Profile/Copyright © 1971, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
They pulverize. They loon. They smolder. They give air raids, not concerts. They constitute the only entertainment act this side of war movies and westerns that always guns down everything in sight before the curtain comes down.
Their echo has been known to cross time zones. You can hear them for miles. If someone had given their lead-guitarist, Peter Townshend, the musical score of The Sound of Music, he would have produced The Guns of Navarrone. The guitar is less a musical instrument in his hands than a sawed-off guit-gun.
To appreciate The Who's shows, you first have to survive them. The temptation is strong here to urge you to find yourself a crash helmet, goggles and flameproof suit before you read further, so you don't come out of just this typeset exposure to them deaf, dumb, and blind.
You see, they're not a blast, but a blasting. It's a point of contention whether this rock band or San Francisco has hosted the most earthquakes.
However, it's not true that they once picked up the town of Shepherd's Bush and shook it upside down till all its groupies fell out.
The town was Leeds.
I don't have to tell you Who I'm talking about. They don't need advance publicity—they can be identified by the quaking ground. The Stones may come on meaner, Led Zeppelin louder, but The Who is rock ‘n’ roll's super-destroyo act, the most devastating noise machine rock has ever known.
Buying a ticket for a Who show has always been—and will always be—like paying for a punctured eardrum. On an average night, they make any World War II newsreel seem about as explosive as "The St. Dominic's Girls Choir Sings ‘Tantum Ergo.’" Like, the name for most of The Who's six tons of road equipment isn't "amplifiers," but "Sound Towers."
Their best noise dates back to when recording executives considered "feedback" an engineering problem that needed a good looking into.
It's not settled, exactly, who first made performance use of feedback—the Yardbirds or Hendrix or The Who—but regardless: a Who record like, say, Live at Leeds, isn't a record at all—it's a hand grenade with the pin out (the only kind of pin you'll ever hear drop when The Who's on).
Why, the night after Live at Leeds release, the International Who Fan Password became "Huh?" It hasn't changed since.
For a reporter, the closest thing to getting sent to a Who concert is covering a fire. I mean, when this country finally and fully discovered The Who at Monterey in 1967, the big question on most city editors' minds was if Her Majesty was using the U.S. as a testing ground for The Bomb. Or a moonshot.
These guys were so high-voltage, they showed up on radar, for crying out loud. (In England, word was, Lloyd's of London would rather insure a Johnny Tremain statue in the park than a rock critic who took in Who concerts. "Send your seismologist," Lloyd's would tell editors.)
Way back when they were four teen Mods out of England's Shepherd's Bush district in 1964, The Who were welcoming any kind of listener—with or without seismologist credentials.
Few knew Who they were, only that if the lead-guitarist didn't break his strange habit of shoving his guitar through amplifiers, and then swinging the remains by the neck all over the stage, Parliament would make him get it licensed as a firearm.
From the start, a Who show was less a concert than a gunfight. It was all sparks: a sunset Shootout at the fantasy factory between John Wayne of the adult generation and Rocky Raccoon of the young generation.
But what sparks! They take a stage about as subtly as a landslide, lash through an atomic-life-per-show of an hour and a half, destroy everything within kicking distance, grill the audience, exit on one monster, ear-blowing, supernova burst, and, supposedly, hop a Magic Bus to their favorite thunder cloud.
The art of The Who is to turn a Battle of the Bands into a Demolition Derby. Not acid rock here, but ashes rock. Keith Moon, enshrined in his silvery drumset with the full lunar glow of a sapphire among diamonds, gattling your ears and tattooing your emotions.
Roger Daltrey, a tough and dazzling Jolly Roger of a lead-singer, whirling his microphone Marlboro-cowboy-style over his head, lassoing in his generation. John Entwistle, a discreetly spidery sight with a high-velocity bass, standing still and formidable as a speck-lit airport at midnight.
And finally, Townshend—The Who's swinging, slashing, stomping, skyrocketing lead-guitar. It's a good thing the only other stringed instrument on stage when The Who plays is John Entwistle's.
Throw Alvin Lee, Jeff Beck, Stevie Winwood, Jimmy Page or the like in there one night and you'd have a Japanese wooden sword fight.
To wit, Peter Townshend onstage is less a guitarist than a pilot. When someone tells you he's about to solo, they don't mean listen up. They mean clear your mental runways so the lead-guitarist can fly out of Entwistle Air Base and take you on his private flight of fancy.
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Before long, someone went and nicknamed Peter Townshend "Birdman." He'd flash his guitar's neck across bright stage lights, then swing his right arm in full circles round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round, chording with split-second precision each time his hand windmilled past his instrument.
Every time you'd see the feat, you were sure if Birdman's right wing went round one more time, he'd go into a tailspin. In fact, he's not only not of this earth when he's performing his stuff, but actually writes many Who songs on airplanes.
And, of course, what's an aerial act without fireworks? You get smoke bombs, smoldering amplifiers, and sizzling guitars for the price of demolition to this one.
You even witness a burning of the stake when Peter Birdman sends his guitar up in flames. The guy's coveralls either have an asbestos lining or he's Evil Knievel grounded. He probably watches volcanoes erupt for relaxation.
The grist for Townshend's composing mill is any and all of daily life, the style from thunderstruck chords to—so help me--pinball-wizard opera.
Now, I know anybody'd figure that The Who—with all the anti-noise-ordinance violations they've managed — would do for opera something akin to what Pat Boone did for Little Richard with "Tutti Frutti," or what Elvis Presley did for Italy with "It's Now or Never." In other words, nothing too pleasant. Right?
But this guy Townshend, he's a quick one. His sense of pitch is as acute as a bat's. The last time he made an off-key sound, he had a bonnet on his head and a diaper around his waist.
He could play by eye, let alone by ear. Coming out of a musical family, Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend learned a lot hanging out at home in the drawing room.
By creating Tommy, rock's first opera, he showed the world a mind adrift in clouds of composing genius.
He thereby also gave rock its crowning classical moment on June 7, 1970, when the gold curtain rose from the stage floor of New York's Metropolitan Opera House and there, beneath the famous crystal chandeliers, stood The Who, ready not to boogie, but to, so to speak, opera.
Yet the really amazing thing about Townshend and his Who is not so much the fact that they could succeed phenomenally with a rock opera, of all things, but that they never did knuckle under to a softer sound.
It's like the only four people I know of who ever accused this rock band of "selling out" were The Who.
And it is The Who—more than anyone else except the Stones—who keep hard rock hard. I mean, you listen to "My Generation" once and you don't get fooled again.
You don't settle for hits anymore. You go for direct hits. Like Townshend himself, you get so you can sniff out good rock.
In fact, it is the pure quality of Peter Townshend’s kind of built-in hit-detector that makes it difficult to pinpoint in a phrase or sentence his accomplishments with The Who.
To describe it as "sensory overload," as Ken Kesey did, is like describing the cause of death in an electrocution as heart stoppage.
To bill The Who as "Maximum R&B," as they were billed in their early days at the Wardour Street Marquee Club, is like billing Van Gogh as "Maximum Oil Colors."
To call their stage behavior "obstreperous" is like calling the ship's log of the Titanic "unpleasant."
No, I think The Who's greatest achievement is so special as to be not physical, but spiritual, if you'll pardon the word in a Who article.
"Two wars," Peter Townshend told the London Evening Standard in 1965, "gave youngsters something to identify with. Our generation had to find something else."
What it comes down to for me, then, is that in part because of this band I know Who my generation is.
I can see my generation.
I can feel it.
I can touch it.
And can I ever hear it!
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CD: The Who, Who’s Next. MCA, 2001.
Book: Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who. St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
Websites: http://www.petetownshend.co.uk, http://www.thewho.net
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