Re: Who infuenced Who

[Sroundtable@xxxxxxx]

Here is an incontrovertible truth:
The Who set the standard for the high energy, visually spectacular, insanely intense rock concert.  Bands before the Who stood relatively still and played their music to re-create the sound of their studio work.  The live work of pre-Who bands lacked the ultimate passion of what the Who did live.  All at once a Who concert was fun, violent, beautiful, angry, melodic, and ugly.  A Beatles concert featured the fab four in their positions playing great music to a crowd that often drowned them out.  They weren't statues, mind you, but they certainly broke no ground live.  After all, they were the Beatles and didn't need to put on a spectacular live show to sell tickets and satisfy fans.  Mick Jagger certainly innovated the lead singer position with his strutting, contortions and attitude, but the overall Stones live experience beyond Mick was, like the Beatles, great sounding music from great musicians, but lacking the raw energy and passion of the Who.
The Who's live work, as we all know, was an absolute quantum leap over all bands.  The wild, reckless abandon of Pete and Keith while still making exceptional sounding music was unprecedented.  Add the cocky, mike twirling frontman with the most versatile pipes in the business, and the concert jumped off any figurative scale measuring live bands that existed at the time.  The whole scene, with the three wild men and the stoic, magically skilled bassist standing almost as an innocent, yet interested by-stander, had to blow the collective mind of rock and roll at the time.  
Fast-forward to 2002 and nearly every band gets incredibly physical when they hit the stage live (even though far too many try to perfectly re-create the studio sound of their music rather than creating great live variations on the original music as the Who did and continues to do).  The bouncing, jumping, head-banging, crowd-spraying, instrument smashing acts we see today have The Who as their direct or indirect inspiration.  This is an undeniable fact.  The Who originally took live rock to a level many notches above what was being done at the time.  Amazingly, no band has yet been able to take it to the NEXT level.  This is the most powerful legacy of The Who.
Mc