Odd Disjunctions

The dicussion of how touring affects singing and performing generally (and I
fully accept, WF, that the Who were better at the beginning of the farewell
'82 tour than at the end - I know because I saw them at Exhibition Stadium
near the beginning of the tour and they were good) makes me wonder why Pete
& Co. didn't adopt an opposite, or at least parallel, strategy to the idea
of staging such occasional mega-tours and one-offs, namely to put out
carefully crafted studio records (i.e., from '82 to date) where the band
could take the time, and use the modern array of studio techniques, to get
it right. There's nothing wrong with this approach - the Beatles used it
with Martin: look at the (large) number of takes recorded in the logs
discussed in the Anthology series. So did the Who in the old days. Eg.
possibly their greatest album, Who's Next, was the product, as PT has said,
of a very well-rehearsed band. Somehow, in the neo-punk era to which the
late 70's music scene gave rise, carefully recorded and produced albums
became regarded as somehow inauthentic, and maybe this perspective
influenced PT's approach to how he wanted the Who to handle its post-'82
career - such as it was of course. The funny thing about this is that it
turns out that the Ur-album of the original punk era, Never Mind The Bolocks
etc., is itself a carefully crafted product. People argue to this day about
how many guitars were overdubbed on its great songs, but there were lots and
that's one reason - there are others - that NMTBHCTSP will always be one of
the greatest albums ever recorded whereas, say, Green Day's first record,
which is still pretty fair of course, will likely be forgotten in a few
years....Gary M.