5 Ways The Who Changed Everything

[Brian Cady]

>From The Ottowa Citizen:
http://tinyurl.com/kl6yn

A Who's who of rock
The legendary British band, with Pete Townshend
playing a mean guitar, altered the course of rock.
Patrick Langston looks at five ways the Who changed
everything. 

Published: Thursday, September 14, 2006
 
His voice seething with fury and frustration, Roger
Daltrey unleashed one of rock's greatest moments when,
in 1965, he sang to adults everywhere, "Why don't you
all f-f-fade away?"

We stuttered along, substituting something stronger
for "fade away," unaware that My Generation, the Who's
anthemic single, was not only a seminal moment in rock
'n' roll and youth culture, but that this band would
prove to be one of rock's titans, alongside the
Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Pink
Floyd.

Four decades later, the Who's stature is iconic, their
stamp on rock music a given.

We know all about their early 1960s roots in R&B and
the British Mod movement, their legendary personality
clashes, the band's extraordinary lasting power
despite the deaths in 1978 of original drummer Keith
Moon and in 2002 of founding bassist John Entwistle,
and the Who's reputation for the kind of
blood-and-sweat touring that brings them to Scotiabank
Place tomorrow night.

But what exactly did this British Invasion band,
guitarist Pete Townshend at its helm, do that altered
the course of rock?

High Art and Rock Opera

"I am someone who believes desperately in rock 'n'
roll as high art," Townshend, the Who's chief lyricist
and an erstwhile art student, once said.

Beginning with the 10-minute mini-opera that is the
title track of the Who's second album, 1966's A Quick
One (Happy Jack), Townshend went on to pioneer the
rock opera with 1969's Tommy, about a "deaf, dumb and
blind" kid now etched forever into the popular culture
landscape.

The Beatles, Procol Harum and other bands were already
dipping into the cerebral well and the musical Hair
had arrived, but it was the Who's high art yearnings
(or at least Townshend's) that paved the way for
rock-opera ventures, from David Bowie's The Rise and
Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars
(1972) to Green Day's American Idiot (2004).

Townshend's latest mini-opera is Wire & Glass.

Our Inner Tommy

If Tommy was a leaping-off point for big ideas in
rock, the Who also helped propel popular music's
deepening inward journey and growing social
consciousness.

Riddled with mental illness, sexual confusion and
identity crises, flesh-and-blood characters such as
Tommy and Jimmy, from 1973's rock-opera Quadrophenia
(doubtless inspired partly by the two years the young
Townshend lived with his nutbar grandmother) helped
foster the desperate spiritual questing that still
underpins some of the best rock 'n' roll.

And while rock songs have offered plenty of compelling
people, like the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, it was
characters like Tommy, whose lives, like ours, changed
over time, that hit home.

Tommy, writes rock critic Anthony DeCurtis, plummets
from pinball transcendence back into a "frighteningly
isolated, eerily enticing inner world," his story a
metaphor for a period torn by "revolution and reaction
... communal generosity and individual selfishness."

Take that, Peggy Sue.

Synthesizers and Destructive Tendencies

As technically adventurous as they were artistically
prescient, the Who gave synthesizers their start as
serious contributors to rock with 1971's Who's Next.

The album's chart-topping Won't Get Fooled Again was
rock's first synthesizer-fuelled hit single.

That song and Baba O'Riley, from the same album, were
apparently also the first to use sequencing, with
pre-recorded keyboard and synthesizer parts dictating
the song's tempo and band members falling in line
(think 1980s electro-popsters Depeche Mode).

Despite the Who's electronic sophistication, a first
step toward today's laptop musicianship, they also dug
brutality,

famously smashing their instruments on stage in the
early years.

Townshend credited an art school concept,
Auto-Destructive Art, for the idea, and its
crowd-pleasing potential became clear when the Who's
early single, 1965's I Can't

Explain, abruptly rocketed to No. 8 after the band
wrecked their instruments on the British TV show
Ready, Steady, Go.

The boys also trashed hotel and dressing rooms, a
numbingly predictable recreation aped by other bands
for years to come.

Power Chords and Really Loud Music

Now integral to hard rock, metal and punk, power
chords, those full-frontal assaults of guitar and
distortion, also owe much of their widespread
popularity to Townshend, who picked up where the
Kinks' slightly earlier use of them had left off.

Think of Townshend windmilling his guitar as drumming
dervish Moon and catatonic bassist Entwistle --
currently replaced by Zak Starkey and Pino Palladino,
respectively -- carved out the rhythm: the words
"Townshend" and "power chord" are synonymous.

And let's not forget all that the Who did for rock 'n'
roll eardrums.

"This guitar is a f---ing machine gun," Townshend once
told a techie. "I want it so loud that nobody can hear
themselves think."

A decade-long holder of a Guinness world record for
loudest concert ever, the band was apparently
regularly clocked at 130 decibels, an achievement
which, if you caught Jay Farrar at Bluesfest this
summer, you'll know rock guys still lust after.

Volume enhancers before shampoo manufactures ever
thought of it, the Who -- not those copycats Hendrix
and Cream -- have also been credited as the creators
of that deafening speaker configuration, the Marshall
Stack.

Punk's Progenitors

Punk rockers from the Clash to the Ramones would
concur that the Who were, indeed, the "Godfathers of
Punk" (the Sex Pistols covered the Who's hit single
Substitute on their 1979 album The Great Rock 'n' Roll
Swindle).

"The punk element can be heard quite clearly in the
early records, even going back to the High Numbers"
(the Who's interim, early days' name), says New York
rock journalist Andy Schwartz.

"There's a kind of aggression there, there's a
sparseness in the sound."

Schwartz also points to the punk-like "self-awareness"
that permeates much of Townshend's early writing.

Add those power chords, Keith Moon's "anarchic"
drumming, the working-class rage in one-time sheet
metal worker Roger Daltrey's voice, and classic lines
of alienation like "I hope I die before I get old" (My
Generation) and you've got punk before there was punk.

The classic Who lineup of Townshend, Daltrey, Moon and
Entwistle ended, 14 years after it started, with
Moon's alcohol-related death in 1978, the band's
influences on rock by then well-entrenched.

Since then, the Who -- except for brief retirement
stints in the 1980s and '90s -- have continued to tour
assiduously as individual members worked various side
projects. Their first studio album in almost 25 years
is scheduled for release next month.

The Who plays Scotiabank Place tomorrow.


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