[no subject]

While the latter outfit featured a German chanteuse
and songs about heroin addiction and S&M, the Who had
Keith Moon, and songs about amphetamine anxiety and
masturbation. While the Velvets had Warhol and an
aesthetic that tended towards the nihilistic, the Who
had Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert - budding film
directors - and an attitude that could best be
described as antisocial. They looked and sounded like
trouble and, alongside the Rolling Stones, consigned
the notion of the clean-cut, well-scrubbed, asinine
teen idol to the dustbin of history, from which, four
decades later, it has sadly re-emerged, even more
clean-cut, well-scrubbed and asinine than ever.

In songs like 'I Can't Explain', 'Anyway, Anyhow,
Anywhere' and the anthemic 'My Generation', they
distilled all the inarticulate anger and frustration
of adolescence into three-minute pop songs that barely
held together, but sounded for a brief pop-art moment,
like the shock of the new in all its inchoate glory.

It is difficult now to hint at how shocking and darkly
defiant a line like 'I hope I die before I get old'
sounded back then before hippy idealism derailed the
proto-punk attitude that underpinned the much
misunderstood Mod movement which, by accident or
design, the Who were inextricably aligned to back
then.

On stage, they did everything short of implode: Daltry
out front, sneering, stuttering and spitting out the
lyrics, while Moon flailed at his kit and Townshend
wrenched all manner of noise from his guitar. Only
bassist, John Entwistle, as oddly English as his name,
stood passive, the still centre of a storm of violence
that culminated more often than not in screeches of
feedback and a dismembered Rickenbacker.

'I get jet planes, morse code signals, howling wind
effects,' Towshend told the same Melody Maker writer
proudly, but most of all the sound the Who produced
was the howl of amphetamine-fuelled teenage rage -
'anti-middle age, anti-boss class and anti-young
marrieds', as the guitarist once memorably put it.

If the Who's image was originally moulded by canny
managers who saw that the time was ripe for the mass
marketing of a certain kind of negativity and
aggression, the group soon transcended their
limitations to become, like the Sex Pistols after
them, arbiters of a whole generation's disaffection.
Their songs, too, became more ambitious and eccentric:
'I'm A Boy' dealt with transvestism, 'Pictures of
Lily' with masturbation.

Later, of course, the three-minute form would be
stretched to whole sides of an album and Townshend
would be credited with the dubious honour of composing
the first pop opera. This book, though, deals in the
main with the pre-Tommy era. It is a visual portrait
of a group in excelsis, resplendent in Union Jack
jackets and button-down shirts, sharp suits and proper
hair cuts.

Culled from mainly on-the-road portraits by six
photographers, including Ross Halfin, who wrote a
previous companion collection, The Who Live, and
Dominique Tarle, who put together an equally lavish -
and expensive - Rolling Stones photo album last year,
Maximum Who is one for devotees of the band, or of
that particular Sixties moment when pop started
turning into rock and the possibilities therein seemed
infinite and explosive.

In many ways, too, it is a sad and valedictory book,
not just for that era, but because, last month, the
stoical John Entwistle died of a heart attack.

Entwistle's intricate bass signatures and unruffled
onstage demeanour were as integral to the group's
sound and image as the hyperactive drum style and wild
man antics of his rhythm partner, the late Keith Moon.
Entwistle's oddly illuminating asides accompany many
of the photographs here. 'We'd go off in three
different directions,' he recalls, 'and try to stay
together.' When they succeeded, the Who sounded like
no other pop group before or since, a perfect merging
of the street and the art-school, an illustration of
how, as with all great pop groups from the Beatles to
the Smiths, the whole effortlessly transcends the sum
of the parts.

Somewhere Dominique Tarle describes the sound and
vision of the Who in the Sixties as 'sophisticated
brutality'.

You can't ask more of a pop group, particularly a
pop-art group, than that.

7 Maximum Who is a limited edition of 1,500 numbered
copies signed by Ross Halfin, only available at
www.genesis-publications.com


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-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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