Petra Haden's A Cappella Who: Say What?!

Haden's "The Who Sell Out" mimics the phony commercials used in the band's parody of pop music's commercialism. (Alicia J. Rose)

Imagine faithfully re-creating a classic album by a legendary rock band . . . using only your voice.

That's exactly what Petra Haden has done with "Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out." Haden has replicated not only the Roger Daltrey-led vocals on that 1967 LP but also Pete Townshend's guitar, John Entwistle's bass, Keith Moon's drums and the sound of assorted other instruments. She even performed the commercial parodies and radio jingles that made "The Who Sell Out" one of rock's first concept albums, a tribute to and parody of Top 40 radio and English pirate radio (in this case a pirate station that plays nothing but Who songs).

And Haden did it all on an eight-track cassette recorder, intending it solely as a gift for the friend who planted the crazy notion in her head.

Oddly enough, Haden had never heard 1967's "The Who Sell Out" until she embarked on the project, and wasn't even really familiar with the Who. One of jazz bassist Charlie Haden's triplet daughters, she was born in 1972. Early on, she developed an extraordinary ability to vocalize the sounds of instruments she heard in jazz and classical music. By the '90s, Haden had established herself as singer-violinist for the indie-pop group That Dog and as a key player in the Los Angeles pop and experimental music scene.

Classic rock, she admits, was not an area of passion or expertise for her.

"I wasn't a Who fan, never had any of their records," says Haden. "I approached this project strictly to learn how to use an eight-track so I could do other things, and also just for fun, to see what could come out of it."

The recorder had been given to her by bassist-singer and Minutemen co-founder Mike Watt. Haden, who's known Watt since she was 12 and attended a joint Minutemen-Charlie Haden concert, had played violin and done background vocals on some Watt albums. He was a big fan of her 1996 album "Imaginaryland," also an a cappella solo project.

In 2000 Haden was recovering from serious injuries, after a car hit her while she was crossing the street. Hoping to take her mind off her medical problems, Watt gave her a Tascam 488 recorder with "The Who Sell Out" loaded on one track, leaving seven blank for her to fill with her voice. Over the next three-plus years, Haden hit the rewind button more times than she cares to remember, working on the project intermittently, with no plan to have anyone other than Watt hear it.

"When I started this Who project, I wasn't even thinking this was a big risk," says Haden. "I just approached it like I was doing a Bach piece. On 'Imaginaryland,' I sing Bach's Prelude No. 2 in C Minor simply because I love it and wanted to hear what the outcome would be. . . . I wasn't thinking of all the Who fans out there who might be mad at me.

"And I never thought that Pete Townshend would ever hear it!"

Not only has Townshend heard it, he loves it.

"It sounded like a crazy idea," Townshend recalled recently via e-mail.

"When I heard it I loved it immediately. Obviously something more than music is going on here, and that something is Petra herself. The sound she makes is so delightful, girlish but not cloying. She's a really good musician because she listens -- maybe this is her jazz background. She may have gotten a couple of words wrong (who cares) but what she gets right is the detail in the harmonies and modalities of the music. The songs come to life in a way that makes me feel I'm hearing them for the first time."

Now considered a classic, "The Who Sell Out" wasn't a commercial success, though it did produce the Who's only Top 10 American hit, "I Can See for Miles." When the album was released, Townshend called it "an absurd album of melody and humor," adding that "pop music should, we think, be understandable and entertaining." That's where the radio jingles and phony commercials (for Heinz baked beans and Odorono deodorant, among other goods) came in. But the album also contained some of Townshend's most exquisite love songs ("Our Love Was," the Brian Wilson-like "Sunrise"), alongside the subdued psychedelia of "Relax" and "Armenia City in the Sky," one of the few Who songs written by an outsider (John "Speedy" Keene, briefly famous soon after for writing and singing Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air").

"I Can See for Miles" and "I Can't Reach You," Townshend observes in his e-mail, "were always great songs, but what happens to them in Petra's hands is that they become messages from soul to soul rather than bellows from bloke to bird or bloke to bloke across the scratchy Pirate Radio airwaves. It's simple, she takes a more intimate approach and I'm so delighted the music still works. I'm a big fan of home studio recording too, so I like that aspect of this CD, that it was done on such simple equipment."

The equipment may have been simple, but the challenges weren't. After all, realistically, there was no way Haden or anyone else could mimic Moon's distinctive drum sound, Entwistle's thundering bass or Townshend's guitar crescendos.

"My biggest concern was doing the drum parts because I don't have that knack for imitating drums -- I'm not a rapper," Haden says. "I only had seven tracks and I was thinking, 'How am I going to fit the drums? Mike Watt loves Keith Moon and I don't want to let him down, but I'm going to have to put some kind of drums on there.' So I just filled the space with whatever kind of drum sounds I could do. The thing I wanted to concentrate the most on was the harmonies and the music."

"The Who Sell Out" is the most harmony-rich recording the band ever made, with some passages evoking Beach Boys complexity.

Haden didn't always get the lyrics right by listening -- it didn't occur to her to Google them -- and there are some odd gaps, like the missing payoff line in "Heinz Baked Beans."

"I know it took three years for me to do it, but I just did it as a side thing when I had time to do it," Haden explains. "I would do another song and another song, and I wasn't always paying attention to lyrics. Now I'm coming across people who are kind of insulted that I got some of the words wrong, but I really just did it for fun, just to see what would happen."

Haden especially enjoyed doing the Radio London jingles and faux-commercials, noting that "when I was a little kid, for fun I used to tape-record pretend radio shows."

The comical commercials are central to "The Who Sell Out." In the '60s, Townshend had been entranced by Top 40's slick and smooth integration of music, promotional jingles and ads, seeing it as the larger cultural context in which pop music was meant to be heard. In fact, Who manager Kit Lambert had, at Townshend's suggestion, tried to sell actual commercial space between the tracks on "The Who Sell Out."

"I always thought about the Who as a kind of billboard for the frustrated ideas and disaffections of our fans," Townshend writes. "We reflected frustration, but also longing. We knew our generation would become the greatest consumers of all time: I hoped to become part of the satirical self-critique that I sensed would follow. The band didn't always get it, but our managers did. Selling music now to advertising agencies who want to use nostalgia or other triggering to attract attention to their products is a natural part of what I've always done. I've always sold my music. First act of Philistinism in my view was selling it to that bunch of reprobates called the Who. From such depths, one can only rise."

Watt loved the tracks Haden played for him. When the project seemed concluded, he sent a tape to New Jersey radio host Irwin Chussid, America's foremost champion of strange music. Chussid in turn sent it to Bar-None label head Glenn Morrow, who talked Haden into making it available to a larger audience. She did a little tweaking and cleaning via the studio computer program Pro Tools. Even so, the album, released at the end of February, is a lo-fi wonder.

And Haden, who recently did an album of eclectic cover songs with guitarist Bill Frisell, has convened several rehearsals with a female choir.

"I've always wanted to have a choir to sing the 'Imaginaryland' stuff," she reports. "We practiced 'I Can See for Miles' and it took some work to get all the harmonies -- we had to listen to it over and over." Eventually, she says, she wants to play "The Who Sell Out" live, commercials included.

Townshend, who has been working with Roger Daltrey on the first album of new Who material since 1982 and is helping plan an animated version of "Tommy," sees some key connections between 1967's "The Who Sell Out" and 2005's "Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out."

"I spent some time with Chris Stamp" -- Who manager until 1978 -- "recently, talking about the original record. We recalled that until we came up with the idea of collecting all the disparate material we had as a spoof radio show, it felt like there was no record ready. . . . We were short of material and desperate not to have to go back into the studio again. . . .

"The format provided the answer. It also provided the sleeve design. Petra looks nicer in beans than Roger Daltrey. Actually she looks nicer than any of us, with or without beans. I can't wait to meet her soon and demonstrate that this grey haired old guy I am today can still have a conversation -- just as long as you young people speak up, and don't mumble. I'm honoured by Petra in the highest manner possible -- as a musician she has listened to the original album very, very carefully, then interpreted the music. She makes me feel like Mozart. I so wish Keith Moon, John Entwistle and John Keene were alive today to hear this. I know they would feel the same."