IT'S HARD

All studio tracks recorded June 1982 at Turn-Up-Down Studios (Glyn Johns' home studio) in Surrey, England.

Produced and Engineered by Glyn Johns
Photography and Concept by Graham Hughes [The cover, infamously described by Q magazine as "your dad at the disco", is a reference to Tommy with a Space Duel video game as an update on Tommy's pinball table. Pete disowned the cover soon after the album's release. "I had very little to do with the cover and the title. One of the problems with the band is that we very, very rarely agree on policy. So where we should have had a terrific album cover, we have a rather spineless cover because nobody works hard enough for it. Nobody fights."]

It's Hard was originally released as Polydor WHOD 5066 on September 4, 1982. It reached #11 in the U.K. In the U.S. it was released as Warner Brothers WB 23731 also on September 4, 1982 and made #8 in the Billboard charts; the last Who record to date to reach the U.S. Top Ten. It was also the first Who album to be released as a compact disc, shortly after its LP release, as Polydor 800 106-2, pressed in West Germany as they had the only CD pressing plant at the time and it was the last Who album to come out as an 8-track. The album was awarded gold record status by the RIAA November 3, 1982.

Liner notes by Brian Cady [with research help from Jim Jackson]

...a welter of cliché and listener-friendly FM rock sludge...
- John Atkins, The Who On Record

...their most vital and coherent album since Who's Next...
- Parke Puterbaugh, Rolling Stone

It's difficult to get away from the notion that The Who's final album was recorded purely because they owed it to their American record company who'd paid them a substantial advance which might have had to be returned if no album was forthcoming.
- Chris Charlesworth, The Complete Guide To The Music Of The Who

The album that the Who are working on now is probably the most self-conscious and probably the most dangerous record we've ever set out on.
- Pete Townshend 1982

I hated it. I still hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it!
- Roger Daltrey 1994

Welcome to The Who's last studio album (to date) and certainly their most controversial. It's Hard received some rave reviews when it came out but quickly became their most reviled studio release and one of the biggest reasons why The Who didn't record another for 24 years. Before it was released, however, Pete Townshend didn't just promote the album, he was enthused about it as a revitalization of the band and there are Who fans (and I'll admit I'm one of them) who find this album very under-appreciated. It's Hard began under curious circumstances and it is impossible to properly approach the album without knowledge of both what was then happening in The Who and in the world at large.

Face Dances, The Who's previous album, had been commercially successful but was very disappointing for the group. Both Roger and Pete talked of the band being disengaged from the material and Pete was determined that it wouldn't happen with the next album. However, he had problems of his own to solve first. By the end of 1981 he was not only drinking heavily, but was also addicted to Ativan and sleeping pills and was freebasing cocaine mixed with heroin. When he went to his parents' home for Christmas holidays, he looked so close to death that they begged him to get help. Reuniting with his wife Karen, from whom he had been separated for the last two years, Pete flew to California to a clinic run by Meg Patterson. Here he underwent the same NeuroElectric Therapy that had helped Eric Clapton overcome his drug addiction. While he was there he sent word back to The Who that he wanted to return to work. Pete: "I managed to convince the guys in the band that I would stay alive if they allowed me to work with them again. After the Rainbow fiasco [the 1981 concert where Pete drank four bottles of brandy and got in a backstage fight with Roger], I had difficulty proving to Roger in particular that I was going to enjoy working with the Who, and that it was important to me that the band end properly, rather than end because of my fucking mental demise."

When Pete returned from California in February, The Who were ready for him, having been rehearsing at producer Glyn Johns' house. "The band was working, they were active, they were writing. Roger was playing the guitar. If I had said right then and there, 'Listen chaps, I don't feel like making the record,' they looked as if they would have gone on and done something without me. And they weren't making any demonstrations to me, either. They were just doing it because they wanted to do it. It was really strange. I thought 'I'd really like to play with those guys.'"

But what would they play? Pete only had two songs ready for the new album and the failure of The Who to respond to the Face Dances material was foremost on his mind. "Before we started recording, I sat down with everybody and I said, 'listen, what's the fucking album going to be about? What are we going to say? I can't just go and write a load of songs again and bring them in and hope that you're going to feel good about them or hope that they are going to be right for the band or hope that the band's fans are going to think that they are right for the band. Let's at least all decide how we want the album to fucking sound, whether we want it to be different or old sounding, open or loose or tight or what, and even further, what we actually want the subject of the songs to be about before we commit ourselves and then at least we know when we've completed the album, we won't feel like we did about Face Dances.'"

"'What do you want to fucking sing about? Tell me, and I'll write the songs. D'you wanna sing about race riots? D'you wanna sing about the nuclear bomb? D'you wanna sing about soya bean diets? Tell me!' And everyone kinda went, 'Uhhh.' So I said, 'Shall I tell you what I think we should be singing about?' So I told 'em. And it actually turned into a debate...what was it that each one of us shared, our common ground? Well, after establishing quite quickly that there was very little common ground, we did find that we all cared very deeply about the planet, the people on it, about the threat to our children from nuclear war, of the increasing instability of our own country's politics."

Two weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and relations between the two superpowers began to break down. In the fall of 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president of the U.S. Opposed to the SALT II nuclear arms-limitation treaty and with plans to increase the U.S. military budget by $32 billion, Reagan set out to heighten the arms race. Britain's conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979, supported his efforts.
 

In interview after interview in 1982 Pete spoke of how The Who's new approach excited him and revitalized the band. "[The Who] all feel a great...sense of urgency I think it the only way to put it." "...it's changed our attitude a bit, because now we have something we want to take out and work one hundred percent; we want to shove it down people's throats, in a sense." "...a lot of material we're doing at the moment is quite anguished." "I thought, 'fuck it! There must be something! I've got two growing children, there must be something I can do about the planet. There must be something other than the occasional fucking concert for Amnesty International. I must be able to do something, express something." "I felt that suddenly the band had an outside purpose and it really did unify us a lot, it made us feel like human beings, part of society, living on a planet, not as isolated superstars who were worried about advancing middle age, money problems, whether they could buy another radiator cap for their Rolls-Royces. We were living in the real world again. Despite the fact that we can't alter who we are, or the fact that we are set apart from society, but to re-establish our position as observers, as commentators, as writers with a heavy emotional bias. To a great extent, it has given the band a feeling of being again." "Recording has rejuvenated us. Not so much in musical terms, but in the sense of standing together and saying that we're prepared to actually change the way that we live and the way that we operate, if it will make a difference."

And Pete also spoke of how happy he was with his songs and the recording. "I think the writing I'm doing now for the band has come out much more successfully." "I haven't tried particularly hard on the material. I haven't sat and ruminated and tortured myself to get anything out. I've just written the songs that I think are right for the band and they're much, much, much better for them; much more effective." "We're working with Glyn Johns who produced Who's Next and Who Are You and all the early, very early Who stuff, he engineered. And it's going extremely well." "I must say the material's come out really good and I'm really pleased with it so far." "The new Who songs are violently aggressive, the most aggressive stuff we've ever come up with. The songs that I've written are totally preoccupied with the danger and tension of living in the '80's. And that is the common attitude and stance that the band has." "Six weeks later the album was finished and it was a natural, unconsidered, spontaneous record; the kind I would imagine a brand new group could easily make. Perhaps in the context of a lot of Who records, particularly Who's Next and Quadrophenia it's not quite such a landmark, but from our point of view it's a tremendous record."

Roger's reaction to it in 1982, however, was negative even as he tried to sell it. "It's more of a live type album. I think it's very unpretentious. It's not particularly my favorite Who album. I think there's about five really good tracks on it...it's a stopgap album...I think musically you just cannot keep doing the same old thing. I think that's been one of our mistakes; that's one of my main criticisms of this album. It is a bit like this is The Who doing what they know how to do and I don't like that particularly. I like taking chances."

In the end, if you are sympathetic to the record, you tend to believe Pete that The Who were putting out an impassioned political statement. If you're not sympathetic, you tend to believe Roger that It's Hard was nothing but a contractual obligation. Which is the truth? It's hard to say.

Pete also wrote about this later in the thinly fictionalized short story "Champagne On The Terraces" in his book Horse's Neck. Some of the lyrics are quoted there as well as in the story "Horses" where he recounts a dream about discovering a decaying white horse in a cottage with a massive snake curled inside of it. He explains the meaning of the dream, as "this is a gift from God, a presentation of his grace. If it arrives with the package torn I can't argue. I'm ready to be humiliated, to suffer, to go through whatever I need to go through. I won't betray God or his world." Although Pete says this song was not intended for Lifehouse, a character named Athena appears as the voice of The Grid in Pete's 1993 Lifehouse re-write Psychoderelict.

After Pete had disguised its origins by changing the woman's name to Athena, The Who released this as the album's first single backed with "A Man Is A Man." It was released in the U.K. as WHO 6 September 25, 1982 and went to #40 in the Billboard charts and #31 in Cash Box. It was also released there as a 7-inch picture disk and as a 12-inch picture disc with "Won't Get Fooled Again" added on the b-side. In the U.S. it was released earlier, charting on September 4, as Warner Brothers 29905 backed with "It's Your Turn". It peaked at #28, The Who's last Top Forty single in the U.S. It was performed live during the first half of The Who's 1982 tour. Oh, and the line everyone asks about is "she's just a girl, she's a bomb" not "she's a whore". Click here to see the album's lyric sheet: Athena.
 

IT'S YOUR TURN 3'39
(John Entwistle) Red Hot Music, BMI
Rhythm guitar: Andy Fairweather-Low

John: "It's not very often that The Who have words with a lot of humor in, so you've got to think seriously about things. Roger suggested a few subjects and I hit on a couple of the subjects he suggested and I tried to write seriously but I still find it difficult." There is a note on the inner sleeve of the album that says, "John thanks Roger and Pete for help on subject matter and lyrics." Pete, however, does not remember giving John any help on his songs. Fairweather-Low had performed backing vocals on the Who Are You album and was invited by Roger to play guitar during rehearsals while they waited for Pete to get out of rehab. The 1997 re-mix adds an echo to Roger's voice at the conclusion of the song that wasn't present in the original version. Click here to see the original lyric sheet: It's Your Turn.

Pete and The Who have been involved with charities in Chicago (and many other places besides) and The Who performed twice at the House Of Blues in Chicago November 12 and 13, 1999 raising money for Chicago's Maryville Academy charity benefiting neglected and abused children. This song was performed live only once during The Who's October 6, 1982 show at The Horizon in Rosemont, Illinois and has not been performed again after that. The ending of the version on the 1997 CD is extended by 8 seconds from the original fadeout and an echo is put on Roger's "people are suffering...people are hungry" towards the end. Click here to see the original lyric sheet: Cooks County.

IT'S HARD 3'47
(Pete Townshend) 1982 Towser Tunes, Inc., administered by Longitude Music Co., BMI

Pete: "This one I've had for quite a long time as a lyric written on a piece of paper...I was imagining myself as a kind of Johnny Cash figure and talking about bravado and angst and, you know, it's easy to complain and it's easy to bluff. It's very hard to do." This started as a demo called "Popular" written near the end of the sessions for Face Dances. Pete: "The band reaction was lukewarm; we were close to ending the album and were all unsure of what was happening. I later removed the 'Popular' chorus, replaced it with 'It's Hard' and managed to sell another song!"

The demo is available on Pete's album Scoop. "It's Hard" was released as The Who's last commercial single of new studio material in the U.S. to date on February 1983. The b-side was "Dangerous". It failed to chart. Footage of the band playing the song backstage at the Capital Center in Largo Maryland September 22, 1982 was used in the tour advertisement for Schlitz Beer. The 1997 CD version lacks a guitar "fix up" in Pete's opening solo that was in the original. Click here to see the original lyric sheet: It's Hard.

DANGEROUS 3'15 (1997 CD 3'35)
(John Entwistle) Red Hot Music, BMI
Synthesizers: John Entwistle and Tim Gorman. Organ: Tim Gorman

John: "[Of his three tracks for It's Hard] I think the one I like best is 'Dangerous', not so much for the words, just for the actual backing track which was really nice to do."

Tim Gorman was in a San Francisco cult band called Lazy Racer which had an album produced by Glyn Johns. When Pete said he was looking for a new keyboard player, Johns played him the Lazy Racer album. Pete liked what he heard, so Johns called Gorman in San Francisco and told him he was now a member of The Who! He continued to play with The Who through their 1982 tour. John "Rabbit" Bundrick, The Who's usual keyboardist from 1979 on was not in The Who at the time. He had been fired after a violent, drunken incident in the summer of 1981. He was reinstated in Pete's solo band Deep End after The Who's 1983 breakup. Gorman went on to play with Paul Kantner in the late 1980's and with Jefferson Starship in the early 1990's. On the 1997 CD version of It's Hard there is a reprise of the bass/organ duet from 1'13 to 1'28 that was cut on the original and an echo is added to Roger's voice starting at 2'26 that wasn't in the original mix. Click here to see the original lyric sheet: Dangerous. The line "back to the stone age" is a reference to an infamous remark made by U.S. General Curtis LeMay in 1965 that in response to aggression by North Vietnam, the U.S. should "bomb them back to the stone age."

John's bass line on the 1997 version is from a different take and is mixed higher. The intellectual firebrand Camille Paglia said, "I would cite the Who's magnificent, rumbling 'Eminence Front', with its penetrating insights into psychology and politics, as an example of what an evolved punk can and should achieve." Click here to see the original lyric sheet: Eminence Front. According to R. Rowley, the background music is played on a Yamaha E70 organ. Click here for more details.

ONE LIFE'S ENOUGH 2'21
(Pete Townshend) 1982 Towser Tunes, Inc., administered by Longitude Music Co., BMI
Additional synthesizer: Tim Gorman

Along with "Glow Girl", one of the few Who songs to deal with reincarnation, a theme that also appears in Pete's solo work. See "You Came Back" on Scoop for another example. Click here to see the original lyric sheet: One Life's Enough.

Pete: "I'm in a kind of Catch-22 situation, because what I've done best for twenty years has damaged that part of my hearing. The only time I did it recently was on a couple of John's songs because it was what he wanted, and I came out of those two sessions with my ears ringing for a week. And I thought, 'Well, there's another db lost, you know.' I'm just very anxious to preserve my hearing." Click here to see the original lyric sheet: One At A Time.

WHY DID I FALL FOR THAT 3'18 (1997 CD 3'56)
(Pete Townshend) 1982 Towser Tunes, Inc., administered by Longitude Music Co., BMI

 
Pete: "I don't know how it is over in the States, but over here if you try to get in a conversation about arms buildup or nuclear weapons, people turn away and order another pint of Guinness, and they want to talk about bloody Arsenal! They're going to be dead tomorrow if they don't start thinking about it...but they're embarrassed; 'It's annoying...oh, don't talk about that! We're impotent, we're neuter.' Now that is what's happened to rock 'n' roll."

Six months after the release of It's Hard President Reagan would announce the SDI initiative, popularly known as "star wars"; an attempt to build a nuclear missile defense system Reagan was characterize as an "umbrella" against nuclear attack. The 1997 CD keeps the song going another 38 seconds past the point where the original mix faded out. Click here to see the original lyric sheet: Why Did I Fall For That.

CRY IF YOU WANT 4'35 (1997 CD 5'18)
(Pete Townshend) 1982 Towser Tunes, Inc., administered by Longitude Music Co., BMI

Roger: "I think the statement, the song that most captures what The Who feel at the moment is a song called 'Cry If You Want.' I think it should have been the single...I think that really does state how it feels to be 38 years old and singing in a rock band called The Who!"

Pete: "I think in people of our generation it expresses itself not as an aggressive frame of mind but rather a realization that we've been a pretty useless generation of people, I think. We've done very, very little. We haven't actually even fought for what we've believed in. We've been pacifistic, we've been spoiled by peace...I'm trying to deal with my life and trying to face up to my responsibilities as a human being. That's boring to seventeen- and eighteen-year old kids. They don't want to know how miserable their lives are going to be, how much hard work they're going to have to do when they're thirty or forty years old. They just want to believe that they can stand onstage with a guitar and change the world."

In the original version, Kenney's martial-style drumming doesn't begin until 35 seconds into the song. On the 1997 CD it has been extended back to the beginning of the song. That CD's version also extends the ending another 43 seconds for some more Townshend power chords. Click here to see the original lyric sheet: Cry If You Want.

BONUS TRACKS:
 
 

EMINENCE FRONT (LIVE) 5'44
(Pete Townshend) 1982 Towser Tunes, Inc., administered by Longitude Music Co., BMI
The only song from It's Hard to enter The Who's standard live repertoire. A live version also appears on the 1990 album Join Together.

DANGEROUS (LIVE) 3'48
(John Entwistle) Red Hot Music, BMI

Another song performed live only during the 1982 tour.

CRY IF YOU WANT (LIVE) 7'12
(Pete Townshend) 1982 Towser Tunes, Inc., administered by Longitude Music Co., BMI

Pete's opening remarks are from The Who's performance at The Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida November 27, 1982. It has been grafted onto the December 17 Toronto performance. The song has become an infrequent addition to The Who's mid-2000 live shows.

If you want to contact me about something on this page, click on my name. I want corrections!
Brian Cady

Return to Liner Notes Index