The Esquire article

This February's Esquire's article:

Who's Dead?--Mark Jacobson

"Call this an old fart's lament, but the Who have been going downhill for
three decades, since the 1967 release of The Who Sell Out, an event that
roughy coincided with yours truly's having the top of his head blown off at
the Fillmore Ballroom during a cataclysmic rendition of "I Can See for
Miles."

That's how it was with the Who:  Dumber than the Stones, not as musical as
the Beatles, more gimmickily pretentious than either, they nevethless
possessed the largest capacity for transcendence.  I saw Coltrane play "A
Love Supreme," and the thrash of Pete Townshend's windmilling arm against a
soon-to-be-destroyed Gibson brought me closer to the Spirit.

Ah, the things you do to pay homage to the totem of long-vanished youth, I
thought recently as I drove the doleful Long Island parkways to see the band
play at the Nassau Coliseum, the yahoo-intensive home of tractor pulls and
WWF Texas Death Matches.  The Who have been so corny for so long.  It's that
old UK music-hall mawkishness that did them in somewhere in the middle of the
"See me, feel me" chorus of the elephantine Tommy.  It was probably always
there, back in the too-clever verses of "A Quick One While He's Away," but
that's when Keith Moon's fearless anarchy reigned and before Tonshend's
grandiloquent narrative sentimentality totally swamped his more trenchant
"Can't Explain" side.

So what could one expect from Townshend's most recent
road-show/opera/meal-ticket exhumation, Quadrophenia?  The loosely synapsed
saga of the war between the frill-sleeved mods and proto-soccer-hooligan
rockers was uncompellingly sodden when the album came out in 1973.  Yet here,
under the four championship banners of the New York Islanders hockey club,
the Who were rocking the house.  Twenty thousand people, the majority of whom
hadn't even spilled their first Bud when Keith Moon died, shouted the lyrics
of second-rate self-derivative Who tunes like "The Real Me" and "I'm One."

In these situations, the old fart must hold his tongue.  What use is it to
buttonhole these latter-day CD consumers, screaming, "This is not the good
stuff!  Your acceptance of this pale professionalism only encourages them to
devalue themselves!:  This, of course, would be beside the point.  For, truth
be told, the Who still sound like the Who, which is not nothing.  For sure,
there's little chance that Townshend will bust off the neck of that $2,000
acoustic guitar he no longer windmills.  But who else can say they've been
going downhill for three decades and still can fly up like Icarus, toward the
eye of God?"


So there you go folks.

                                                 "Discuss!"

Amy "part-of-the-majority-who-had-yet-to-spill-my-first-beer" Dresser