New York Times on MSG Wednesday

[Brian Cady <brianinatlanta2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

Online at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/arts/music/02WHO.html?ex=1029038400&en=1bbe910773ae0638&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER
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The Song Isn't Over for the Who, Aging but Defiant
By JON PARELES

Pete Townshend still cares about the Who's songs. His
conviction was in the way he attacked one guitar after
another at Madison Square Garden Wednesday night:
windmilling through power chords, wrenching out
sustained notes and then slicing them off,
machine-gunning harsh tremolos and then speeding and
squiggling with manic insistence. The Who had
something to prove, and he knew it.

He made it explicit in "The Kids Are Alright," a
statement of youthful affirmation he wrote nearly 40
years ago. "When I wrote this song, I was just a kid,"
he sang in a confessional new verse, continuing that
he never expected to be performing "at this old age."

He sang that a kid from his school class was dead now,
referring to John Entwistle, the Who's founding
bassist, who died on June 27. "I don't think there's
such a thing as dying for rock 'n' roll," he sang.
"You can only live for it."

The Who has been breaking up and reuniting since it
released its last studio album 20 years ago, and until
June 27 it was one more venerable band milking its
oldies on the summer tour circuit. Within days of
Entwistle's death, the band announced it would tour
the United States anyway. The Who hired Pino
Palladino, a dependable studio musician from Wales,
and was back on the road. Some fans disapproved; many
others snapped up tickets. Wednesday night's show was
the first stop in the New York City area; the band is
at the Garden through Sunday. 

The Who now has only half its original lineup: Mr.
Townshend and its lead singer, Roger Daltrey, who
belted the old songs with new vocal turns and still
swung a microphone on a cord. The drummer Keith Moon
died in 1978, sending the band into a tailspin from
which its recordings never recovered.

The reconstituted band, with Zak Starkey on drums and
Mr. Palladino on bass, along with John Rabbit Bundrick
on keyboards and Simon Townshend (Pete's brother) on
guitar, is inevitably cleaner-sounding than the band
of the 1960's and 70's, in which Entwistle's steady,
growling basslines were the barricade between Moon's
eruptive drumming and Mr. Townshend's hair-trigger
guitar. But the rhythm section still pushes both Mr.
Townshend and Mr. Daltrey. Songs from "Tommy," which
in the late 1960's reflected Mr. Townshend's elevated
rock ambitions, were a down-and-dirty blast of hard
rock, and all the better for it.

The Who no longer stands for adolescent rebellion,
though the band tore into "My Generation," with its
vow "Hope I die before I get old" leading up to a
furious Townshend guitar coda. The Who now lives for
the bond between a band and its fans: the exchange of
loyalty (and high ticket prices) for passion. Song
after song in Wednesday's set  "You Better You Bet,"
"Sea and Sand," "Relay," "See Me, Feel Me"  were
about getting through to someone and baring souls.
"I'm nothing without you," Mr. Townshend sang in
"Bargain."

The teenage uncertainty that fueled the Who's early
songs is still in the music, still talking back to
authority figures. But so, now, is an adult
consciousness of mortality, of the impermanence of
friendship and music. With an audience that was both
uncertain about the band's future and willing to give
it a chance, Mr. Townshend loudly renewed his
covenant.

While the Who set out to resurrect past glories,
Robert Plant, who opened the concert, didn't want
simply to sing hits from his old band, Led Zeppelin.
He gave the audience its Led Zeppelin quotient with
songs like "Goin' to California," "Four Sticks" and
"Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You." But before and after
them, he performed songs that stirred up the odd
combinations that had made Led Zeppelin so eccentric.
In songs by Tim Buckley and Bukka White, and in the
1960's standard "Morning Dew," he pulled together old
blues, Middle Eastern modes, Indian vocal turns,
Celtic fingerpicking and psychedelic drones, seeking
ecstasy in the face of mortality. "Gotta keep it
movin' on, people, sideways and forward," he said.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
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