Des Moines Newspaper preps for The Who

[Brian Cady]

http://tinyurl.com/s6klc
Who still cares
By KYLE MUNSON
ANYWAY, ANYHOW, ANYWHERE

September 21, 2006

More than 30 years and two fewer original members later, the Who finally returns to Des Moines on Tuesday - with a fresh mini-rock opera ("Wire & Glass") to unleash as part of its first full studio album since 1982, "Endless Wire."

To many music fans of the younger g-g-generation, perhaps the Who merely is the band that provides title songs for the "CSI" TV franchise.

But to Mike Fitzpatrick, lead guitarist for Des Moines roots-rock band Brother Trucker, the Who's Pete Townshend is the Alpha and Omega of the electric guitar. He looks forward to Tuesday as a nostalgic echo of when as an impressionable seventh-grader he first witnessed the Who on its "farewell" tour in 1982 in Cedar Falls.

"I probably had no bigger hero at that time in my life than Pete Townshend," Fitzpatrick said.
He acknowledges "I Can See for Miles" as the Who's finest song, but he departs with conventional wisdom to select "Tommy," not "Quadrophenia," as the band's ultimate album.

"The backing vocals, the kind of the darkness around 'Christmas,' " Fitzpatrick said in praise of the musical and psychological richness of "Tommy." "Everybody's happy, but Tommy has no clue what's going on."

The notion of "rock opera" arguably is the Who's most enduring contribution to pop music.
"It's kind of a misnomer," Robert L. Larsen, musical and stage director of the Des Moines Metro Opera, said of rock opera. "The only thing it has to do with opera is the fact it's continuous musically. ... It's really a musical theater kind of experience. ... It's a different genre."

Opera for the most part isn't amplified, Larsen pointed out, whereas rock 'n' roll is framed around a blaring electric guitar. Opera is all about "the strength, power and beauty of voices," Larsen said.

"While rock singers might have strength, they seldom have beauty," he added, half in jest.

Townshend has commented on "Tommy" - and opened up on just about every other aspect of his life - as part of his confessional journals and blogs at www.petetownshend.co.uk.

"Tommy was called 'pretentious' almost as soon as it was released," Townshend writes. "Yet the use of the term 'rock-opera' was mischievous and itself a stab at the deeply entrenched snobbery that existed then within the walls of the serious music establishment."

Today, the Who itself is a pillar of the rock establishment.

But David Drissel, associate professor of social sciences at Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge and a Who fan since the '60s, can remind us all of the band's role as the "godfather of punk rock" that was birthed by a specific youth subculture in England: the mods.

"Postwar Britain in the '50s and into the '60s, young people didn't have as much as they did here in the U.S.," said Drissel, who teaches "The Social History of Rock 'n' Roll." "Coming out of this poverty these two subcultures had two different ways of dealing with the poverty. ... Both were working-class subcultures, but the mods dressed up as though they were in a higher class, more middle class in their attire, nice suits. ... The rockers would wear leather jackets and look the part of, like, a rockabilly."

[Even more at the site]

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