The 500 - #115 - The Who Sells Out - The Who

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album #:115
Album Title: The Who Sell Out 
Artist: The Who
Genre: Rock, Art Pop, Power Pop, Mod Pop
Recorded: Multiple Studios in London, Nashville, Los Angeles and New York

Released: December, 1967
My age at release: 2
How familiar was I with it before this week: Somewhat
Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #316, dropping 201 places

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: I Can See For Miles

In the mid‑eighties, during a stretch when my Who obsession was in full bloom, I must have picked up The Who Sell Out a dozen times in local record shops, debating whether to add it to my growing collection. The cover alone made it hard to resist. Guitarist/singer Pete Townshend rolling an oversized deodorant stick under his arm beside lead vocalist Roger Daltrey, soaking in a bathtub of baked beans. Flip it over and the spoof ads continue. There is drummer Keith Moon smearing acne cream across his face, and bassist John Entwistle draped in cheetah print with a bikini‑clad model on his arm, pitching a Charles Atlas fitness program. It was all so wonderfully odd.

Back cover to The Who Sells Out.

Despite the lure of that wonderfully bizarre cover, I never actually bought the album. After spending time listening to it on Spotify recently, I wish I had. The whole record is a bright, mischievous collage of styles and sounds. It runs the gamut, from the satirical mini‑commercials (the brassy, almost Monty Pythonesque Heinz Baked Beans is my favourite) to explosive rockers such as I Can See For Miles. But then it surprises the listener with tender moments such as I Can’t Reach You or Sunrise. I played it for my wife on a drive from London to Niagara Falls and found myself pointing out how each track feels like a quick, clever burst of creativity. If one doesn’t grab you, just wait a minute. The Who will soon be chasing the next idea.

Album sleeve for single, I Can See For Miles.

There are several versions of this album floating around on Spotify. You can start with the original mono release, 13 tracks exactly as listeners heard them in 1967. There’s also the 1995 Deluxe Edition, which adds 10 bonus cuts, including a wonderfully unhinged psychedelic rock take on In the Hall of the Mountain King by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843–1907). And for the completists, the 2009 multi‑disc set offers both the stereo and original mono mixes, plus roughly thirty additional outtakes, ads, and curiosities that reveal just how much fun the band was having in the studio.

As I was scrolling through the various editions on Spotify, one cover stopped me cold. It featured a brunette woman standing in for Townshend and Daltrey, complete with deodorant roll‑on and a bathtub of baked beans. The album was titled Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out. Intrigued, I pressed play and was instantly rewarded. What I’d stumbled upon was a fully a cappella re‑creation of the record. Every instrumental line and harmony was not simply sung, but magnificently layered, textured and performed entirely by the voice of the woman on that cover, the astonishingly talented Petra Haden.

Album cover to Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sells Out.

My research, which had begun with the four lads from West London, England, took a sharp turn and landed me across the Atlantic with a multi‑instrumentalist from New York City. Born in 1971, she is one of three triplet sisters, the daughters of the legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden. Among his many accomplishments, Charlie spent years playing with Ornette Coleman. Their shared credits include the 1959 record The Shape of Jazz to Come, an album I wrote about in September, 2023, when it appeared at #248 on The 500.

Charlie Haden (1937-2014)

Musical brilliance clearly runs deep in the family. Her sister, Rachel Haden, plays bass for the Los Angeles rock band That Dog, while their other triplet, Tanya, is an accomplished artist, cellist, and singer, married to one of my all‑time favourite entertainers – actor, musician and comedian Jack Black. Imagine the creativity bursting out at their family reunions? I'd gladly man the barbeque just to be a "fly-on-the-wall" observer.

Jack Black and his wife, Tanya Haden.

As the story goes, it was musician and producer Mike Watt who suggested that Petra Haden record this all-vocal version of The Who’s third record, Sells Out. Watt recently toured with Iggy Pop and The Stooges (three records on The 500) and was also with the punk band Minutemen. My late friend Claudio Sossi wrote about the album Double Nickles on the Dime (#413) back in July, 2020. At Watt’s urging, Petra began this massive project.

Mike Watt.

She took the idea seriously, and ambitiously, with the goal of recreating the entire original album front-to-back -- not just the songs but the commercials, textures and instrumental lines, using only layered vocals. Every guitar riff, bass line, drum fill, horn blast, jingle, and harmony is sung by Petra herself, meticulously overdubbed track-by-track. It took her three years to complete and, when she decided to perform it live, she needed to assemble a 10-woman choir, which she dubbed The Sellouts.

Petra Haden (middle) and the Sellouts, perform the album live.

As it turns out, I saw Petra Haden perform long before I knew who she was. In 2006, my pal and frequent guest blogger, Steve “Lumpy” Sullivan, scored us box seats to see Bob Dylan at the then new John Labatt Centre in London, Ontario. The opening act was the Foo Fighters, who were performing their hard rock catalogue with acoustic arrangements. Providing violin and backing vocals on that tour was none other than the talented Ms. Haden.

My ticket stub for Bob Dylan, The Foo Fighters and Petra Haden.

I didn't end up buying The Who Sell Out in the ’80s, but after re-issues, re-discoveries, chance encounters, and one astonishing a cappella cover, it found me. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: trust your curiosity, follow the weird detours, and never underestimate where a baked‑bean bathtub might lead.

The 500 - #116 - Out Of Our Heads - The Rolling Stones

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album #:116
Album Title: Out Of Our Heads
Artist: The Rolling Stones
Genre: Blues Rock, British R&B, Blue Eyed Soul, Rock and Roll
Recorded: Multiple Studios in London, Chicago, Los Angeles

Released: U.S. Version released July, 1965
My age at release: 19 days
How familiar was I with it before this week: Somewhat
Is it on the 2020 list? No

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: I Can't Get No (Satisfaction)

Many years ago, I received a birthday card styled as the front page of a newspaper. It featured the major events of 1965, my birth year,  along with pop‑culture trivia and a roster of celebrities born on the same day. It looked something like this version I found on the internet:

The #1 hit on U.S. radio charts on the day I was born was (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones, which was released as a single a month before their third studio record, Out Of Our Heads, hit shelves. It was the first of eight #1 singles for the English rockers and one of 23 to hit the Top 10. Initially, it was only played on underground, pirate radio stations because the lyrics, which reference sexual frustration and commercialism, were deemed too provocative for public airways.

Album jacked for the single release of (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.

The song begins with one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in modern music and it was one that would influence rock and roll bands for years. Before 1965, riffs were cleanly toned, blues-based and served the vocal melody.

Guitarist Keith Richard's fuzz-soaked repetitive hook flipped that script. The riff became the focus of the song, and everything else hung off it. That approach to song writing became the blueprint for future superstar bands, including Led Zeppelin, The Who, Aerosmith, AC/DC and every hopeful garage band rocker since.

Richard's legendary riff as a music score and guitar tab.

Legend has it the riff came to Richards in his sleep. He later said he didn’t even realize he’d written it until the next morning when he found his Phillips cassette recorder beside his acoustic guitar. On the tape were about two minutes of guitar playing, including the now‑famous riff, followed by the sound of his pick dropping to the floor and roughly 40 minutes of snoring.

Keith Richards in 1965.

A popular ice‑breaker I've encountered at staff meetings and education conferences borrows from the world of boxing and pro wrestling, where fighters enter the arena to loud, high‑energy “entrance music.”

Whenever the question about my “entrance music” comes up, I usually default to something heavy and brash from Rage Against the Machine or Soundgarden. However, I think that needs to change. Satisfaction was literally the song filling the air on the day I entered the world, so it feels right to honour that coincidence and make it my choice the next time I’m asked. The riff certainly works, even if the lyrics cast me as a bit of a pessimist.

Granted, there are some other, ironic and funny Top 10 choices for entrance music that also turned 60 last summer.

I Can't Help Myself - The Four Tops
What The World Needs Now Is Love - Del Shannon

What's New Pussycat? - Tom Jones

Yes I'm Ready - Barbara Mason

Mr. Tambourine Man - The Byrds

How about you? What songs were in the Top 10 the month you were born?

Would any make a powerful, or comedic, impact as your "entrance music"?

The 500 - #117 - Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs - Derek and the Dominos

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album #:117
Album Title: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Artist: Derek and the Dominos
Genre: Blues Rock
Recorded: Criteria Studios (Miami, Florida)

Released: November, 1970
My age at release: 5
How familiar was I with it before this week: Quite well
Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #226, dropping 109 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Layla

In a way, the story of this record, the only release from British blues rock sextet Derek and The Dominos, begins in the west Arabian Peninsula during the 7th Century.

Bedouin poet Qays ibn al-Moullawwah was just a boy tending flocks of sheep with his cousin, Layla. The pair belonged to the Banu Amir tribe, and their early bonding blossomed into a deep, but forbidden love as they became adults. Their relationship gave rise to a legend and then a poem titled majnūn laylā, sometimes anglicized to Layla and Majnun, but better translated to Layla's Mad Lover.

A modern sketch of al-Moullawwah by
Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran.

As the story goes, when al-Moullawwah and Layla fell in love as adolescents, he began composing poems about his feelings for her – feelings which became obsessive. Some locals began calling him "Majnun" -- which translates to "mentally unhinged".

Undaunted, al-Moullawwah asked for her hand in marriage. Her father refused and, shortly after, forcibly married her off to a noble and rich merchant of the Thaqif tribe in the city of Ta'if -- a city that still exists in Saudi Arabia.

When word of her marriage reached Majnun, he fled the tribal camp and vanished into the desert. His family, despairing of his return, left food for him among the rocks and scrub. Those who passed through the wilderness claimed they saw him wandering alone, reciting poetry aloud or carving verses in the sand with a slender stick.

Majnun in the Wilderness -- unknown artist.

Layla moved to a place in Northern Arabia with her husband, where she became ill and died. In some versions, she dies of heartbreak from not being able to see her beloved. Majnun was later found dead in the wilderness in 688 AD, near Layla's grave. He had, reportedly, carved three verses of poetry on a rock nearby They are the last three verses attributed to him.

Part of a poem composed after Layla's
marriage and before Majnun's descent
into madness.

The story of Layla and Majnun has inspired more than a thousand years of artistic creation across cultures, languages and art forms. Originating in 7th‑century Arabic poetry, it was transformed into one of the great masterpieces of Persian literature by Nizami Ganjavi and went on to influence poets from India to the Ottoman world.

The legend has been adapted into operas, ballets, plays, films, miniature paintings and modern dance works, and it continues to shape contemporary storytelling. In Western culture, its theme echoes in works such as Romeo and Juliet and in other stories, including the ill-fated Abelard and Heloise.

In particular, the theme is incorporated in modern popular music, most famously by Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon, whose composition, Layla, appears on this week's record by Derek and the Dominos. Across time and geography, the story endures as a powerful symbol of forbidden love, artistic obsession, and the idea that love itself can become a form of mad devotion.

Layla single album jacket,

Derek and the Dominos were a short‑lived but hugely influential blues‑rock band formed in spring,1970, by Eric Clapton, alongside Bobby Whitlock (keyboards, vocals), Carl Radle (bass), and Jim Gordon (drums). All four musicians had previously played together in Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, a touring soul‑rock ensemble that Clapton joined after the breakup of his high‑profile supergroup Blind Faith.

Delaney & Bonnie Bramlett were an American husband
and wife duo who performed soul, rock, blues and country music.

Wanting to escape the pressure and celebrity attached to his name, Clapton adopted the alias “Derek” so the group could function as a more anonymous, collaborative band rather than a star‑led project. The group solidified while backing George Harrison on sessions for All Things Must Pass (#433 on The 500) and soon began recording their own music in Miami with guest guitarists Duane Allman and Dave Mason.

Clapton (left) with Allman in 1970.

The band released just one studio album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, which is now regarded as one of the greatest albums in rock history. Despite the creative success, Derek and the Dominos fell apart in 1971, less than a year after forming. The breakup was driven by a combination of factors: severe drug addiction (especially Clapton’s heroin use), internal tensions, exhaustion from touring, and emotional strain following Duane Allman’s death, which happened within a year of this release. Attempts to record a second album collapsed, and the group quietly dissolved without a formal announcement. Although brief, Derek and the Dominos left a lasting legacy, defined by raw emotional intensity and a single monumental recording.

Allman died following a motorcycle crash, he was 24.

In tracing the arc from the ancient Arabic poem to Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the connection becomes more than a clever literary reference: it becomes a shared emotional architecture. The legend of Layla and Majnun is not simply a story about romance, but about love that cannot be acted upon, love that survives only through expression. Majnun’s devotion is rendered through poetry whispered to himself, traced in desert sand and finally, painfully, carved into stone. Centuries later, Eric Clapton encountered this same emotional aching in his own life when he fell in love with model Pattie Boyd who was married to his best mate and Beatle, George Harrison.

Boyd in a photo shoot - 1968.

The song Layla functions as a direct emotional translation of the poem rather than a retelling of its plot. Its urgent opening riff captures obsession and desperation, while its famous coda slows into resignation and longing, perhaps mirroring the two emotional states of Majnun’s journey from pursuit to acceptance. Across the album, Clapton and the Dominos repeatedly circle the same themes found in the Arabic tradition. Love is represented as fixation, suffering and, ultimately, something that can reshape identity rather than resolve itself.

George Harrison and Pattie Boyd wedding (1966).

In both stories, the beloved Layla is not fully possessed, yet becomes immortal through art. Ultimately, the recording of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs demonstrates how ancient stories persist not only because they have been preserved, but because they are perpetually re‑felt.

Clapton did not borrow the name Layla to decorate a song. Instead, he recognized himself in Majnun’s condition. In a way, the album stands as proof that across cultures, centuries and languages, the same truth about love unfulfilled. If it cannot be lived, it can be preserved in poetry, visual art and music. It can become something that outlasts the emotions that inspired it. In that sense, the poetry scratched into shifting desert sands and a 1970 rock album are doing the same work. Both are bearing witness to a love that could not be resolved.

CODA

Boyd divorced Harrison in 1977 and married Clapton in 1979. However, that marriage lasted only a decade. In 1991, she met property developer Ron Weston, whom she married in 2015. They are still together.

There are seven Harrison and Clapton songs specifically written about Boyd (Listed below). Every one of them is on an album that is on The 500 list. I wonder if Weston has any on his playlists?

I Need You - The Beatles (1965)

If I Needed Someone - The Beatles (1965)

Something - The Beatles (1969)

For You Blue - The Beatles (1970)

Layla - Derek and the Dominos (1970)

Bell Bottom Blues - Derek and the Dominos (1970)

Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton (1977)

The 500 - #118 - Late Registration - Kanye West

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album #:118
Album Title: Late Registration
Artist: Kanye West
Genre: Hip Hop, Pop Rap, Progressive Rap
Recorded: Three Studios in Hollywood, One in New York

Released: August, 2005
My age at release: 40
How familiar was I with it before this week: A couple songs
Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #117, rising one spot
Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Gold Digger

I love the way music transforms. How a melody can slip out of one era and reappear in another wearing a completely different outfit. How something sacred can become secular, and then become something else entirely. I think of it as sonic alchemy (although I suspect I'm not the first to use that term). For me, it defines the way one artist melts down an old sound and recasts it into something new. Eventually, a new creation exists that is unrecognizable from the original source material.

It reminds me of the way my classroom lessons evolve over the years, and how each new cohort of students finds inventive ways to remix the challenges I give them. I often call these “low floor, high ceiling” activities because the entry point is accessible to everyone, but the possibilities stretch as far as their imagination. One of my favourites, a simple rock‑blaster coding game, has been reimagined for more than a decade in ways that still surprise me.

Gold Digger, the second single released from Kanye West's sophomore studio release, Late Registration, is a fascinating tale of sonic alchemy that takes place over more than a century. It is also a musical odyssey that continues today and, I suspect, will keep going beyond my lifetime.

It all started in 1901 when American gospel songwriter William Lamartin Thompson penned the Christian hymnal Jesus Is All The World To Me. Thompson, born in East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1847, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in his early twenties. After facing rejection from commercial publishers in New York, he founded The W. L. Thompson Music Company in 1875. It soon became a prominent gospel publishing house and allowed Thompson to retain the rights to his music -- a rarity at the time.

William Lamartin Thompson

Fast forward 50 years and the gospel quartet The Southern Tones borrowed the hymn's melodic structure and transformed it into the song It Must Be Jesus. The reworked piece became a modest hit, mainly on Southern gospel radio stations where, one afternoon in 1954, singer Ray Charles was listening to it.

It Must Be Jesus - by The Southern Tones.

Charles secularized the gospel groove, a decision that shocked some church communities at the time, and wrote the soul song I Got A Woman. Charles kept the melodic contour of the song, as well as its rhythmic bounce. He also made use of the "call and response" lyrics, a technique that he would return to with his biggest hit, What I'd Say, in 1959.

Album jacket for the single, I Got A Woman (1954).

Fast‑forward another 50 years and Kanye West is in the studio, zeroing in on a tiny slice of Ray Charles’s I Got a Woman, the moment where Charles belts out that unmistakable line, "She gives me money, when I'm in need". Kanye lifts that fragment, reshapes it, and drops it into the foundation of his beat, building a new melodic world on top of Ray’s groove before laying down his rap.

To strengthen the Ray Charles connection, West recruited actor, comedian and singer Jamie Foxx to sing the a capella (vocal) introduction to the song. Foxx had won the Academy Award a year before for his portrayal of Charles in the biopic Ray.

Movie poster for Ray, starring Jamie Foxx.

So, a Christian hymn from 1901 informed a gospel hit from 1954 which was reworked into a R&B hit for Ray Charles, which, 50 years later, was sampled in a platinum selling hip-hop classic. That sonic alchemy continues today. In 2025, American rapper Freddie Gibbs partnered with DJ/producer The Alchemist (real name Alan Maman) to release the song I Still Love H.E.R. which samples West's Gold Digger. The beat, indeed, goes on.