue, Red and Grey
9. Life with the Moons, No. 2
10. Squeeze Box
11. My Wife
12. Who Are You
13. Music Must Change
14. Sister Disco
15. Guitar and Pen
16. You Better You Bet
17. Eminence Front
18. Twist and Shout [Live]
19. I'm a Man [Live]
20. Pete Dialogue - Pete Townshend
21. Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85958 in Music
• Released on: 1994-07-05
• Number of discs: 4
• Format: Box set

Amazon.com
This exemplary four-disc box takes the high road, attempting nothing less than an honest reconstruction of the Who's stormy, adventurous, uneven pilgrimage. While offering an evenhanded cross-section of single hits and classic album tracks, 30 Years garnishes the expected high points with B-sides, alternate and live versions of familiar tracks, and the quartet's earliest singles as the High Numbers. Reinforcing the package's documentary agenda are interview and stage-patter sound bites. What emerges is a fascinating chronicle of how the Shepherd's Bush mods journeyed from the giddy, explosive concision of their January 1965 debut single, "I Can't Explain," to the discursive, knotty sweep of creative architect Pete Townshend's "rock operas," Tommy, Quadrophenia, and the uncompleted, unreleased Lifehouse. The Who's swift evolution into rock visionaries is traced chronologically, meaning the band's original immersion in "maximum R&B," which forged their earliest club dates, doesn't surface on record until midway through the sequence, on key tracks from their thundering Live at Leeds album. Fans may quibble over the relative weight given specific albums, but the shape of the Who's career and their passionate identification with their audience are rendered faithfully. So, too, is Townshend's skill at mingling issues of faith and identity with generational manifestoes and sly broadsides. And there's ample evidence of the quartet's outsize musical power; the sheer volume and violence that earned them notoriety early on is matched by a lyricism that deepens by mid career. Given the candor of the presentation, it's not surprising that 30 Years reaches its zenith midway through the set or that the last song (a reunion of the surviving trio covering Elton John) can't help seeming anticlimactic. --Sam Sutherland

Customer Reviews

A Whole Lotta Who...but at Who's Cost
You would have to spend a lotta money to get all these songs on their original discs. This is the best "best of" compilation ever...but at the cost of superior sonics. The sound quality on these discs is horrible. Listen to any track on the box's discs from WHO'S NEXT and then listen to the remastered WHO'S NEXT from just a few years ago and the difference will amaze you. I can stand for the sound to be a little wooly on the older stuff but for the tracks on disc 3 and 4 to sound the way they do is a crime. The box is only worth it to me for the hard to find tracks like JOIN TOGETHER and LONG LIVE ROCK and THE KIDS ARE ALLRIGHT. Other wise save your money and by the remasters of WHO'S NEXT and LIVE AT LEEDS.

More Like 20 Years, Actually
The "Thirty Years" title of this collection is misleading. Though released to coincide with the band's 30 year anniversary, it had already been 15 years since the death of drummer Keith Moon and 12 years since the release of the band's last studio album. Only one track was recorded after the band's 1982-83 "farewell" tour. Chronological nitpicking aside, this four disc box set, while indeed containing a ton of terrific music, suffers from an identity crisis.

Who exactly is its target audience? I ask that question because it is about evenly split between rare tracks/alternative versions and original recordings from the band's studio and live albums. As such, the collection is too lengthy to be of interest to casual fans and contains way too much repetitious material for ardent fans who likely already own most if not all of the Who's catalog. Confusing things even more are a generous helping of "dialog" tracks (including Pete swearing at the audience during a live show, the band members making disgusting phlemetic noises prior to recording "Behind Blue Eyes") that do more to damage the band's legacy than enhance it.

All of that said, the music itself remains tremendously powerful. For all of its flaws, "30 Years" is still well worth repeated listenings for those with a little extra money to spend.

Lots of little mistakes and annoyances add up
It's not that this is bad material (with some exceptions, like the horrible alternate "The Real Me" that should have stayed unreleased), just that there are a LOT of little mistakes and annoyances that really add up. One or two mistakes or annoyances would have been understandable and easy to ignore, but not when they keep happening over and over again. The constant seguing of the songs is by far the worst error. This technique only works well when the end of the first song and the beginning of the following one sound enough alike to phased in and out simultaneously. Many times there isn't even one single nanosecond of breathing space between songs. There are also a few songs which are a mix of studio and live versions, like "A Quick One" and "See Me, Feel Me." Other big errors are mislabelling "Sparks" (the live Woodstock version) as "Underture." They never did "Underture" live. The live "Bargain" on here is also shortened by about a minute; the full-length version of this particular live rendition is found on the rarities compilation 'Who's Missing,' which was released some years before this boxed set came along. There are also a number of errors in the booklet, like giving incorrect chart positions for some songs and reinforcing the common but incorrect belief that Keith Moon was born in 1947; he was born in 1946 but lied about his age so people would think he was younger.

Besides the constant seguing, the other most annoying thing on here is the inclusion of way too many songs from 'Sell Out,' a total of eight of the original thirteen. There's also too much material from 'Who's Next' and the original LAL. Giving more than three or four songs from each album is no longer just giving a little sample of each album represented, and it feels jarring hearing them all played out of order, with so many songs from those albums included. Maybe that's the reason why there were barely any songs from their sorely underrated Eighties catalogue, with only one song apiece from their final two studio albums and then the next two Eighties songs being really poorly representative of that period. They could have picked a better song from 'Who's Last,' as bland a live effort as it may be, in lieu of the live version of "Twist and Shout" they used, as well as a better song from the '89 triple-LP 'Join Together' over the endless live rendition of "I'm a Man." The final song, a '91 cover of the Elton John song "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)," is fun and peppy, but could have been included somewhere else if it had to be included at all. That is not the track you use to close a boxed set with; it should have been so obvious that the final track should have been a blistering live version of "WGFA" or "SMFM"!

Still, the material included here is by and large great, along with some cute Keith skits done for the BBC, interviews, onstage dialogue, and studio conversations held before songs. There are also a lot of songs that were unreleased before this boxed set came along, though since then most of them have been released as bonus tracks on the CD remasters. And some of the songs are still hard to find on CD, are only on vinyl, or are hard to find altogether, whatever the format they're available on, like the irresistably cute ditty "Dogs," "Call Me Lightning," and the High Numbers-era material like "Here 'Tis" and "Zoot Suit"; before this, only the High Numbers song "I'm the Face" was available on an official release. It's too bad they couldn't have cut some of the superfluous songs to make room for more rarities, like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or some of the songs on the out-of-print 'Two's Missing.' Overall, the many mistakes and annoyances aren't enough to overlook the fact that it's still great material. I'm lucky I found a used copy of this, complete with the booklet, for only $35 in a used record store!