Orange County Weekly Review

["B.W. Radley" <bwradley@earthlink.net>]

In response to not only this review, but a number of rather vicious comments
that followed:

Before all of you get your knickers in a twist over this review, please
consider the points it raises:

1.  TICKET PRICES.  The contention is that at a high of $146.50 the price of
tickets were out of line.  The following is compiled from Ticketmaster
current (as of this evening) listing of the most popular concerts on sale.
This is limited to those concerts that are scheduled for the Southern
California area and list the high ticket price.

Red Hot Chili Peppers--$35.00 (Irvine)
Jimmy Page/Black Crowes--$81.50 (Irvine)
Phish--$24.00 (Irvine)
Barbara Steisand--$2,500 (Staples Center)
Pearl Jam--$30.00 (Blockbuster Pavilion--Devore, CA)
Tina Turner--$98.00 (Staples Center)
AC DC--$45.00 (Blockbuster)
Counting Crows and Live--$45.00 (Irvine)
Tim (Don't Call Me Tug) McGraw and Faith Hill--$59.50 (Bakersfield)
Christina Aguilera--$37.50 (Universal Amphitheater)
Creed--$33.00 (Irvine)
Iron Maiden--$45.00 (Irvine)
Luther Vandross & Boyz II Men--$85.25 (Irvine)
Neil Young--$128.50 (Greek Theater--Los Angeles)

At $146.50 for the best seat (and as I had it I can vouch for the price)
compared to most of the other concerts on this list, one could reasonably
conclude that the prices may be somewhat higher than one might expect for a
garden variety concert.  (Steisand's concerts are being billed as her last
ever--gee, does this sound familiar?)  However, taking into account The
Who's place in history, one could understand a higher than average price.
But more than Neil Young, who if not as important an artist in Rock history
as The Who, at least still has an active recording career?  Perhaps not.
Well, the old laws of supply and demand still apply.  If 17,000 or so people
were not willing to shell out that kind of money, they wouldn't have bought
the tickets.

Does anyone deny the comments attributed to PT in the LA Times?  If so, I
can assure you that I read that interview and those comments were most
certainly there.  (Of course, one might question whether or not PT's own
marital problems might not have played some factor in the decision to tour.)

2.	MERCHANDISE.	This is a point where I do take issue with the reviewer.
Granted most of the tee-shirts did not have the most original of designs,
but I don't believe that for concert tee-shirts, the prices were out of
line.  At both Irvine and the Hollywood Bowl, most of the tee-shirts were
selling for $30.00.  When I saw Bruce Springsteen in May, tee-shirts were
selling for $45.00.

Personally even at $30.00, the price was a little too rich for my blood for
a stupid tee-shirt.  But then, I bought a tee-shirt for $10.00 from an
enterprising young man in the parking lot.

The best deal that I saw was the Lifehouse boxed set for $65.00, which is a
good $20.00 less than the import price.  But the $298.00 "photo book?"
Well, even for an art book that does seem to be a bit on the pricy side.

3.	"GREAT MOMENTS WITH MR. TOWNSHEND."	Although Mr. Kane was crass and cruel
I concur with the gist of his comments.  While I know that many of you feel
that this tour is the most brilliant thing in years, as I wrote a couple of
days ago, I must respectfully disagree.

Here are the Mr. Kane's points, and my thoughts:

A.	Lack of spontaneity.  ("Okay, here's where Townshend does the windmill
thing with his arm. And here's where Daltrey twirls his microphone around in
the air by its cord.")  Well . . . they have been doing those bits of
business for eons.  If you thought about it for a second, you could probably
guess when they were going to do it.

And to that, even the stuff that to the casual viewer might appear to be
spontaneous might not.  For example, the added verse to TKAA, which a lot of
people think was something added off of the top of PT's head, was the same
thing he was singing last October at The Bridge Concert.  Part of a new
song?  Perhaps.  (I'll personally believe that they are going to record new
songs when I see a new Who album, with new songs.)

B.	"And here's where Daltrey exposes his pudgy torso for all the crowd to
see, even though his tan looks mysteriously like it's the rub-on variety."
And the difference between that statement, and the following, which I wrote
a couple of days ago, is what exactly?

"I bring this again back to seeing Elvis in 1976.  The thing that struck me
about seeing that concert was that while it was apparent that Elvis was in
very ill health, the majority of the audience, who had been fans of his
since 1950's were acting as if he had just stepped off the stage of the Ed
Sullivan Show.  They were believing with their hearts instead of their
heads.

I had that same feeling seeing The Who--only this time, I was one of the
ones who was suspending belief.  I was one of the ones who would not accept
that Roger no longer had washboard abs, that Pete no longer had a full head
of hair, that Zac was not the bastard son of Keith Moon, that John . . . OK
. . . perhaps somethings don't change."

C.	"And here's where Townshend tries showing us how 'nonconformist' and
'rebellious' he is by saying 'fuck' in his grizzled Brit accent-'Fahk, fahk,
fahk!'-as the crowd yelps it up. Yeah, Pete, you tell 'em!"

Well, it certainly does smell of crass hyprocatcy and grasping at straws for
a middle-aged multimillionaire to pretend to be the 20 year old ex-art
student he was 35 years ago.  To that I would add that it certainly reveals
a lack of respect for one's audience to flip them off and to make statements
on stage which gives every impression that one knows that they are ripping
off the very people who has put food in their mouths for so long and they
don't give a rip one way or the other.

D.	"The band clearly weren't into anything more than self-caricature, which
naturally brought down all those great old songs as well. It's not that we
expected much else. There were also loads of tech gaffes-sound cutouts,
jumpy video-which nobody onstage seemed to care much about."

Again, I go back to my statement that the Hollywood Bowl show, and to a
lesser extent the Irvine show, "rank with my seeing Elvis in 1976 when it
was evident that he was in extremely ill health, as being one of the most
troubling and sloppy performances by musicians of any repute I have ever
seen."  For example, had I seen the red Strat that kept cutting out every
time I was brought out one more time, I would have jumped on the stage and
put it out of its misery.  However, as one could not see the video screens
from the stage, I do believe it was unfair to blame The Who for that
problem.  (Although the same problems happened at the Hollywood Bowl.)

BW Radley
bw@bwradley.org